secret storm's secret site

I want to go to there...

2009-09-17T10:34:00.003-04:00

It happened again today and it’s really just the sheer ridiculous number of times it’s happened that made me sit up and take notice and then of course to sit down again and write about it. Because of course – as should by now be crystal clear – once I’ve got one thought on the go, it’s never very long before another comes sidling along to keep it company and the tangentializing begins like that shampoo commercial where the girl told two friends… who told two friends… and so on and so on and so on.
So what happened again today (for the umpteenth time – an amount that’s situationally-dependent, but for the sake of argument lets say at least 20 times in the past month) was that someone came up and asked me for directions.
Nothing out of the ordinary, right? But then, mere moments later another strange somebody came up and asked me for a whole bunch more directions, which was obviously just apres him le deluge because before another ten minutes had passed a third person came up to me and asked for his very own set.
And it’s not like I was the lone potential directions-giver. This all occurred on a very congested bit of pavement at University and King on a Wednesday evening at about 6 PM. Total rush hour. The streets were clogged with traffic and the sidewalks were practically shoulder to shoulder with busy business men (and women) on the go. And each time the same thing happened: the direction-asker would sweep her (or his) eyes across the wall of humanity before bearing down on me with all the deliberate awkwardness of a drunk at a cocktail party.
And each time I had to smile and shake my head and tell them no – sorry, I have no idea where your there is.
But they keep asking.
Now by no means am I suggesting that being asked for directions makes me eligible for special notice – or in fact that in this instance or for any other reason I’m the least bit special at all – but it came hard on the heels of the day before where I was accosted at question point twice in one hour. See what I’m saying? It was the multiples that caused the notice, but even without the coincidence factor, I have always been vaguely aware that if someone is lost and I am in the vicinity, it is likely to me they will be turning. Bless them – bless them and their completely misbegotten faith in my directions-friendly face.
I don’t know why, but what I think it must mean is I’ve got the kind of face that looks as though it knows where it’s going and would be happy to let others know where they’re going too.
Sadly, those two truths remain eternally unconnected because though I would be perfectly content to share any bit of helpful information with anyone that asked, I almost never know where I’m going if it’s the slightest bit off my regular grid and unless people are asking me for directions to my actual home, I probably don’t know how to get them where they’re going either.
This is a lifelong issue. I am famed for my inability to find or follow directions. To apply a map with actual streets. To instinctively know east from west (west is the direction my friend lives in – east is on the way to that PetSmart off Laird) though I’ve got north and south nailed as up and down. Thank God. But even those simple compass points require constant, vigilant practice to make me feel comfortable relying on them as I can easily be bamboozled into turning the whole thing upside down or inside out and be completely lost in the rolling of an eye.
Just last week I was off to meet a friend for dinner (n.b. I am genius – read ‘adequate’ – with subways and streetcars) and after using up every drop of TTC available to me, hit the pavement and began the ordeal of finding her by going to completely the wrong location on the first try. Not just the wrong direction – totally and utterly not the place. I was canny enough to ask the host of the wrong restaurant where the right one was and he gave me very simple directions: return in the direction from which I came, walk until I hit Adelaide, then turn left and keep going until I either walked straight into or right past the place I intended to go.
What could be simpler? I knew the direction I had come from and I knew for sure without even thinking twice (one glance at the hand that holds the pencil was enough) which way was left. So why did I decide to turn left several blocks earlier than advised with an idea that I would then turn right and then left and (oh, jeez, who knows?) end up at the destination from my own trajectory. Why? Why did I think I knew better than the man who knew absolutely where I was going and the best way to get there? Why was I so sure I was clever enough to achieve this? Why – with years and years and years of personal experience and hard-won knowledge that I suck at going places - did I suddenly decide to become Direction Girl?
Why?
The answer remains unfathomable. I mean, even in these relatively few paragraphs (relatively few for me…) you must have grasped that when it comes to going places, there is where I am not. That striking off on my own is likely as foolhardy as my secret conviction I could do surgery if I tried.
But weirdly, I do this all the time. It’s as though I’m continually testing myself to see if I can suddenly start finding my way – as though I might wake up one morning miraculously equipped with some kind of mental GPS – without any effort on my part. As though finding places and reading maps is a state of mind that can change, perhaps when that particular state of mind has simply had enough of getting lost, or the loser gets bonked on the head or experiences an electric shock or has a piano dropped on them.
But each morning I awake, as determinedly geographically-challenged as the day before.
It’s ok. Eventually I get where I’m going.
I got to my dinner date not much more than half an hour late and my date was brilliantly forgiving and understanding. All the recriminations were going on inside my head between me and me – and that’s not an argument that’s going to end anytime soon.
But from now on I am committed to taking a cab when meetings are critical and destinations are unfamiliar. I will give myself extra time on the more casual occasions when I feel myself starting to feel quietly adventurous. I will listen more carefully, make more notes and repeat instructions as often as necessary to simply get the address correct. I will accept this handicap as is, admit I have a problem and not hope for a piano to fall on my head.
And as for where you’re going? Unless that’s a philosophical question, it’s probably best not to ask.
Remember, it’s not the destination – it’s the journey.

Cry me a river

2009-05-19T13:15:00.006-04:00

When a top professional tells you your breasts are amazingly photogenic, you can rest assured you’re hearing it from someone who knows.

Of course when that professional is a medical imaging technician and the view she’s raving over is entirely internal, some of the pixie dust tends to dissipate. When you yourself get a gander at the captures and see nothing so much as a sort of fuzzy astronomical chart of the Milky Way, your confidence reverts to entirely pre-compliment status. But such was the opinion of the nice lady at Women’s College Hospital and such was all I was able to take away from my second mammogram.

Last time I endured the discomfort and indignity of a mammogram and breast ultrasound I took away a good deal more, from a personal insight, to an instant diagnosis, both of which I felt compelled to write about and gained the distinction of being the first writer ever to have the word “tits” published in the Globe and Mail. (Eulogy material! Score!)

There’s a PS to that story too (which I also wrote about; there was a time when I could hardly go to the bathroom without making, if you don’t mind me saying, a blog entry) whereby a woman who read the story contacted the Globe to get in touch with me. Seems she had also been moved by my experience… she had been reading my essay on the way to her own appointment with boobular destiny at the imaging clinic and took a special comfort in my personal happy ending. The surprise (even shock, she related) was that her name was Jane Wilson too. Imagine: it would be like coming across a secret letter from yourself to yourself, telling you everything was going to be alright.

But this time around I received no immediate answers – no publishable material – no distinctive anecdotes; just the remarkable experience of being treated like a human being in the often inhuman business of doctoring.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the medical world (I’ve always said that with a properly illustrated textbook and a sharp steak knife, I could take out an appendix. And really, I’m almost certain of this…) from volunteering at the Sick Kids, to supporting friends and loved ones unfortunately buried right up to their necks in it, for reasons less than desirable.

I suppose it began with my mother and her time(s) spent in hospital for treatment of, and then for dying of breast cancer, through my father and his time in hospital and in hospice before death, kindly at home, to my dear darling friend who has battled an absolute army of illness since I first met her more than 10 years ago. She’s had fully three different types of cancer, requiring surgery and chemotherapy and she battles on – with a few less bits and pieces (nothing she can’t live without) and a patience that’s starting to become just the faintest bit frayed around the edges as cancer has once again reared its hideous head to tease and taunt and terrify us all once more.

And in all those times and through all those experiences, I’m very sad to report that more often than not the treatments – and those who treated – were the worst part of the experience.

This is not in any way to suggest that overall, medical professionals are cold, emotionless automatons, bound and determined to make a bad time worse (or even like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, grim, determined, practiced sadists) just that in the most tender and terrifying moments, it is the rare professional who is able to make the worst moments better. Or even bearable. I am speaking of course of the highest ranks of medicine – the surgeons, internists and specialists – because with equally rare exception my experiences with nurses and GP’s have been nothing short of life-saving.

Is it their job, you ask? Their job to comfort and support and empathize with people in extremis? It’s not written down anywhere, so I guess the answer is no. But surely it is the fundamental job of humans to make the plight of other humans easier to bear – and no more importantly than at the moment of a devastating diagnosis.

I can take my father out of this equation almost entirely. With the exception of a few of the very highest placed specialists (who were the most unpleasant of all the medical people I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet) he was surrounded by the support and even love of his GP and the professionals she guided him toward, to help guide him through his last weeks and days. As far as I can tell, she went out of her way – the infamous above and beyond – to gently lead him down the painful path of acceptance and then readiness for death. When he died at home late at night, she was standing by and came over past midnight to sign his death certificate and kiss his forehead before he was taken away by the funeral people.

(As he was removed from his lovely home, zipped up in a big black bag and rolled away on a gurney, my brother was amazed that a) it could even happen to this man who had loomed so large in all our lives, for all our lives, and, b) that it was he who was leaving and we who were staying.
“I get the feeling we should just all clear out and he should be bricked in with all his books and clocks and paintings. Nail boards over the door, seal the place right up and leave him here like a pharaoh in a pyramid.” I agreed. But it was a condominium and I knew even then there was no way we could have gotten the condo board to go along. They were, to a jaded soul, next to medical specialists, the most unromantic folks you could ever care to meet.)

But the story was very different for my mother. When she received her second (and last) diagnosis, telling her the cancer had returned, complete with the intelligence that there was no treatment, there was no cure, there was no hope, she, rather understandably, began to cry. She was told, abruptly and with neither preamble nor sympathy, to pull herself together and get out of her doctor’s office.

I always told myself this was because it was so long ago – in the 80’s – when bedside manner wasn’t taught at school along with injecting oranges and memorizing what the hipbone and everything else is connected to.
But honestly? I really don't think anything has changed.
For my friend… well, with her the story is different yet again. I hadn’t met her during her first bout with cancer, but have stood by her for most everything else over the last decade or so. Because I’m a freelancer, I’ve been able to accompany her to most of her appointments. I’m there to play cards, make jokes, suggest diversions, gossip and giggle and basically get her through the waiting period, before going into the examination room with her and remembering the questions she wants to ask when fear and anxiety have got the best of her for a few moments. (She also has an appalling memory. Mine is slightly less so.)
With her, I’ve gotten to know all the receptionists and nurses; we see each other every six months for routine checkups between shocking diagnoses, and we are for the most part all happy to see each other. Her oncologist (a very important one) and his interns are amongst the exceptions; they’re thoughtful and nice and patient. And hopeful – a quality I cannot laude highly enough.
But there are always a few wormy apples you have to brace yourself against. Take the young bottom-of-the-barrel doctor-ette who was filling in for the oncologist’s own intern one stressful day when my friend asked her how much longer before she’d be seen.
We’d already waited hours for what was supposed to be a quick appointment before we needed to high-tail it over to the hospital next door to be prepped for an unrelated surgery; the one we were waiting for was for lymphoma, the one we were on our way to was for colon cancer. (Did I mention how brave my friend is?) Anyway, we had a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity; if we waited much longer the surgery would have to be re-scheduled – an agony almost worse than the impending operation. What I’m saying, is we weren’t moaning for fear we’d miss our pedicure appointments. This woman, this fill-in intern, this creature took one look at my friend (who it should be noted was simply one of about 40 people with cancer waiting to see a doctor that day) blew out her cheeks in exasperation, and told her she didn’t know.
“It’s just that I have to be at Mount Sinai in half an hour,” says my lovely friend.
“Oh cry me a river,” said this Satan in scrubs, and blew past her on her way to heaven (or hell) knows where.
Cry me a river. Right up there with the oncologist who recently told a chemotherapy patient asking for help with the side-effects: We don’t care.

I’ve got more stories, each more inexplicably chilling than the last. The surgeon who wanted a piece of my friend’s liver so badly, she didn’t want to wait for biopsy. “I’ll take about 40%; we’ll follow up with chemo. Look at the time – must run.” She was wrong. At that point the cancer had not progressed and the prognosis was good. We made all sorts of Chianti and fava beans jokes after that. What else was there to do? Then there was the post-op technician in the recovery room who told her to stop whining about her pain, before discovering the morphine drip had been pulled out of her vein and was soaking into the mattress.

And I know that there are people who will be reading this who have had marvelous, exceptional, joyful, even transcendent experiences – exciting satisfying adventures in medicine. More likely, there have been those of you who have had wonderfully unremarkable experiences. Or who can relate stories of pleasant, even caring salutations with those who are about to help you stop dying. We all have our anecdotes – these are just mine.

The day after tomorrow is another biopsy day for my pal. We gird our loins (or rather, I do – hers need to be sort of un-girded for the procedure) call on our reserves of charm (you’d be amazed at how important sucking up is – it’s saved us a time or two) and convince ourselves once more that this is just another predictable discomfort on the way to confounding them all again by surviving.

And my tits by the way, are okay. My humane and human specialist went above and beyond, and even to some trouble, to secure my old films to make double sure in a compare-and-contrast sort of way that the photogenic pair are here to stay that way.

And I appreciate the kindness almost more than the prognosis.

Update:
P.S. Having said all the preceding, I am still grateful beyond all measure that I actually have a health care system to bash...
P.P.S. The girlfriend is great - she had the liver resection, but it looks as though they got it all and she won't require chemo. It is the best possible outcome and we are all thrilled.

Speaking of cats

2009-03-12T23:56:00.005-04:00

It's come to this.
I have crossed a line... or a bridge... or a Rubicon... or something you cross (time/space continuum?) and have arrived on the other side bewildered. And not entirely happy.
You think maybe it could happen some day; perhaps you've heard tell that it's happened to others - you might've read a book on the subject or shared a joke with your friends; but you just personally pray that that ignominious day will either a) never come, or b) come, but not make itself known, personally, to you, so you can fool yourself that that day, hasn't actually... er... come.
Essentially, I was called out.
Thinking about it isn't so bad - saying it out loud, slightly less than not bad - but hearing it... and hearing it in a sentence that is clearly directed at no one other than you - well, that's a whole 'nother proposition altogether. An entirely different kettle of worms.
Here's what happened:
I was on the subway, lateish - 9 or so - returning from an evening with friends. I was dressed against the inhospitably (some might say downright unfairly) inclement weather (covered up is what I'm saying) leaning in the doorway, just basically doodly-doo-ing in my head - counting stops, reading posters, checking out my cohorts on this journey... when I noticed one of my cohorts was similarly checking out me. Intently.
With purpose even.
Back to aggressive doodly-dooing... darting eyes re-recording what I've already exhaustively read poster-wise... studying the subway map as if I didn't know what comes after Summerhill and before Davisville... pretend-checking my purse for... what? (Keys, phone, wallet, gum... whatever...) and then one quick glance across the seats opposite me - and there he is again. staring... studying me like, well, like a subway poster.
He's 20-something-ish. Cute. Okay, very. Looks like Cat Stevens pre-Yusuf - all dark, shiny, curly hair, twinkly eyes (creepy-starer he may be, but credit where credit is due) and (as far as I can tell) sober.
Age him ten years or so and he's a dating trifecta.
But I'm shy. It's embarrassing being stared at - I'm deeply uncomfortable with it - and I just want it to stop. It stops. It stops when he gets up and walks straight toward me. And everyone is watching.
"Hey," he says, "I just wanted to tell you you look beautiful tonight." He growls it sort of, but it's an articulate growl.
I don't know where to look. My eyes do some more darting, blinking (plink, plink) before I face him. I take a deep breath.
"Thanks," I say, not burdened at that moment by a surfeit of articulateness. I think I touched my hair. Blushed.
He smiles. His eyes pierce me.
"So," he says, "I guess you're what they call a cougar, eh?"
Black. It all just went black. I'm pretty sure my mouth fell open. I know my pupils dilated. (I just know.)
"I beg your pardon," say I in a tone that begs nothing; as if by questioning it, I can somehow demand it be retrieved. A take-back... a cosmic do-over.
But it was done.
He looks at me, puzzled. I suspect he's familiar with the look of happy women, but at this moment he's face-to-face with the unfamiliar.
"But why," he asks. "What's the matter?"
"Let me give you a tip," I say to him as our subway car bursts back into the light and slows down as we prepare to stop at the place that lies between Summerhill and Davisville. "Take it from me: women don't like to be called 'cougars'. It's an insult."
"But why?" he asks again, genuinely surprised.
"Because it's a term whose implication suggests that older women prey on young men. It makes us sound like sex-mad predators," I tell him. "It's not the least bit flattering. It makes us sound desperate." I pause. "It makes us sound old."
The train stops. The doors judder open.
"But what am I going to call you that will get me a date," he asks, twinkle snapped miraculously back in place.
I am not moved this time. This time I have moved on.
I look straight at him.
"Nothing," I reply, and with the perfect timing for which I am not the least bit renowned, I step off the train and the doors slam shut.
I am a woman of a certain age. I am hanging onto that last frayed, split-ended, dangling piece of string that tethers me to the kite of the baby boomer generation. Minutes away really, if you want to stretch a point (let's) to that generation known as "X".
I look after myself, I look good for my age; I wear lipstick when I go out and high heels (virtually no matter the weather) and on a good day, I hold my own.
I am not a cougar.
And if you disagree with me - seriously - I'll scratch your eyes out.

How lucky can you get?

2009-01-28T18:25:00.014-05:00

We’re mere days away from Superbowl XXQVCII. (Or something – seriously I have no idea which year this is; I was going to look it up, but really, why bother? If you care, you know… if like me you could go the rest of your life without ever hearing how much Pepsi is paying for a thirty second spot, or which inappropriate, non-football related pop star – Janet Jackson? Please. Jessica Simpson – umm whaa? - is going to perform at half time, then knowing how many years in Roman numerals this game has been going on is seriously more information than I could ever possibly wish to know…in whatever format you choose to announce it…)
So though I won’t be watching the game, one thing I’m unlikely to miss is the ever-popular aftermath sure to lead each and every newscast for the next 24 hour cycle, complete with coaches and players all praising the Almighty for making the unquestionably correct choice in awarding them the game ball. I don’t doubt there will be prayers prayed beforehand, during, and after – in grateful thanks, or in dazed, confused misery for how things could go so terribly, terribly wrong.
Whatever.
Personally, I don’t pray to God for things. I think it’s presumptuous, obnoxious and actually, completely inappropriate. I want all His energy directed toward the starving, the homeless, the diseased, the abused and the abandoned. And I don’t ever want to be in a position, quite frankly, where my problems are of a type critical enough to move up to a pre-eminent spot on His celestial agenda.
I don’t pray for things. I just… wish for them.
Like last Sunday. (And just to reiterate, God had nothing to do with it. I have it on the highest authority that on the day He was either in church or resting.) I was on my way to meet my friend Tom for coffee, scuffling along through the slush, day dreaming and dum-dee-dumming as one does. And I remember just one clear thought that day: gee – these socks are comfy!
The day before (also a busy day for Him – too busy by far to be keeping an eye on me) the same Tom and I had gone shopping at one of our favourite haunts – the Dollarama! What a place – a virtual Aladdin’s cave of treasures and trinkets – and all for one single dollar! Everything you could imagine – though perhaps not of strictly the highest possible quality – sitting out in huge piles, just begging to be taken home. I defy anyone to go into one of these places and not come out with something. Kitchenware, bathroom fixtures, soap, shampoo, pens, pencils, pads, erasers, reading glasses, make-up, pots, pans, toys, beads, placemats, gift bags… the list is endless.
(Like the poem about Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout – who "Would not take the garbage out". She would: “…boil the water and open the cans and scrub the pots and scour the pans and grate the cheese and shell the peas and mash the yams and spice the hams and make the jams, but though her daddy would scream and shout – she would not take the garbage out! ...And so it piled up to the ceilings, coffee grounds, potato peelings, mouldy bread and withered greens, olive pits and soggy beans, clamshells, eggshells, stale scones, sour milk and mushy plums, crumbly cake and cookie crumbs…” and so it goes – on and on and on. I don’t want to give anything away (spoiler alert) but things don’t end so well.)
Not that there’s anything remotely garbagey about the Dollarama – though you certainly can get garbage cans and garbage bags and environmentally friendly poop n’ scoop dog poo bags and rubber gloves and disinfectant and J Cloths and brooms and dustpans and even air fresheners, should the former somehow fail to address the issue, as well as food and snacks and candy and nuts and gum and ashtrays and lunchboxes and Tupperware and crayons and colouring books and hair elastics and underwear and (I swear, God help me – not literally though, you understand) even white and flesh-tone lift-and-separate brassieres for $1!
And socks. Lovely, lovely, squishy, teddy bear textured, terry towel inspired, colourful, delicious, impossibly kitten-soft socks. For a dollar. I bought two pair.
And I was wearing one of those pairs on Sunday – my Sunday-go-to-coffee socks – enjoying their unmatched comfort so much so that I actually thought to myself: “I wish I had a hundred dollars so I could buy 100 pairs of these fabulous socks and never, ever wear any other kind ever, ever again.”
On my honour, that was my wish. And an original one too; I never have wished - and likely never will again - for $100.
Moments later I was in the coffee shop and there was Tom, over at the cash register, picking up his mug of tea (Tom obviously isn’t entirely clear on the inherent purpose and point of the coffee date. No matter – he’s great with so much else) when he saw me and called out: “What do you want?”
“One hundred dollars!” I called back, only to see his face go white. Really. White.
“Say that again,” says Tom, in a voice that I would soon come to associate with incredulousness.
“I said, ‘I wish I had one hundred dollars!’” says I, absolutely mystified at his wide-eyed (incredulous) stare.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a 100 dollar bill.
“This is yours,” he said. “You won the lottery.”
Reader, I swear every word of this is true.
You see, Tom and I had also called in at a Loblaws on our way home the day before to each pick up a few groceries. On the way out, Tom insisted we stop so he could purchase a lottery ticket, and on the spur of the moment, I decided to get one too.
(Normally I never indulge; my father let me in on a secret many years back - the purpose of the lottery he explained, in the hushed tones of one sharing at the very least the key to the ancient riddle of the sphinx, is basically the following: you're meant to lose. Practically guaranteed. When viewed from that perspective, I sort of lost permanent interest in the lottery. And though I will waste money on many, many (many) things, since that day I find it difficult to buy lottery tickets – I hate to spend my money on something that’s pretty much taking my cash in exchange for nothing more than the faintest of faint hopes. It doesn't feel like a very good bargain is all I'm saying - and just a shade magic-beanie if you know what I mean.)
As soon as the tickets were purchased, Tom suggested we agree to share the imaginary millions if we won and I readily agreed. Why not? Even the bare bones of shared hope is infinitely more enjoyable than the lonely, pinched, personal variety.
And Tom’s ticket won. $200 and change. And he couldn’t get down to the coffee shop fast enough to give me my half.
And further, let me be clear on this point: neither Tom nor I are completely rolling in it these days, if you get my drift. Even with Tom quitting smoking and me cutting my own hair (cheap – or just plain canny? I ask you…) we’re still watching our bank balances very, very closely and not in that chortling, hand-rubbing, miserly way of totting up our respective fortunes. More like gauging the rubbery-ness of each and every cheque endorsed. The truth is - I swear, okay, to God - that I wouldn't have faulted him for a moment if he'd chosen to hang on to the whole 200 bucks. It was a casual agreement - we neither of us expected to win - and we both of us could have used every penny of the full amount.
For perhaps 5 seconds I cursed myself for wishing for $100 when $1 million would have been so much more… useful. But the truth is in one moment I had wished for $100 dollars, and no more than one moment later I received exactly that: $100. And I was over the moon.
Coincidence? Maybe. Luck? Unquestionably. Gift from God? Not a chance.
I didn’t pray to God for that money – I just wished for it.

But I do thank God every day for a friend like Tom.

Update

2009-01-25T14:03:00.003-05:00

Blogging is like virtually any other activity that takes practice and time – fall out of the habit and you fall out of the rhythm, the swing and even the need to blog.
The last time I wrote was February of last year and come to think of it (as if I didn’t know) that’s when so much else changed as well.
I lost my little life companion, the ridiculous Lily. At the age of 15 and suffering an untold number of conditions, ailments, illnesses and just plain old age, I was with her when she died in the midst of a snowstorm on a terrible day that even now I steel myself from thinking about. She was just so tiny, so elderly, and even with me there beside her, so very alone when she died. Barely six pounds at the end, and moments before in deep distress, when she died her eyes remained open and the tip of her little pink tongue was left hanging down on her greying bib of her now scant hair. I had her cremated, and the ashes and dust and detritus that remain of her now remain with a friend. I can’t bear the finality of that tiny urn. I’m just not ready.
I started work on a long-term project that turned my life upside down as I changed from a stay-at-home freelancer, to a fulltime, riding the streetcar, going to the office career-type gal. Quelle change. I haven’t worked all in a row, every day, in an office (with the exception of much shorter contracts: a month here or there) since 1990. Seventeen years.
But I surprised myself by loving it. I loved the interaction with the others I worked with, the purposefulness of working on an intriguing project every day, the routine it created even as the routine of the job itself changed virtually daily.
I who love being alone so much was absolutely smitten with the idea of working as a team. I became closer with the people I already knew and welcomed whole-heartedly (open arm-edly!) the new friendships with others.
The project is a TV series – 25 short documentaries about people who are changing the world by the way they lead their lives. Big-time philanthropists cheek-by-jowl with little-time, nearly invisible regular folks who are changing their own personal routines to make the world a better place. To say it was inspiring is as clichéd as it was true. It consumed my life for months. Long months. Good months. A couple of them great.
The series also supports a dedicated website designed to turn the inspiration of the stories into action, linking people up to a social network-cum-clearinghouse of life-changing ideas as well as action-oriented volunteer opportunities. I was involved with creating that too – and I enjoyed turning my mind to a different sort of creative vision, the sort that required big picture planning and a specific sort of imagining. I find I like “imagining” as an actual work-related activity. I find I’m good at it too.
And the project created friendships and purpose with it. I’m now volunteering with an organization headed up by one of our profilees. I’m mentoring a just-turned 9 year old boy, helping him choose a ‘goal of contribution’ and helping him follow through on it too. I have so many young girls in my life I thought it was time I tried a relationship with a boy and I found, to my delight, a little guy just as quirky, as complex and as lovable as any little girl I’ve ever known.
I found a new life-companion too. The equally ridiculous, (as Lily) Charlotte. A rescue Pekingese (see photo above) with a host of medical and physical issues that only serve to make me adore her and want to comfort her more. (My friend Tom found her on a rescue dog site on the internet – “She's such a loser,” he said. “She’s got you written all over her.”) I was sure when I entered into the arrangement on my birthday back in June that I was essentially signing on for a load of problems, but her history made me want to help. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that far from being an angry, nippy, put-upon victim of years (8) of abuse and neglect, Charlotte was (is) an absolute joy to hold and behold. She’s kind and shy and just wants her belly rubbed and to be given treats once in a while and to lie beside me anyplace I choose to lie down. With the exception of the belly rub part (I prefer a back massage) we’re very much alike.
And I traveled too. To Miami, Nassau and Vancouver Island. Trips with friends, holidays with family, a little time out of mind that deepened my affections and lightened my stress.
But now that stress is back with a vengeance. The brutal economic conditions that have dealt the world such a resounding blow have dealt me a blow as well. Funds for my project have dried up as well and as of now (this minute, this second) there are only vague whispers of possible, potential work. I’m scared. Really scared – as I haven’t been for a long time. Along with everyone else my resources have dwindled – some have out-right disappeared – and as of now (this minute, this second) I don’t know how I’m going to survive.
But at least now I have time to blog.
So I've got that going for me.

Out of the dark

2008-02-06T00:30:00.002-05:00

Well, here’s an embarrassing admission: I’m an addict. Or was…or am in recovery... or taking it one day at a time or something. I’m not completely over it – I still indulge almost every day. But in small amounts… for a limited time… and I cut myself off after just one: one sinful, spectacular, perversely satisfying hit a day.

I had to stop. My life had become, to a certain extent, unmanageable. I was miserable, tired, depressed, worried and anxious – virtually all day, virtually every day. And the more it affected me, the worse I felt, the more I wanted; in some backwards Bizarro-world diminishing returns kind of way, (and I can’t imagine why – it wasn't even remotely logical) I was using it to achieve its opposite effect, with spectacularly negative results.

Finally, it got so bad I went to my doctor and described my symptoms – the constant song I couldn’t get out of my head, my worries and anxieties… the physical and mental misery I felt practically bathed in. And all the while I was talking to her, right there in her office, I was on the drug, experiencing the drug – I actually had it on me when I went in – and I never said a word.

My MD began by prescribing other drugs – anti-anxiety medications that nearly pulverised me with exhaustion, but did nothing to allay my symptoms. I awoke each morning as if from a coma, not fully conscious for at least an hour; on some of the drugs she had me try, I’m not sure if I was ever fully conscious at all.

But I continued to take my drug. And I continued to suffer.

Eventually, she sent me to a psychiatrist who spent a full ninety minutes questioning me in minute detail about my symptoms and habits and history. I’d had some of my drug before I went in – I even managed to have some more in his actual office – but I did it surreptitiously and never referred to it. And neither did he.

He gave me a diagnosis describing a serious anxiety disorder and recommended behavioural therapy with some form of medicinal support. He gave me a receipt for services rendered to present to my insurance company. He also suggested the name of a colleague whom he felt could help on the therapy side of things and wished me luck and sent me home. He mentioned that I would likely never be entirely symptom-free, but that I might hope for significant improvement.

I felt I needed another hit of my drug on the way home (I had a few moments of panic as I sought to track it down in the unfamiliar neighbourhood, but eventually scored - it’s easy to find if you know where to look…) all the while meditating on what he had said about the diagnosis and his recommendation for treatment and tried to picture what my life would be like stripped of most of its pointless fretting and worrying and agonizing and realized I had pretty much forgotten how such a state might feel.

I arrived home and took another hit.

A couple of weeks later, holding hope practically clenched in my hands and with my heart beating even faster than its abnormally elevated rate, I showed up for the first meeting with the referred specialist, but was soon devastated to find that not only did our session not offer so much as a glimmer of the happy destination I was imaging myself headed for, but instead made me so much more upset (and worried and anxious and fearful) that I vowed never to return. Whatever chemistry was affecting my brain to the extent that I had needed this man’s help in the first place, did not extend to any actual chemistry between the two of us. I felt worse than I had ever felt up to that point and took the streetcar home in the gathering dusk, sunglasses firmly in place to hide the bitter tears I’d shed as his inability to help me became Waterford-crystal clear. I took another quick hit of the drug on the way home, but as ever, no relief was forthcoming.

I felt simply hopeless. I couldn’t imagine another pill would produce a miracle – I couldn’t imagine there was a pill I hadn’t tried – and the horrible experience with the therapist just compounded my feelings of helplessness. I’d lived with this pain for so long (though it was gradual in coming) that I’d come to accept this state of exquisite hyper-anxiety as normal; but the last few weeks, reaching out to the medical establishment had brought hope back to life.

The subsequent disappointment was devastating.

A friend’s mother – an experienced and caring therapist – took time out of her already full calendar to begin telephone sessions with me. She was marvellous… and her confidence and positive approach were balm to my shredded nerves. But I continued to indulge in my addiction, to self-medicate in the worst possible way, so that even her tender understanding was undermined by my own self-destructiveness. However, with her help and support, I found a level of misery I could cope with and tried hard to accept that if this was where I belonged mentally and emotionally, than I had best make the best of it and find pleasure where I could.

And of course the pleasure I most easily found was in reality the source of my despair.

It was another friend – also sweet, caring and kind – with the added bonus of living relatively close-by, who, in the end, was the one who forced me to face what I was doing to myself and to make the connection between my pleasure and my pain.
When she approached me, she did it without judgment, merely by pointing out what she observed: I was a small person she said; was I aware that I was possibly indulging in this addiction, not only in larger and larger quantities, but also more and more often? How could my body take it? She was worried she said – she just wanted me to think about it.

She was the first person who had said a word – the first person who had even noticed that I was escalating my intake – and she could see it was affecting me.

So she was the first person who made the connection. I was resistant at first: I didn’t want to admit it and I didn’t want to stop what I was doing: it was my one pleasure I told myself, my one restorative – the thing I most wanted first thing I the morning and then all through the day.

I panicked a little; what would I do – how would my days look, feel and start – if I were to give up my drug and nothing much improved, then what would I do?

It was that final question that provided me with the impetus to change: if nothing changed, if all continued as before, then I would just start again. I would give it a two week trial (and I wouldn’t even give it up completely) and at the end of that fortnight, if I still felt the same, it would be back to business as usual. I would just have to get through those fourteen days.

I can’t remember now if part of me wanted everything to stay the same: not from the perversely attractive familiarity of mental anguish, but from the addiction itself – the quick subtle pleasure, the habit, the feeling… everything – or if I sensed that she had inadvertently put her finger directly on the pulse of the problem and that I might once again begin to hope that my days and nights would become calmer, gentler and… better.

It doesn’t matter now – the fact is she was prescient: within a day or two of cutting back I began to feel different. I spoke slower, more calmly, more deliberately; I slept better – and little by little, the constant nagging worries diminished to the gentle roar I now recognised from a seemingly distant past.

The psychiatrist was right too though: it is part of my personal make-up that I am never totally free of anxiety and worry. A normal day for me might feel like a state of uncomfortable unease for someone else – but compare that to how it was: multiplied by a hundred, complete with soundtrack! – and you may have an inkling how deeply, seriously affected I was by my one little pleasure.

From a former high of about six to seven “Venti” sized coffees a day (at 20 – 24 ounces and 415 mgs of caffeine each) I now allow myself just one cup. A small or a medium – never a large – and I don’t allow myself so much as a sip after four o’clock in the afternoon. My life has changed and it is so much better and brighter and more hopeful. My worries and anxieties are manageable and my need for intervention – chemical or cognitive – is just about nil. I am back and I am better.

Still, I don’t think I’ll ever completely give it up.

And screw it: I’ll never drink decaf.

Tracking the tears

2008-01-08T12:11:00.000-05:00

Did she or didn’t she? Was she or wasn’t she?
Really crying that is.
That’s the question being debated on cable news shows and across American breakfast tables this morning: was Hillary Clinton really so overcome at a New Hampshire meet and greet that she lost her well-known iron-clad control and let a few tears well up as she shakily answered a reporter’s seemingly inoffensive, non-emotional question (about she got up in the morning and faced another day on the campaign trail – appropriate answer: “fresh fruit and a protein shake!”) or was she just faking crocodile tears designed to soften an image that has hardened and cracked like cooling lava and cost her campaign so much in the polls of late.
Hard to say.
Personally, I’m never completely in charge of my tear ducts – injured or emotionally moved to a certain point they will simply open up and have at it and I am virtually incapable of clamping down on the incipient boo hoo.
I was in the Bahamas last week having the time of my life and cried fully three times.
Once when I banged my head getting into a cab (the sound alone was nauseating, the pain was unbelievable and I actually saw stars if not tweeting birds…) and the agony was so acute the tears just popped out. The second time was in reaction to a bizarre episode involving a fellow hotel guest who had fallen down and was frothing at the mouth in reaction to a CENTIPEDE BITE (!!!!) he had received a week before and which was now slowly poisoning him… almost to death in front of our eyes. (Creepy eh? It should be noted that he was bitten not in Nassau but in his apartment in New York City, that he had been given medication to counter the centipede poison, but he had subsequently drunk so much holiday liquor that the medication was all but useless, however, through the quick work of hotel staff and emergency personnel he was brought back to consciousness and would – we were assured – be fine.) I was stricken with the thought of a person going happily about their Bahamian holiday and then suddenly finding themselves facing a horrible painful death on a sunny morning in front of various and sundry colourfully-dressed strangers. It seemed both surreal and tragic, and I leaked a little at the thought.
The third time is a bit embarrassing to mention as it was on the plane ride home when the change in pressure went up against a recently acquired cold and stuck flaming knives into my eardrums that didn’t let up for nearly half an hour as we circled the runway. It was really horrid pain and, well, after about 20 minutes I was also feeling pretty sorry for myself, so once again, a few tears escaped my weakened ducts. (And btw, there were also a few babies shrieking in agony, so I wasn’t exactly the only one crying you understand.)
I can also be moved to tears by seeing other people cry (the same way you can catch the giggles or the yawns) by watching the Save the Children commercials, and those harrowing SPCA spots with the soulful German Shepherd staring hopelessly up from inside a dirty cage. Gets me every time.
So maybe there’s a little cheap sentimentality, a little self-pity, a little drama and a little over-weaning empathising going on here, but so what? Is it so inappropriate to cry from real pain? From connecting with another person’s fear and suffering? From the notion of children and animals cruelly treated?
Who, I would like to know, is so easily dry-eyed around similar scenes? And when did it become such a sign of weakness to feel something?
The tears issue, which has felled politicians in the past, seems somewhat akin to the flip-flopping issue; voters it appears, are disgusted by either a show of genuine emotion (as compared to that ersatz hand-on-heart, flag-waving crap) or the intellectual process of changing one’s mind following the attainment of new knowledge, preferring the dry-eyed and the single-minded to the raw and the real.
You can speak with passion, commit to laying down your own life in service to others, and discuss the prayers you share, bleeding heart to bleeding heart, so long as you refrain from shedding an actual shameful tear.
The fact that the President hasn’t once wept over the lives he is personally responsible for sacrificing in an illegitimate war over the past six years strikes me as more the mien of a sociopath than a resolute leader. There’s the “encouraging the enemy” argument that goes along with the “never show weakness” stipulation that the President and his nearest and dearest fall back on when asked how they sleep at night (and by the way, how do they?) but genuine – even controlled – emotion of the tearful variety is never seen, never discussed, never admitted to.
Hillary didn’t even really cry as far as I can tell; she just welled up and her voice cracked. So on technical points, it seems she has avoided the career-killing sob. The question now is whether the welling points to a fatal weakness yet to reveal itself, or whether the slight moistening may actually act as a character softener and place her back in contention against her charismatic opponent, whose obvious passion (the only emotion besides anger and contempt permitted on the stump) isn’t fighting the same popularity and personality problems.
I’ll tell you what I think. I think she did the math. I think she looked at a complicated equation involving the square root of her image, multiplied by the number of times she voted with the Republicans (also shaky, self-serving arithmetic as far as I can tell) and divided it by the number of voters she needs to close the gap with Barak Obama, and came up with precisely the performance she turned in at Portsmouth New Hampshire’s Café Espresso.
I’ll tell you something else. It makes me sick to be criticizing the woman who was until recently the most viable female candidate for President since Geraldine Ferraro; I absolutely hate it that through her actions and just plain old gut instinct, I find her about as appealing (and as female) as Margaret Thatcher… I feel disgusted and a little frightened that her character and candidacy may be a significant contributor to the loss of the White House to the Republicans. Again.
It makes me want to cry.

Away with words

2007-12-09T17:07:00.000-05:00

For a romantic, even sentimental poet whose most famous works brought us expressions such as “ships that pass in the night” and “into each life some rain must fall”, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow clearly also had a darker side.
Reflect if you will on this little rhyme:

“Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting,
With exactness grinds He all.”

The title? Retribution. Just the sort of thing you can imagine stitched onto a sampler by the wife of a hellfire and brimstone preacher, framed and prominently displayed as a constant reminder not so much of God’s enduring love, but of man’s interpretation of Him as figure of infinite, agonizing, crushing judgement. There’s no actual cruelty suggested, just a relentlessness that does the math with all the precision and coldness – and perfection – of a pocket calculator. Nothing will be missed on this divine ledger, no small indiscretion overlooked, no crime, no matter how well concealed or cleverly explained, forgotten.
I have a slightly different vision of a higher power – but truly, to each his own. I think Longfellow’s short but chilling little verse reflects more the attitudes of society and certainly the course of history.
Nobody, it seems, in the end, is going to get away with anything.
Consider the legacies of Conrad Black and Brian Mulroney – still in the making and with an infinite future of judgement waiting to grind each into the shape future generations can look back on and see in bas relief; not completely three-dimensional, but simple and clear. (This is also supposing those future generations will care to do so.)
There’s something so similar in the mien of these men, something so strangely apropos that these two should be going through their dark nights of the soul in tandem, as they separately await judgment for (alleged) crimes of financial chicanery.
Two very different men, two totally different paths – one having chosen the private sector, if not a private life of a media baron; the other a lifelong politician, whose every decision and pronouncement would have been reflected back on the very pages published by his current personal doppelganger.
Big men. Big voices. Big deals. Big egos. Big downfall.
The Mills of God in their cases also twinned – the courts of law on the one hand, of public opinion, the other. Though their fates await separate sentence (and in Mulroney’s case, even a formal accusation has yet to be made as the enquiry into his dealings with evil elf Karlheinz Schreiber continues) it’s likely a safe bet that outside their fears of financial ruin and/or imprisonment, their real preoccupation and the very real personal pain both are suffering is in regard to that one area that is unaffected by crimes and courts and sentences: the judgment of history. The loss of a powerful and positive legacy they both so clearly yearn for.
The Toronto Star featured an article yesterday opining on that very subject, though perhaps you could sense which way the story was leaning with the reporter’s inclusion of Richard Nixon as an example of history’s judgment of a man vilified in his own time, destined to be remembered as the only president ever forced to resign in shame and ignominy. Though she left the ultimate judgment hanging – as she must: excellent journalist though she is, she makes no claims of psychic prescience – there was and is very little doubt that she shares the opinion of most onlookers: the final judgement, whether made by God or man, by history or histrionics, doesn’t look so good.
It doesn’t matter the good that may have been achieved by either from time to time in the course of their lives and careers, there’s a sense that overall, in a “Mill’s of God” sort of way, the balance for both lies very squarely on the dark side of the spreadsheet.
What’s surprising is that two such intelligent men – you simply don’t reach the heights either have achieved without a generous helping of grey matter – have such an inability to see themselves as others see them. To acknowledge the waves of disbelief and disgust, which they casually dismiss with all the depth of a bitchy cheerleader: “You’re just jealous!” you can imagine them bleating, as every other editorial weighs in with character sketches that might make you or me weep.
Another similarity between the terrible twins are their problems with communication – though their difficulties are expressed in two very different ways.
Conrad Black for instance, who is renowned for his virtually bottomless vocabulary renders himself incomprehensible for using words far more expensive than your regular over-the-top $10 variety; his would have to go for tens of thousands were they to be auctioned off, so obscure, so long, so complex, so multi-syllabic, but in the end so very unintelligible. Language used not to communicate, but to NOT communicate. What’s that about? Seriously?
(I myself am a lover of words, I like to use them all, or as many as I can get pen around: the most apt, the most delicious, the most lyrical, the most descriptive and I’ll admit that some of them are not in everyday usage – but they’re the best words to communicate precisely what I want to say. However I would never – and I mean never – put myself in the same class as Black who, for example, instead of saying his future wife was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen mere moments after meeting her, described her to those around him as being the absolute acme of “female pulchritude”. I’m convinced half of them, before diving for their dictionaries thought he was describing a fat woman with bad skin. When a person is moved – as I have no doubt he was at first clapping eyes on the very toothsome Barbara Amiel – I’m sure he described her that way a time or two, and as I’m sure you’re aware, it has nothing to do with her actual teeth – you’d (I’d) assume all that puffery and bullshit would whither away to breathless descriptions of beauty and gorgeousness and maybe a comment or two about her rack or her ass if he was truly swept away. But to go straight to "pulchritude", suggests a man no longer able to even think as the rest of us do, let alone express himself in such a way as to be easily understood. He’s turned English into a second language… to the English.)
And Mulroney – he of the modulated to a fare-thee-well, phonier than an old-fashioned disc jockey, cheesier than that guy who used to describe recipes using Kraft products in between breaks during The Wonderful World of Disney. (Combine two cups of Kraft miniature marshmallows with six slices of melted Velveeta cheese, stir in a heaping tablespoon of Kraft Skippy peanut butter, and roll in a half cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips and top with Cheez Whiz – et voila! A marshmallow peanut butter cheese log! Perfect for entertaining – just chill and cut into interesting shapes! Gah!)
I remember my father laughing and describing the then Prime Minister’s voice after the two of us had been listening to some speech or other. “Brian Mulroney,” said my dad – a conservative himself I’ll remind you – “has a voice that sounds like (and here he slowed down) deep, brown, shit.”
I giggled like mad. My dad rarely used language like that. But clearly, in search of the appropriate descriptor, he could come up with nothing truer than that which he described. And it’s true. The result: nothing he says – though you may easily understand the words and even the point – sounds honest, or real, or true. Communication yes – but not of anything he intended. Rather, time and time again – and as seemingly out of control as Conrad Black is in his choice of words – he unintentionally reveals a character as attractive and sweet-smelling as deep, brown shit.
(Aside: I interviewed Mulroney once – two seven minute segments on my news and public affairs talk show – and he began patronisingly, treating me like the piece of blonde fluff I’m sure he assumed I was, before quickly moving into a defensive mode as I lobbed the less-than-softballs he’d been expecting. Still, he gave nothing away and really said nothing either. But the point in a great many of these interviews is not to force some alarming, heretofore unheard of shocking truth out of your interview subject – with their experience with the media that’s never gonna happen - rather to simply allow them to be themselves and reveal themselves in the ways in which they answer, avoid or obfuscate. I was pleased with the interview, though the news director had no comment except to say: “You didn’t make him cry.” I was angry at him them... I think it’s pretty funny now. And it's true - I didn't make the Prime Minister cry.
I’ll say this about Mulroney: he was patronizing, indirect, insincere, oily and cold as chipped ice, but he didn’t smell like deep, brown, shit – he smelled very, very good. It was the most remarkable thing about him: his quite glorious cologne.)
But I doubt there’s a perfume sweet-smelling enough to lift him out of the swamp he’s currently waist deep in, alligators circling, a haze of media like a cloud of noseeums, nipping at his sensitive skin. A hide that’s grown thinner and more delicate as the years and the inconsistencies have piled up.
And Conrad Black, who by all accounts is intending to write another book – his own story it is rumoured – once he beds down in the big house, is probably already mentally marshalling his words as he lies sleepless staring at some expensive hotel ceiling in Chicago awaiting tomorrow’s sentencing.
I doubt "sorry” will be one of them.
So the question is, if the Mills of God are currently grinding these two once high-living, high-flying, high-stakes gamblers into cosmic dust, is it solely for His insight and subsequent celestial sentencing, or might either of these men someday get off that relentless wheel and see for themselves what so many have seen for so long?
Or would it be kinder to pray that they never know with “exactness” just how far down they’ve been ground.

Juliet waves...

2007-09-11T13:01:00.000-04:00

"Each thing I do I rush through
so I can do something else.
In such a way do the days pass - "

I can’t remember the first time I read Stephen Dobyn’s poem (from the book Cemetery Nights, Penguin Books, 1987) but I know it resonated with me in a way only an essential truth first recognized can.
That’s me: each thing I do I do rush through – anticipating the next with a focus that reflects such dismissive contempt for that which is happening now, that I’m surprised I even make an impression on the various retinas I flit across on a given day.
It’s like I’m not here at all.
And, yeah – if we were on Oprah we’d all be yammering away about lightbulb moments and other equally obvious nutshellian concepts, but when you get it smack in the face (and from poetry for Gawd’s sake) it goes deeper and sticks deeper, until you find yourself subconsciously asking yourself over and over again: “am I doing it now? am I doing it now?”
Invariably, the answer is yes. Wondering if I’m doing it ‘now’ is the most ‘in the moment’ thing I do.
When I’m reading, even the most enjoyable, engaging page-turner of a book, I’ll notice myself taking sidelong glances at the pile of books by my bedside, taking future inventory of what I plan to be immersed in next; in fact simply making note of what I’ll be gearing up to rush through after this rush as it turns out.
No matter the movie, old favourite (All About Eve) or new thriller (the edge of the seat Children of Men for instance) I’ll constantly be checking my watch – the basis of my love for the brilliant Timex Indiglo technology I suspect – re-checking my grocery list, or mentally dressing for a date later that night, truly only enjoying what unfolds in front of my very eyes in the briefest of fits and starts. Even the later date is only a prelude to what it is I’ll be doing later in the wind-down phase.
(Which is inevitably reading the current book and thinking about the next…)
The concept of “living in the moment” is difficult for most I guess – the skill (talent? ability? facility?) requiring conscious effort and practice. There are any number of guides from the obvious to the esoteric, and a variety of meditations from Transcendental to Zen, but none of it works for me. I’m always looking for the next one…
Total aside – well, slight – when I was 16 my parents signed the three of us up for a course in Transcendental Meditation. The real thing – taught by hippies, living in an open-plan, solar-heated, pyramid/teepee-inspired house, no furniture taller or more structured than the Indian-print cushions we are guided to sink meditatively into, practically drenched in Pacific Northwest patchouli (they’re much Zen-ier out there don’t you find?) Complete with an initiation of burning grasses and the revelation of your own personal, specially-chosen-for-you mantra at a low key “ta da” graduation ceremony tacked on the end, we went for several lesson over the weeks, but I might just as well have stayed home to bug my brother... because at the end, it just didn’t take. I simply hated my mantra. Loathed it. The word – more of a sound really – ended on two jarringly glottal-stopping consonants that made my brain hiccup. (I’d tell you but then I’d have to charge you $100 and set something on fire.) The dreadful focus–sapping mantra made me incapable of meditation (though it did improve my already superbly developed napping skills) and I dropped it all within weeks.
My favourite memory of the whole thing however was the vision of my super-conservative father – suited, tied, all business, all banker… how he ever got the crease back into his pants is a mystery that remains elusive to this day – cross-legged on the floor, earnestly attempting to take it all in. It was my first intuition that this most cube-shaped of squares might have some pretty interesting curvy edges deep down inside. Turned out to be true too.
But (as ever) I digress…
But yesterday I did spend almost half a day completely checked into the current moment at that place it seems I receive all my insights of late, at the Hospital for Sick Children. There before my eyes were the people for whom fate or nature or God (or whatever you believe it is that makes such a destination a necessity for the innocents) were receiving a crash course in the meaning of “living in the moment”. Each moment. By moment.
We began in the CCU with John (not his real name – I’d never directly identify any of the children – not just because it’s the law, but because it’s them) who has lain paralyzed for the past two months after being suddenly and inexplicably stricken with Guillain Barre syndrome in the middle of a family holiday thousands of miles away. (His father told me the whole terrifying heart-stopping, white knuckle adventure of bringing him back to Toronto from a rather quiet backwater paradise, for which even being airlifted in a private emergency Lear jet required seven separate stops and starts…) Guillain Barre is a mysterious condition (a syndrome rather than a disease, as doctors have not been able to discover why the body’s immune system begins to attack the body itself creating symptoms that begin with weakness and tingling in the arms and legs, progressing to a point of complete paralysis where a respirator is necessary) that culminates in a “locked in” situation where the patient’s brain and intellect are completely, blazingly intact – and the body is utterly intractably frozen.
I cannot imagine why John (a teenaged math wiz and serious girl-fancier) would need months (or possibly years – the ultimate prognosis is unknown) of having his respirator regularly detached in order to suction the excess fluid out of his lungs as he lies there completely immobile with only a sophisticated eye blink system developed between he and his father to comunicate, to learn the lesson of ultimate patience. Further tested by a new (also mysterious and so far untreatable) rash which has sprung up all over his body and is deeply, painfully itchy, John can only indicate through eye blinks where it’s at its worst and there his father gently, delicately rubs without scratching.
(Can you imagine? Just think about it for a minute: the most horrible itch – and it’s everywhere: arms, legs, scalp, bottom – and there is nothing you can do to scratch it. There may be more painful tortures available on the market, but for drive-you-out-of-your-mind discomfort on the grand scale, I’d say an allover unscratchable itch would be pretty high on the list.)
There he is – and his focus must be on the minute by minute, experiencing the piercing reality of his traitorous immune system – and while we were there (my volunteer partner and I provide hair cutting and styling, a maybe not so surprisingly successful program for a group of people whose lives are lived in unimaginable routine and boredom, broken up by moments of equally unimaginable sheer agony and/or terror) the suctioning had to take place every five minutes or so. Minute by minute. That’s how John lives – a life measured in breaths and blinks and the immediacy of his body’s needs.
But still we connect. He rolls his eyes at my teases, he blinks his one for yes, two for no choices about how high his sideburns should be shaved, how much more should be taken off the top and sides. We all are there in tight focus and completely locked in to John. The only mind escape I make – and only for a moment – is to recognize: “I’m here. Thank God”, then I pick up the mirror (embarrassingly pink with the word “Princess” scrolled across the top – John just rolls his eyes again) to give him the ultimate control of a bit more off the top and his desire to have the back of his neck shaved straight across – not curved or pointed. (I think my partner lingered over the shaving, feeling instinctively how delicious the razor would feel against his sensitive, itching neck. He closes his eyes and they roll up ever so slightly like a dog having a delicious belly rub. It’s a nice moment.)
But we’re finished – and it’s time for yet another painful suctioning – so we depart, but I’m still there – in the moment – still thinking of John and wondering when we’ll see him next and praying and projecting (okay – I know, but projecting in the moment) that next time he will be off the respirator and his fingers will be able to lock around a pencil so he can work the complicated calculus he loves so much and that must itch inside his mind far worse than the visible rash on the outside of his slender, unnaturally still body.
Outside the room, robes and masks off and I’m surprised by a familiar face – a lovely face – the mother of another of my favourite patients, another of those magical special connections, a toddler with another undiagnosed life-threatening illness that apparently almost took her away forever last Friday.
In the hallway, there we are and it’s none of my business but the doctors are talking to the mother and joy of joys, we are hearing (me “over-hearing”) at the same time she is that the prognosis is good – that a corner has been turned and Juliet (not her beautiful name but in the neighbourhood) is improving. Her mother comes to me and we hug – it’s been 3 months at least since I’ve seen her, though I’ve thought about the two of them often and always with Juliet in some imaginary sunny-afternoon home situation (toppling bricks and masterfully colouring outside the lines and looking up from under her extraordinary eyelashes with a smile that is the very definition of heartbreaking) but apparently I’ve been out of the loop, as after seeing Juliet last time, on the mend, the terrible thing has happened again and the illness has returned.
But today is yet another day – one of the ones with the hope-against-hope joy attached - and I am reveling in every eyeful of her mother’s transformed face with an in-the-moment thrill that’s better than just about anything you could imagine. (I certainly can’t think of anything just at this moment…)
She has to go off to confer with the doctors, but she says to me as she races off: “If you’d like you can go in and see her – she’s on the respirator and not really conscious, but you’re welcome to have a peek.” And I know I am being given a gift as the truth is all over her hospital room door – along with the washing and gowning and masking and gloving instructions is the sign that restricts all entry beyond those deliberately authorized. But the ultimate authority has given me the go-ahead, so I suit up and tentatively tiptoe into the room. There she is (grandfather at her side, absorbed in just looking at that precious face) and she’s grown! She’s only just a little more than two, but I can see subtle differences along with her delicately curling, just slightly auburn hair, longer than ever (girlfriend needs a trim – girlfriend will be getting it…) and I see all this in and around the respirator and IV lines and the dozens of other monitoring and life-giving equipment; but there she most definitely is, pale and small with her startling white eyelashes fanned gently on her round, still-baby cheeks. (One of the mysterious symptoms of Juliet’s condition is that it has turned her unusually long eyelashes snow white. Extraordinary!) I hold my breath as I compare her then to her now and feel that thrill again, as even though the child that lies before me looks as hospitalized and fragile as a child could possibly look, I’ve heard the word - and the word is “better”.
As I stand there, she slowly opens her eyes – those lashes! – and looks straight at me. I lower my mask a little and whisper: “Juliet – do you remember me? It’s Jane…”
And she lifts her tiny little hand and she waves at me.
And now I am out of the moment again. But I am not rushing forward, I can only go back into the past – just 24 hours ago – to live over and over that precise moment.
It is Joy.

The Bitch's Back

2007-06-24T15:56:00.000-04:00

So my inner voice and I are chatting away like we do all-day, every day.
(Inner Voice: Why are you having another coffee? You’ve already had three… ME: Because I LIKE coffee – it’s great. And it’s supposed to be good for you – it was all over the news recently: health benefits, antioxidants, improved work performance and a bunch of other neat stuff. IV: Where did you get that information? positivelycoffee.com or some other such nonsense? ME: Well, actually, yes…IV: How can you just believe this stuff? It’s probably still more bad for you than good – you’ll be getting nervous and edgy soon and you know how THAT affects you…and it’s up to me to talk you through it… ME: Oh geez – great, that’s all I need…could you please just leave me alone? IV: Ha!) and so on.
I did an exercise recently – one that’s supposed to get you through a writer’s block (I have just a teensy one right now – nothing to be worried about …IV: Oh really???) where all you do is sit down and write for ten minutes on anything, everything – whatever comes to mind – free associating, even writing, for instance: “I have NOTHING to say... I have NOTHING to say...” a thousand times or so.
It all starts out as rubbish (of course, as is true: "I have NOTHING to say…”) but surprisingly I rather quickly segue into what’s going through my head as I just let go.
(Money worries, relationship worries, work worries, house worries, global warming worries, friend worries, dog worries, nagging can’t-quite-name-them worries…why do I keep kicking my own ankle until I have a permanent scab on it, that keeps getting kicked off – what am I? six? … and a million other thoughts that seem to flow through my dancing fingers and across the keyboard in a way structured writing never does. And all of them, every last one, is anxious and depressing and negative.)
And that’s when I see it – this whole letting-go is simply revealing my constant undercover inner voice and allowing absolute free rein/reign over the process... and all I can think is: what a BITCH!
Now I know this is nothing new – I know that everyone knows free-association is simply a way of getting to your subconscious or your ego or id or whatever (IV: I can’t believe what crap you talk! Have you no shame? If you just did a little homework, you’d KNOW if it was the ego or the id or the subconscious or whatever – but you don’t! You just grab hold of a thread dangling off the edge of a notion and swing from it, acting like it’s as thick and strong as the anchor chain on the Queen Mary!) so you can dredge up all sorts of revealing shmutz that may well offer up a few gems bobbing around in its sticky ooze.
And darned if it doesn’t actually work.
I start writing about my inner voice and wondering why it’s such a crabby, sarcastic, hyper-critical control freak. Why couldn’t it be a warm and fuzzy mum-type voice, all reassuring and self-esteem building and unconditional acceptance-ing? (IV: Because what you want is immaterial - what you need is someone to knock you into shape – you have no idea how easily you can be seduced into thinking everything is going to be okay, when without my constant attention everything falls apart! In seconds!)
See what I mean?
But I wonder, as I listen to this shrill nag inside my head, if she’s so very the opposite of me, or how much she’s closer to my actual conscious me-self – the one I keep to myself so everyone I know and love doesn’t think I’m just some negative Cassandra, finding fault and figuring the odds (IV: Forget the odds;the odds are NEVER in your favour. That’s why gambling is a mug’s game. You’re talking about luck – and don’t you DARE imagine luck is ever going to get you anywhere…) and basically pronouncing sentence on everyone and everything like a bitter Olympic ice-dancing judge – to whom the number 9 simply does not exist, preferring 5, or on a real red-letter day, maybe a feeble 6.2.
I reject that.
I’m sunny, good-natured, positive, helpful and loving! (IV: You’re pessimistic, neurotic and occasionally, dark.) I believe everything will work out for the best. (IV: You’re terrified it won’t, and half believe that even hoping things will somehow balance out is leading you down a very slippery slope indeed.)
If you think I’m joking about my inner-bitch, I assure you I am most certainly not. (IV: Call me anything you like – you need me and you will never not need me.)
Some days, as you can imagine, it’s just exhausting.
And it’s not that I don’t think everyone has an inner voice, just that I wonder how many have one as constantly critical, or as constantly unpleasant, or just as… as constant. (IV: Are you doing math? You know you can’t do math. Stick to blah-de-blahing… THAT'S what you do best…)
I mean, you’ve got to figure not everyone has the inner equivalent of a dedicated parole-officer trailing them around, else how could so many people take things that don’t belong to them, deliberately say terribly hurtful things, cheat on their taxes, not tip their server, or go through red lights – and here’s the real kicker – without feeling regret or guilt.
And there’s tons of those – and not all of them are psycho- or sociopaths. There are few living right here in my condo apartment building, doing nothing illegal per se, just being sort of 24/7 crummy and mean. (You simply would not believe my board of directors! IV: They’re doing the best they can – you quit when things got a little uncomfortable. ME: I quit when two of them almost went at it with fists, a third accused a fourth of lying, and the fifth lost all sense of decorum and began being outrageously clear about his most unpleasant and personal opinions. IV: Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs – get a spine for heaven’s sake! ME: You see what I have to put up with? Criticism, clichés AND this board of directors?!)
Then there are the people who just naturally remain pacific and open-minded. People whose inner voice tries to imagine the best possible outcome in any situation (IV: the word you’re searching for is “denial”) while accepting that nothing’s guaranteed. (IV: Hmph...) These are the people who don’t look like they’ve spent four hours getting ready just to go to Loblaws for some hamburger meat, buns and a six-pack of diet coke, and even though they may not be America’s Next Top Model or Brad Pitt, look perfectly nice all the same. (IV: It’s called “giving up.”) They also seem to rather naturally do the right thing (IV: Now you’re getting somewhere…) and it looks nearly effortless. (IV: You can stop right there! Doing the right thing is always a horrible, dirty, hand-wringing, brow-sweat inducing, exhausting, difficult, depressing battle. Otherwise, you’re not doing it right. Fact.)
And I wonder how my inner-voice would do up against other people’s inner-voices in a knock-down, drag-out, spare-no-prisoners fight to the death? (IV: You’re kidding right? I don’t need to challenge other inner-voices to know I’m right! I’m right because I am – and because you tell me so every single time you fall into line like a good girl. I won’t even talk about it. Shut up!)
My inner-voice does not like being challenged, though to be honest, it stopped listening to me a long time ago. (IV: There are only so many hours in a day…and I choose to spend them productively…) I’m not sure what it listens to, unless there’s some kind of cosmic negative-reaction radio station, quietly playing the hits all day long. (IV: Mind your own business... better yet: just move over and I'll take the wheel…)
I’m not sure if I dare post this on my blog for fear everyone will think I’m falling into some sort of schizophrenic fugue (IV: You have my permission to trust that instinct!) but I also feel exposing this internal truth/tug of war may go some distance to lowering the volume and injecting some much needed balance. (IV: There you go with all that “balance” again. I suggest you investigate Chaos Theory when you have a moment… in between singing Kumbaya and “Trusting the Universe to provide”…)
I want to send some sort of depth-charge in there – some kind of criticism-seeking missile – to shut the voice down, or at least disable it in a way that would allow just a hint of faith and optimism to shine through. (IV: I’m warning you Missy! Step away from that computer NOW.) But I don’t know the code, and as well, I’M already disabled by this stupid voice which has told me for as long as I can remember that self-scourging, cynicism and mistrust is the only way to stay on the straight and narrow. (IV: I don’t care for the characterization – or the attitude – but the theory is fairly accurate.)
I’ll say it again: BITCH!
But I know there is another voice in there – the one that HATES the bitch voice – a voice that shyly, hopefully - maybe a little tentatively - disagrees with everything the bitch says, and believes (maybe naively, IV: MAYBE????) that kindness and support and trust and love are just as effective as a source for inspiration followed by action.
(IV: I won’t listen to another MINUTE of this! Until you smarten up, straighten up and inject a little painful reality into your thinking, I wash my hands of you – and don’t come crying to ME when everything falls apart… as it inevitably will... good bye and GOOD LUCK!)
ME: Heh heh… now you’re talking!

Love survives

2007-06-03T14:28:00.000-04:00

Life’s an adventure.
Subway, bus – it doesn’t matter – whenever I’m on public transportation I’m thinking about the same thing: who amongst my fellow passengers would I band together with if our train/bus was bombed, hijacked, or otherwise thrust into movie-esque danger by brute villains, unbridled nature or a traffic jam.
I want to be prepared; I don’t want to get stuck with the spineless, briefcase-toting whiner who’d sell us all out for a nickel or a break for freedom (you know that guy’s a goner anyway) or one of those stock Hollywood women who do nothing but shriek and whimper and refuse to bridge the gaping chasm, or swing from a snapped cable, or climb up the inside of an industrial smokestack before it blows. Those people brown me off.
I want to be part of the wise-cracking survivors – that hardy pod of people willing to do-what-it-takes and get off a good line before facing almost certain disaster.
I’m sure you do this too. If Hollywood has taught us anything, it’s taught us that no matter the circumstances, in any random group, planeful of passengers or disordered mob exist all the various personality types necessary to thwart danger, right wrongs, or, in my case, assuage boredom. The fact that it doesn’t hold true in real life is hardly the point; in real life most people just want to get where they’re going, and in our stepping-over-the-homeless to get to Starbuck’s society, heroism seems in mighty short supply these days.
So what if I’m just on my way to the vet (a bus and two subway changes) to pick up a fresh supply of (one of) the dog’s medications (how I ended up with the $4 coffee and a pink bracelet I’ll never know…) Both coming and going – at off-peak hours – there’s still oodles of fun to be had on an otherwise tedious side-trip with just the merest flick of a sideways glance every now and then. Wearing sunglasses helps too; staring on public transit is a no-no (everybody knows) so if you want the widest possible pool of compadres, it’s best to do your eye-balling surreptitiously.
You’ll need: 1 (one) incredibly good-looking guy complete with piercing eyes and tortured back story; 2 or 3 (two or three - one bald) sarcastic buddies with hearts of gold. Remember: at least one of them will have to be sacrificed before it’s all over, so look for some real charactery characters. You’ll need a nurse, a young mother (and baby) some game older folk, a handful of disposable extras who’ll do as they’re told and at least two craven cowards. (See above.)
Et voila – your cast is complete, change at Bloor.
For the last few months, all my adventures seem to be of the minor-league Sisyphean or Aegean Stables sort: the pushing boulders pointlessly up steep slopes, or mucking out filthy stables kind. Sorta hard, kinda boring, sleeves rolled up to eternity and no end in sight. So if I manufacture adventure on the Avenue Road bus, what’s the dif?
Until you come across a real adventurer or two and you remember that for some people being poised on the brink of life and death, facing enormous heart-breaking choices and bearing agony with dignity is a daily reality.
I met two such people recently.
Just about the greatest thing I get to do on a regular basis is volunteer at Sick Kids; wearing the volunteer vest with pride and being allowed to spend time with people who might just be in extremis (or quite possibly worse: watching someone they love in extremis) is to take part in life at a time when it really matters. All life matters of course – but some parts take place at the thinnest possible edge of a very thin wedge, when if you’re lucky, you may be able to help someone when they need it. My sort of helping – a volunteer’s sort of helping – is obviously not of the actual life-saving kind; it’s more of the moment-saving kind. Bringing people back to moments of normalcy and just remembering what it is to be not just a patient or a parent, but a human. A kid or an adult – playing a game, going for a walk, sharing a laugh, fixing someone’s hair, talking about boys, movie stars or sports. It isn’t earth-shattering, but sometimes it’s deliciously, run-of-the-mill, just-another-day grounding.
So I met this mother/daughter duo recently, and something about them touched my heart to the point of breaking. Meeting heroines doesn’t happen every day, but it happened on this particular day – a day when the mother and I also discovered we have a shared past (having lived in the Bahamas at the same time as children, our fathers in the same line of work, many of our friends the same). It was a point of recognition and connection and maybe why we snapped into bonding-mode quick as a reflex action. But maybe not. Maybe it was just because she was wonderful, and honestly? She shone. She shines.
And so does her daughter. Though shining from a place deep, deep within, as this fourteen year old has been virtually completely incapacitated by a shockingly cruel disease, unable to speak or move, trapped inside a tiny, emaciated body, but bursting with life and joy all the same.
This little girl has a disease called MLD – Metachromatic Leukodystrophy – a degeneration of the white matter of the brain and the central nervous system. It’s a rare disease, one of a small grouping of diseases (most famously one of the leukodystrophies – ALD – was portrayed in the film Lorenzo’s Oil) that are characterized by the destruction of the myelin sheath, the loss of which rapidly robs the sufferer of movement, speech, sight, cognition and ends a few too-short years later, in death.
Perfectly healthy until the age of nine or ten, the disease first reveals itself in the child in a variety of behavioural changes, prompting many parents and doctors to treat it as a behavioural or psychiatric problem before the hard-to-diagnose/impossible to treat condition is finally identified. There is no cure and no treatment other than to alleviate as best they can the effects of some of the symptoms; families are left to cope with the reality of the unutterably altered life of a beloved whose last years and days are all too easily imagined. The child’s mother described it to me as manifesting as a combination of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Multiple Sclerosis and Alzheimers – any one of which would be devastating, but as a group nothing less than mind-bogglingly horrifying.
And yet, and yet…
They laugh. They smile. They hope. They love. They face reality. They pray. They accept support and offer love in return. As a family they are united and strengthened. They attract the love of others as easily and naturally as a bee collects pollen, and share it as organically as that same pollinating bee, with much the same beautiful, flowering results.
I love being with them. I love to be in the presence of that miraculous mother/child love that knows no limits, not even of death.
As I observe a small, small snippet of their lives I know I’m seeing heroes – not a briefcase-clutching whiner, or chasm-avoiding shrieker in sight. There are no brave, sarcastic quips tossed over the shoulder, only meaningful, warm connections that resonate with affection and faith.
It’s THE great adventure. And I would follow this pair anywhere.

Winged Cupid painted blind

2007-04-18T16:51:00.000-04:00

On some level I’ve accepted that it’s spring. This (obviously) isn’t on any level that requires any of the physical senses to render a judgment – it’s still cold and grim and I don’t hear much cheerful tweeting or observe any enthusiastic budding going on. I have yet to taste the season, but it certainly doesn’t look very appetizing, what with its thin layer of post-snow, tattle-tale grey detritus accessorizing the bleak and remorseless landscape – but I have purchased a pair of shoes.

These aren’t just any shoes either – clobber to put space between me and the pavement and to protect me from the elements – these are shoes of hope for a better tomorrow and faith that it’s coming soon. Maybe not Friday – maybe not even next week – but soon.

They’re beautiful. Strappy and stilettoed, with a sexy band that wraps around my ankle giving me that skinny, delicate racehorse look. (I think I’ve established that I could run the high hurdles in heels. True story.) Providing me with approximately 3 and a half inches more in height than God in his infinite wisdom saw fit to bestow upon me, all in all, wearing them around the bedroom and admiring myself in the mirror, I have to admit I look a bit of a dish.

From the knees down anyway.

But I never would have purchased them had I not begun to believe I might actually be given a chance to wear them. It’s the springtime ritual – like a gardener setting up his soil for a summer of grass and growing; clearing out the weeds, raking off a winter’s worth of rubbish and twigs, and spending an inordinate amount of time down at the garden centre, ogling seed packets and bedding out plants.

For me it’s more like pruning and clipping away at my body like an ornamental hedge, upping my work-out routine, moisturizing the bits that have remained dryly hidden so long, and considering a bold new lipstick that might startle during a more austere season. And of course, finding that one perfect pair of summer sandals that will perform the miracle of turning me into a virtual living advertisement for good times reborn.

For women of a certain age (ie: the “new 30”) as spring hoves into view and clothes change length and density, the discussion inevitably turns to cosmetic procedures. As predictably as a nipple slip from a slipping celebrity whose career needs a “look at me” jolt, after a certain point in life, you’ll notice everyone (including those who vowed… at the age of 19… to grow old gracefully) begins talking about things they’d like to get “done”.

Most of my crowd is still at the non-surgical stage; miracle creams having proved non-miraculous, the latest trend is to injectables, transferables and blasters. Injectables (botox to halt wrinkles, collagen to pouf and puff) transferables (take fat from hip ‘A’, insert it into crease ‘B’, and blasters (lasers that shock veins, spots and blots into submission) are the pre-surgical, impermanent youthenizers of choice. Everyone knows someone who’s had it done, dallied or flirted with a procedure or two, or is saving up for a course of treatments guaranteed to turn back the clock an hour or so.

It’s pricey stuff. For three or four months of a crinkle-free brow you might be paying a thousand dollars or so for a few hits of the botulin toxin. For collagen or fat injections designed to fill in various wrinkles, lines and crevices, you’ll pay over the odds for a similar period of smoothness. It may seem silly and vain and ridiculously expensive to pay for procedures you hope no one will notice except to remark on how rested you look, but if no one and nothing save a few poisonous microbes are sacrificed in the name of beauty, where’s the harm?

It’s when you see examples of plastic surgery gone horribly, hideously, over-the-top wrong; those who’ve grown not old, but petrified, without a hint of grace or subtlety, that your 19 year old self re-emerges to become instantly lovingly reacquainted with your delightfully, naturally softening and slackening muscles and skin.

I saw such a creature recently. With (non-surgically) widened eyes I gazed upon the effects of countless surgeries, procedures and alterations and heaven knows how many thousands of dollars. So much surgery was apparent (and remember, all I could see was all I could see – if you get my drift) that the cumulative effects actually tipped the balance in the other direction, rendering the lady ludicrously distorted into almost cartoonish relief, putting the finest possible focus on all that was elderly. Was she 75? 85? Impossible to tell – she was ageless in the most unflattering way possible.

From the tips of her deliberately careless hairdo (her windswept-looking locks frozen stiff in mid-breeze) to the tips of the sharp and pointy crimson-lacquered nails glued to her withered crone-like mitts, the woman was jaw-droppingly impossible to glance away from. Her utterly immobile face stretched as taut a quarter-bouncing buck private’s barracks blanket, her cheeks so smooth a baby’s bottom would have suffered by comparison. Two small slitty eyes peered out from under the carefully arranged fringe; confused-looking cloudy marbles that seemed as surprised as anyone else that a human was somehow operating inside the thin and lifeless shell. One could almost imagine going up and tapping her on the forehead – hello? is anybody home? – but not, for the fear her casing would literally crack open.

Situated just south of a tiny sharpened beak were two enormously inflated pendulous lips, the weight of whatever filler filled them pulling down the lower lip until the shiny innerside was visible above the bolster-sized protrusion. Taking sips from a water bottle every now and then, she carefully inserted the entire neck in between her lips – maintaining her perfectly made-up mouth? taking exquisite care not to put pressure on the frail and full-to-bursting skin? – and slowly glugged a few swallows, before just as carefully withdrawing the bottle from deep within. It was like watching a snake consume prey.

She touched herself every now and then with the utmost care. Only the tippy tips of her fingernails gently probed an errant hair, or oh-so delicately settled on the corner of her mouth to brush away an infinitesimal speck of lipstick. Like butterflies who taste with their feet, she seemed to be sampling herself with these sensitive little grazing fondles, finding much to please herself it seemed, with every lightly glancing stroke.

As you have no doubt gathered by now, I was experiencing an entirely inappropriate fascination with this stitched-together waxwork, whose appearance startled all, but drew me in with repellant curiosity. Didn’t anyone ever say no? Couldn’t some of that money been pressed into service improving her eyesight? For only a mirror with the attitude of the one hanging in Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s boudoir could possibly have informed this lady that her efforts were not only not in vain, but superbly flattering.

The supermarket queue moved forward and the lady and her companion paid and moved on and I eventually cranked close the open drawbridge that was my mouth. The checkout clerk caught my eye with an eye-rolling smile and a headshake. One of those special simpatico moments with complete strangers where nary a word need be said. I too paid for my purchases and set off for the parking lot, the sighting of the surgically de-hanced woman beginning to fade as my roving eye caught newer sights and my mind leapt on to other thoughts (what’s for dinner… where are my keys… an unending chorus of “I will Survive” embedded by the muzak goons at the supermarket) so when I rounded a corner in the parking lot and came upon the lady and her companion I was startled all over again.

He was just opening the passenger door to hand her in, when he stopped and tugged gently (of course) on her arm to pull her back to him. She returned to his embrace and lifted her face to what quickly became an unnervingly hot smooch. Encircling her tiny waist with his arms, he only stopped the kiss to turn his face down and sideways to press his lips passionately (and again, gently) to her neck.

Her outrageously poufed lips spread wide in a smile and she closed her eyes in what looked like an authentic swoon. He pulled her closer still for a moment, then gazed down into her eyes, kissed her lips once again, then (gently – okay?) helped her into her seat.

I felt as perverse as a Peeping Tom and embarrassed that I had witnessed what was so obviously a very private and intimate moment.

It was shockingly, movingly beautiful.

Spring can do that.

Boulevard of Broken Backs

2007-03-12T14:32:00.001-04:00

I did what I always do whenever I hear the first few bars of Boulevard of Broken Dreams – I reached for my cell phone. But even the 25 seconds of tinny Top Forty wasn’t enough time to find out who was calling. My injury made virtually any movement an impossibility.
I make an effort to stay fit. I mean, you have to – right? The current obesity statistics and health warning scare tactics are beginning to make the tobacco and firearms industries look like also-rans in the race to decide who kills more North Americans per bite, butt or bullet.
I eat well. Right, I mean. Properly. Always with an eye to balancing the proteins, fats and carbs. And not just any carbs mind you; the complex carbs – the fruit and veg, the mutigrained and whole-wheated; the stuff that really only earns its stripes by being purchased in straw baskets, priced by the pound, with pounds of expensive dirt still clinging to it.
Skinless chicken. Poached fish. Olive oil and grapeseed oil and virtually zero fat gleaned from anything remotely tasty.
I still enjoy a lovely fried up breakfast every now and then – the odd french fry, the occasional hunk of marbled meat accompanied by a baked and buttered potato. Even my doctor says that a diet comprised solely of healthful items represents a lifestyle not much worth living. But still, I eat well enough to complain about it.
And I certainly work out enough to heave the odd long-suffering sigh. Daily aerobic exercise and every-other-day weight training to keep my heart healthy, my muscles burning and my stomach flat enough to risk a navel piercing. To be honest it’s mostly vanity over health, but if the results are the same – what’s the dif? I walk everywhere and I walk fast – I don’t play any actual sporting games, but the group I play charades with – and the charades themselves - are highly physical.
So it’s come as a complete shock and not a little embarrassing that I find myself laid up at this time.
The fact is, I threw my back out reading.
This isn’t like the times I broke my toes. (Five.) Or the time I had my appendix out, or tonsils out, or was kicked in the leg by a horse. This isn’t like when I got my fingers stuck in a swing set, or when my mother closed my thumb in the car door. This isn’t like when I hit the ground on the netball court and broke one of my front teeth right in half when I was ten. This isn’t like when I dropped the lead crystal vase on my foot, or was bitten by the spider, or sprained my ankle by getting it caught in a recessed sprinkler hole at the Rosedale reservoir or… or any of those things.
This really hurt.
And I’ve been reading for a while now, so you should know I know how to do it for the very most part without any serious risk at all.
But I was – and this may be the key – I was binge-reading.
It’s been a stressful time of late. The dog has been very ill. (See previous blog re: Emergency Veterinary Hospital – total racket) And my dear, beloved friend has been under near constant strain and medical observation for a cancer that we know exists, but until definitively sourced remains untreated. I won’t whinge about the weather or the war or the President (or the Vice President) or Steven Harper or Hillary Clinton or the president of my condo board or traffic, as they’ve all likely been driving most of us to distraction; it’s all this illness and what’s behind it – and what’s likely before us – that has me positively vibrating in a state of fear of late.
And reading is what helps.
It’s always helped.
I remember a time of unemployment when I first arrived in London that had me nearly prostrate with terror. Luckily, a useful position to be in while being perversely comfortingly terrified by an absolute raft of Steven King novels. I went through them one after another like that suspiciously skinny Japanese guy who wins all the hotdog eating contests: not really enjoying them at all – just methodically cramming them all down. Maybe a glass of water in between.
When my father died I went into Eyre-mode (Jane) and then went on a search for all the Bronte books, focusing my attention on people long since dead. I appreciated that the authors I was reading had been dead and buried and fully and completely mourned more than a century and a half ago. Solidarity you understand.
There was a friend’s suicide that only Monica Dickens could help me through. Beginning with her book The Listeners about a suicide hotline, and continuing through deep tragedy and high comedy, Dickens has always been a very personal favourite. She reminds me of my mother. When she (Dickens) died I cut out her obituary (I still have it) and read her all, all over again.
To be honest, there was nothing, no magic, no book yet written that could distract me for even a moment when my mother died. But then penicillin can’t cure every infection – and even tried and true recipes for recovery may fall far short of a very great need. Still, it’s coming up on 25 years now – and I feel a little better.
But that was cancer too. And this is cancer now. Both my beloved friend and Lily have been roughly diagnosed and neither are receiving treatment. The friend because we don’t have all the facts yet (despite a virtual river of blood tests, multiple MRI’s, CAT scans, X-rays, two biopsy’s and even a PET scan) and the dog because she’s too elderly and spoilt to withstand any treatment beyond actual treats. She’s wobbly though (rickety too – not to mention shaky, tottering and feeble) but still eats and sleeps like a pro. So we go on.
But I’d pulled out the big guns. The complete novels of Jane Austen, beginning with Sense and Sensibility and continuing through the originally unpublished works of Catharine, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon.
I needed distraction big-time. So the first weekend with neither plan nor hospital visit scheduled I just turned on the bedside lamp, heaved up the all-in-one volume and lay down on my stomach to disappear into the 18th century for a while.
Some eight hours later I realized I was feeling a significant crick in my neck and a stabbing feeling in the small of my back that upon moving about, got worse. I ignored it. I just turned over and started Mansfield Park.
The next day feeling decidedly stiff (and using words like “behoove” and “opine” even when talking to Lily) I polished off the paper, then picked up my trusty Austen again, flipped to elbows propped and stomach down position and got stuck in for another day of drifting and dreaming.
It was the following day, last Monday morning when the chickens came home to apparently abandon roosting in favour of pecking vicious little divots all up and down my spine. It took me ten minutes to get out of bed. It took me slightly less time to get to the kitchen to make coffee, but I had to abandon even the thought of the paper for the time being as I knew the effort to stoop was at that precise moment totally beyond me. I fed Lily treats basically by shying them at her. I figured mollifying a Yorkshire terrier was just one bend away from facing life facing the floor – a permanent right angle trying desperately to get vertical, or at least horizontal.
To say I suffered the tortures of the damned might be overstating it just a smidge, but as anyone who has back pain knows, it’s a teeth-gritting, step-shuffling, fragile-as-glass feeling experience from start to finish.
Luckily for me, it’s mostly finished. Pain shoots across my shoulders fairly regularly and when I get up from a chair I still look like a cross between a pregnant woman and an ancient cleaning lady. All that hip-shot, small-of-the-back supporting and gusty sighing.
I have a new-found empathy for the pregnant and the bent, not to mention all those who suffer chronic back pain because while it lasted, my literature-related injury was hell.
But the distraction? Heaven.

So what the hell...?

2007-01-30T12:07:00.000-05:00

So.
So I took a little break from blogging. Felt a little burnt out blog-wise – a little under whelmed, a little over-Bushed. More than a little Cheney-ed.
So the truth is Christmas and New Year are always difficult holidays for me and this year for the first time, I didn’t feel alone. (Not that I’m not aware that there aren’t squillions of people suffering the emotional equivalent of the tortures of the damned, just that my closest friends are – surprisingly enough – pretty centered and no matter their spiritual stripe, tend to take the holidays in stride. I really do think I am comic relief for most people…)
So this most recent festive season, besides the lack of jolly snow, the near-tropical temperatures (that was then, this is now…) and the television and radio advertisements that began before Halloween with their ice-pick to the brain repetition, there was a different vibe; a near-universal aversion to the week of self-indulgence, useless gifts and It’s a Wonderful Life. Everyone seemed to be saying: “If I can just get through it… it’s only a few more days… 2007 has GOT to be better…” and various other sentiments in a similar vein.
So it quite cheered me up. My spirits were actually somewhat buoyed. I felt that rare sense of smug suitability that comes from hanging with the majority.
So as it turned out then, the holidays passed relatively painlessly, I got a few presents I am likely to use, I enjoyed the laughter and company of some seriously decent friends, and the stroke of midnight came and went without that familiar frisson of fear that, to the contrary, 2007 might turn out to be unbelievably, cataclysmically worse.
So then I got to go away to a tropical paradise for a week with a giggle of lovely girlfriends.
And SO, dear readers who are still with me, so it didn’t matter that for the single week we graced Nassau with our lily-white presence the skies turned grey, the winds picked up, the surf got rough and the sand went medieval on our asses, scouring our bodies and shooting into our ears and up our noses like an exfoliation gone terribly, terribly wrong. Did we care? We did not. We played cards, watched old episodes of Ab Fab and Black Adder, screened All About Eve for the thousandth time, drank, danced and read. At one particular hair-letting-down session, I actually picked up some surprising (and heretofore unheard of) sex tips, that should God see fit to bestow upon me the appropriate partner, I fully intend to make use of.
So who could ask for anything more?
So as it turned out, by the time we got home, (by which time the Bahamian weather had done an about face and was once again delighting and tanning the masses) we could have hoped for quite a lot less.
So one of our number returned home to the end of her relationship. An engagement begun just over a month before with fanfare and diamond ring and announcements presented to separate groups like a hockey team (not the Leafs) on tour with the Stanley Cup. There was and is no explanation. There was and will be no discussion. She hadn’t even unpacked her suitcase before she was loaded down with the baggage of this particularly horrible fait accompli.
So I don’t suppose I need to go into how completely gorgeous and kind and dear and undeserving of this she is, but trust me, she is. Could this mountebank (I feel a little Conrad Blackishness come over me at the strangest moments) EVER hope to meet a woman of equal qualities? I am happy to report that without question he never, ever will.
So then another of our number, my dear beloved friend came back to a test we were all expecting, but one for which we had high hopes would have benign results.
So many of us have different types of friends and acquaintances for whom we (and they) provide different functions and joys. One group of friends, for instance, I mostly play with – charades, quizzes, Trivial Pursuit-type stuff. Another bunch are my volunteering friends – people who I meet and laugh and interact with almost exclusively at the hospital. A third group are a sort of going-out-with group; not everyone wants to dress up and go to smart clubs and dance and quaff too-expensive drinks, but some do – and when I’m in the mood, these are the perfect souls with whom to do it.
So then there are the dearest, most beloved of friends, the ones who share intimacies, fears, frights and the deepest belly laughs. This is one such friend.
So she has cancer. As long as I’ve known her she’s had cancer. But because she is who she is, she’s never been ‘cancer girl’. It’s just an annoying, slightly terrifying fact that comes up regularly with trips to oncologists and radiologists and surgeons, who inspect and poke and draw substances out of her body with a nonchalance that comes with overlong familiarity.
So I am this friend’s memory. Along with a couple of bits and pieces of innards, any sense that her body is a private entity and any self-consciousness she might once have harboured, she’s lost her memory somewhat, and with what remains, the natural fear that comes from facing the horrors yet again, she finds it difficult to remember the questions she wants the answers to, reactions to recent miracle cures mentioned in newspaper articles, dates of past appointments, operations, scans, blood drawings and various other personal invasions. So I come. I take notes, I listen and ask the questions she can’t remember or is too afraid to ask. It works for us.
So I was with her when the latest in a long line of specialists entered the cold little exam room to give her the results of her most recent test, the one that told us that the cancer has returned for the fourth time.
(So not that it matters now, but I have to say I continue to be amazed at the rock bottom sense of empathy many medical professionals still come unequipped with; I thought it was an old story – the doctor who comes in, dumps hideous news on a terrified patient then escapes out the door (no doubt to do it to someone else) without an expression of sorrow, a word of encouragement or a glimmer of humanity. It’s not an old story. It’s the same old story.)
So we are frightened. We are horrified and disbelieving and shocked that three was not the bloody charm, that four has come to bite us on the collective ass with a sharpness that takes our breath and our cozy comfort away.
So I love her and I'm sick at heart.
So here we go again.

The sex appeal of Stephane Dion

2006-12-08T14:43:00.000-05:00

In what can safely be described as the triumph of stuffy over stimulating, Canadians should be taking enormous heart from the recent Liberal leadership convention and its appointment (anointment) of the man who may one day be putting the prissy back into Prime Minister – Stephane Dion.
Just look at him: grey, bland – even a little pasty – a man for whom the term ‘colourless’ could well have been coined. His posture shouts (well, murmurs really – there’s nothing loud about him) schlub, his fashion choices whisper ‘drab’ and his eyes sparkle not at all. He’s about as cool as the flip side of a pillow on a hot summer night, and even the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty likely considers his appearance just a little too “ehn” to defend.
He’s the new leader of the Liberal party – the Canadian answer to the dangers of charismatic leadership, and the folly of admiring leaders of action over those who would choose sober second thought.
Nobody is going to put Dion on their fantasy list of world leaders (living or dead) they’d like to sit down to dinner with, and that’s just fine with me; I’d rather he was beavering away in his opposition leader’s study, burning the midnight oil, sorting out the future of the country I call home, than chariz-ing wildly away over supper with his fans.
As goes Stephane Dion, so maybe goes the notion of political maturity at a national level. Could we have become a citizenry that is finally consciously choosing substance over star power? Or is this just a blip on the radar of bland?
I remember (oh how I remember!) the near constant comparisons of the front runners for President made in the 2000, then 2004 U.S. elections; Al Gore and then John Kerry attacked by both the people and the pundits who judged, then accused the men of being “wooden”, “stiff”, “boring” and “indecisive”, whilst congratulating Bush for his qualities of charm, charisma and “keeping it real”… He was the leader voters thought they’d most like to hunker down and tip back a beer with. He quickly gained the reputation of a man of action – no girly sitting around and pondering the potential downside of a preemptive invasion of Iraq (that was for little old ladies and the weapons inspector fusspots out of the U.N.) – showing his cojones by sending others to risk theirs.
Ah, but it’s an old story now, of chickens as if shot from cannons whizzing home to roost, and Republicans backing away from their once slavered over leader faster than you can say “mission accomplished”.
But Bush is still in denial.
The latest “Good God! Please, someone – anyone – what the hell are we going to do?” bipartisan effort to address the quagmire that is the war without end in Iraq – the Iraq Study Group led by former Secretary of State to former Bush President George H. W., James Baker – which suggests waking up and giving reality a shot, was greeted by the President with about as much enthusiasm as Britney Spears demonstrates for underpants.
Damning the report with some of the faintest praise he could muster, calling it, “interesting” with “some good ideas” that he would “consider”, the President left few wondering whether the document suggesting accelerated troop withdrawal from Iraq as well as serious diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran would achieve anything other than a quick trip to the circular file. Had the report been a blind date, you just know the setter-upper would have had some explaining to do for even suggesting such a homely gal.
The unintentionally funniest moment (the only kind he has as far as I know) of the affair so far came in Bush’s comment during the press conference when reporters seemed to be questioning how seriously he took the nine-months-in-the-making study.
“To show you how important this one is,” he said. “I read it.”
Ha!
But I digress.
What was I saying? Oh, right; Stephane Dion.
You see, that’s how forgettable he is.
The man whose sole quirk appears to be his attachment to a cherished backpack he totes to work in place of a briefcase, has already lifted the Liberal’s approval rating up and over the Tories, suggesting ordinary Canadians are also liking what they don’t see.
Which isn’t to suggest that just because a man is bland instead of folksy, or boring instead of charismatic, that such a person would make a good leader; rather that the absence of a glittering personality and a slickly delivered way with words doesn’t mean the opposite.
In Dion’s case, even his critics agree the intellectual academic with the mile-high out-of-office resume is a man of outstanding honesty, integrity and intelligence. Paired with his former life as a professor teaching political science at a number of prestigious universities, as well as being the editor and author of countless books and published papers focused on political science, public administration and management, it appears the man has more than enough experience, smarts and insight to lead a party, and maybe even a country, in the sort of considered, thoughtful, reflective style rarely observed in these days of packaged personalities and cynical sound bites.
Wow.
He’s bringing stuffy back.
That’s sexy.

The thing with feathers

2006-11-18T15:13:00.000-05:00

There’s always an interesting article or two on ananova.com.
In a section called ‘Quirkies’, headings for offbeat news reports fall under the categories of ‘Quirky Gaffes’, ‘Strange Crime’, ‘Sex Life’, ‘Animal Tales’, ‘Sporting Quirkies’, ‘Show Biz Quirkies’, ‘Heart Warmers’, ‘Rocky Relationships’ and ‘Bad Taste’, telling stories so bizarre one might suspect they were invented.
But ludicrous or outlandish as tends their collective wont, the tales usually turn out to be only too true.
From the man who lit a firecracker tucked into his bottom as a tribute to the famous gunpowder plot of 1605, (Britain’s Guy Fawkes Day) with ridiculously predictable results, to the story titled: ‘Convict posts himself to freedom’ (successfully mailed – he’s still on the run!) there is a delightfully Ripley-esque ‘Believe it or Not’ air to the vast majority of items detailing snakes slithering up toilets, old age pensioners surprised whilst having vigorous sex in unusual locations (or bravely thwarting younger, fitter criminals) as well as the expected inspiring tales of various legless mountain climbers and blind airplane pilots.
But my favourite article is currently gracing the ‘Animal Tales’ section of the web site; it’s the one about the rare Black Australian Swan from Muenster Germany who has fallen hopelessly in love with a gigantic swan-shaped plastic paddle-boat.
‘Black Peter’, a colour-blind avian mater-for-life, has fallen in thrall to the snow-white pleasure-craft; so aroused are his tender affections, he refuses to fly south for the winter.
There’s something both noble and ridiculous about the swan’s devotion – but then there’s something noble and ridiculous about just about anyone who attempts to make a life-long go of a love relationship.
The statistics for the longevity of human relationships are much less heart warming, with 50 % of American couples expected to divorce within the duration of their relationship. In Canada the numbers are a hardly more confidence-inspiring 1 in 3. Of course the numbers are only staggering when compared to the period before 1967, before the Divorce Act allowed married couples to slough off the human source of their emotional despair.
Of all the institutions that seem to exist almost solely to support and exhort the married state, no group is more distressed about the figures than the United States Republican Party. Having tried to co-opt family values whilst de-valuing the legitimacy of anything less than a strict man/woman union, it’s Red State marriages that add the most significant oomph to the United States separation and divorce numbers. (Where they also lead in incarcerations, illegitimacy and violent crime…)
Still, no matter the dire threats conservatives, fundamentalist preachers, ‘REAL’ women and Republicans link to the moral morass they claim the globe is sinking inexorably into as represented by our fickleness toward family, the facts are that divorce stats are actually plateauing. So that’s good news.
(Also good news is that chronic singleness seems to be losing a goodly portion of its sting. The word ‘spinster’ has disappeared almost entirely from our collective vocabulary, whilst the word ‘bachelor’ seems only to appear when the words ‘Charity Auction’, ‘pad’, or ABC Television are in tow.)
But for anyone of a romantic bent, the notion of a creature without human thoughts, morals, values or the ability to rationalize, but chock full of the ability to commit for life, is a sweet and hopeful thought indeed.
Down at the end of my street (well, at the end, turn right and walk two and a half blocks south) sits one of those chain travel agencies – you may have seen one: the exterior painted a lunatic shade of aggressively cheerful red, the windows filled with flight information and bargain basement prices for trips to Tokyo, London and Madrid – and each contains a ubiquitous plastic man: life-sized, dressed in airline pilot blue, complete with cap and tie. He smiles broadly, he gestures confidently, he never leaves his post by the door – and half the time I walk past the travel shop, I do a double take, wondering what a man is doing standing stock still, staring out of a shop window, until I realize and remember: oh, right - it’s ubiquitous patented plastic travel agent guy.
But clearly he’s caught my eye; maybe it’s the smile – or the uniform – or maybe it’s the solidity of his stance. His immoveable, permanency… his dependable there-ness that affects me so each time I happen by. He’s swan-like in his constancy.
But he’s also hard and hollow, two qualities the Muenster swan could never be accused of as demonstrated by his classic mating behaviour: single-minded in his devotion, circling his paddle-boat babe, staring endlessly at it (her) and crooning in his swany way.
(Local Muenster-ites have been so touched by the tale that arrangements have been made for the swan and the boat to spend the winter in a warmer and more protected pond enclave situated beside the elephant enclosure at the local zoo, eschewing the cooler clime of the downtown ornamental lake the two share during the summer months. Ah, the ability of love to move...)
But why admire patented plastic travel agent guy? Why not go straight for Black Peter in a Leda-esque turn of events? Quite apart from the guarantee of feathered fidelity, a quick perusal of Yeats’ glorious 1924 poem describing their mating indicates love with a swan is pretty hot stuff.
Check it out:
A sudden blow: the great wings
beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heat beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Clearly, ubiquitous travel agent guy is a poor substitute for anything approaching the powerful, romantic, endless love demonstrated by cygnus atratus. No matter how far the plastic man-shape can fly you (at low, low prices if you book early) Black Peter would rather stay home and croon to you. Man or man-made, mere mortals rarely come close to achieving his singular, ardent worship.
I am touched. And I haven’t touched an egg in more than a week.
Coincidence?
Or hope?

I've got mail

2006-10-30T11:27:00.000-05:00

There’s always someone making one of those ridiculous all-inclusive, no exclusions, blanket generalizations (and more alarmingly, sticking to them) about how you can accurately judge someone based on a single, simplistic, subjective rule of measurement.
For ince…
If you want to know what a person is really like, look at their shoes.
Clothes make the man.
You are what you eat.
You can always tell a lady by her habits.
Wot I like is a hoss with a nice honest eye. (From a racehorse trainer with a pronounced Yorkshire accent…)
I actually know someone who suggests if she sees a pair of appalling shoes on a first date, there will be no second such get together.
If I am what I eat, I am pretty much a long, golden, crispy stick figure, fried in oil and peppered with salt. (Though I can see how attractive this could be…)
As for a lady’s habits, a clever lady changes them based on everything from her physical circumstances, to the company she is currently keeping. (Which is another way to judge a person – based on their goofy friends and completely weird families… and totally unfair in my particular case, considering my friends and family…)
If clothes entirely make the man, I never would have dated and adored a guy I first met when he was helping a friend paint his living room. If I’m not mistaken, those were actual pajamas he was wearing, with the seat practically ripped out, and with a cartoon character decorating his pajama top. (And his shoes were pretty crap to boot.)
I do agree however, that when buying a horse, “a nice honest eye” is a definite plus. Those wicked, rolling, showing-the-whites or narrowed ones often tell a story that ends with a pretty nasty nip or kick. And it’s my experience that this standard can safely be applied to humans as well.
But perhaps there IS a way to really objectively tell what sort of person a person is – perhaps if you reached conclusions based on the sorts of issues and elements a person attracted to themselves – by the thousands even – perhaps then you could construct an accurate picture, a judgment of their character virtually impossible to refute.
Perhaps if you got a peek at their SPAM.
When did it begin? When did I do the deed? And for what (or what’s) did I initially do it?
When and I why did I remove my spam filter? (And how and when can I get it re-installed?)
I’m pretty cavalier with the old computer – for old is what it is and sloppy is what it’s become. If my computer were a closet, nothing would be on the hangers – everything would be strewn across the floor, hanging on a door handle, decorating the bedposts, or balled up and tossed into a laundry hamper.
It’s like a messy desk – I can find everything I need (I know pretty much exactly where everything is) but I spend an inordinate amount of time shifting around piles of other stuff, as I work to unearth whatever it is need at that particular moment.
My MS Word files are hopeless. I make an effort every time I get a new client to create a new series of files that all begin with a certain word – the client’s name perhaps… sounds simple doesn’t it? – then it all breaks down when I begin to invoice and have to decide whether to begin with the word “Invoice” or “Client’s name”, making a mental note to remember which way I went, or if I’d actually swapped the client’s name with a name for the specific assignment I was actually working on at that particular time, or if it was one of those files where I left spaces between words, or ran the whole lot together, or named it beginning “AAAAA…” and so on, so I could find it easily somewhere near the front of the document index.
(I may know where everything is on my desk, but the filing cabinet that is my mind is like something out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.)
But I digress. (The essential problem of the tangentialist: “… so where was I?”)
Right. My non-existent spam filter.
So no, I don’t know what specific, exact action or web site or pop up it was I wanted to see (I want to see EVERYTHING) or if it somehow involved lowering a firewall, or discarding some cookies (I still don’t get the cookie metaphor) or changing some security settings, or whatever. I just know I did it, and nothing has been the same since.
Now every day I awake (depending upon what time I went to bed the night before) at least 60-plus announcements, advertisements, come-ons or downright threatening email messages. And then they just keep coming in, regular as clockwork (regular as spam) until I lay down my weary head at night.
And they don’t come out of nowhere you know. Some ingenious “spy” or “bot” or worm or germ has infected my central computery nervous system and is sending me (on a daily basis) somewhere in the neighbourhood of all told, 200 unwanted, unneeded and for the most part, thoroughly unwholesome email messages.
But they all come from somewhere – and for a reason too. They’re ingenious these spam-artists, somehow infiltrating whatever I’ve got masquerading as a security system and plucking things seemingly out of the depths of my soul.
There are emails that come from people with names that look like names of friends – and I don’t mean friends with names like Nancy or Tom. Weird names… foreign names… obscure names… names I’ve perhaps not even used in emails, but rather in my own personal word files.
And clearly (and obviously) every single web site I visit, every google search I make, every secret private thought I have (and some I’m sure I’ve only imagined in my most fevered dreams) is daily being reflected in my email.
There’s a school of thought that no matter how odd or perverse or reprehensible or unthinkable a thought is, if you thought it, somehow, somewhere, you truly do own it on some level.
If that is the case, based on my spam (and on the emphasis in numbers of messages) this is who I am:
I am clearly extremely fat, as offers for miracle weight loss medications, equipment and training programs arrive at the rate of at least ten not-so-subtle suggestions a day. Also bald if the propensity for receiving (miracle) Propecia treatments are any indication. (Considerately deliverable in plain brown wrapping to save the postman knowing my secret shame.)
I am desperate for a loan (which several institutions would be thrilled to give me) ready for some pretty spectacular investment opportunities (if the strangers who are offering me stock tips are as smart as they tell me – and if only they could spell) on the verge of meeting some extremely slutty Russian girls (of impeccable character) ready to date a virtual United Nations of soulmates (particularly black singles in my area) looking for a new wristwatch (and uncaring as to the accurate spelling of Rollexx) and have been warned (I don’t know how many hundreds of times) that this is the second attempt that a gift card worth hundreds of dollars from Oil of Olay, Febreeze, Target, Toys ‘R Us or J C Penney is lying around, simply waiting confirmation from me.
I could so easily improve my credit score, get a free loan worth thousands with absolutely no credit check, get in on a hot real estate deal and I’d be a fool not to invest safely (and wisely) with those people who cannot spell. I am, like, riddled with financial potential!
Do I personally have any shoes with which to be judged by? Apparently not – but for the past two weeks, at least ten or twenty times a day, an offer for “Uggs in every colour” eggs me on to get shod ASAP.
“Replica” handbags and purses are mine RIGHT NOW, at tremendous savings if only I order (securely) from people who breached my security system in order to tell me so.
I have a lot of money – the problem is, it’s stashed in a series of American banks across the US, left to me by some distant, unnamed relative and all I have to do to claim the dough is send on the particulars of my chequing account here in Toronto.
Oh – and the folks from PayPal and Ebay are also constantly writing to me (again, mysteriously not making use of the spellcheck feature) to tell me that they suspect someone is trying to infiltrate my accounts, so if I would just (again) send them all my financial particulars, they’ll take care of those crooks immediately. They just need my AMEX number to make all those problems (or something) go away.
And then there’s my penis.
I hear about my penis A LOT.
The simple fact that I don’t have one is of no interest to my spammers. According to them, it is soft. It doesn’t work. I can’t have sex all night long – and the girls don’t love me anymore.
But – and it’s a big ‘BUT’, for up to 80% off, I can buy Viagra (Vihaggra, Vighara, Viaghra) or Cialis (Cailus, Cilaius, Calisius) safely, securely, and even in soft tabs if I’m having trouble getting the hard ones down. They’ll rush it to me overnight. They offer friendly support, and as an added benefit, they remind me I’ll never have to go to the drugstore ever again. (As if going to the drug store is akin to showing up for a root canal or an embalming...)
Clearly, if you judge me based on my spam, I’m a bit of a fat, bald, broke, soft, unloved mess.
But I have a nice honest eye, I’m on the verge of getting a very big loan – and slutty teenage Russian girls are nearly expiring from excitement at the prospect of meeting me.
So I've got that going for me.

A Prayer for Paris Hilton

2006-10-07T16:57:00.000-04:00

I’m a re-reader as much as a reader. I don’t know if I could do the math without a slide rule and a calculator (not to mention a better memory) but for every five or so books I read, I suspect at least one of them is a re-read.
Every other year for instance, I re-read all of Jane Austen. Almost every year I re-read The Grapes of Wrath. Amongst many others I know I’ve enjoyed the novels of Jon Wyndham more than a time or two, ditto for Susan Howatch, Monica Dickens and great grandfather Charles Dickens (particularly Great Expectations) and I have an almost unnatural fascination with Barbara Tuchman’s masterpiece A Distant Mirror; Life in the Calamitous 14th Century. There are many, many more – some I remember almost line for line, some, no matter how many times I read them, remain a nail-biting mystery until the end.
But right now I’m re-reading one my most re-read reads, A Prayer for Owen Meany, for the I-don’t-know-whatth time.
Each time I’m drawn to different aspects of the John Irving novel that seems to top so many lists of reader favourites, though I’m always cozily happy to luxuriate in the sense of living so close to the centre of the action, as Irving’s fictional storyteller Johnny Wheelwright lives just a few blocks north of where I reside, in the absolutely genuine enclave of Forest Hill.
(I’ve written before of my fantasy Toronto-based novel, with characters all named after various neighbourhoods: Rose Dale, Don Valley – sometimes ‘Dawn’ Valley, depending, – Lea Side, Forest Hill naturally, and plucky heroine from the wrong side of the tracks – and real intersection in the worst part of town – Jane Wilson. Must get around to it some day…)
But this re-read-through has me more spellbound than usual at the parallels between that time and this. In fact, both of the times in which the novel is set – the narrator’s current perch in 1982, and his childhood memories of the late 1950’s through the 60’s – bear painfully apt comparison to the times in which we currently struggle.
For Johnny Wheelwright (the grown up) living an American’s ex-pat life in Toronto, trying to avoid the headlines detailing Reagan’s presidency in the era of Iran Contra and Star Wars (the political-missile type, not the movie-type) is a daily agony (and an actual impossibility – he’s irresistibly drawn to the papers) comparable perhaps only to the headlines he would have been reading about the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson and the horrors of the Vietnam war, back in his hometown of Gravesend Maine in the 60’s.
The Johnny Wheelwright of the 80’s observes horrified the pronouncements of the Great Communicator, noting: “… the American people will never hold him accountable for what he says ; it is history that holds you accountable, and I’ve already expressed my opinion that Americans are not big on history. How many of them even remember their own recent history?”
And the answer even now as America fights yet another war that cannot actually be won, has to be – not many.
But for all of Wheelwright’s observations about life perched in Toronto watching history unfold south of the border, it is the titular character who is at the centre of the story; Owen Meany who is the real ‘observer’, the insightful and mystically other-directed ‘pronouncer’, and never have his words seemed more prescient than in a passage where he reacts to the Kennedy/Monroe scandal and the loss of his own personal innocence in all it literally meant and all it figuratively represented.
He says about Marilyn Monroe (all in caps – the diminutive Meany had a horribly “wrecked voice” – but a powerful one) “… SHE WAS LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY – NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING – I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE – JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEM. LOOK AT HOW DESIREABLE SHE WAS! SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY – AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY.”
He goes on… “MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN – MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY. MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED OVER AND OVER AGAIN – SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, AND SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY. THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOUR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY’RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT’S WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME,” said Owen Meany. “WE’RE GOING TO BE USED.” Doesn’t that just give you a shiver? Doesn’t that just give you the all-day shudders in horrifying recognition? And not just the part about Americans being overweight…!
We’re living in the time of the ‘Decider’. The time of a war entered into on base lies, with no real understanding of the enemy, the culture invaded, the needs of the civilian population, or the real issues of re-construction. And as for an exit strategy – well, one just has to wonder how long the current conditions will continue in ignominy before the U.S. retreats, leaving that part of the world, and as a result the entire world, in a worse condition than they found it. Even now, the reports are in: the world is a more dangerous place than ever before. Far from defeating terrorism, the current Administration has stirred it up like a giant hornet’s nest, doubling, tripling – multiplying the anger, hatred and desire for revenge in terrorist outposts from Hell to Kandahar.
But maybe worse than all of the above is that whatever comparisons can be drawn between these times and those Administrations, the citizens of the U.S. (and by extension, Canada) are no Marilyn Monroes: silly, sweet, idealistic and looking for someone to look up to, to trust and to lead. We’re still overweight, but our new ‘signifier’ isn’t. We have a new representative of our times, our values and our countries and the worst possible news is that it’s Paris Hilton.
Don’t believe me? Ask Paris herself.
“I think every decade has an iconic blonde,” she told Britain’s Sunday Times correspondent Giles Hattersley earlier this summer. “Like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana – and right now, I’m that icon.”
Apparently Giles sees the resemblance too, remarking on how Hilton “… signifies the base desires of the age: money, sex and low body fat.”
Or more simply put – insulated narcissism.
And Owen Meany has an explanation for that too.
“THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM. IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING ABOUT WHAT WE’RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD.”
Maybe the best possible thing the American people could do would be to demand the draft be reinstated.
It would be nice if they could reincarnate Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe read and traveled and hobnobbed with intellectuals; she took acting classes and married Arthur Miller and had a crush on Albert Einstein. She was political and involved and went to a psychiatrist and had an inferiority complex and tried to be good. As far as I can remember, Marilyn Monroe endorsed nothing other than Chanel No. 5 and Dazzledent Toothpaste.
Paris Hilton likes to be read to. She likes pink. She likes purses. She likes other girls’ boyfriends. She will sell anything (including her own porno movie) if you will give her enough money.
This is the icon of the decade.
Some icon.
Some decade.
Draft Paris.

Married to the Mouse

2006-09-10T14:42:00.000-04:00

On October 6th, the next in the fascinating 7 Up series by Michael Apted arrives in North American theatres.
Anyone who's seen the first 6 in the documentary film series will no doubt go racing to the theatre when the 7th, 49 Up debuts.
The films are fascinating, often deeply moving and surprisingly tremendously honest and revealing studies of the fourteen individuals (now 12 – two have elected to end their participation) chosen back in 1964 to be the human embodiment of a social experiment that sought to test the real-life truth of the Jesuit motto: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man”.
Astonishingly, it appears the Jesuits, for the very most part, were right. If not in some of the childhood dreams and ambitions of movie stardom and marriage, at least in the truth of the character of most of the participants who even with 42 added years of maturity remain at the core, pretty much the same.
Every time I see any of the docs I am amazed at the capacity each of the participants has for self-examination and brutally honest reflection. I wonder how it would be to have such a personal record of my life and times, and in the next moment, I thank God I was never invited to take part in such a project. How much stark reality can anyone cope with when attempting to reflect on the truth of self-perception?
For instance, even on the fairly empiric subject of size, my personal perceptions are pretty much completely off the charts.
In a riff on the ‘how old would you be if you didn’t know how old you really were’ (no mirrors allowed) dinner party game, I ask you, how tall would you be if you didn’t know how tall you really were?
(You say you haven’t wondered how old you’d be if you didn’t know how old you were? I have to ask then, “Eat out often?” because this is a classic and a pretty interesting question. It goes to how you perceive the world and how you perceive the world perceives you; people’s answers are always fascinating and, I think, pretty revealing. I don’t see this as a question of youthfulness per se; personally, I think it’s more of a how you see the future – how much of it you feel you still want to experience and where you place yourself on the continuum. I see myself as 18 – most everything still ahead of me, attitudes and opinions still not entirely fixed, legal in most, but not all states and provinces.)
If I didn't know how tall I really was, I'd have to say I'd be pretty short.
Even on the subject of love, I always thought the most romantic thing anyone ever said to me was size-related... cell-sized. They said that they wished they were an amoeba and I was a paramecium so that they could surround me, engulf me, absorb me, and carry me with them always.
If you put aside the singularly unattractive notion of cannibalism, not to mention the distressing image of the inevitable digestion process, what you come up with is someone who in another place and time might have said: “I just want to put you in my pocket.” Sweet.
I like that. But then I would, as I always sort of fantasized about dating Stewart Little (being Stewart-sized myself naturally) and living in a doll-house for the rest of our lives, dining happily on crumbs the size of wedding cakes and making a strawberry last a week.
I had it all planned out.
Our doll house would have been placed in a window to achieve maximum sunlight – when the sun was out – and access to the moon and stars when those elements were similarly available. I never thought about the problem of electricity and flush toilets and hot and cold running water being installed in our dollhouse home (where would you buy the tiny pipes and fittings?) deciding that Stewart would unquestionably be handy and thoroughly capable of devising ‘ways and means’ of achieving the ends necessary, as any mouse who could make money out of tinfoil, sleep in a cigarette packet bed (next to a spool-sized bedside table) sail a model schooner and drive a toy car cross country would probably be up to the challenge.
Interestingly, for all this fixation on miniaturism, people are usually surprised when they learn I am a shade under 5’ 3”. And I mean people who have met me – standing up even. They think I’m tall, and it’s not just that they’ll usually meet me when I’m wearing heels – I always wear heels.
Always. I used to joke that I wore them even to bed on the off-chance that someone might come along and measure me in my sleep.
(And for all those people who look at me with a certain withering contempt, clearly indicating (even without saying) that anyone who daily slips into 3 or even 4 inch stilettos, must needs be a vain, impractical, pointless person to go on a walk with, all I can say is, I could probably beat you all in the high hurdles, as long as I wasn’t wearing mules or wedges. Just so long as I was appropriately buckled up and strapped in, 20-something years of high-heel wearing has made me fit, agile and ready for virtually any challenge the urban landscape has on offer.)
But it’s not the heels that make people think I’m tall. And I don’t think it’s the deep voice or even my rather large head (not that it’s freakish or anything, just large) I think it’s my demeanor which says ‘tall’ and my shoes that likely shout ‘short’.
And I’m a little size-ist myself. Not that it’s conscious – it just happens that way. Most of my girlfriends are tall, or at least tallish. I don’t think I have single friend shorter than I am, at least not since Emma Thompson-Murphy swept past me sometime around her thirteenth birthday.
As for men, just so long as they’re 5’ 6” or larger (me in heels plus a hair) I’m satisfied. I once dated a man who was 6’ 5” and I’m here to tell you (the details being unimportant) that it simply doesn’t work.
But the perception on this side of the equation is unequal to what’s going on outside. However tall people might think I am, I myself feel small and sometimes nearly invisible. I just happen to be almost the only person that feels that way. Like the Emperor and his non-existent clothes, I tend to go about my business as if no one can actually see me. But perhaps that’s a little disingenuous, because even so, I always wear heels.
Give me the child until she is 7 inches tall and I will show you the woman.
Whatever my perceptions, the truth is I remain resolutely a solid, unabsorbed by any other larger cell structure, I live in a normal sized home – married to neither man nor miniature beast – and the only nod I make toward my fantasy of a tiny life is possessing a dog the approximate size of a rat or a largeish guinea pig. It is a compromise to say the least, or since we’re talking life-size, possibly the most.

Scarf Ace

2006-08-30T15:20:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder, as another year positively zips by, reminding you that somehow every other day is Thursday, the week is just two days long, the month a week, and a year? Well, a year can now be measured in the 12 or so national holidays; the distance between Thanksgiving and Christmas barely long enough to wash and dry the Tupperware between one set of left-overs and the next. (Though it has to be said: you can never make too much stuffing.)
Monday was the day it picked up speed: the arrival down at the communal condo mailbox of the Sears Christmas Wish Book. So it’s not just me blinking uncomprehendingly at the swift passage of time, the media (which includes advertising, marketing and the selling of Santa-related goods during an August humidity alert) is taking an increasingly withered and demonic hand in the phenomenon as well.
It’s the kind of whack upside the head by a thousand or so pages in glistening, gleaming colour that snaps you out of your comfortable torpor and into wondering with this light-speed movement of time, just who or what you’re going to turn into when you reach an age-related outpost previously identified as laughably inconceivable
Take your pick: 40, 50, 60 (not the 30’s, they’re just the slightly dog-eared 20’s, evinced by the inability to party so long or so enthusiastically, and a newfound interest in moisturizer) and see if you don’t experience one of those involuntary shudders as the unthinkable date shows every sign of drawing inexorably nearer, proving you wrong, or at least as human as the rest of us.
I am still more than a few seasons removed from the age I could never quite wrap my head around, but much as I acknowledge its future calendar reality, the actual reality just does not compute.
Until I saw a woman yesterday – and I don’t know what it was, but I felt a genuine ping (or a pang or a twitch or a twinge, you know – one of those) thinking: “I recognize you – you’re the future me.” And my fears became palpable… or at least visible.
I think she was somewhere around 50, taking what looked to me like a brave – though misguided – crack at her mid-40’s; very attractive, but missing the mark by several years and just a soupcon of dignity.
She wore a conservative beige skirt, yes, but she had matched it with a camisole and blouse in acid green and chromium yellow respectively, a combo that made one wince at the colours whilst simultaneously stifling an indrawn hiss at the fit and fashion. Mutton dressed as lamb, cow as calf, desperate aging dame as fresh-faced hopeful.
It’s a thin line…
But it wasn’t just the clothes and the colours, or the kitten heels or the pale pink lipstick; it was the attitude – attempting hipness with a gang of individuals several decades to the south.
We weren't really at all alike - I'm younger, shorter, blonder, weirder - so what was so familiar? What clinched it?
More like what cinched it...
It was the scarf.
A scarf I recognized – a scarf she had tied jauntily around her waist – a scarf similar to the one I had also been toying with tying around MY waist that very morning, wanting to spice up an otherwise insipid outfit of conservative black on black.
That damn scarf! Why didn’t I see it before? It’s the total dead give-away of the incipient senior citizen. I have a drawer-full. Some older than me – the last silky vestiges of my mother – some are vintage, faux Hermes and the like, but some fellow fashionistas, some are new. And in their newness, telling a tale so worrisome I’m just surprised I didn’t see it coming a mile away - or at least a decade ago.
Though I haven’t worn any of the patterned squares as yet (I keep my pants up with old ties or – such ingenuity! – a belt) I keep hauling them out and trying them on, waiting for the moment when one of them fits naturally with what I’m wearing.
What I didn’t know – didn’t realize – was that what I’d actually been doing was trying on my old lady self to see if it fit each and every time.
I comforted my self then – I comfort myself now – with the knowledge that I’ve always unconsciously and naturally placed the scarf back in the drawer and stepped away from the implications, the truth being that I am still just grasping gently (never clinging!) to an ageless youthiness that I plan to maintain for another decade or so. Damn the calendar, full speed backwards.
But I notice small changes – and they’re not in my body or wrinkle count – but in my choices; a little backpedaling perhaps, a little downplaying, a little less va-voom, a little more… well, yes, dignity; the word heavily laden with intimations of maturity and, yes, (ack) age.
For one thing, my necklines are going up.
Never one to hide any asset under a bushel or a turtleneck when given the plunging opportunity, I’ve begun thinking about – if not always completely acting upon – adding a little subtlety to my fashion mix. Ditto shorter skirts going a little longer, crop tops disappearing virtually altogether and less eye makeup during daylight hours.
There’s something sort of sexily compelling about a fresh-faced youngster flirting with smokey dark eyes and lashes as thick and bristly as tarantula legs, that sends a different message altogether if the possessor of said kohl-rimmed peepers is somewhere in the neighbourhood of ‘that certain age’.
It’s not the horror of the arrival of ‘that certain age’, just the dawning realization that I’m not going to be able to side-step it as I so naively and originally (and confidently) assumed.
There is a bright spot. One I initially overlooked as I plunged into horrified recognition of the scarf-lady; in retrospect I could see she really didn’t give a crap what anyone else thought of her look.
(She honestly couldn’t have and still left the house looking like that…)
But she had a style which she chose to exhibit without any noticeable shame at her temerity in having one. She laughed and talked with the 20-something’s and they laughed and talked right back to her without any discernable eye-rolling or outward disgust.
I think she was happy – and comfortable – with herself. It was what was so attractive about her.
Perhaps she’s simply in a self-accepting, fully conscious transition: from regular, common or garden typical tax payer, to crazy old broad with a wardrobe full of anachronisms and kitten heels in every colour.
And scarves; scarves to add whatever personal statement or flash of personality might be missing from her particular get-up on any given day.
As long as she refrains from giving a crap I suspect she really will maintain that ageless youthiness I’m also hoping for. And with her in mind if I hang onto just a soupcon of dignity – and my scarves – I may be able to achieve it too.

Doggie Diva

2006-08-07T12:31:00.000-04:00

So I’m at the vet the other day, waiting to put more money into the paw of some wealthy pet pill-pusher, when a name is called and a woman stands up.
Much the same as people get referred to as Ben’s Mom or Meghan's Dad the minute they get in proximity of a school or other child-centric locale, at the vet you’re referred to by your pet’s name. Thus when I heard “Fluffy Santiago” summoned I knew it wasn’t “Fluffy” the person who stood up, and I further suspected I was the only one who would appreciate the sentiment, but I couldn’t help myself saying to no one in particular “Fluffy Santiago? What a coincidence – that’s my stripper name”.
And true to form – and expectation – all that greeted my contribution was a resounding, even judgmental silence.
Fluffy Santiago’s mother didn’t look any the worse for having heard the offending phrase, but the other pet owners looked distinctly unimpressed – all except a girl with an extremely odd looking dog (seriously, the legs, body and head were all from different animals – no blending or smoothing – and looked like they’d just been hastily slapped together, perhaps as placeholders until something more appropriate could be found… which wasn’t…) who broke into giggles before promptly wiping the smirk off her face. I suspect the general sense in the (un-air conditioned) pet pain palace was that I had taken a cheap shot, when really all I was doing was letting myself free-associate while nervously awaiting news.
Because I wouldn’t on purpose. Truly. I detest the cheap shot.
But if it was – subconsciously or otherwise – a shot that was cheap, it’s the only cheap thing I’ve done recently, at least in relation to veterinarians.
About a month ago, late on a weekend evening (the time when all children, dogs and teeth routinely act up) Lily had to be hustled off to the animal emergency hospital and ended up spending the night and fifteen hundred of my hard earned dollars on a condition we still have no diagnosis for: just a handful of ominous symptoms and a worry that’s with me from the moment I awake each morning.
(May I just say - Emergency Animal Hospital? Total racket. And a real insight into how it must be for Americans health care and health-care insurance wise. Because pet insurance? Another total racket.)
But to be honest, this is nothing new. Since the day she came home with me 13 years ago, I have been on near constant high alert that Lily was on the brink of death. Struck by a car, kidnapped (it happens – twice in my seemingly sleepy little dog-napping neighbourhood) accidentally squashed, squished or squeezed (she’s very small) or just plain succumbing to some horrible doggie disease, and all in some fatalistic way just because I love her so much.
Remember in Terms of Endearment, the character Shirley MacLaine plays, who shakes awake her peacefully sleeping infant to see if it’s breathing? Done it. Many a time. Through my fears I’ve trained her to be somewhat spoiled, a bit of a hypochondriac and a prime manipulator who only has to let out a squeak or a whine to get me coming on the run.
And now all those worries are coming home to roost as it looks like her time may be limited. She has an enormously enlarged liver (I begged her to put down the vodka – but she just loved those Greyhounds so much…) which seems to be pushing all her other little organs around, making it difficult to breathe, eat, or find a comfortable position in which to rest.
Since the emergency vet, we’ve been to my own vet three more times and have another appointment scheduled for Thursday to see if we can’t find some drug or other to make her more comfortable. The other options surrounding diagnosis are just too risky and painful to consider, as are the options for treatment should we get a diagnosis.
There’s no good news scenario available for Lily, save the hope that she can maybe continue to heave her giant liver around for some time, in as comfortable a state as we can devise for her.
She’s also, quite aside and apart from the enlarged liver, apparently going through premature senility – part of the answer as to why she’s so unsettled – she simply has no memory of the fact she’s been on and off the bed ten times in the past hour. I should have known; I sing to her, and for some time I’ve suspected that I’m not the only one who routinely forgets the words to “I love a Piano” and “Indian Love Call”.
Strangely all her fetishes and quirks remain unchanged: she likes to walk between lines – between the traffic on the street and the edge of the curb stone on the sidewalk. She has to be dragged to the centre of the pavement. (Think Jack Nicolson’s OCD character in As Good As It Gets.) She hates the colour red (and I thought dogs were colour blind) invariably kicking red cushions off sofas, chairs and beds, like Tippi Hedren having a bit of a freak-out in Hitchcock's Marnie.
And she likes to eat dinner twice: once to suck the tasty wet food off the kibble, the second to eat the kibble, but all the while with a long-suffering look on her punim, like a prisoner of war forced to eat sawdust while her wicked oppressors are gorging on chocolate, fresh coffee and creamy Danish butter. (Think The Great Escape.)
The movie references didn’t start out as a theme, but the fact is it’s just a natural association. Lily is without question a movie star type of dog – a diva with a list of ridiculous demands (who was it who had to have the brown M & M’s removed from the snack tray in their dressing room as a condition of performance? And who do you think it is who will only eat her apple if the skin is first peeled?) who deigns to walk amongst her fans, always aware of her effect on people – which is considerable. Folks regularly abandon infants in strollers and puppies and kittens (true story: a woman and her two little girls let their Yorkie puppy wander off into the path of a large cranky Labrador at the vet last week in order to repeat that instantly familiar phrase, “She’s just so CUTE!”) to worship at the shrine of my small, bad, brown dog.
So I’m in a sort of limbo – I don’t know what she has or how long she has to live – but I find I prefer it this way. As long as she’s annoying me with constant demands to be lifted on and off furniture, eating like a small brown pig and begging for her beloved treats with all the fervent need of a drowning victim going down for the third time, then we’re both happy. Well, happy-ish.
And my real stripper name? Based on the traditional method of determination, I’d call myself Charlie 14th Avenue. Which is neither particularly strippery, nor terribly memorable.
If I ever find myself in the act of peeling – clothes or apples – I think I’ll just call myself Lily Wilson. It isn’t particularly sexy either, but it is a name I’ll never forget.

Condo – lux, 1 bdrm, grt view, air, centipede, sec, incl prkg. Offers…

2006-07-24T15:48:00.000-04:00

There are times when being single isn’t all beer and skittles… times when you can maybe imagine trading all those delightfully solo single choices for a duet and a compromise… even times when you’d consider sharing a bathroom with someone who would naturally expect you to get half your crap out of the medicine cabinet… times when you would actually do it.
Times like last night.
It all started with musings about high concept movies.
One of the highest high-concept movies of all time (right up there with Jaws and Eight Legged Freaks) is set to roll out this summer, with a title so “I get it” you might wish you’d thought it up yourself.
(And then went to film school and suffered through dozens of hack jobs, underappreciated, taken for granted – abused even – before getting just one tiny break and then another, then catching someone’s eye, then possibly having to do things you’d never tell your mother to get just one more tiny little freaking break, and another, then get to be First AD on some piece of crap picture so bad you’d never-tell-your-mother-and-it’s-not-even-porn, then get this crazy idea in the middle of the night and use every last little favour you’d ever built up just to pitch it to someone you don’t even respect and who’d steal your idea then take the credit and win an Academy Award. Or something like that. It’s a story as old as time…)
‘Snakes on a Plane’.
Do you even need to see it? I know you want to – who wouldn’t – but the whole plot just reels out before you and it doesn’t even matter if you get it right, because any movie about snakes escaping on an airplane (they’d have to be escaping – there’s no story in a bag or a box or a cage or a crate of snakes making it safely from one destination to the next) has got to be good. Or at least visually arresting or compellingly watchable – because if there’s one thing the average imagination has no trouble with, it’s imagining hundreds of goddamn snakes erupting, slithering, darting, coiling, springing, hiding, waiting to pounce or popping up out of a tiny airplane toilet just when you’d least expect it – or want to. At least my imagination has no trouble with it at all.
I was – for some reason – thinking about it last night and chose just that moment to go to the kitchen for something or other and right before my eyes, out darted a centipede. A huge, brown, revoltingly multi-peded, burnished copper-brown insect skittered between my legs (oh God – what if it had gone up my leg? Must… stop… thinking… about… a…centipede… in… my… panties…) and paused for a moment by the dog’s dinner bowl, just sort of hovering there while I went through all the usual reactions; a half wretch, involuntary itching and shivering, hopping from one foot to the next, looking for absent friends, then looking for something to whack it with (this happened in seconds – including imagining whacking it, then mentally backing up and having a quick debate in my mind about whether or not I could do it, then how I would pick up it’s hideous corpse and whether one (or more!) of its incredibly awful little legs (or feet! Do they have feet?) would brush against my hand or finger or arm and how I’d feel about that and whether I could ever enter my kitchen again without reliving the whole upsetting experience) before settling on the University of Toronto continuing education catalogue with which to do the deed.
(Because unless they’ve got a course on amateur extermination I’m not even going, so it’s no great loss if it ends up being coated with ex-centipede slime.)
But the little bastard made a break for it and scuttled (it took a moment to get his entire repulsive body going) under the dishwasher where as far as I can tell he remains holed up.
And now what am I going to do?
Centipede in My Kitchen.
And no, my kitchen isn’t some seldom used storage room for snacks and ice and dog food – it’s a fully operational, frequently entered, constantly used nook from which meals – from scratch and from recipes mind you – flow out with the speed and agility of a centipede wriggling under a dishwasher. Sesame crusted salmon? Check. Shrimp in garlic, peppers, parsley and white wine? Oh yes. Boeuf en Croute? Lamb with garlic and shallots in red wine vinegar? Yeah baby. Yeah.
But not last night. Last night I stopped wanting to go in there. Last night I didn’t want Coq au Vin, or Veal Sauté Marengo, or even so much as a tunafish sandwich on multi-grain; last night I wanted a man.
I wanted him to go in there and kill it. Step on it. Smash it. Squish it ‘til its guts splooshed out. Grind it into centipede hash and serve it to some unsuspecting bird.
Frankly? I wanted it gone.
There’s a lot I’ve learned to do for myself living alone – a lot I thought I’d never be able to do: making dentist appointments without being told, paying my taxes, getting regular checkups, cleaning the oven, amusing myself when the cable goes out or the internet connection fails, fixing the toilet, unblocking a drain, getting over a broken heart, sewing on a button, re-wiring a lamp. All of that I can and do do. But I cannot – and on this there can be no negotiation – I cannot handle centipedes.
I cannot live at the centre of my very own horror movie, even if the topic of that film would not sell a single ticket or frighten one single impressionable, sensitive, crybaby kid.
I feel itchy all the time now – the hair on the back of my neck is at permanent attention and my eyes are always darting, darting, trying to see where the bastard centipede might be coming from next. I didn’t sleep well last night and I’m typing this with one hand so I can grasp the continuing ed catalogue with the other. This is no way to live.
So I get a man – or I move.

Playback to the future

2006-07-02T14:43:00.000-04:00

Did I ever tell you about how I got into radio?
I never meant to.
For most people who go into radio, the desire is deep and the dream is long cherished and passionately pursued.
They’re the people who’ll tell how they'd lay awake long into the night – night after night – pup-tented under the covers, transistor radios with the volume reduced to the softest whisper pressed against their adolescent ears. They’d listen to late night disc jockeys and radio programs tuned in from way down the AM or FM dial. Some tell of being able to tune in to far off cities (also part of the dream – the escape; getting out of their – hick, one-horse, crummy little - town) only accessible during particular seasons or as a result of unusual weather conditions, sounds of the exotic far away cities drawing them breathlessly further into their burgeoning fantasy.
They’ll regale you with how they listened to music programs or big city talk shows, drinking in the patter of (imagined, usually) cool and studly males and dream-goddess women speaking with voices so laden with sophistication and sexual growl that even years later (or so I’ve heard) a particular tonal quality can drive a man – or a woman – instantly hot with memory and desire.
If you ask, you’ll hear near-mythical tales of legendary announcers, whose voices stimulated something deep inside the future radio-head, planting the seed of the dream and verbally stimulating it to grow. It’s one of those professions – right up there with the church, the theatre and the space program – that draw adherents and ardent believers who feel as though this is the one way, truth, light or frequency that will satisfy their deepest and most passionate wishes. For them, it’s a calling.
But I wasn’t one of them.
For one thing, my parents didn’t listen to the radio, so it wasn’t really on my radar. For another, with so many moves to so many different countries, building the habit and the kind of dedicated fan commitment that's step one for a dedicated follower was nigh on impossible.
But by the time high school rolled around, I was, like my peers, addicted to AM hit radio. I loved Cat Stevens and Carole King and Pink Floyd and the Guess Who. I sniffed with disdain at Elton John, (until Too Low for Zero) and though too young for the Stones, the Who and the Beatles, came to appreciate them the second time around in the first wave of rock nostalgia.
But the deep, desperate ‘wanna’ had been missed, filled instead with dreams of acting, or veterinary school, or something, anything to do with horses.
That’s why, in 1981 when life dealt me a series of cards that meant folding my first dream (acting) as a result of an industry strike, the next dream had yet to be dreamt.
What would I do? With university courses in General Arts I wasn’t trained to do anything… seriously, anything at all. Obvious answer? P.R. .
(See ‘Alligator Pie’; August 9th, 2004.)
The first place I tried – a radio station in Calgary – had neither need nor use of my (nonexistent) abilities, but the Program Director who agreed to see me after I wandered in unannounced off the street saw – or heard –something else.
Here’s how it happened…
(And by the way, I was as shocked as anyone when the man offered to see me.)
I don’t think I even knew what a Program Director was, I certainly didn’t know who HE was, but his office was near the front door, so he saw and heard me make my enquiry, coming out to interrupt my increasingly muddled and pointless conversation with the receptionist before drawing me into his office, offering me a seat and a chat.
His long, long office. With a couch and coffee table at one end and his desk at the other. 10 yards apart? Twenty? A thousand? Almost as soon as we entered the room, the phone rang, so he directed me to the couch while he trekked down to the other end of the room to pick up the receiver.
I could barely see him – I certainly couldn’t see his fuzzy face, or make out for certain what looked (to my surreptitious squint) like nods and smiles directly at me. Should I nod and smile? Should I stare off into space as though I couldn’t hear his conversation, offering the faux privacy manners would seem to dictate in tight quarters?
I wasn’t wearing my glasses or the contact lenses that had recently been irritating my eyes. Vanity had driven me blind – and was making me far more embarrassed than sitting in a strange man’s (blob's) office under essentially false pretences. (As a total lack of PR training, experience or the most minimal knowledge almost certainly should have…) I was starting to perspire as I couldn’t gauge on just exactly which level I was potentially being rude.
I had an agonizing moment of two of indecision as his glance and gestures seemed ever more me-directed.
It was the social discomfort that was so excruciating; I had to take the initiative.
I got up from the couch, made the long, long walk down the length of his office, stopping once to pick up a chair placed against the wall before pulling it right up to his desk like it was a table in a cafeteria. Relieved to be operating within my limited visual range, I sat myself down, elbows perched somewhere amongst the papers and pen holders and other desky paraphernalia.
He told me later that was the moment. The moment he decided the kid had guts – there must be something special about the kid – maybe the kid had the kind of guts and initiative it would take to make it in the hard world of soft rock.
The truth is ‘the kid’ was myopic.
We talked for a bit. He told me they never had had and couldn’t anticipate a time when they would require a P.R. professional, but maybe with a voice like mine I’d like to be on the radio…?
This is the thing – for anyone who’s ever found themselves suffering the tortures of unrequited love, or smack in the middle of a really tough negotiation – you can’t ‘play’ hard to get; you can’t fake the ability to get up and walk away. (Well you can, but woe betide…)
You either are hard to get, or you really could walk away.
And I really didn’t care. The suggestion came from too far out of left field; it was something I had never dreamt of, nor even then, imagined I would ever particularly want to dream it. I was just weeks from having been signed to two of the top Hollywood agencies - William Morris and Norby Walters – and though I’d hated LA and the parts of the business I’d seen, I hadn’t entirely given up on acting. The P.R. thing was always meant to be a stop gap whilst waiting for the actor’s strike to end.
I told him I’d never thought about it… but, umm, gee, well… maybe, sure – why not – I’d take a crack at it... if he really wanted me to.
After the gesture of pulling the chair up to his desk, this was what made him certain I was the girl for him: raging ambivalence.
(That’s the other thing – the male ego; with dozens of young men throwing themselves at him, begging for a chance – they’d work for nothing, they’d pay for the privilege – it was likely intoxicating to offer the opportunity to someone who wasn’t all that impressed.)
And I wasn’t un-impressed; I would likely have had the same reaction to being offered the Presidency of the United States: I could see it was good position, I could imagine others wanting it – I just wasn’t all that sure it was something I was prepared for, or even particularly wanted to do.
Long story short, I was brought in that evening to sit in on the all-night show with the current disc jockey… brought in the next evening to do one or two cut- ins with him…brought in the next evening to try an hour or two on my own… offered the job the next day after the poor guy I’d sat in with had been dismissed.
(And for those of you hating me now, I beg to remind you that most of my most fervent desires and dreams have met with disappointment. And I didn’t know the other kid had been fired – I was told he was going to be ‘filling in’ for vacationing announcers; ‘filling in’ a euphemism for ‘filling in unemployment forms’ as it turned out…)
I did the all-night show for six months or so, then was brought in to do mid-days, which in turn became the afternoon program for a couple of years. Then after moving to Europe, stints at a Riviera radio station, an English rock station and the BBC World Service.
Then it was 1987 and I left Europe and radio for Canada and television, never to return.
But maybe…
I have a chance now to do something interesting with a very smart and funny guy. Talk radio – he said/she said – funny, informed, topical, part scripted/part improvised, call in – interview, you name it. We’re working out the details now. And I’m feeling something a little like what I felt in Bob Morris’ office all those years ago: a little unsure, a little inexperienced, not entirely sure this is the right thing for me, but this time with just a hint of a growing excitement.
Do I want to be on the radio? This time, I think I’ll say ‘yes’.
Maybe even passionately.

Little Nell in the 21st Century

2006-06-10T20:06:00.000-04:00

I’ve always thought that with a really good text book (thickly bound, with excellent, detailed diagrams and super-realistic drawings) and an extremely sharp steak knife I could probably take out an appendix. Possibly tonsils – maybe even a gallbladder. I wouldn’t try anything more demanding – heart transplants, bowel resections, grafts or limb reattachment; I know my limits – I am after all, technically, a complete and utter untrained, inexperienced amateur.
But that’s why I was so pleased when a friend who’d recently had an operation allowed me to assist the nurse when the long line of staples that held her together like a crazy meandering zipper were taken out. I had fantasies of actually removing a couple, but the reality was I was allowed to stand by and daub the incision now and then with an alcohol-soaked sponge whilst providing gay banter (though not too gay – she still has a fear of exploding) to distract her from the not deeply painful, but genuinely uncomfortable experience.
It’s a start is what I’m saying.
The friend though – I’d love her even if she made me sit in the waiting room reading out of date Harpers and Maclean’s. She’s a peach – of that there is no doubt.
And through her and her fame as an actress, I’ve been able to experience a little of the celebrity lifestyle. I’ve been her date at awards shows and movie premieres and the odd special appearance (most recently the opening of a new Chanel boutique – at which neither goodie bags nor free samples were on offer I am devastated to report) as her husband really isn’t all that into the celeb scene. Truth be told, I’m not either – a more boring or creepily self-obsessed crowd you’d be unlikely to find – but it’s all grist to the mill… all events I’d otherwise unlikely experience without her personal invitation. And besides, when we go home, we laugh like drains.
But through things I haven't done with her, on the basis of friendship alone, I’ve also got myself a six degrees of separation (and often less) attachment to some truly famous folks.
In one degree, I can lay claim to Angelina Jolie, which means in two and three, I’m this close to Brad and Jen. And the new baby. And the old babies. (And in four and five, Gwyneth and Vince and the whole cast of Friends and so on and so forth.)
The list goes on and on. Colin Firth in one; ditto Keifer Sutherland, Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie (my personal fave) Sam Shepard, and Rocko, Cuddles, Bill and Buttons from Puppets Who Kill. There’s more, but you get my drift.
This is an entirely arms length (and were I try to get any closer probably electrified fence, razor wire and armed bodyguards-length) attachment, but true for all that.
But all on my own, all by myself, I have a connection to one of the most talked about men in Toronto this week, (maybe even the world) the head of the RCMP investigation into the alleged terrorists whose wicked (stupid, bone-headed, creepy, crappy) plan was to lay waste to some Canadian landmarks before decapitating our Prime Minister.
That’s right. If trouble were to stalk me I’d feel both comfortable and compelled to contact the Assistant RCMP Commissioner, Mike McDonell.
Back in 1999 when he was merely Inspector, Officer in Charge of National Security, Mike contacted me after reading a letter I wrote to the Toronto Star about my connection to the RCMP.
I’d written (and they printed – and sent out a photographer to snap an extremely unflattering photo of me) a letter in reference to a story they’d run about a little developmentally challenged girl, an American, who’d become enamoured with the RCMP as a result of her love of the TV show Due South. She’d identified with the main character who was a bit of an oddball but whose brave and honest portrayal gave her hope that she too would some day find her place in society, beyond the teasing and cruelty she’d experienced from the thoughtless, careless children she’d grown up amongst.
The Mounties apparently responded to her mother’s fan letter with an enthusiasm and joy that sort of knocked the kid and her mum sideways. According to the article, a slew of Mounties sent notes and pictures and video tapes and presents and personal letters thanking her for her kind words and encouraging her to keep believing in herself, as they intended to do so for her.
It was a touching story. I swear a genuine tear rolled out of my genuine eye and down my equally genuine cheek. I sat right down and wrote those Star folks a letter, explaining my experience and detailing my attachment to the men in red way back when I was a little girl too.
I wrote about how I had decided when I was ten years old to become an RCMP officer (after discarding movie star and veterinarian) because it was the only job I could think of where you got to ride horses.
So at the age of ten, as a sort of heads up to the then Commissioner, I wrote a letter describing my drawbacks (my age; my place of residence in England at the time) and my shining qualities (I could ride a horse, jump 3’ 6”, muck out a stall and clean tack) which I was sure would guarantee me a spot in the ranks.
Pretty cute eh?
My mother thought so, so she sent the carefully joined together printing and addressed the envelope and sent it off to the man in charge. She may have thought we would get a response, but I don’t think she imagined the then Commissioner himself would write back (including in the large envelope my original letter so that she could keep it) and congratulating me on my ambition. It was a very sweet letter. Though it informed me that as a girl I couldn’t be considered for the mounted ranks, he sent along a handful of brochures of other jobs I could do, and encouraged me to keep dreaming, as I was clearly exactly the sort of girl the RCMP was looking for.
(Presumably after they got their man.)
So this is the tale I spun the Toronto Star, and damned if Mike McDonell didn’t hunt me down, identifying me amongst all the other Jane Wilson’s (how did he do it? they have their ways I’m told…) and both telephoned me and sent me a handwritten letter to thank me for my story.
He wrote:
“Dear Ms Wilson,
Just a short note of thanks to let you know how much I appreciated your letter to the editor of the Toronto Star. That you took the time to share your experience and express your continued respect for the RCMP touched me. Your thoughts not only served to pique my pride in being a member of the RCMP, but they also helped to remind me of my responsibility to the people of Canada to carry on the fine traditions of the RCMP.
Your particular interest in equitation hit a personal chord as I was a member of the 1980 and ’81 Musical Rides and my interest in our Equitation section remains strong.
Know that your letter put some of the spring back into this Mountie’s step and I am sure that of others as well.
Gratefully,
Mike McDonell”
No ersatz six degrees of Kevin Bacon – my very own connection to my very own Mountie, (the man into whose step I placed a spring) and he’s the guy who is engaged – this minute – in saving us from the terrorist threat.
Who needs Brangelina or Kiefer or even Julie Christie or Buttons. I’ve got my man.
And I have no doubt that if I were tied to the railway tracks, Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell would come to my aid.
I’m grateful. It’s an increasingly scary old world out there, with the burgeoning threat of terrorism and violence even here in Toronto; threats from which not even the most famous movie star, the thickest textbook or the sharpest steak knife can protect you.

The sunset of Tony Orlando

2006-05-30T10:32:00.000-04:00

I saw another of those shrines recently. The homemade kind; the sort usually made for children killed by accident or predator, constructed of teddy bears and ribbons and corner store flowers, misspelled notes of shock and longing, bible verses and photographs, crudely drawn construction paper sympathy cards, candles, votives, and always some odds and ends inexplicable to the uninitiated – hats, t-shirts, stuffed animals – the detritus of lives connected to the deceased, crushed and made meaningless by terrible loss.
And you don’t have to be a high profile murder victim to get one. Car crash sites are popular, as are store front pavements or stricken family’s front lawns, or the drop off lane in front of the local primary school if the terrible, accidental moment happened there.
The shrines are simultaneously deeply moving and faintly ridiculous – so real and so surreal at the same time: how’s a teddy bear in a cowboy hat and a pair of plastic six shooters going to get us out of THIS agony you think.
Where are the rent garments and handfuls of hair torn from grieving heads, instead of this alter to the god Hallmark?
Still, it’s what people DO when they can do nothing else. It began long before, but reached a crazy peak when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in a tunnel in Paris. The flower tributes dropped off in front of Kensington Palace (and in the Parisian tunnel, and at her ancestral home in Northamptonshire, and not a few in a nose-thumbing gesture directed at the Queen outside Buckingham Palace) soon rose up as high as an elephant’s eye before spreading wildly and widely sideways. The bizarre blanket stitched together from ribbon-tied bouquets and ‘Candle in the Wind’ songsheets, photographs lovingly clipped from magazines and newspapers, and with farewell notes sheathed in plastic as if the writers were well aware that their personal eulogies would be hanging around long after the Princess’s funeral cordon had passed by.
(And they were right and they did.)
Still, I don’t know how I feel about these crowd-created holy places. Do they honour the individuals or trivialize them somehow? When anybody can drop by and drop off a note that reads: “So long Sally – I didn’t know you, but I pray for your eternal soul” what does it mean? Do they continue to pray for Sally? Does the gesture signify anything beyond a 21st century knee-jerk reaction to a top of the local news type story that fascinates and horrifies for a moment, then is gone and forgotten with the requisite placement of a plush toy and a ribbon-anchored heart-shaped mylar balloon?
It’s really not for me to say. But from what I can gather, it does indeed comfort the family left behind. It has meaning and value and moment for them.
We need these public rituals, official rememberings and heartfelt (if sometimes weird – I saw a pair of frilly underpants placed at one of those shrines once and I still don’t know what it meant) messages sent into the ether in order to take final notice before moving on.
And heaven knows, as far as the war goes, it may remain virtually the only way we have left of paying tribute to the dead.
But maybe…
Steven Harper appears to be re-considering his no-press policy for Canadian soldiers’ bodies arriving home from the fracas in Afghanistan and Iraq, following the hue and cry that reached a crescendo when Canada’s first fallen female soldier arrived home unremarked upon by a banned media contingent. But his ‘no flags at half mast save Remembrance Day’ edict shows either a steely consistency, or an eerie blindness to a country’s need to publicly acknowledge ultimate sacrifice.
He has been resolute in insisting the decision is one made to offer the families of the fallen the privacy they need to mourn, but in the absence of families actually requesting such space and solitude, the command rings hollow. Hollower still when you realize no similar policy has been announced for police and firefighters killed in the line of duty.
It just doesn’t pass the smell test. It stinks.
It would be sickening to think it is simply a policy aping the American one – the one that fears too much reality may undermine an administration’s right to send soldiers to their deaths whensoever and wheresoever they please.
Because for Americans, outside of a few photographs released following freedom of information demands, the dissemination of images of flag-draped coffins are as elusive and rare as child pornography – and treated with pretty much the same eyes squinched shut disgust by the wartime White House.
A White House that would much rather tie a ribbon round an old oak tree than make the tough decisions that would make ribbon tying – save for those who die innocently and accidentally – a thing of the past.
We need a new tribute, a new official day and symbol aimed at educating world leaders in the desires of their citizenry – like red ribbons for AIDS awareness, or pink for breast cancer education.
A yellow no-more-yellow-ribbons ribbon.
Wear it with pride.

Model of a modern Major General

2006-05-05T15:01:00.000-04:00

I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one who read the AP newspaper story today and breathed a sigh of relief.
After all, when you see the headline: ‘U.S. mocks militant’s misfire’ over a picture of Abu Masab al-Zarqawi clutching a machine gun, then read on to discover the Pentagon has actual video footage of the Al Qaeda leader having trouble discharging his firearm, what can you possibly do but shoot a grateful prayer heavenward and mutter an admiring “talk about ‘mission ‘accomplished!’” before getting ready to count down the last days of the war?
It’s true: al-Zarqawi was videotaped about 20 miles south of the Iraq capitol trying to fix a jammed weapon before finally surrendering, forced to ask a friend to help him unblock the stoppage.
Not only that, but according to military experts who pored over the tape, examining every damning second, al Zarqawi was wearing New Balance tennis shoes – American tennis shoes – as he performed this pathetic stunt.
The ‘mocker’ identified in the headline is one Major General Rick Lynch, spokesman for the U.S. command and Baghdad-based bitch-slapper, who offered commentary on the fugitive film, interpreting each feeble attempt at firing, studying every awkward, incompetent gesture of aid from al-Zarqawi’s similarly befuddled cohorts.
“It’s supposed to be automatic fire,” Lynch explains. “He’s shooting single shots. Something’s wrong with his machine gun, He looks down, can’t figure out, calls his friend to come unblock the stoppage and get the weapon firing again.”
It doesn’t say in the newspaper report, but one assumes the Major General spoke in a tone dripping with the sort of contempt that would naturally accompany the discharge of such a distasteful duty.
(Having to look at a man unable to shoot a gun, is one thing… one hideous, hopefully never-to-be-repeated thing; to be called upon to provide narration for such an unmanly, testosterone-challenged spectacle must have been cruel indeed.)
“This piece you all see as he walks away, he’s wearing his black uniform and his New Balance tennis shoes as he moves to this white pick up,” Lynch continues, giving no indication whatsoever of the make or model of the evil Al Qaeda-mobile. “And his close associates around him… do things like grab the hot barrel of the machine gun and burn themselves.”
Ha!
The picture is clear: how can a guy with a jammed machine gun – a guy who cannot even fire his jammed machine gun and can’t fix it on his own – ever hope to win a war against the kind of guys who find stuff like this funny?
The strategy is brilliant.
The strategy is familiar…
Too familiar…
Re-cast with characters costumed in monochromatic, hooded terrorist garb and chic desert camouflage, and with a plot that though it sometimes meanders away from the central theme, still manages to capture the very essence of the film to which it pays reverent homage, the U.S. Army is reading from the script of Mean Girls.
Hollywood comes to the desert in a scene straight out of the teen queen comedy movie genre, as the popular girls (U.S. forces) take on the bumbling foreigner (al-Zarqawi) using gossip, innuendo and other hurtful torture techniques in order to humiliate and bring her (him) down.
Lindsay Lohan may be a more sympathetic heroine, and the popular girls would likely look better in short skirts and lip gloss than the U.S Army, but for planning, execution and follow through, the motivation and hopes for success read virtually the same.
Here’s where I’m nervous.
I don’t think they saw the last reel of the film. As any tween-something, gum-snapping Lohan-fan could tell you, the mean girls do not – could never – prevail in the end. The details are a little fuzzy to me (having regrettably never actually seen the movie) but the never-in-doubt happy ending is as familiar and predictable as the night follows day shtick.
Hell – Animal House, Stripes, Caddyshack and virtually every film save The Apple Dumpling Gang has much the same plot: meanies never prosper.
How about a cartoon for inspiration? Maybe they could tie al-Zarqawi’s machine gun barrel in a knot… or drop a ten ton weight on his head (or a piano or flower pot if those are more accessible in the Middle East) or get a giant Acme brand sling shot and…
I take back the sigh of relief. I don’t think images of the current Al-Qaeda leader fumbling with his machine gun is enough of a slam dunk humiliation to alter the course of the war in Iraq. What’s truly pathetic is the story Major General Lynch is telling America – and the obvious hopes he has that such a tale will provide comfort to their number.
Because even armies and animators must needs follow the story-telling rules as old as time: Wile E. Coyote could never defeat the Road Runner – even on rocket-powered roller skates – and neither will the U.S. triumph over the forces of evil reading from such a banal script.

Bear market bull

2006-05-03T19:49:00.000-04:00

Though she was not vouchsafed a heroine’s death – which would have been a neat trick for a car – Sylvia nevertheless didn’t let me down even up to and including her final journey.
She got me safely to the mechanic who thumbs-downed the plucky little Mazda 323’s future, gently suggesting that by investing some $4000 in repairs to make roadworthy a $2000 car (her purchase price more than ten years ago) I hadn’t thoroughly grasped the finer points of the law of diminishing returns.
The mechanic might have something there – I tend to hang onto things well past their sell by’s. Like the dog for instance; she too is somewhat less than roadworthy these days.
At nearly thirteen years old she’s starting to look a little rough around the edges. Her eyes are milky with cataracts, she has luxating patellas (her joints pop in and out with astonishing ease) she’s a little creaky with arthritis and the after-luxating effects, her teeth aren’t much to talk about and she has weird little cyst-like bumps springing up on her back like toadstools after a spring rain.
I just got her back from the groomer who cut and snipped the worst mats and tats off her, shaved her close, shaped her head, sluiced out her ears and trimmed her pad-hair. $59.98 thank you very much – and worth every penny (including the ten dollar tip) for being able to perform all these ablutions and cut her toenails – a feat my last vet would only do under sedation. (I’m almost sure it was for the dog.)
Six pounds of unhappy Yorkshire Terrier can be a surprisingly formidable article – she screams like a lost soul writhing in the pits of hell (seriously – you should hear it…) and squirms with an intensity that would put a boa constrictor to shame.
I know people are always writing these funny exaggerated little stories about their pet’s adorable foibles, but I am seriously not kidding. She’s a terror.
On the other hand, she doesn’t bite, she's cute as hell, and I love her more than money.
But talk about your diminishing returns; if I counted up all the hair-do’s, vet visits, airplane tickets, dog food, dog treats (I should buy shares in Milk Bone and Hartz Mountain) booster shots, collar and leash accoutrements, carry cases, dog medicine, vitamins, kennel costs and planned, as well as emergency operations (she’s missing her ovaries, six teeth, something benign that showed up on her tiny butt and at least a year of my life when she was afflicted with a pancreatic attack last year – that visit alone cost more than $2000) it would have to amount to several thousands of dollars – well into four or even five figures.
If I really did the math, she probably costs me as much as the car each year – gas, oil and insurance included – though with considerably less mileage, and virtually no convenience.
If I could cash in this investment, realize the returns so to speak, I might have my retirement taken care of – certainly a kitchen reno, a newer car, a holiday or two and enough lip collagen to rank me right up there with Melanie Griffith and the Bride of Wildenstein.
Not that I would of course – but I could.
But I’m not alone in being late in latching on to this ‘diminishing returns’ thing. Though I’m sure he considers himself as more of a ‘magic of compound interest’ type of guy than a capitol loss, the truth of the matter is that the President of the United States is a plummeting stock minus the stop/loss order – how low can he go?
It’s a bear market for Bush. Returns are (empirically) diminishing when you, a) find yourself still trapped in a war with no end in sight and bodies continuing to pile up; b) watch gas prices soar at the start of a busy summer; c) get your ass handed to you, hearing the unvarnished truth (though filtered through satire) face to face for the first time ever - through the conduit of a Comedy Central comedian.
Steven Colbert rocked that White House Correspondent’s dinner! He ruled – and he had the entire White House grinding their teeth into splintered stumps in silent fury as he told them truth after equally uncomfortable truth:
“Misery accomplished,” he said, then aimed his sites on a series of high profile pols.
John McCain? Wham! The Joint Chiefs? Whack! Rumsfeld? Kapow! Justice Scalia? Kee-runch!
George W. Bush? Slayed, sliced and served up for dinner, making a mockery of the shrimp cocktail and rubber chicken, himself looking more as though he was tasting and smelling something very, very bad indeed.
“The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady,” remarked the host of The Colbert Report. “You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday, that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change, this man’s beliefs never will.”
And:
“I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only FOR things, he stands ON things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And he sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”
And the White House press corps for whom the dinner was ostensibly held?
“Over the last five years you people were so good over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the affect of global warming,” said Colbert. “We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out…”
Ouch baby.
In the guise of his TV alter ego, the faux newsman with the right wing bias, Colbert probably didn’t need to add (though he most assuredly did): “I have nothing but contempt for these people.”
It was brilliant, it was pointed, it was satire at its finest. But at the end of the day, it was too true to be funny.
Diminishing returns.
Like Canada’s relationship with the Bush government, exposed now for what it truly is – from fits of pique and punishing language directed at our nation for not joining in the war on Iraq, to the myriad taxes, regulations and restrictions placed on goods and services we might have assumed fell under the heading of Free Trade, to the recent deal on softwood lumber (we took it because there was and never would be any other choice) – Canada has finally had our rose-coloured spectacles forcibly removed. Would that the citizens of the US had seen it sooner.
I’ll miss Sylvia the car – I’m hanging on to Lily the dog – but they both offered good value for money, whether through dependability or laughs.
The Bush administration offers neither.

Prime Minister Poodle

2006-04-23T15:11:00.000-04:00

With temperatures swinging between the high hot teens and the warm, damp pre-teens (kids today…) there really isn’t much doubt: spring has arrived in all its burgeoning pulchritudinous glory, so I say, chances are summer will absolutely, surely, almost certainly likely follow.
I don’t like to be too definite about these things – global warming warnings aside, things are clearly changing out there. We may have to add a new season if only to acknowledge the truth of the heat.
What’s after summer and before fall? Based on the last few years, hell sounds about right by temperature, but hell being a permanent place rather than a transient season, more imagination is required.
Sahummer? Sort of halfway between summer and Sahara? ehn. But since it’ll be at least a couple of decades before we experience full-on desert conditions, I’m plumping for ‘simmer’: summer, almost at - but just off - the boil. Ask anyone who’s stuck their finger in a pot on the bubble – it’s still plenty hot enough to burn.
So it’s time to welcome warmth. Time to disrobe, peel off and strip down.
Most importantly, it’s time to change shoes. Discard socks, throw off hose – and dive into the blistery pleasures of open-toed shoes, sandals and flip flops. I’ve missed my flip flops.
But there are other flip flops I’ve been missing even more. The brave and the quietly, slowly bold – those of the sober second though – the human flip floppers.
If Canada’s newest leader and America’s current and arguably most destructive, the practice of changing one’s mind – or admitting one’s mistakes (or telling the truth) – will remain dead and buried along with those who have lost their lives at the whim of those who pride themselves on split-second decision making.
Personally, I respect flip floppers. Love ‘em with a passion equaled only by the passion of those with whom I disagree love singularity of thought. All my fears that Canada risked electing a leader who aped the worst of the US president’s qualities are gradually materializing.
Beginning with a cabinet and caucus-wide directive that threatens those who disagree publicly with the PM or diverge from any part of the conservative party line with firing or public humiliation, Steven Harper is the iron fist in the iron glove.
(Fully equipped with, according to some wags, a mid-section masquerading as his very own wrought-iron pot belly stove.)
Disturbingly, some journalists have identified these qualities of absolute control and naked power-wielding as responsible for the early perceived successes of the new government. If ‘success’ means appearing to be united without the boring, though necessary requirement of actually being united is the definition, well, then yes.
But how can that not suck?
And how sad must it be now for all those recently elected Tories, excited as kids at summer camp, rubbing their little hands together and chortling with glee as they imagined what they’d say if the voting public would just give them half a chance. Now they know. Nothing. At least nothing that hasn’t been, scripted, tested, checked, re-checked and sanitized for the convenience of conformity – and all that that implies.
One opinion now, and only one. Top down, single-minded, unchanging, unwavering, unapologetic.
Presidential even.
It’s this that confounds me. The immense pride these leaders take in announcing that unlike their rivals they always make up their minds at warp(ed) speed and once made, never change them. The very act of reconsidering a position or plan based on anything from new information to results is sneered at with the same contempt as is asking for advice, working toward compromise, or even letting experts, (let’s say for example, UN arms inspectors) complete their job and report on their findings.
A little slower decision making, a little more information gathering and possibly even a retreat from an erroneously held position and who knows how many wars could remain un-fought, how many more kids provided with safe affordable daycare, how many policies re-thought and polished. How much better, how much more flexible and unrestricted life could be.
The triumph of the new government is further demonstrated by the perceived success of the recent trips the PM and his erstwhile rival and current Foreign Affairs Minister Peter McKay took down south.
What’s been billed as a new closer relationship with the US is on closer examination what looks to be an exercise in flat out obsequiousness. Anyone seeing Peter McKay practically blush and flutter his eyelashes at US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (I was blushing at any rate) as he drooled over her career and accomplishments, shamelessly sucking up as he described a friendship so chemically, so karmically simpatico, and as he got precisely nothing (save a condescending smile) on Canada/US border restrictions requiring Canadians to carry either a Passport or some sort of identity card when traveling to the US, must have wondered what the hell price getting a US official to smile at one must cost.
The first installment was no doubt adding Canada’s voice to US calls for sanctions on Iran – despite the fact that such a position appeared to have arisen out of the clear blue sky; no discussion raised in parliament, no consensus building with cabinet, caucus or Canadians.
Even the Prime Minister failed at achieving any of the goals the close, understanding relationship with the US he promised his government would build would bring – his bravest posture was flying in the face of fashion at the walkabout in Mexico.
Not an inch was gained on softwood lumber, not a millimeter moved on border issues.
The tougher stance taken by the former liberal government may not have earned any friends or gained any ground with the Bush administration, but blind obeisance and awe-struck admiration doesn’t seem to be getting the job done either.
Just allowing someone to be your lapdog doesn’t mean you won’t be kicked to the curb or the doghouse just as soon as it suits your master.
And don’t expect it not to hurt – the President is more likely to be wearing pointy-toed steel-tipped cowboy boots than a pair of open, flexible flip flops.

Oh yes he did...

2006-04-10T14:20:00.000-04:00

All the most interesting exchanges in my life right now seem to happen at auditions.
(And for those of you wondering if I got the Viagra singing gig, the answer is no. And to be honest, I’m puzzled; the singers I hear in the commercial sing rather well – and surely that wasn’t the direction the producers intended to go… or was it?! Crap. Déjà vu flop sweat all over again…)
So I’m waiting to go in – this is a spot that requires a male and female and we’re matched up to read together… I get one of the cute stars of the Canada/Russia Hockey movie (rowrr!) – and as I circumspectly listen in on various conversations going on around me, another male voice walks in.
“Bob,” squeaks some chick sitting to my right, reaching up to snag him with a powerful mitt and dragging him down before planting a noisy smooch on his cheek. (All names changed not to protect the innocent, but because I don’t remember them.) “You didn’t call me last Wednesday…” She pouts fetchingly, still gripping him vice-like by the elbow.
“No,” he replies, “I didn’t.”
And that, fellow amateur sociologists, was that.
Finis.
The end.
No further discussion took place.
I could hardly believe it – where were the excuses? The explanations? The broken ankles, dying relatives, accidental blows to the head? I didn’t know whether to cheer or throw rotten fruit. Where was the socially expected – nay, demanded – dishonest response to an obvious, embarrassing question?
Answer: nowhere. This guy apparently doesn’t do bullshit.
The rest of us (those who apparently still do) were shocked into silence for a few moments, though soon relieved (were we ever) by the producer inviting the non-caller in to read. The non-called woman remained in the outer office with us, talking to another auditioner a little too quickly, clearly acutely embarrassed by Mr. ‘No, I didn’t’; laughing a little too loud and a little too long at a comment about the change in the weather.
Soon enough the negative guy came out and I and my hockey-playing thespian partner went in. Whatever Act II was destined to bring, we weren’t fated to be part of it.
(Which one was it from the CBC conclusion-airing-tonight movie? Well, I’ll give you a hint: the one with the bad 70’s-style wig. Not helping?)
We didn’t need a lot of takes – the two spots (for barbecue sauce) were fairly simple: classic dopey man/long-suffering woman sarcastic exchanges – and hockey boy and I were out of the booth in two shakes.
(Which barbecue sauce was it? I’ll give you a hint: the one with the woman’s name. Not helping?)
To our mutual surprise, Dr. No was still in the waiting area, but Ms Pout had disappeared. Bathroom break? Humbled stumble away from the production company? The mystery continues to this day, unabated.
As the next two clichéd characters were called in, I, Canada ‘72 and the man with neither guile nor apparent need of prevarication left together, walking to the elevators as we hitched on coats and slipped on gloves. (The weather actually hadn’t changed that much yet. Hence, no humour.)
“So what was that about?” asked my ‘classic dopey man’. “Did you forget to call?”
“Was this a date situation,” I threw in, “or a friend-thing?” I wanted to know the extent of the crime.
“Well,” the accused replied, “I met her in a bar downtown and we hung out together and…” (He might just as well have inserted ‘yadda yadda yadda’) “I just didn’t call.”
“Wow,” said the TV movie star.
“And the legend begins,” said I with just a soupcon of sarcasm, getting off the elevator and scooting toward the door ahead of the guys, who were hanging back to talk.
I didn’t want to get into it any further; didn’t want to hear if he was going to boast or explain apologetically, didn’t want to know if he was as pleased with himself as I suspect most of the guys in the audition ante-room were with his solution to morning after (week later) interrogation.
I had just experienced a combination Seinfeld/Sex and the City/He’s Just Not That Into You moment and I needed at least another moment to catch my breath, pause and reflect.
I’m torn. There’s a part of me that gets his action (not calling) but rejects his delivery (point blank, no explanation in a room full of people) whilst simultaneously trying to gauge how I felt about her action (asking a question she really wanted an answer to) balanced against her delivery (point blank, no build up, in a room full of people).
Two crimes at cross purposes.
But much as I’m confused at how I feel about the communication, whether I like what I heard, how it was transmitted, received or overheard, I have no doubt what the non-message means and what it implies.
There is a simplicity of communication that is almost beautiful in its pared-down straightforwardness. He came, he saw, he didn’t call – and you can bet he isn't planning to in the future.
In a world filled with obfuscation, miscommunication and downright, bald-faced lies, the guy who says no and means it is a kind of role model.
We daily hear leaders make promises, commitments and pledges they have no intention of keeping; some rabbit on about ethics, then given a chance, do exactly the same (Stronach/Emerson – Martin/Harper … pot/kettle) whilst others impassively watch the murder of innocents in a war entered into on verifiable falsehood.
The most recent horror in the ongoing Iraq war horrors (besides the horror that calls for impeachment are still so faint and whispery) is the revelation in the filing by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case last week, reporting that Scooter Libby, assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney was given direct instructions by the President to leak information to reporters, bolstering the case for war – even as the information in question (that Saddam Hussein was building up stocks of uranium) was being denigrated by senior White House defence advisors including the then Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Following hard on the heels of the heretofore unreleased bombshell memo that revealed the President had told British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the lead up to the war that he was going to go ahead, UN Inspector’s verification reports or no, the Libby admission just piles on the facts, as the lies pile ever skyward.
The political equivalent of broken ankles, dying relatives and homework-snarfing dogs.
Where is the screaming, crying, garment-rending and pitchforks and torches parade on Washington? Where is even the slightest recognition on the part of the President or the administration that fairytales were told to sleepy citizens, some of whom remain, even now, comatose to the truth?
Oh for the elegant clarity of “no.”
No, there is no connection between 9/11 and Saddam Husseim.
No, there are no WMDs.
No, America is not going to war with Iraq.
And now, more than ever, we hope to hear: no, America is not going to war with Iran.
“No, I didn’t.”
Oh yes he did.
Meanwhile, neither I nor my mysterious TV movie voice partner have received a call back on the barbecue sauce commercial.
And I know what it means.
In a world full of ambiguity, it may not be pleasant, but it's helpful.

WWPD (What Would Pete Do)?

2006-04-02T14:01:00.000-04:00

I realize now that I’ve reached a sort of critical mass with my stuff.
There’s just one too many things on the blink, to the extent that I now have to kick, joggle, whack, shake or rattle several key pieces of equipment to get them to work.
This list includes – but is in no way limited to – my VCR (a series of sharp taps on the side with the remote to make the wavy lines subside) the right front headlamp on my car (a fairly firm kick up the side – pause – repeat as necessary ‘til the light comes on) the hard drive on my computer (I sort of gently whack the sides – dislodges dust I’m thinking) and my dishwasher, which after prolonged tinkering I’ve managed to stop (for the time being) from leaking all over the kitchen floor. Most of the time.
There’s more – plenty more – but whatever inborn obsolescence was built into my stuff, for whatever reason, everything seems to have decided to poop out at once.
I wish I was more like Pete Dougherty – erstwhile companion of coked-out supermodel Kate Moss, himself a disaster in a Rat Pack-style pork pie hat, careening from drug bust to drug bust, caroming off the sides of police officers, reporters and minders from New York to London, smoking his crack, snorting his horse, and just for a little variety one assumes, regularly getting pissed as a fart.
The guy’s an immature mess, which makes the name of his band so absolutely perfect it almost beggars the imagination – certainly one has to proffer a tip of the hat, or at least a salute with the crack pipe – being known as the frontman for ‘Babyshambles’.
But Pete now has a new addiction, one I get and one I wish I had the guts to mainline – buying old Jaguars, parking them illegally and then buying replacements when they get towed away.
For about $2000.00, Dougherty purchases beat up old Jags and drives them around until they fall apart, he does, or the London parking authority makes the decision for him. In a ritual reminiscent of hair-washing, instead of lathering rinsing and repeating, he buys, drives, parks and leaves, starting the cycle all over again at a rate that likely exceeds his schedule of hair-washing… or at least based on paparazzi photos, so it would seem.
A plan so simple it just might work.
I have dreams of doing the dishes just once more, then quietly and stealthily defenestrating my Eaton Viking dishwasher up and over in the dead of night.
Leaving Sylvia my car by the side of the road, (in the bike and taxi lane tee hee!) then running to catch the Red Rocket (Toronto has a great public transit system, so who really needs an automobile?) leaving the car, wonky headlight and steadily encroaching puddle of oil for someone else to deal with.
Don’t get me started on the VCR – long may it corrode in some far away landfill.
Everybody says we live in a disposable society, but how many people have the Pete Dougherty guts to actually throw things away?
About two years ago I wrote about a piece of cardboard I wanted to hang onto against the advice of a tidy boyfriend who wanted to throw it away (along with a raft of other things – let’s face it, the guy was clearly OC) since I wasn’t using it. Not at that minute I wasn’t, but come on. It was a nice, clean, beautifully flat (the secret to good cardboard) unmarked, glossy, shiny piece of perfect pristine cardboard. The type of cardboard you could only have prayed your mother would hang onto so you could use it for a million different craft projects; (when instead you really only usually got the kind of crappy card that came back with your father’s shirts from the dry cleaners) glue, paste, sparkles, stickers, poster paint, beads, bits of tinsel, felt, leaves, buttons – why anything would stick to it. And beautify it. The possibilities were endless. They still are.
Which is why I still have the cardboard, and the boyfriend, as I indicated back then, not so much.
But that’s only the beginning. I delight in wearing clothes I wore in high school – and not only for the thrill of still fitting into them. It’s true what they said: everything really does come around again and I’m one of those people who aren’t standing around moaning about their old platform shoes: I’m ready for virtually any fashion comeback from the 70’s, 80’s or 90’s.
Jackets with shoulder pads? Check. Skinny-ankle stone-wash Guess jeans? Check. Below the knee hippie boho granny skirts with matching tapestry vests? Check. Giant disco-era earrings? Check, check, and check!
I still feel sick about the pair of Frye boots I wore circa 1975 that I’m positive my father threw into a garage sale (along with my stuffed dog, pony books, board games – and heaven knows how much pieces of pristine cardboard) back in the 80’s when I wasn’t looking – and a similar pair of Frye boots (‘Campus’ style in ‘Banana’) that will now cost you in the neighbourhood of $253.00 – and that’s American – and before tax and shipping charges, so who’s sorry now?
(My father – the garage sale guy – is dead, so actually, we’re sorry on a lot of levels.)
I have a slight magazine habit that I’m trying desperately to quit. But how can I throw away a 1999 Allure with a photo of Heather Locklear on the cover (she and Richie Sambora, still so happy!) when there’s an article inside about the PERFECT ab exercises? I mean, when is an article about perfect ab exercises ever going to come along again? Or a turn of the century Cosmo with tips on how to REALLY please a man? That stuff is radio-active, once in a lifetime gold people!
But the laundry room in my condo has a sort of take a penny, leave a penny book and magazine swap area, and just when I think I know all I really need to know about Brangelina, along comes laundry day and in between cycles, I’m not only reading, I’m taking. And not leaving on the return trip either.
What would Pete Dougherty do? (After getting stoned I mean.) Why he’d throw it all away… and get more!
This is the part I have to remember as I fear filling garbage bags with treasures from the wardrobe fashion forgot… divesting of at least half of the paperbacks I readily admit I will never read…. and shipping any Vanity Fair published before the 43rd President of the United States took up politics (and I mean pre-Governor of Texas days) down to the laundry room to torture some other misbegotten packrat with more storage space and less sense: there’s plenty more stuff where that came from. More vintage clothing stores, more out of print bookshops, more second hand cars and smirky smug salesmen to sell them.
I have a new role model who seems to have got half the equation right – he’s adept at getting rid of stuff. But I worry about the other half. The re-acquiring habit.
Here’s where I can help: I could kick, joggle, whack or shake Pete Dougherty out of his built-in obsolescence, until he was so rattled he’d never touch another drug again so long as he lived.
And then we could pull together all my old magazines and books and fabric and beads and stuff… and do a little craft project together. A little scrapbooking maybe. I know where we could get a nice pristine piece of cardboard if needs be…
That’s what Jane would do.
So it’s all good.

Crappy Anniversary

2006-03-20T20:23:00.000-05:00

It was exactly one month ago to the day – February 20th – that Right Wing hate historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in jail for his words – published and spoken – denying the holocaust.
It’s a serious sentence, but then David Irving was one heck of a serious denier; in a nutshell, through his books and in particular a couple of speeches he made in 1989, Irving has long claimed that the murder of some six million Jews in World War II was a hoax; that the crematoriums either did not exist or their use by the Nazis was wildly exaggerated, and that Hitler has been misunderstood and unfairly smeared by historians.
For most people Irving has long been thought of as a nutcase of the first water – a rabid Right Wing revisionist – whose opinions and qualifications to hold them were held in somewhat less than scholarly esteem.
He might have earned no more than a footnote in history as one of those flat earth-type creepy kooks who come along once or twice in a lifetime if it weren’t for the fact that his views became a rallying point, offering succor, comfort and quotable quotes to a legion of his like-minded anti-Semitic, holocaust-denying followers.
There are those (respected historians, literary figures, journalists, legal types and not a few regular folks) who are concerned that in a day and in an age in which comics can get you killed, we ought to be standing up far taller and straighter for freedom of speech, no matter how incendiary or hate-filled.
I find myself in agreement; a sentence like this – or worse – ought to be saved for far more dangerous instigators, those whose words were responsible for, say, the deaths or maiming or ruination of many, many thousands of people.
People like, say, President Bush, or Vice President Dick Cheney, or even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, all of whom were busy beavers this last weekend, celebrating the third anniversary of the war by impressing various and sundry with their positive, even cheery views on their successful Iraq strategy, despite escalating violence and the emerging threat of civil war.
Compared to this terrible triumvirate, David Irving (as repulsive as he unquestionably is) is a piker.
The President tossed in his two cents – with a two minute address to the press yesterday on arriving home from yet another relaxing retreat to Camp David – letting us know that despite the estimated 200 Iraqis killed in sectarian violence (translation: civil war) over the last few weeks, he himself was “encouraged by the process”.
The Vice President appeared on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” yesterday, responding to questions that challenged his statement three years ago; a statement that suggested the American army would be greeted like liberators (complete with laurel wreaths and pelted flowers) and his more recent contention that the insurgency “was in its last throes”.
Cheney brushed off those concerns with trademark condescension.
“I think it has less to do with the statements we’ve made,” he replied, “which I think were basically accurate and reflect reality, than with the fact that there’s a constant sort of perception, if you will, that’s created because what’s newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad.”
In other words, the media did it.
Don Rumsfeld trumpeted his view from the op-ed page of The Washington Post. He likened the war in Iraq to two of the last three great conflagrations (inexplicably neglecting to mention Vietnam…) World War II and the Cold War, saying that to leave Iraq now would be “… the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis. It would be as great a disgrace as if we had asked the liberated nations of Eastern Europe to return to Soviet Domination.”
Which is it? A mission inches from success, working arm in arm with a delighted and enlightened Iraqi nation, or a nightmare scenario comparable to Nazi Germany?
The White House administration is in denial.
And while such a crime bought David Irving a three year reservation in an Austrian hoosegow, it seems a similar sentence is being passed for the atrocities in Iraq – the only difference being that those who must pay are the citizens of the United States (and indeed the world) who must endure nearly three more years of this administration and those who run it.
Oh – and most particularly those already dead or dying in service of the lies, and those still fated to do so.

Hard song

2006-03-08T13:18:00.000-05:00

It surely shouldn’t be so surprising that the daughter of the man who taught Frank Sinatra how to sing and Gene Kelly how to dance (or was it the other way around?) is poised on the brink of musical stardom.
And why not?
Why should a complete and utter lack of ability, training, talent, pitch, range or rhythm preclude such a career move?
I’m poised I tell ya – poised.
It all began yesterday with an early morning audition for a radio commercial; I went in knowing neither the product nor the pitch. (Not as much of a drawback as you may imagine: they give you a script, they tell you how they want you to read it, they record it, they shout “Next!” Nothing simpler. Just keep moving. And forget validation for your parking… or your performance, frankly.)
But I was surprised yesterday morning as the receptionist at the studio handed me the script to see it printed on the page in what looked like stanzas.
“Poetry, eh?” I thought as I shrugged off my coat and sat down to read the script and await my turn at the mike.
But anyone could see it wasn’t poetry. It was a song. A song I recognized; two verses, a chorus and a ‘bring it on home’ flourish of a finish.
There had to be some sort of mistake.
“There has to be some sort of mistake,” I said to the receptionist, my voice thin with rapidly growing anxiety. “I’m not a singer. Did they tell my agent they wanted a singer? I am not,” I paused for emphasis, “a singer!”
“No, no,” she calmed. “They want real people – people like you.”
I just looked at her. I didn’t know her – she didn’t know me – so how could she possibly understand just how ‘real’ I really am? How could she – or the casting agent – possibly gauge just how much ‘real’ the producer and recording engineer were prepared to be bombarded with when I went into the studio and started being ‘real’ at the top of my lungs?
No false modesty here. Besides writing, I pay the bills with voice recording. I was the voice of CTV for three years, the voice of the Life Network for another three, and over the years the voice behind countless hundreds of commercials selling everything from fried chicken to Fords. You have probably heard me tell you that if you know the extension of the person with whom you wish to speak, please enter it now, or press pound to return to the main menu, or nine to hang up. And thank you for calling.
Oh – and have a nice day.
I have a nice voice. Real nice.
But I cannot – not one note – sing. I mouth the words to Happy Birthday to You, rhubarb and mumble my way through hymns and Christmas carols, and never, ever sing in the car unless I’m alone with the windows tightly rolled up, saving any actual singing for the shower (where I do actually sing) grinding and creaking my way through the Top 40 with a sound approximating a cheap, untuned violin played by a toddler with a broken whisky bottle.
I’m really that bad.
I suck. I stink. There may be someone who sings worse than me, but if there is, I surely don’t want to hear them.
Whatever genetic talents were passed on to me by my father (who confided his musical mentorship of ‘ol’ blue eyes’ and ‘ol’ happy feet’ when I was six... and who would lie to a kid?) the actual singing gene was left unspliced, rendering me tune-free and tin eared – and happy that way. I’m fine knowing my limitations.
What I am not fine with is sharing them (recording them! for eternity!) with strangers. There’s knowing your limitations – and then there’s exhibiting them, loudly, with the potential for ‘sharing’ them with potentially millions of innocent citizens.
I could feel the flop sweat starting to trickle, I felt warm – too warm, open a window somebody, please! warm – and was just beginning to consider ways and means of getting out of there with the minimum of humiliation and the maximum of speed (I just couldn’t think how to credibly break my ankle without at least a stair or a step, or a reason to climb on a chair and deliberately fall off) when the producer came in and called me up and walked me back to the recording studio like a French aristo dragged through the streets of Paris to the guillotine.
(Curses – not a slippery area rug or even the teensiest of uneven floorboards from which to launch myself hospital emergency room-ward.)
I was feeling nauseous by the time he set me up at the music stand, adjusted my mike and handed me my headset. (Are you getting a picture of just how bad this was going to be?)
Back in his own safe (safe!) little booth, the producer told me he’d play the musical track for me a couple of times so I could hear where the verses began and when the chorus came in; I ignored it – I had just enough time to shoot a prayer heavenward before the engineer asked me for my levels and launched me musically hellbound.
After all, I didn’t need to listen to any lead track; I’d heard this tune a million times – each and every time I’d watched Singin’ in The Rain.
“Good mornin’, good mornin’,
It’s great to stay up late,
Good mornin’, good mornin’ to you!”
…and so on.
Singin in the Rain. Great movie. Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor and… Gene Kelly.
Gene Kelly!
Was it possible? Could this be a sign of some sort? Gene Kelly? Student of my father? (Odd, as my father was born more than 20 years after Gene, but – geez, have you never heard of child prodigies? Infant prodigies? Embryo prodigies?) And Gene, let’s face it, when compared to his dancing and acting was actually pretty crap as a singer.
And I am crap as a singer! (Granted, a whole different, appalling level of crap – but crap none the less.)
“When the band began to play,
The sun was shinin’ bright.
Now the milkman’s on his way,
It’s too late to say goodnight!
So……..”
I started to feel a little better. The nausea waned ever so slightly, my heartbeat regulated, the little hairs standing straight up on the back of my neck went from attention! to at ease.
I took a deep breath, adjusted my headset, nodded at the producer, waited for his hand signal, then I belted that song into that mike!
I experimented with key changes and tones and volume – I may have executed at tremolo – I sang like some warped, oblivious-to-their-abilities contestant on American Idol. I even, so help me God, stuck out my arms and waved them around a little bit.
I sang and I sang.
Then I sang it again. Three times altogether. And each time, my confidence grew. It was complete crap – but it was my crap. They wanted real – and they got it. And I didn’t care. And I brought it home with a flourish.
I wafted out of the studio and floated down the hallway to the reception area, where three other women were taking off their coats and staring at their scripts, and clearing their throats and fingering their collars like they’d suddenly gotten unbearably tight.
I smiled at the assembled women, slipped into my coat, grabbed my bag and as I was about to bid farewell to the receptionist, it occurred to me that I didn’t know what product or service this musical mess was supposed to be selling.
“So what was all that in aid of?” I asked – though I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I got it, I just cared that I finally got it. I had discovered a new skill – one that could take me heaven only knew where. Singing badly – with verve! With passion and excitement and tremolos! Me! Singing!
“Viagra,” the young lady replied, looking up at me with a sly smile.
Oh. Okay. Now I want it. I want it bad. I won’t just be in on the joke – I will be the joke!
Viagra. Priceless. My cocktail party icebreaker requirements are taken care of for the next decade.
So it’s on fellow crappy singers. I’m sitting by the phone, waiting for my agent to call. Hoping and praying and humming “Good mornin’, good mornin’!”
And I’m thinking of taking up dancing…

Driven to despair

2006-03-05T16:50:00.000-05:00

On the front page of my newspaper today, the photograph of a smiling unarmed Canadian soldier mere minutes before he was attacked by an Afghani man who screamed “Allahu Akbar!” before plunging his axe into the officer’s head.
Tomorrow the front page of my newspaper will no doubt be imprinted with a photograph of the Canadian soldiers who died in the light armoured vehicle accident last week in Afghanistan and whose remains are being shipped home today.
It’s days like these when the revulsion for ‘Mission Accomplished’ reaches near-critical mass, and the impotence many feel at the prospect of being able to affect any change in the seemingly endless madness born almost exactly three years ago feels endless in itself.
The only subject that really captures my interest nowadays (apart from my own issues, actions, problems, obsessions, rejections, repressions, regressions, regrets, worries, compulsions, concerns, memories, fears, fantasies and finances – is it really so surprising I can’t find a moment to bathe the dog?) is the vast, oceanic reserves of anger against the Iraq war that appear to be building up and spilling over all around the world.
So far as I can tell, everybody lives wrong.
Trust me on this: they certainly drive wrong. Sometimes I wonder if this is where the anger is seeping out.
I’ve written before about my (to me) shockingly swift transformation from traditional ten and two, well in advance signaling, driving manual suck-up, and all-round world class rules-of-the-road obeying driver, to raging, red-faced, road-rage-aholic over the past couple of years. It’s become practically instantaneous.
I can be bopping along (singing a song) contemplating a job well done, or one imminently begun, happy as Colossal squid in a world full of the smaller Giant-variety, and in moments be near-apoplectic with fury if some other driver should attempt to cut into my left lane from his ill-conceived stuck-behind-a-parked-car position on the right.
(Don’t try to kid me; you knew there would be parked cars. You knew there would be bottle-necking at the traffic lights. You further knew that there would be some slow-moving, oblivious folks, complacently driving in the slower left hand lane, who would either inadvertently provide you with an entrée to squeeze in front of them, or graciously wave you on. Not today buster. Not here, not now – not me.)
I am one of those people. The ones who speed up when you try to cut in. The ones who watch the changing lights like a race car driver waiting for the flag to drop so should there be any advantage to changing lanes, I’ll have leapt off the start line and passed you before you could say ‘bitch on wheels’. I drive (when provoked) like a teenaged boy, or a bitter man with a small penis.
Or an American President armed with the kind of advisors and intelligence that have placed the world in the grim marathon of death that shows no signs of abating.
(Don’t try to kid us; you knew that the reports of Iraqi possession of WMDs were inflated if not completely wrong. You knew there would be anger if you drew the world into the war. You knew there would be death. You further knew that there would be some slow-moving, oblivious nations who would either inadvertently provide you with an entrée to squeeze them in with you, or graciously wave you on. So you did. Then, now – you.)
Not so long ago while waiting to turn left across a busy thoroughfare onto my own street, after flashing her lights, honking her horn, and revving her engine, the woman stuck behind me finally pulled out from behind, drove up beside me and with a look and in a tone that were chilling in their ferocity, let me have it.
“Why don’t you turn at the lights,” she screamed. “Bitch!”
With a zoom and a squeal she was off and gunning toward her next appointment with antagonism, and I would have followed her – chased her down – to explain in words of very few syllables (most of your best swear-words only ratchet up the syllabic quotient when compounded) exactly where I lived, expressly why I was turning precisely there, and explicitly where she could place her concerns if she didn’t like it.
Until I realized it would be exactly, expressly, precisely and explicitly like screaming at myself. Pointlessly.
The thing is, in virtually all other ways, in all other situations, I am as gentle as a kitten – or at least as passive aggressive.
(I won’t pee in your shoes, or drop small dead animals at your feet – the worst I’ll do is ignore you or treat you to a look of withering disdain – but I won’t even be catty behind your back.)
I am in all ways but the one, the very image of the average North American, taking it on the chin, accepting the government’s every concealment, cover up and outright lie with a “Well, what’re you going to do?” shrug and eye roll. Still.
Even though somewhere between 35,000 – 100,000 people have died since the war began on March 19th, 2003.
Those numbers are comprised of the civilian dead estimated between 28 and 32,000 individuals, (these are the numbers of people reliably reported dead – British medical journal The Lancet estimates the body count as closer to 100,000 Iraqi civilians) and the American dead now standing at 2,297. Add another couple of hundred coalition troop deaths, and you arrive at the population of a small city.
Only a few people would have to move out of Berkeley California, Pueblo Colorado or Charleston South Carolina to approximate the number of deaths the Iraq war has wrought, and not a few folks would have to move in to Sarnia or Sault Saint Marie in Ontario, or even Kamloops or Nanaimo BC in order to achieve the same results.
And the wounded. The wounded.
In numbers representing American wounded alone, the estimates stand at between 15 and 48,000 troops.
A further 8 to 10 percent of combat troops are said to have been treated for psychiatric or behavioral health issues.
The number of Iraqi wounded is impossible to assess. There’s no doubt the number is enormous. As for their psychiatric or behavioral problems, who could guess, when US general Mark Kimmet’s helpful advice to Iraqi citizens upset at seeing innocent civilians killed by collation troops on their own telelvision screens was: “Change the channel.”
Meanwhile, a Canadian soldier with a hideous head wound lies in critical condition in an army hospital in Landstuhl Germany, and, as the result of a road accident far from the treacherous streets of downtown Toronto, the bodies of two Canadian soldiers, victims of the road accident in southern Afghanistan last week are to be flown home for burial today.
Sometimes (all the time) I think my road rage is misplaced.
But sometimes I think it’s the only place I have to put it.

President McCheese

2006-02-23T12:42:00.000-05:00

Today’s New York Times features an editorial so ‘duh’ in its subject matter, the only reaction I had upon reading it was “Uh, right. And?”
Coming out against selling junk food to toddlers – hardly blowing the lid off misanthropic advertising – was the theme for the editorial that once again reiterates the message: healthy food, good… unhealthy food, well, bad.
Maybe.
“Many health professionals now fear that junk-food advertising to toddlers and pre-teenagers is contributing to soaring rates of obesity and diabetes among the young.”
Gee, ya think?
And if so, where were you last Wednesday?
Over a couple of weeks when the Vice President shot a man point blank in the face, when Brownie, the erstwhile Director of FEMA appeared to tesify at the senate hearings and took precisely no responsibility for the disaster that was the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Katrina – even blamed his boss and the guy who hired him, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff – and when death by cartoon has reached an all-time high, perhaps it’s not so surprising that the President’s speech on health care delivered at the headquarters of one of nation's leading saturated, hydrogenated, and trans fatty acid-pushers went walkies as far as the media were concerned.
It’s come to this.
Where was the editorial breast beating and finger wagging?
Where was the sarcasm and amused horror emanating from Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich at the NYT?
Where (oh where) was Jon Stewart?
Out to lunch one suspects. How else to explain such a dropped donut.
The day: last Wednesday, February 15th.
The place: Dublin Ohio, headquarters of hamburger chain restaurant Wendy’s.
The agenda: President Bush’s speech unveiling the value for lower-income Americans in choosing ‘Health Savings Accounts’ (HSAs) over traditional health insurance in which employee and employer each contribute monthly co-payments.
The breathtaking irony seems to have escaped Bush, his handlers and even the media; either that, or they’ve simply become so deeply and everlastingly cynical, that the notion of promoting health care alongside one of the root causes of what is universally considered to be the nation’s biggest health challenge (sky-rocketing obesity rates linked to the consumption of unhealthy, processed fast foods) isn’t worth the trouble it takes to grimace and shake one’s head.
That same breathtaking irony is further stretched to near-suffocation when one attempts to tot up the product placement value of setting up the President of the United States as a shill not only for a new corporate health care dodge, but for hamburgers, fries and shakes.
Further, people were so caught up in salivating over the Vice President’s accidental shooting of a friend – a red herring if ever there was one; despite the wow factor of envisioning a gun-toting Cheney so transfixed by blood and murder he couldn’t even pause long enough to miss a human as he fired away at the penned quail, the real issue was when, how, and by whom the facts were disseminated – that other news items quickly fell by the wayside.
Much as I find the veep loathsome, corrupt and, frankly, simply terrifying to look at (I really don’t think life gives you a phiz like that unless you actually earn it) the shooting was clearly an accident; had Cheney owned up to it, apologized for it and reported it to the President and the country, why need anything more be said?
(The fact that the facts were immediately obscured, shrouded, laundered, spun-dry and rendered sanitized for our listening and viewing consumption was the angle that finally hoisted the correct outraged eyebrows some days later. It is in fact the real achilles heel of this administration; obsessing over the way in which information is delivered to conceal what is actually being delivered should be forever remembered as the hallmark of this presidency. That and the fact that they can actually make a wounded man apologize to his attacker; what, is he like, Canadian or something?)
But how on earth does the New York Times expect to rescue even a single babe innocently gumming a ribless McRib into submission when they allow such a patronizing exercise in contempt by the President to slip by?
To an audience full of Wendy’s employees, describing America’s health care system as “The best in the world” and pushing health savings accounts aimed at the poor and underemployed (and designed to remove the onus for making health care contributions from corporate America) the President took the well known, tried, true and trodden tact of setting himself alongside the average Joes – in direct opposition to the big-time, big hat, citified democrat critics who would likely oppose his plan – in encouraging minimum wage workers to sign on.
“It’s kind of basically saying ‘If you’re not making a lot of money you can’t make decisions for yourself,’ Bush told the Wendy’s staffers. “That’s kind of a Washington attitude, isn’t it? ‘We’ll decide for you if you can’t figure it out yourself.’ I think a lot of folks here at Wendy’s would argue that point of view is simply backwards and not true.”
I think the folks he’s talking about are the ones wearing the thousand dollar loafers – not the ones in the paper hats and hairnets.
The President went on to make the analogy that HSAs were really no different from the Wendy’s menu – that in the same way they offered choice: “At Wendy’s you can choose between a quarter-pounder and a salad” the President pointed out, (in one fell swoop both confusing Wendy’s with MacDonalds and making the single reference to healthy eating that was made that day) whereas the HSAs offered Americans the opportunity to purchase their own health care account.
The President chose not to mention that the high-deductible catastrophic coverage would require an individual to spend at least $1050 and a family at least $2,100 on medical expenses before the coverage actually kicks in.
The fact that such an initiative benefits Wendy’s more than its employees is apparently just so much more ketchup on the fries; since 2005, Wendy’s has already reduced its health care spending by inducing some 9000 of its 40,000 employees to sign on for the accounts.
Bush’s position is that the accounts will make people more conscious of the money they’re spending for health care, which will ultimately help drive down the nation’s health care costs through competition.
The trickle-down (ooze down?) theory designed to save the nation’s bacon (double cheeseburger) on the backs of those who can least afford it, once again.
The saddest fact is that in order for the poor to participate in a high-deductible plan like HSAs, they’ll need to carve even more off already stretched budgets, necessitating economies in spending, resulting in cheaper groceries, less fruits, vegetables and fresh – expensive – healthy foods, driving them back into the gaping maws of the cheap and fast junk food joints where accumulations of fat, salt, chemicals and empty calories will contribute to clogged arteries, heart attacks, cancer, diabetes and obesity.
I think the New York Times is wrong. I think advertisers and their agencies are pikers compared to the real danger threatening the wellbeing, health and lives of Americans – you’ll recognize him: he’s the one in the thousand dollar loafers selling hamburgers at Wendy’s.

Pussy footing

2006-02-08T22:56:00.000-05:00

Another red letter day for the forces of disinformation (uninformation?) as Toronto radio station CHFI (98.1 on your FM dial) announced they will not be running advertisements for breakthrough playwright Eve Ensler’s latest offering The Good Body.
It seems said advertisements in quite logically promoting the author as the creator or the much lauded The Vagina Monologues, necessarily makes mention of the word ‘vagina’.
Vagina.
Quoth station manager Julie Adam: nevermore.
Turning down some $20,000 in advertising revenue to guard the tender sensibilities of her listening audience, Adam, Program Director and General Manager of CHFI said that though she had heard the event was fabulous, and that she, herself, personally, was a woman who had no trouble saying “that word” (taking enormous care to not actually say ‘that word’) the mandate she claims she is charged with – family friendliness – makes it impossible for her to put anything on her radio station that parents might feel uncomfortable with.
“You use a word like that,” explained Adam, “and the next thing you know they’re asking, ‘Mommy or daddy, what’s that mean?’
“If you want safe,” she continued, “CHFI is your station.”
Really Ms Adam?
Safe?
Safe from the danger of marauding sexual organs? Rampaging penises? Breasts set on taking over the world? Vicious vulgar vaginas?
As scandalous as a Victorian piano leg obscured by neither drape nor pantalette, it would seem that the mere mention of the word ‘vagina’ is enough to arouse unspeakable dread in the heart of a radio station manager circa 2006.
What nameless fears are aroused by the word vagina? Is it the word? Is it the vagina itself?
Is there something wrong with vaginas?
If we’ve learned little else in recent years, we must have at least grasped that children need to learn about their bodies to learn about themselves. Telling a little boy he has a penis or a little girl that she has a vagina is but the very first step in giving them the words they need to know themselves, their bodies and their boundaries.
Implying there’s nothing shameful or disgusting or embarrassing about their bodies by making the words acceptable empowers children to use those words, to tell anyone who might wish to touch them or hurt them or take advantage of their youth or their innocence or their ignorance that they know what they have – and they know it is fine and good and it is theirs.
Telling someone not to touch your wee wee or your pee pee or your hoo hoo carries somewhat less power than telling a molester to take their hands off your vagina.
Educators agree how important it is to teach children as young as toddlers – at whatever age they are able to say the word vagina – the appropriate names of their body parts; parents and children need to have a shared vocabulary, if for no other reason than that children will be able to explain exactly and explicitly whatever happened to them should such a tragedy take place.
If a child is too shy or ashamed or ignorant to even describe what happened to them, that’s not safe.
Using real words shows respect for a child – and for their body. Using the appropriate words distinguishes between sexuality and silliness and shame. Using the appropriate words is, what’s the word… appropriate.
I don’t expect CHFI to teach children about sex or sexuality or what they should know, or how they should be told or when. But neither do I expect them to take a stand that sends a message that has another meaning altogether. A message that essentially says that the word ‘vagina’ is unfit for public discourse.
It’s that constant message – the one that tells little girls that the most intimate parts of their body are something secret, something hidden, something wrong.
It’s not absence of message – as a vagina is not an absence. It’s a presence – as a vagina is a presence. But unlike a vagina, it’s a nasty, dirty presence – a message of shame.
Vagina, vagina, vagina.
Oh say it radio station manager. Or if you can’t say it, at least don’t take part in hiding it and implying there’s something wrong with the word by refusing to allow it to be said publically in an entirely appropriate context.
Go see The Vagina Monologues. Go see The Good Body. Learn something about the vagina. About the body. But quit suggesting you protect your audience by being part of what makes children unsafe.
There's something shameful here, but it's not a vagina.
Let’s make vaginas safe for everybody! Step one: say it.
Vagina.
VAGINA!

Girl Without a Pearl Earring

2006-01-28T12:40:00.000-05:00

Running completely counter to my normally unerringly accurate political predictions, the Liberals have lost the election.
I can relate; I lost an earring today.
Beautiful. Got the pair in Barbados – a long swirl of delicate spiraling silver ending in a lovely little Mabe pearl – and I lost just one of them.
It drives me crazy because apart from the grrr factor, I still have the one sitting here solo on my desk, becoming ever more precious and valued by the moment, teasing me with its smug, self-satisfied thereness. Somewhere is its mate – in the middle of the road, crushed under some careless boot or oblivious car, lying obscured under some restaurant table, or perhaps glinting delicately (and oh so beautifully and preciously and finally) in a trash bin at the Business Depot where I stopped in this afternoon (happy – I was happy then) to mail a letter and look at the pens and pencils.
(I like looking at brand new pens and pencils. I rarely have any at hand. Can you guess why?)
And it also drives me crazy because in the larger sense, this is what I do; I lose things, I break things, I bump into things, I knock over things (usually glasses – full, natch) I crash into things (five broken baby toes tell the sad, sad story) and I forget things, usually crucial sorts of things. Important directions, appointment dates if made more than a week in advance, people’s names (hideously rude and embarrassing) and ‘where did I put my keys?’. The phrase itself should have a trademark symbol next to it, so ubiquitous and classic it is to my daily perambulations.
(This is why I’m fit; it’s not the five day a week workouts or the relatively healthy diet. No, it’s running around, back and forth, up and down the parking lot steps, into each closet, rifling through coat pockets, looking for those stupid, stupid keys.)
My friend (with whom I traveled to Barbados) crashed headlong into the glass door that separated the lanai from the living room on Monday, shocking me into silence. I neither comforted her, nor fetched ice, nor looked for blood or bruises – I was too busy staring at the offending glass door, wondering what she was doing in my place. Wondering why she had suddenly taken on my job, doing the comical Three Stooges/Marx Brothers pratfalls, banana peel slips and crashes headlong into closed, unforgiving doors that has been my inadvertent shtick since first I tripped over a roller skate and fell headlong down the concrete steps outside our house at the age of five.
(Really, you should see these earrings – correction: earring – never before have I possessed anything so poignantly, perfectly lovely. I realize it now. And unless I get a call from the restaurant or the office supply store, chances are, I never will again.)
This isn’t the first single earring I’ve lost. The first I remember was a diamond stud I lost about 20 years ago when I was living in the South of France; it must have rolled under the bureau, or down the drain in the shower, because I know I had it when I went to bed the night before. But even so, for years after, in countries all over the world, I would fumble through purse linings and coat pockets (winter coats!) thinking: maybe, maybe my fingers will light on it one day and bring it gleaming and twinkling and back into partnership with the single stud I still own and still keep tucked away in the back of a jewelry box. Maybe – maybe in Bizarro world! Surely not in this one.
I lost two single earrings in the backs of cabs on the same visit to New York a few years back. In one of those cabs, I also left my burgundy paisley wool Ralph Lauren scarf that went with everything I ever owned and a few things I still aspire to. I think about that scarf. And I occasionally look at those two lonely, single earrings – the intaglio that made me look at least two levels more sophisticated than I really am, and the small silver burnished silver Me & Ro dangly earring that still makes my stomach churn thinking how perfect two would be.
I was taller wearing those earrings. Prettier and smarter and the sort of person who doesn’t lose everything that isn’t nailed down or too heavy to lift.
I missed an appointment once that can still make me quiver with loss and mortification more than 20 years later. (My mother used to call them: "those moments so shameful, they can keep you warm on cold winter nights.")
I had written some segment ideas on spec for a breakfast television show in London when I first arrived in town and couldn’t get arrested as a disc jockey. Nothing new now, but back in 1984, my makeover segments and fashion and decorating tips (designed to be packaged and sponsored) were still pretty fresh. To my surprise – seriously, I didn’t know anybody… I got the producer’s name off the credit roll at the end – the production secretary called to say the Big Name producer would be happy to meet with me within the next 10 days on a specific day and at a specific time. I was dizzy with excitement and anticipation, imagining the future that lay before me, practically decorating my new career girl corner office in between selecting and rejecting dozens of outfits to wear on the day of The Big Meeting.
The day before The Big Meeting I got very grown up and decided to call to confirm my appointment and was surprised to receive such a frosty reaction from the production secretary who took my call.
“Yes, hello, this is Jane Wilson – I’m just calling to confirm my interview with Mr. X tomorrow at two?”
“I’m sorry Ms Wilson,” said the chilled to below zero voice of Ms Production Secretary. “But that appointment was for today at two. We were wondering where you were.”
“But, no, wait, that’s impossible! My appointment is for Wednesday the 22nd. I have it written down here…”
“Today is Tuesday the 22nd,” replied Ms P.S. “Today was the day.”
“But – oh my God – I’m so sorry! This is horrible!” I was beside myself with embarrassment and remorse; I couldn’t tell the days of the week? “Please – may I please re-schedule the interview? Any time – I’m just so sorry, I can’t think how…”
“I’m afraid Mr. Big Name doesn’t have any time available for the next few weeks,” she said with total lock-down finality. “And we’re not taking any meetings for the next few months. I’m afraid you’ve missed your chance,” she added, her voice suffused (or so I imagined) with contempt and patronizing dismissal.
Then she hung up.
I wrote the producer the most craven, apologetic, spineless begging letter I could compose, and sent it off, expecting nothing and receiving just that.
It was hard to forget or put out of my mind. It was just so clownish and pathetic and stupid and there was no one – no one – I could blame besides myself. The memory was cringe-worthy and to this day I can conjure up those feelings of futility and sheer gobsmacked horror at having blown such a great opportunity so completely and thoroughly.
(There is a footnote to all this though; about a year later while I was living and working in the South of France, a note from the Big Name was forwarded to my mailbox. In it he apologized for being so late in replying – he was only now going through his correspondence he said – as he had been fired from Channel Four a few weeks after our proposed (and disposed) appointment. They were good ideas he said; keep working on it, though sadly, he wouldn’t be the one who would produce them. Nice eh? I still feel sick about it though…)
Since then I’ve lost a pair of unusual pink cotton casual pants I picked up for a few bucks on a weekend trip to Montreal. (I called them my happy pants. They were. Happy. Then. Not so much now.) I’ve misplaced a black Benetton cardigan that was totally ordinary but fit perfectly. Perfectly I tell you! I’ve lost at least a half dozen more single earrings, a crazy hat (vivid purple crushed velvet on one side, poisonous chartreuse printed silk on the other – and it’s reversible!) a couple of love letters I can still more or less quote from memory, a handful of boyfriends and two parents.
It’s amazing I still have so much stuff left.
And despite the occasional painful twinges of frustration I feel at each of the losses and accidents and disasters (I am now thinking of tracking down the lady at the tiny, anonymous little jewelery kiosk in Holetown Barbados to see if she can send me a replacement earring – damn the cost!) I am truly conscious of the importance of being able to let go of things – of not letting material stuff control my emotions or upset my equilibrium.
My mum taught me that.
A few months before she died we were celebrating what would be our last Christmas together. I remember she was wearing the pretty cream coloured blouse with the ruffled collar I had given her that morning and apart from looking tired and much too thin, she was enjoying the dinner and the family and the fireplace and all the beautiful twinkling gleaming family heirloom stuff that came out on only very special occassions, admiring the table we had set while she was napping earlier just the way she would have set it: the large balloon wine glasses, the red bordered hunting print place mats, the best silver and the china she had inherited from her mother. 1900’s Limoges china, simple and beautiful, with just a narrow strip of burnished gold bordering the dinner plates. She treasured that china – we all did – as one of the few really nice things her mother had been able to pass down to her.
I was clearing the table, hurrying to get it done so we could all sit down again together, shoes off – as is my toe-smashing tendency – and as I went to go down the two carpeted steps that led from the dining room to the kitchen, my stockings slipped on the rug and I went down with a bang and a gigantic crash. Seven dinner plates were shattered beyond repair.
I just sat there, the wind knocked out of me thinking how devastated – maybe even angry – my mother would be. So careless! So stupid! So precious.
I was already crying when she reached me. She just knelt down and said:
“Don’t cry – don’t be upset. They’re just things. It doesn’t matter – they’re not people. Come on, get up, let’s see if you’re okay.”
I was. And so was she.
I have what’s left of the china and I haven’t broken another plate, though the few chips they’ve acquired over the years don’t upset me as much as they might. I’m okay. They’re not people.
I hope Mr. Martin is okay too.

Oh, the humanity!

2005-12-30T18:23:00.000-05:00

The internet, in case you hadn’t noticed, has changed everything. And by ‘everything’ I refer of course to access to embarrassing celebrity photographs.
Finally a little balance is entering the picture; a picture that since the beginning of time (or women’s magazines, whichever) has been airbrushed, shaded, re-thought, re-drawn and altogether re-imagined, re-presenting women as something akin to Superwoman.
Superwomen - with superskin and superthighs and superboobs.
Inhuman beauty – the excruciating standard of the new millennium.
So the reality is essential I find. And this isn’t a New Year thing, a resolution thing – it’s an essential thing, because in eleven days I am going on holiday. To a beach and bathing suit place for eleven fun-filled days of sun and sand and sucking in my stomach. Hence the need for embarrassing celebrity photographs. Because (and here’s another thing you wouldn’t necessarily know if the internet had never been invented) after scanning the various appropriate websites with even the most cursory of glances, no one with any sense would worry either a tittle or a jot about less than perfectly taught abs, or slightly jiggly glutes or even somewhat wobbly pecs.
Celebrities, we’ve come to see through regular navigation of the world wide web, are just as imperfect (and sometimes excruciatingly more so) as thee and me.
Tabloids you say! Rubbish I reply – because the typical tabloids are notorious for upping the unreal photographic ante with all sorts of exaggerated and photo-shopped visions and versions of worst case scenario famous folks who though human, are regularly presented alongside Batboy, surefire cures for cancer and the woman who gave birth to her mother. Its unreliable evidence: when I go looking for celebrity deficiencies I want mine hot, fresh, real and ready for their close up.
Celebrity justice internet style.
Just last week, I was considering adopting a fourth level vegan diet (you don’t eat anything that casts a shadow) when I stumbled across pictures of Tara Reid’s tummy on The Superficial. Billowing, bumpy and bizarrely puckered and pooched, it seems a botched liposuction treatment has repackaged the starlet and placed her in a container a few sizes shy of the contents.
I smile and pick up a potato chip – I have a better body than the erstwhile star of ‘Taradise’. A better tummy, much less weird non-balloony, unscarred breasts, not to mention the fact that I spend most days sober and wear underpants beneath my skirts. Compared to Ms Reid, I am as shapely as a Victoria’s Secret supermodel and as modest as Queen Victoria enshrouded in the darkest of widow’s weeds.
I am a babe. Compared to Tara anyway.
Encouraged by this initial, enormously satisfying research, I plow on through Awful Plastic Surgery. And here self-esteem goes into overdrive; I note that in comparison to the high-priced celebrity surgical shambles depicted, my lips look like lips… my nose looks precisely like a nose… and my bottom and nipples… are right where I left them.
Heaven. I am thinking of taking up pole-dancing and nude modeling.
Creating a monster you say? No, I reply – I have more than enough insecurities, obsessions and hard-earned humility to counter any unattractive over-weaning self-satisfaction.
Besides, just thirty seconds spent with a photo of Angelina Jolie – a mere ten seconds with one of Charlize Theron – and I am back to the whimpering, gibbering bundle of anxieties of yore; the girl who was thinking they should bring back the Bathing Costume circa 1920… the one that comes compete with bloomers, knee-length skirt, black cotton stockings and full-length sleeves. Oh – and sensible hat.
It’s a see-saw. One minute you’re gloating over Kirstie Alley, the next you’re groaning over Jessica Alba. On the one hand you’d feel confident going toe to toe with Britney Spears, on the other, you’re not sure the planet’s big enough for both you AND Gisele Bundchen. Not and leave you with even a shred of self-assurance that is.
I remember a story about an Elizabeth Taylor sighting, sometime around her Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf days.
“Oh my God, look - there she is,” says the middle-aged lady to her companion. “I remember when all I wanted was to look just like her!”
“Congratulations,” replies her friend. “Now you do.”
So I’ve come full circle. I no longer wish to compare and contrast myself with celebrities good or bad. I don’t wish to feel better because somebody else is falling to bits – or because somebody else got put back together with what looks like a few parts missing. And I don’t want to deride myself by odious comparisons to people who though spectacularly beautiful may also have achieved a particular look with the help of make-up, surgery and digital technology.
I want to be my own judge and critic and cheerleader.
I am going to Barbados and I am going to wear a bikini and I am going to know I am just as good as any famous movie star.
After all, I’m human. Excruciatingly.

K-9 Krunchies

2005-12-19T17:38:00.000-05:00

You know that thing where you hear a word or a phrase or an idea seemingly out of left field and suddenly you’re hearing it everywhere? Here’s mine: people eating dog food.
And no, I’m not referring to the sad, almost clichéd, tragic elderly-ladies-and-others-on-welfare-eating-food-designed-for-animals-because-it’s-cheap (though I think that’s pretty much cat food, if clichéd memory serves) but rather humans choosing to eat dog food – because they like it.
Now just because this is new to me phenomenon-wise doesn’t mean I’ve never heard of such a thing. My brother was renowned in our family for trying every type of dog food, wet or dry, treat or medicinal, that came through the door.
Pedigree Chum, Gravy Train, Milk Bones, liver snaps, Gaines Burgers (remember those?) Alpo – everything. He drew the line at rubber bones and chew toys, but other than artificial dog toy stuff, he was pretty much open to everything dog diet related. But that was more than twenty years ago, and like every little brother, mine was a certifiable creepy nut.
(I myself ate a few Good Boy Choc Drops – licked one, then scarfed the rest truth be told – but only because they actually tasted like chocolate; like large, slightly dry Hershey’s Kisses. One hopes they weren’t actually made of chocolate, but even if they were, no matter: I had saved our pets from toxic chocolate poisoning through pure greed. I’d like to tell you I was prescient, but really, it was nothing more than gluttony.)
Anyway, years go by and this week my book of choice is Augusten Burroughs’s autobiographical ‘Running With Scissors’, (hilarious and horrific, just like the jacket copy promises) and I come across a passage where Burroughs is shamed into joining his weird surrogate family in snacking on Purina Dog Chow.
“It was surprisingly tasty,” he reports. “Nutty, slightly sweet with a satisfying crunch.”
Then, apropos of nothing (it’s that out of the blue phenomenon working again) someone mentioned to me their habit of gorging on Kibbles ’n Bits back in their college days. The perfect dorm snack that no one else would steal out of the communal kitchen – but that was just the upside; the real purpose of the purchase was because he LIKED it. Kibbles ‘n Bits.
And I am left sitting here wondering if my brother Chris wasn’t messing with me all those years ago about how “delicious, yummy – come on, you’ve got to try some” the food destined for Charlie, Pip, Sadie and Chloe was. Maybe he was purposely using reverse psychology: he may have been ten, but he was a smart little creepy nut.
Maybe the big secret was that all that tinned gourmet dog food and delectably crispy, crunchy kibble really IS tasty. Maybe he was trying to keep it all for himself. Or, more likely, attempting to maintain his title as weirdest Wilson. No mean feat…
So yesterday I’m at the pet store picking up a little homeopathic arthritis remedy for the dog. (And a little was all it was – it cost a fortune for a tiny bottle; but do I want to sleep through the night unaccompanied by yips and twitches? I do. The cost of uninterrupted slumber? $27 plus tax. But as they say in the credit card ads, the end to sleep deprivation? Priceless.)
I take a lot of stick from people who think I spoil my dog. The truth is, she’s kind of exceptionally cute and small and purse-puppy-ish. They think I treat her like a tiny human, but the fact is, she’s just good value personality-wise. I like hanging around with her and playing with her and even though I put coats on her in the wet and in the winter, I don’t dress her up, or stick little hats on her, or buy her exceptionally pricey toys or treats. Honestly, I treat her like a dog. So I’m a little nonplussed by all this gourmet dog crap.
So there I am, lined up at the till, looking at all the impulse purchases dotted around the counter, more now that the holiday season is here, and trying hard not to get sucked in by the plush reindeer antlers, and tinselly collars with jingle bells, and Santa caps of all sizes – with ear-holes and without – that cost a little too much to be believed, but are just cheap enough to make you waver. And I finally succumb to a small packet of Christmas cookies – in gingerbread man, Christmas tree and wreath shapes. They’re adorable. And the dog demonstrably has a chronic pain disorder and they’re only $1.50. They’re really too pretty to waste on a creature who will lick things off the bottom of my boot, but after all, it’s Christmas and so on and so forth.
Waiting to pay, I take a sniff of the biscuits and am surprised to discover they don’t smell musty or meaty, but cinnamony and spicy and altogether exactly like real gingerbread cookies.
“’Scuse me,” I say to the harried woman behind the counter. (If this shop is any indication, dogs will be having a breakout Christmas this year. Makes you feel a little sad for the Jewish and Muslim pets; though G-d knows, I wouldn’t doubt there are plenty of kosher and halal treats available to the dedicated dog fancier.) “But are these for people or dogs?
“I just wondered,” I continued, “because they smell absolutely delicious.”
“Both,” she mumbles, trying to get the overloaded Interac machine to accept my bruised and wilting card. “People are always trying their dog’s food, so we’ve started making the treats animal and human-friendly. We’re selling loads.”
I’m not surprised. I simply would not be able to tell the difference. By smell that is; you can fool me, but you couldn’t make me eat something displayed at muzzle level, next to the rubber squeak toys and the desiccated liver chunks and hard and greasy pig’s ears.
It would appear however that I am on my own. All over the internet, and hung and stacked throughout pet stores and specialty dog-bakeries throughout the GTA, are human-friendly pet snacks. Not surprisingly, there are even a few high end outlets that sell (and sell well) a whole line of candy treats for man and beast.
“At last, a snack people can share with dogs – and vice versa!” goes the slogan for the snooty online gourmet treat merchant that sells all manner of delectable dog treats:
Dog/People Truffles: 25 for $25; Lickety Splits Dog/People Carob Sticks: 12 for $12; Turtle Dog/People Treats: 4 for $15; and Woofy Pop Popcorn for people and their pets: 3 microwavable packs for $8.
I won’t bother commenting, I’ll just let you do the math.
So we get home and I remove her faux Burberry overcoat, unbuckle her red collar with the initials ‘LW’ outlined in diamante, and measure out a dose of the arthritis-relief medicine. I take a sniff – fascinated now to see if pet remedies also come in dog-friendly flavours – and gag at the viscous brown liquid that smells like a cross between rotten eggs and dog poo. If I could manage it, I’d pinch her nose for her, but I just pry open the gaping maw and squirt the stuff in.
She seems okay, she licks her lips and looks up brightly, clearly hoping for more. Good dog! Truly, the stuff was shudder-worthy, so I tear open the packet of Christmas dog biscuits and offer her a small wreath to snack on before dinner.
She takes it gingerly, as if it was a favour to me and stands there sort of sucking on it ruminatively, before dropping it on the floor. She gives it one desultory lick, before turning around and trotting off into the bedroom, toenails clicking happily on the smooth parquet.
I pick up the biscuit and give it another sniff. Cinnamon and ginger spice. Very nice, very Christmassy. Still a dog biscuit.
Later, I go to join her in the bedroom, but I can’t find her; she’s in none of the usual places – sprawled on the chaise, curled up on a pillow on the bed. I check the bathroom, under the desk, then I spy her in the back of the closet.
She’s licking the bottom of my boot.
Priceless.

Pretty much over

2005-12-07T17:51:00.000-05:00

I heard a remark on the radio as I was driving around town this afternoon.
Listening to CFRB (I only listen to Talk Radio now – as a former disc jockey I find it all but impossible to just listen to music – I can practically hear the format under the tunes, and can almost guess which songs the producers will play to take them exactly to the hour, the quarter or the half; it’s distracting is what I’m saying) I heard John Moore suggesting to his guest the Prime Minister that the election, with not so very long to go, still pretty much hadn’t gotten underway.
The Prime Minister had to pretty much agree.
I was relieved. Because as far as thinking about the election myself – considering the issues… listening to the candidates… deciding just exactly how much of a wally Steven Harper is this time around – I haven’t exactly been engaged in the process. My mind has been elsewhere – and unlike years past, this time around I really don’t care.
Of course I don’t mean I don’t care I don’t care – I mean I think “it’s going to be okay”I don’t care; I think that barring some unforeseen major trauma, we’re looking at another Liberal minority or bare bones majority, so I think status quo-wise, everything should remain pretty much, well, status quo.
And I don’t think it’s as a result of that haircut that leads the Conservatives – and I don’t think it’s because the Prime Minister has turned up the scintillation factor, exhibiting heretofore undiscovered reserves of charm, or even because Buzz Hargrove had a meltdown and fell in mad, passionate love with the Liberal party all of a sudden. I think it’s because there are larger issues in play and for the first time in my lifetime, considerations outside our country which may well contribute to the biggest influence on the vote.
There’s just a little too much far right nuttiness out there and consciously or sub, I believe Canadians will not want to contribute any more to it by voting in another conservative-type government that has on more than one occasion flirted with some of the issues and obsessions that have so shockingly distracted the President of the United States and his practically frothing-at-the-mouth Far Right Christian supporters.
The Prime Minister and former PM served themselves, their party and their country well in one thing at least: in making clear in issues as diverse as softwood lumber and same sex marriage – not to mention defining Canada’s non-role in the Iraq war – that they were taking a different tack – and by doing so sailing against the wind and the world’s greatest superpower.
The current PM – and future, I predict – has made his most judicious moves in distancing himself and us from the true evils that beset America in the 21st century. Removed as it may seem from the fistfights and dust-ups that blow up over differences in opinion over the future of private health care, the directions the parties see for a myriad of policy issues and the stand each takes on the issues of personal morality and conduct, the war and its ethos seems to fascinate and terrify Canadians as much or more than American voters.
The Liberals will be voted in again because we trust them not to belly-up to the Republican President; it’s as simple – and as complex – as that. There’s a balance that needs to be struck, as ethereal as it is real, that won’t allow for more right whingeing in North America.
The majority of us get it, I believe, get what it has taken several years and multiple deaths and a few (finally) publicly revealed cock-ups for the majority of Americans to get: that the President and those who serve him are as corrupt and wicked as the wickedest of ‘evil-doers’ they swore to take down when they led as much of the world as was theirs to weasel into the so-called War Against Terror.
In a world more beset upon by terror than ever before, the worst part – or the best, depending upon your point of view – is that though the realization has cost the lives and resources and goodwill that it has, it is based less on the actual war and more on the way in which the President and those closest to him have reacted to any criticism of the war.
As Frank Rich wrote recently in The New York Times, the Administration is on the run – and heaving the most pathetic of non-explanatory bombshells in their wake.
Rather than respond to the recent kafuffle stirred up by Representative John Murtha (D-Pa – and former proponent of the war) who called for an early exit from the war in Iraq by joining the debate on “… how our troops might best be deployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism”, the President’s men (and women) moved in like attack dogs seeking the jugular, instead of guard dogs protecting the people, attacking their critics and impugning their characters.
Why no discussion? Why no reasoned explanation? Why call a decorated Marine veteran and hawkish Democrat (and recognized unofficial spokesman for the troops) a coward, (from Republican Congresswoman ‘Mean Jean’ Schmidt: “…cowards cut and run, Marines never do”) or proclaim, as did Vice President Dick Cheney, that anyone who suggested that the Iraq war was entered into on a lie was dishonest and reprehensible, and “… are engaging in revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety.”
(Frank Rich injects a hint of much-needed humour – not to mention uncanny accuracy – into the discussion by comparing Cheney’s over-the-top defensive bombast as reminiscent of the misanthropic Mr. Potter of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life”, he sounded, says Rich “… but one epithet away from a defibrillator.” Beautiful. Right – Potter… or maybe in the Canadian version, Conrad Black; though to be as vocally grandiloquent as his Lordship, Cheney would have to step up not only the wounded disbelief, but the verbal impenetrability factor as well. So far, I still more or less understand the Administration – the words, if not their true meaning.)
The new line from the White House – note: presented with neither shame nor chagrin - is that if it IS true that the war was entered into based on false information about WMD, they were just ONE of the suckers that bought into that theory. Just one of the unfortunately mislead… really no different from anybody else.
Problem is, some of us remember.
This is the problem with the US – they allow themselves to be distracted by this rubbishy legerdemain, forgetting the things that we as Canadians do not forget.
I remember the debate in the UN. I remember Canada, amongst other countries, begging the US to allow weapons inspectors to finish their job, a job if you recall, that at that point had not found anything yet. A job that Hans Blix suggested would take just a couple more weeks.
I remember Colin Powell looking as though some unseen hand had been shoved unceremoniously up his bottom, forcing him into pathetic puppetry as he parroted the words the backroom boys had bullied him into proclaiming, telling the UN Assembly that America, with or without them, would be moving on this the greatest menace to US security since 9/11 – a grave danger threatened from a quantifiable enemy.
I remember the threatening tone with which the US torpedoed the UN.
I remember the constant subtle and not-so-subtle references to 9/11. I remember as the pursuit of Osama bin Laden faded and the search for Saddam Hussein took centre stage. I remember the move from Iraq to Afghanistan measured in weeks, the move out of Iraq still potentially many years.
Until recent months the President and his men (and woman) could depend upon their supporters to take what was given them (‘Mission Accomplished’; 9/11 + Saddam = justifiable war on Iraq; detractors = traitors; torture = effective interrogation) with neither complaint nor question. Now that the numbers are shifting (approval ratings: Bush – 36%; Cheney – 27%) the White House is discussing troop withdrawal as if they’d invented not only the term but the practice.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
I believe the President and the Republican Party should be on notice that a substantial portion of the western world and the G-7 nations are viewing the United States with the same awkward embarrassment as would a room full of guests forced to watch their host drunk and with his fly undone, slacks heading south.
There’s a growing sense that enough is enough – it’s time for a sobering shape-up to occur.
(Zip up that fly, slug down some black coffee and get with the program. And by the way, quit inviting your crazy friends over: they’re eating all the snacks, interrupting all the intelligent conversations and spilling blood-red wine all over the carpets and furniture.)
Put simply: we’ve had it – and Canadians are not going to run the risk of sending a mixed message when a clear one is needed the most.
Here church and state are separated. Here we view war as last ditch retaliation, not preemptive first strike. Here we don’t debate the need for universal health care – we argue the delivery of it. Here we tend to vote liberal, and we tend, if not to like it, then to appreciate the message it delivers on our behalf.
Campaign not yet begun?
I believe the campaign is over.

The value of nothing

2005-12-02T20:39:00.000-05:00

Canadian Supermodel Linda Evangelista famously refused to get out of bed for less than $10,000.00 a day.
The minimum wage for Canadians (on average) is $7.19 an hour. The highest lowest minimum wage is paid in Nunavut ($8.50 an hour) the lowest lowest minimum wage in Newfoundland ($6.25 an hour).
According to March 2005 Parade magazine, the median weekly wage for an American is $638.00 (half earned more, half earned less). The median salary for men was $713.00; for women, $573.00.
R.O.B. Magazine detailed a few salary and wage figures not so long ago that painted an interesting picture of Canadian compensation.
Bank of Montreal Chairman and CEO, Tony Comper, earned $900,000 in salary in 2003, plus a $1.4-million bonus. Even with the generous speculation by the article’s author that he works 15 hours a day, six days a week, 12 months out of the year, his take-home still averages out to a whopping $491.00 an hour.
A bank teller on the other hand, typically earned between $10.00 and $15.00 an hour, which at the high end averages out to $28,860.00 a year. If you can get fulltime hours.Increasingly, bank-tellering is becoming a part-time job. The low end is getting considerably lower.
Ontario plastic surgeons billed an average of $267,389.
Ontario's ophthalmologists and dermatologists pulled in $376,999 and $355,469, respectively.
The highest-billing specialists in Ontario were heart surgeons, who commanded an average of $448,911 in fee-for-service payments.
A General Duty Registered Nurse of the Ontario Nurses Association earned between $42,413 up to a maximum of $63,785 in 2002.
In the world of high tech, entry-level computer operators start at between $30,000 and $45,000. But help-desk support staff, the human punching bags of high tech, receive considerably less renumeration for being yelled at all day: salaries start at $31,000 and top out at $58,000.
Toronto Transit Union Local 113, says that drivers average, with overtime, $52,000 a year. At the high end, 3% earn $70,000, but according to the spokesthingie who provided the figures, that means they "never go home."
A Toronto Police officer makes about $70,000,
Most Canadian teachers with bachelor's degrees earn $33,000 to $60,000. None of it is tax-free; and they can't deduct home computer depreciation and office supplies.
(Out-of-pocket expenses are considerable-Canadian teachers spend about $430 of their own money on supplies. A British Columbia teacher fares worse; their province's average is $1,095 a year. Maybe that's why 40% of B.C.'s new teachers leave the profession within five years.)
A fulltime ballerina makes about $570.00 per week.
A reasonably successful opera singers is lucky if they make $25,000.00 a year after expenses.
No matter how enthused Gerrge Costanza might have been about his alter ego architect Art Vendelay, architecture, while it may pay big bucks eventually, is a profession with a long apprenticeship. After many years of post-secondary education, interns make between $27,000 and $45,000 a year. Associate architects with a small firm can make $50,000; associates with a big firm can make $130,000. Senior architects earn between $39,000 and $75,000. It’s not going to put them in a palace
An executive chef's salary ranges between $40,000 to $90,000, depending on the reputation of the restaurant and the chef. A good waiter in the same establishment, in a good year, earns around $40,000, tips and the minimum-wage hourly rate combined.
The best job I ever had paid about $4000.00 an hour. I worked mere minutes a day for a relatively outrageous annual salary. I had that job for three glorious years.
The worst paid job I ever had was painting a big old barn ‘Big Old Barn Red’. It took a high school friend and I about a week and I think we earned less than $50.00 each. Of course those were American dollars, so adjust your opinions suitably upward please.
These days I charge about $75.00 an hour for writing (for government and corporate clients) and get paid between 35 cents and a couple of bucks a word for magazine or newspaper publications.
But the most important thing I do doesn’t pay a penny, though at the risk of sounding hearts and flowers (and violins – why not) corny, the compensations are priceless.
So it’s not the ‘nothing’ that bothers me; it’s what I’ve recently come to realize is a nearly complete lack of value placed upon what I and other volunteers do.
I’ve been volunteering regularly for more than ten years now. I began at the CNIB reading tons of newspaper and magazine copy for Voiceprint, the ‘audio newsstand’ that broadcasts top national, regional and local stories from more than 100 Canadian newspapers and magazines for the blind, vision restricted, the elderly, or those with problems of literacy or learning difficulties.
I was there for three years. It was a lot of work – reading for a couple of hours straight is a throat-drying, yawn-inducing (you have to remember to breathe properly) strangely exhausting activity, but I can’t tell you the number of times people recognized my voice from this; far more than when I was the voice of two high profile television networks.
The technicians who recorded, edited and broadcast the material were all blind. I’m still not entirely sure how they did it; this was years ago – far before voice recognition software – or any software for that matter. They did it the old fashioned way: by ear and by hand.
After that, my voice a little raw and overworked, I joined up with the Distress Centre for three years. After extensive training and much role-playing through frighteningly well-acted suicide calls, I was accepted as a counselor, speaking with anyone who called in – suicidal, depressed, lonely, shut-in, drunk, handicapped, mentally unhinged, abusive or angry. We were an equal opportunity listening post.
We had to beware of the phone sex callers (cheapskates who would telephone ostensibly to discuss an upsetting sexual problem of some sort or other, but really to get their rocks off) who were often difficult to discern from the legitimately sexually troubled, until their breathing changed and their conversation became erratic. They tended to hang up with a cheery toodle-oo as soon as their needs had been met, sometimes right in the middle of what we might have thought was helpful listening. When they were done, they were done. We tried to catch these calls early, but were always careful not to cut someone off precipitously; genuine sexual problems were legitimately discussed by some of our most anxious and troubled clients. We were there to listen, and if we were occasionally taken in by a caller, (or grossed out by a genuine client) it was simply the price we paid to ensure that everyone who needed it got a fair and sympathetic hearing.
I received precisely one happy call in all the time I was there – from a woman who got engaged late, late at night and had no one to tell until a more appropriate hour, so she called me at 3 AM to share.
A much more typical call would be from someone suffering mental, emotional or physical symptoms that effectively cut them off from society. Lonely, slightly mad, tearful, drunk, stoned or even furious, they’d call from home, from the hospital, or from a payphone in a locked-down ward at the Clarke Institute. Just calling to say hi – or to ask if any of us sitting there in the near dark, softly-lit call room at a hidden location in downtown Toronto could think up a single reason they should carry on. Sometimes we tried to answer the unfathomable, but mostly we listened and befriended and suggested that perhaps one more day wouldn’t be so bad – and the one after that… and then we could go on from there. They could call whenever they needed us.
Suicide was the rarest type of call, but the calls came. It would be nerve-wracking when a suspected suicide would be at the other end of the phone, calling from the platform of a subway station, contemplating when they might jump, or ringing in from home, half-drunk and nearly passed out from an incipient overdose. We were like flight attendants trained in emergency measures who spend most of their time providing comfort and warm reassurances for their passengers (we of course had no sandwiches or tiny little packets of peanuts) but every now and terrifying then, strapping on the life vests and preparing for a crash.
The Distress Centre was an amazing place. We did not have call display, nor were our phones equipped to follow up a call with STAR 69. Clients had absolute anonymity.
We could ask a caller where they were, or try to get their permission to put a trace on their phone if they were becoming incoherent or slipping into unconsciousness, but we were never allowed to meet the clients or take part in their lives away from the phone room on the second floor of the small out-of-the-way downtown church where we took the calls.
We didn’t, for the most part offer advice, or suggestions, or attempt to psychoanalyze the callers in any way. We were simply there to listen, and by listening we befriended.
I would have and could have gone on at the Distress Centre for years, but after three of them, the strain of the overnight shift (we did three daytime and one overnight, midnight to nine shift per month) got to me; it took me ages to compensate for the disruption in sleep, no matter what I did, and the 4 AM blues were beginning to get to me, so I decided to try something else for a while.
I’ve been doing ‘something else’ for four years now. The somewhere I do it is a big hospital in downtown Toronto, famous for its top notch care, cutting edge surgical treatments and life-saving, internationally renowned research.
It’s an enormous place – so enormous, it could take daily shifts of five to ten volunteers, seven days a week simply to direct patients and families around its convoluted hallways and wings to the vast number of clinics and nursing units.
It takes hundreds – more than a thousand people – to support the patients and the variety of comfort and respite programs the people in Volunteer Resources man at no cost to patient or taxpayer.
(There is a budget for the department and four salaried professionals that direct the programs, train the volunteers and cheer us all on, but it’s minimal: splashing out for a sandwiches and fruit punch reception once a year to honour the individuals who donate hundreds of hours a year, for year after year is about the extent of the budgetary possibilities.)
And we’re not Candy Stripers or nice grandma ladies – not that there’s anything wrong either – but the senior citizens are outnumbered by the young and middle-aged professionals and smart as paint students who bear no resemblance to the volunteer of yore: there’s very little pushing of tea carts around. (Precisely: none.) And similarly, though there is plenty of reading to the younger patients, there’s a lot more video game playing and pet therapy and Battleships than The Three Little Pigs.
My colleagues are project managers and account supervisors from top Fortune 500 companies. They’re medical students and teachers and freelancers of all types and stripes. There are a couple of nurses and social workers. We have a retired high school principal (with a practiced gimlet eye, and a warm smile) a top software designer, a government consultant, a lawyer, an executive leadership coach and people who want to spend time usefully as they transition from one career to the next.
Most of us are women and most of us have fulltime jobs or class schedules. Most of us want to be with the patients, but some people feel their gifts are better used away from some of the more upsetting or emotionally charged bedsides, so they fill in in administrative or home-based placements.
We’re just grateful they take part.
It’s a dynamic, exciting, fully-engaging experience that is incomparable to anything else – and would register less value if it were compensated.
That’s really how we feel.
But to discover that because we aren’t paid and our contribution cannot be easily quantified, we aren’t valued beyond a general indulgent condescension, is a blow that is hard for volunteers to take.
We’ve become increasingly aware that volunteers have not been figured into the ongoing strategy planning and brainstorming that accounts for every other position, placement and department in the hospital, and is creating the ‘vision and value statement’ for the next five to ten years.
We’re not there. Not mentioned, not made use of, not factored in, nor accounted for. Our gifts of time and expertise – whether it be for baby-cuddling, game-playing, crafting, reading, pet therapy, hand-holding, shoulder-to-cry-on offering, errand-running, respite care providing, teaching, baby-sitting, computer programming, individual program creation, training, mentoring, organizing, heavy-lifting, traffic-directing, smiling, entertaining… and listening – always listening – is not even mentioned in the presentations, or supporting documentation, or the pages of overview material. Volunteers themselves were not included in the questionnaires distributed everywhere else. With the exception of a very few low-paying clerical positions, volunteers are not considered ‘internal’ for hiring practices, no matter how many years they’ve contributed, no matter how many volunteering or even professional awards they accumulate, no matter their real-world credentials.
But the administration and the board of directors and the foundation that raises extra funds and the friends of the hospital and the corporate sponsors and all the others that receive salaries and compensation to perform their functions and responsibilities for the hospital don’t ask us questions or listen to us if we speak. And they don’t know, beyond the most cursory understanding, who we are and what we provide.
And they should – because our stories are interesting.
Besides my direct interaction with the patients, I am involved in interviewing and selecting candidates to take the training in anticipation of being accepted and becoming a volunteer. I’ve learned that the quality of the people who apply to do this unpaid work with such enthusiasm and commitment are for the most part, there is no other description – extraordinary.
(Privacy issues make it necessary to generalize or exclude any identifying details.)
Yesterday I spoke with three applicants.
The first applicant, a woman in her early thirties was a recent immigrant to Canada. Her English was excellent, her qualifications and experience helping others extensive, and her reason for waiting a couple of months before applying for a volunteer position was that she had been recovering from a lengthy, extensive, life-altering, intensely painful facial surgery.
She looks fantastic now. And she can’t wait to begin. She feels she can relate to patients in pain – she feels she can help by understanding.
The second candidate was a student in her early twenties who had, she told me, been anxious for some time to join the volunteer ranks at our hospital. She told me she had been in a terrible accident some years earlier, knocked over in the street, critically injured; she had been completely paralyzed, brain-injured and on the brink of death. Through the long months and years of recovery, she remembered particularly the volunteers who had become a part of her life – the people who relieved her boredom and kept her company through many lonely days and nights, the individuals who had become a surrogate family - and who she felt she owed a debt of gratitude to. This was the hospital she had spent so much time in; this was the place where she wanted to return.
My third and last interview of the day – and I was already on an emotional high from meeting the first two – was a young woman also in her twenties, also a university student.
We went through the standard introductory questions about her desire to volunteer, her expectations and the qualities she might bring to the position. I was trying to decide which area of the hospital might suit her best and she helped me out by telling me she was studying medicine and was considering a career in pediatrics; she wanted to know how she would feel particularly being around children in pain – if she could cope with the notion of surgery in infants.
“I know the deal from the other side,” she informed me. “I spent a lot of time in a hospital as a child.”
It turned out she’d been in a horrific car accident at the age of five that had killed one of the passengers in the car and had seriously injured her mother and sister. She herself had been comatose for a week, her sister for considerably longer. There were many more weeks of recovery and surgery and months of rehabilitation, but she was fine now – an athlete of some considerable success (and even a little bit of fame) and in between full time classes and a busy sports team schedule, she hoped we’d accept her as a volunteer and allow her to squeeze some of her spare time into our program.
Would we? We would.
The point is this: these women are not unique. As special as they are, there are others with similar stories to tell; people who know the smell of the hospital from the under-side of the sheets in a long-term care bed. They know the boredom and the terror and the loneliness and the pain and the appalling food and the endless days followed by longer nights.
They know what it’s like to see families frozen in agony and fear. They know what so many of even the doctors and nurses don’t know: what it’s like to be helpless and sick and at the mercy of strangers who probe and stick and cut and prod and squeeze and rip and who might have to leave mid-procedure to attend to an emergency. They haven’t just seen patients’ bodies exposed to the elements, they themselves have been exposed to the avid eyes of strangers who never look into their own eyes, but who will know them in ways that even their most intimate relationships will never, and should never achieve.
They are the very best of volunteers.
And they are three more who will join our ranks and disappear from bureaucratic sight because though they will be able to provide a depth and level of understanding and care for vulnerable patients and their stressed-out families, they will receive no salary and so their contribution will amount to nothing.
We need money for more training, more staff and the resources to recruit even more volunteers. We need workshops on bereavement and depression and how to listen effectively.
We need money for training and education of the other healthcare professionals in the hospital so that they can make better use of this enormous, dedicated, resourceful, talented and committed resource.
We need for people to know that the value of volunteering isn’t in the physical health care that volunteers do not and have no business providing, but for the priceless humanity they bring to sick rooms and clinics and isolation wards in a hospital where besides family and friends, they are the only people who enter the room with no agenda to hurt or prod or inject or study or interrogate or frighten, or even to bring appalling food.
We’re there for the human part of them that needs company and fun and distraction and attention and a reminder that they exist as a whole person, and not just as their illness or injury in isolation.
Not being friends or family, they don’t have to comfort us or protect us – from awful information, or even just from their depression – and they don’t have to put on a brave face, or even an interested one. They can even tell us to go away without worrying that we will be hurt or dismayed. Because if we are, they don’t need to know.
This is not a polemic against the health professionals – the doctors and nurses and other front line hospital staff who would probably be thrilled to have the time to sit with a patient and keep them company, allay their fears, hold their hand or cuddle them if they’re crying. But with cut-backs and lay-offs and downsizing and outsourcing, they simply cannot.
And someone needs to do it.
But until a genuine value is placed on work that isn’t paid, the role of the volunteer and the contribution they make will continue to be devalued. Being unquantifiable and non-revenue producing is starting to affect the range of activities we can perform and the array of people being drawn to the task.
We don’t want our heads patted, or our contributions praised, or to be favoured with some meaningless award that allays the responsibility for those whose job it is to weigh and measure where resources will be allocated and the direction in which patient care is going.
We just want to work and to take part and to help the patients and families who need simple human interaction when they are at their most vulnerable. Without taking volunteers into account and without valuing the contribution they can make and the service we provide, the programs and quality of volunteers we can recruit are going to begin to deteriorate.
And the loss may be incalculable.

Are feminists necessary?

2005-11-22T13:19:00.000-05:00

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was all over the Sunday news shows last weekend, plugging her latest effort: 'Are Men Necessary? When sexes collide'.
Personally, I like Maureen Dowd - a not entirely universally shared opinion. The President is reputed to have a pretty stiff loathe-on for her, and word is, former President Bill Clinton has crossed her off his Christmas card list as well. Interestingly, she claims Bush-the-Father is something of a fan; their bantering and edgy, teasing flirtation a long-standing tradition between the two.
And that's what I like best about her: a liberal who takes appropriate shots at her own side should their hypocrisy rise above generally agreed-upon nausea levels, a Democrat who can find common ground with the political enemy.
The question is, with her new book (already firmly affixed on the New York Times bestseller list) can she find common ground, or even a reason for existence for the gender enemy? The short answer is yes; the longer answer (the: 'but what does it all mean? answer) is somewhat less clear.
What is clear is that adversary or no, she does indeed love the enemy.
Dowd points out, in language and with examples no sentient woman can deny, that the women's movement has arrived in the 21st century somewhat off the rails... missing a wheel or two, or at the very least experiencing a chronic flat tire on the road to absolute equality.
Where once we sought to compete, now we want to be Jerry Maguire 'complete'.
Dowd is considerably older than I, but she clearly began her journey in much the same place I did: that is to say, with expectations equal to her hopes, and trust that the natural order would naturally favour a recognition of the undeniably worthy status of women unquestioned in our hearts. How could it not we thought, living in our own buffed-to-a-high-luster skins, several generations into votes for women, only slightly off-put by the failure of the ERA, striding through the 60's and 70's (Dowd) and the 80's and 90's (me) with the world at our fingertips and the support of our gung-ho mothers close behind.
I think Dowd and I share another root cause for similarity in outlook; a similarity of opportunity that kept our eye off the prize (or focused elsewhere, same dif) in the earliest days of our careers.
As a writer (Dowd) and a then broadcaster (me) we were already occupying pretty rarefied ground; when you have a position even nominally in the public eye, even slightly celebrified (when somebody knows your name) you're already treated better... your opinions sought and noted... your pay packet considerably fuller than those of your contemporaries.
"What's wrong with everyone," I remember thinking. "Why are they whingeing about opportunities and equality? They should do like me and work hard and ask for what they want and show up with a smile on their face."
This was what I really thought, I am embarrassed to admit, completely ignoring the fact that as a disc jockey or television presenter, I didn't actually work all that hard (relatively speaking) and as a young, white, English-speaking somewhat attractive woman, I didn't have much to battle against within the limited range of my pseudo-celebrity.
It didn't occur to me then - and not for quite a few years - that no matter how well I was personally doing in my own little world, equal ease of access was not always on offer to my peers. And in the larger sense we had all sacrificed the larger view whilst dreaming our Mary Richards dreams. (Cute clothes, a cute apartment of our own, a cute job at WJM)
I remember when the penny finally dropped. I was dating this guy, who was even in the late eighties/early nineties bemoaning affirmative action hiring, and stating with that certainty that only the simultaneously miffed and privileged can achieve that women had not already arrived, but were in danger of taking over the workforce. Or at least the part that he was interested in.
"Look at your industry," he said. "There's Pamela Wallin reading the evening news - spreading the word across Canada from as vaunted a position as anyone could ever want. See: women have got it made; they've got nothing to complain about anymore."
"Pam Wallin is reading the weekend news," I replied. "The traditional primetime ghetto for women. She might fill in for the anchor from time to time, but she's just the one occupying the 'Girl' chair for the time being."
He wasn't convinced.
"That's still Prime Time," he said. "Women everywhere get to see her as a powerful person. And that's the measure."
The problem begins. This guy is deciding what the measure of success and satisfaction is for women and young women on the way up.
"Okay," I said. "I accept that things could be worse. (He makes a face.) But in the scheme of things, she's nowhere! There isn't a single woman in a position of power on the board of directors of the network. The only female VP is in charge of Human Resources - another traditional pink collar present from the powers that be."
I began picking up a little steam.
"But there's not a single woman making a decision about what programming is being purchased or broadcast. No women signing any cheques that represent the direction or destination of serious resources, No real decision makers in any positions of any power whatsoever."
I'd like to report that my argument (entirely accurate at the time by the way, and pretty much as described: I remember it vividly) swayed him and made him question his long-held opinions and prejudices, but truth be told, he simply veered off into Margaret Thatcher/Golda Meir territory and I, not wishing to makes a scene/create a fuss/ get him mad, let him go down that twisty pointless path.
Will we still be hearing twenty years from now about the two powerful women who once ruled nations? Even when not a single successor has succeeded?
Time will tell.
But what time has told in the four decades or so, and as Dowd suggests in her book, is that women themselves have done an about face, abandoning not only the movement, but even the word 'Feminism'.
(It's icky - and boys won't like you if you say you are one. They'll ask you if you shave your legs, or wear a bra, or hate men with every fibre of your being. And then how will you get a date to prom?)
The combined power of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution just wasn't enough, or didn't have the staying power necessary to keep the momentum going. We don't - or won't - elect women into the highest echelons of power; we don't - or won't - cough up equal pay for equal work. Still. And we don't - won't has nothing to do with it - band together with our gender to make demands, not for supremacy, but simply for equality.
What's going on? Why did we stop? What's the current status quo?
Dowd relates with anecdotal evidence the mood and modality of young women today. They reject the old feminist movement for its singularity - for being so one-note and punitive. And for not appreciating that some women - even women who want to succeed - resent being told that pretty clothes and high-heeled shoes and appreciating certain male attentions run counter to achieving male-style success.
I get it. I agree with it. I've always been a 'lipstick feminist', with just enough confidence and self-esteem to decide even way back when that I could define the sort of feminism I wished to pursue. It didn't actually occur to me that the day would come when calling someone a feminist (of any stripe) would be tantamount to calling someone a butch-dyke, man-hating lesbian Commie.
So alas.
So now we come to the present, and having lost a lot of steam as we swayed back and forth between desiring economic equality and the right to be mothers or executives or bimbos or any other damn thing we pleased, we've now lost a certain amount of momentum - and a certain amount of certainty.
What do you do when you only have 'Girl Money' (an actual new term: it means not having the sort of money one would refer to as boy money - i.e. a goodly amount) and the boy of your dreams asks you out to Susur or the Four Seasons? Do you pull out your mortgage agreement and calculate the cost of acquiring a second on it, or do you sit back, relax and enjoy as your paying host offers you seconds on dessert?
It's a conundrum alright - but only for women over forty. For our younger sisters, it's a confusing reality. How do you play and fight with the enemy? When do you put on ladies-who-lunch gloves, and when do you drop the gauntlet?
For Dowd - and I admit, for me - the most disappointing result of the defunct feminist movement is the argument it made and sold, the argument we accepted and bought: that the best thing about being a feminist was that you could be as smart and equal and ballsy as you wanted and you could still enjoy the attentions of men.
For Dowd apparently - and for me, definitely - the upshot is that the men we wanted to attract were more likely to be attracted to women who weren't interested in competing. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it takes all kinds, which was one of the dropped balls of the feminist movement - but as Dowd writes, she has come to realize that men find her 'draining'. For myself, I've heard 'exhausting'.
The irony is, I feel the same way.

Death car for cutie

2005-11-14T18:57:00.000-05:00

Okay – I’m one of those annoying people who name their cars. Precious? Sappy? Sentimental? So?
Sylvia (a fourteen year old silver Mazda 323) simply feels like a pet – a pony or a donkey or a really large and dopey dog – and I just know she performs better for me for my recognition of her unique character and dauntless spirit.
Perhaps if I had a Range Rover or something sleek and sophisticated and expensive and gorgeous I would be too cool to name it – perhaps start calling it my ‘automobile’ or my ‘motor car’, but until that transformative day, I’ll likely be scooting around in a grayish silver five-speed hatchback, that while she sucks at acceleration, maintains a nimble handle-ability even at high speeds. Even as much as 120 k!
Not every Mazda 323 has a character, but mine does.
Purchased off the gay equivalent of the proverbial little old lady who only drives on Sunday (my guy was a fit and eco-conscious anorak-wearing homosexual, who for the most part eschewed the car for the exercise benefits of the ten speed) Sylvia was born (rolled off the production line) in 1991 and slipped into her own slip in my underground parking garage sometime in 1995.
She came in perfect, top notch physical condition – every button and toggle responding, her windshield wiper fluid filled to bursting, her antifreeze topped off, an oil change and tune up in her recent past. And to top it all off, Sylvia cost a mere $2000.00.
(Okay – interesting aside: I just nipped downstairs to take the laundry out of the dryer and stopped to pick up my mail... ‘Grand Touring Automobiles’ has sent me a personally addressed invitation to test drive an Aston Martin DB9, Jaguar XK-R, Range Rover Sport, or “…possibly a Bentley Flying Spur. Whatever your selection we will be pleased to assist you.” I’ll bet. I might just take them up on it, if only to see their faces when I alight from a Japanese car. Yeah – that’s the thing that will raise their eyebrows…)
Look: ten years with no car payments, minimal insurance with my spotless driving record, and never a flat tire or a break down. She parks on a dime and a tank of gas lasts weeks. The best $2000.00 I ever spent. Why wouldn’t I give such a splendid performer an affectionate name?
She’s not the first car I christened. I had an ancient British racing green Mini I called Martini – she looked like an olive – and a navy blue Toyota I named Lola. (She was a Corolla.) Both of them terrific cars, both unbelievably dependable and resilient… both I remember with great affection.
But Sylvia – well, she’s just been around so much longer, has seen me through the ups and downs and vagaries of a life less ordinary, and she’s captured my imagination in a way that demands a tribute or a recognition of some sort: a thanks-for-a-job-well-done something or other, anything really to mark what looks like potentially her last year of service to a grateful owner.
Because she’s faltering a little –just a little here and there – but in ways and areas that signal a deeper malaise.
Her springs are no longer springy. She goes over speed bumps even at a snail’s pace with a jarring bump – and no recoil; when we’re down, we’re down. She’s reluctant in first, dithery in second and downright obstinate in third. (Fourth and fifth are still smooth so far – but there’s not much use for fifth, or even fourth, with Toronto downtown gridlock the way it is.)
Her muffler – as recently replaced as last year – is no longer muffling very much of anything. (Don’t ask me where I put the receipt or guarantee from Midas – do you know where it is? No? Well, neither do I. Those things are for losers and little old ladies I always say… and of course for idiots who never dream a return on merchandise might be a possibility…)
A gallant gentleman leapt out of his car at a stop light the other day to inform me that my left brake light wasn’t functioning – and I am able to see on my own that her front right headlight is not all that it could, or should, be either.
A black day – and a black eye for Sylvia.
The trunk will not open from the outside, which to be honest is really the only satisfactory or useful way to open it, and her windshield wipers really only glance across the windshield these days. I snapped the key off in the ignition a few weeks ago (what do they make those things out of – pressed tinfoil?) and with just one ignition key left, when the man from the locksmith’s finally jiggled out the snapped off piece and asked me if I wanted him to make me another, it wasn’t just the outrageous price that made me say no.
I think we may have reached a tipping point of no return.
Which is not to say that something cannot be salvaged from this downturn in mechanical health: the hatchback lock should be able to be fixed, the windshield wipers replaced (I read somewhere that some people swap them for new twice a year – luxury!) the front and back lights replaced or mended, the muffler traded in, the dent in her bonnet knocked out, a little Rustoleum sprayed here and there and – ta da! – I’ll have an elderly, wheezy, un-air conditioned car, with seventeen pairs of sunglasses silted here and there around and under the seats, enough change dug out from under the floor mats to actually make all the repairs, and a mien that has gone from sporty and energetic to dejected and exhausted.
She really isn’t silver anymore – she’s a careworn tattle-tale grey.
I won’t drive her to the friend’s cottage now, and as for road trips to Ottawa and Montreal? Long faded dreams my friends. She will remain town-bound until they hook her up and haul her off; a downtown car with trips planned for no further than further downtown.
A pal in the movie business offered to blow her up next time a car needed to be blown up in a scene, suggesting such an explosive send off was tribute in itself. But it’s just too violent an end for such a loyal and dependable old friend.
I’d like to see her hauled off to a chop shop where she can provide much needed parts to other damaged cars. I myself am signed up as an organ donor, I see no reason why she cannot be a parts donor: there are certainly many little bits and pieces of her that are still in working order – steering wheel, ashtray, cigarette lighter and rear view mirror are all still in almost pristine condition. And her ownership and insurance papers have never been out of the glove compartment – quite possibly the neatest of all of her various and handy compartments.
I will drive her for a little while longer – but I know that day is coming: the day when I wouldn’t let Sylvia herself, if she were a person (or a pony, or a donkey or a big dopey dog) travel in her anymore – because she just isn’t safe.

White Hot House

2005-11-07T12:48:00.000-05:00

I saw for the first time a couple of weeks ago one of those great old black and white movies that for one reason or another become hailed as classics of the cinema – inspiring everything from remakes and parodies, to actually becoming part of societal discourse and jargon.
The Bad Seed was the film, and corny as it was, there was also something truly sinister in its portrayal of the little pig-tailed sociopath who nearly drives her mother mad as she tries to figure out if her offspring’s conscience-challenged murderous behaviour is the result of nature or nurture.
Without giving anything away I can tell you that the fictional film mother feared nature, but in the down to earth world of thee and me, a child being identified as good or bad seems to fall pretty much to the nurture argument these days.
Though it’s nothing new to argue the odds; it is a dependable truism that each succeeding generation bemoans their current generation of youth.
“Kids today!” goes the endlessly repeated opening salvo. “When I was a kid, we…” (choose from: a) respected authority, b) took responsibility, c) were maybe a little wild, but basically good deep down, d) were nowhere near as spoiled! Or e), f), g) and so on) fill in your own indignant complaint of how easy it is now compared to how hard it was then, or perhaps something closer to issues of indulgence, self-centered-ness, ‘dream world removal from real life reality’ – you know the drill.
And perhaps, sensitive new-age soul that you are, you’ve been involved in conversations that actually recognize how inevitable you sound, how plus ca change you appear, how just like your parents and theirs before them and so on and so on; still, you insist, this time and with THIS crop of underage citizens, there is a difference. The world really has changed – circumstances (familial, social, economic, legal, moral) have altered to a degree that Something! Must! Be! Done!
But I have a different beef, an alternate concern – a separate anger. My question is, “forget the kids - where are the adults?” Where are the bona fide grown ups that used to run the world and the family and provided the sense of safety and right and wrong that used to be adhered to as often as it was railed against.
Have you noticed? Do you wonder if the real change of the times is not so much in our youth as in our adults? And in particular, of those who are at least nominally the chief decision makers and society leaders that in days of yore, represented all that was responsible, hard working and wise.
Sure, sure… corruption, dishonesty, venality and even criminal stupidity have been and no doubt always will be hallmarks of a certain dependable proportion and percentage of politicians. Certainly anyone who reads history cannot fail to acknowledge the generous sprinkling of the mad, bad and the wildly and demonstrably wicked. But is it me, or has society descended to an all time lower than worms low in selecting and electing those we’ve chosen to represent us in all things worldly?
The top news story today – and every day for the past two weeks, or so it seems – has been about a guy named Scooter.
I am far from the first to note the utter ridiculousness of such a name for a senior White House official, but it bears repeating for all that. Scooter.
SCOOTER!
I don’t care if it was his dear old Dad’s nickname for him, it makes absolutely no difference to me whatsoever that it hearkens back to some dim and distant part of his storied past and his baseball abilities that were likened in some fashion to some other similarly goofily named baseball-playing soul. I just don’t want anyone near the Oval Office, the Situation Room or the panic button, whose name sounds more appropriate for a guy wearing a hat with a propeller. It isn’t seemly – but more than that, it indicates something about judgment that when combined with his vaunted position just doesn’t jive.
‘Scooter’ doesn’t even sound like a lying, deceptive pawn of evil; he sounds like he should be making a soap box racer in the garage or watching Saturday morning cartoons in the basement rumpus room, or helping his Dear Old Dad (Dod?) put up the storm windows – not leaking the name of a CIA spy to his minions in the media.
“Scooter’s been indicted!” must have been the near-unbelievable wedding of words communicated to the extended members of the Libby family (Grandpa Stinky, Auntie Skipper, Cousin Hootie…) a couple of ill-starred weeks ago. And since then, nothing’s been the same.
But still, no grown-ups emerge.
No responsibility from higher up is taken. Not even from Scooter. Beyond Scooter’s mouthpiece claiming that the outrageous charges will disappear following a vigorous defense, it’s business as usual at the White House, with republican dependables hitting the Sunday morning talk show circuit and adjudicating it ‘out of the question’ that Scooter’s boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, will feel any prosecutorial heat from the nation’s most recognizable (not to mention Special) Prosecutor.
But is it true? Is it so? Is there a possibility that someone is going to finally call the leaders – rather than their lackeys to task?
It’s possible.
After all, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hasn’t charged Cheney Chief of Staff Libby with the considerably more difficult to prove underlying crime of deliberately naming CIA operative Plame, but rather with five counts of lying, including lying to a Grand Jury, making false statements to federal investigators, and obstruction of justice.
Libby’s lawyers made a big point around the fact that he would not take a deal – who was offering one? – but would plead ‘Not Guilty’, and let the chips fall where they may.
Let them. However hard it may be to prove perjury when some of the details and alleged conversations took place a couple of years back, Scooter made the mistake of being very clear from whom he suggests he heard the gossip about Joe Wilson’s wife and that person, he claims, was unfortunately one of the most respected names in television journalism, Tim Russert. And Russert is beyond clear – to the point of having proof he wasn’t even around, when he was supposed to have whispered the words “Joe’s wife is a spy” into Scooter’s shell-like – and in his manner and comportment, makes Libby’s accusation all the more specious.
So what’s a poor Vice Presidential Chief of Staff to do? Fall on his sword, or so goes the conventional wisdom. Protect the VP, the big P, take the heat, the sentence and the can tied to his ass with all the aplomb he can muster and wait for the Presidential Pardon… which he’ll likely have to wait for until the end of Bush’s Presidency so as to maintain whatever shreds of dignity the Leader of the Free World and his most senior aide are still clinging to like grim and inevitable death.
Should there be any shreds left in the three long years ahead of all of us.
And still I ask, where are the grown ups? Where are the people making the really tough decisions – like standing up and admitting to cutting down the cherry tree, or manufacturing intelligence on WMD’s or even ‘fessing up to trying to discredit former Ambassador Wilson by going after his wife.
(And if that isn’t indicative of the adolescent school yard bully mentality operating in the highest echelons of power, well, one has to wonder…)
Tough decisions are being made and an immense amount of loyalty is being demonstrated, but it’s to all the wrong people; to protect what is looking like an increasingly corrupt and dishonest administration and to continue to obscure the facts surrounding one of the biggest and most expensive (certainly if you include human life) boondoggles of all time: the war in Iraq.
Americans are not being protected, Americans are not being informed and Americans are not being respected.
Genuine American interests are not being looked after.
Americans are being governed by a modern day version of elderly Bad Seeds – and being led down a particularly weedy garden path whilst being told everything in the garden is lovely.

President Ladybug

2005-10-21T14:14:00.000-04:00

Rob Brezsny is messing with my life.
Brezsny, the writer (inventor) weirdo, wunderkind, thinker, rememberer and official forgetter of all things irrelevant, author of Free Will Astrology (sample horoscope for Cancer – my sign – this week: “Five years ago, artist Dale Chihuly shipped 64 tons of Alaskan ice to Jerusalem. He used it to erect a giant wall in the place where the Arab and Jewish sections of the city joined. The desert heat melted his preposterous construction in three days. Treat this as an apt symbol for a situation that’s going on in your vicinity, Cancerian. There is an improbable barrier between two parts of your life that should be connected. That barrier has now begun to collapse at a rapid rate, and will be gone soon as long as you and yours don’t make a foolish attempt to try to shore it up…”) is also creator of the concept of Pronoia.
His recently published book ‘Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia’ (subtitle “How the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings”) and the current source of much of my frustration. It is impossible to read it without taking in and taking on a number of the wildly appealing, and simultaneously crazy as shit ideas.
Ostensibly emanating from an organization known as the Beauty and Truth Laboratory (pretty much Brezsny and his like-minded pals) the tome contains page after page of good news. And it’s real news; the fact that no matter what you absorb during the supper-hour news broadcast, or even a cursory perusal of your daily paper, using impeccable sources, Brezsny reports that crime is on the decline, teen death and teen pregnancy is at an all-time low, dropout rates have dropped, as well as the cheering fact that the introduction of Viagra has decreased the rate of animal killing as Rhinoceros horn, bear penis, whale sperm (and whatever other creepy rare animal byproducts have been placed on the alter of male virility over the years) as nothing really beats the ease – or the efficacy – of the little blue pill.
He has chapters that aid one in strategizing legal and wildly positive pranks, reminders that though life always gives you exactly what you need when you need it, it doesn’t necessarily give you exactly what you want when you want it. Just as the inherent truth – and the potential for genuinely seeing your life and it’s singularly wacky course from a different angle entirely (and one that makes you think you might actually enjoy thinking that way) he slips in a couple of pages from the ‘Pronoia News Network’ which details factoids concerning everything from the amount of love washing over the planet at every second of every day (the World Health Organization reports that over 100 million acts of sexual intercourse involving more than 200 million partners take place on earth every 24 hours; you could just take it as read, or appreciate Brezsny’s spin which is to calculate just how much euphoria is being generated if even half of those encounters are inspired by love. Heck – a tenth!)
Right now I’m on the waiting list at the library for a book he recommends that threatens to prop my mind open even further.
Titled ‘The Diving Bell and The Butterfly’ by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the memoir relates the story of the 43 year old French editor who suffered a stroke that while it left his brain undamaged, paralyzed his entire body save his left eye. Using his eyeball (though actually, mostly the lid) Bauby was able to dictate his memoir over a two year period solely through eye blinks.
Critics have called it ‘startling’, ‘inspirational’ and ‘a jewel’.
With two hands, a fully working body and the entire world at my disposal through the internet, I have trouble coming up with more than one original blog idea more than once a week. This week of course will not count, since all the ideas contained herein owe their genesis to Brezsny. Great.
And I was intending to write about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers (seems this paragon of all things legal whoopsed and forgot to pay her annual bar dues – the legal ones! – and was ineligible to actually practice as a lawyer in the District of Columbia… but as any fool knows, she’s nominated for a judgeship, not a lawyer-ship, so, like, what?) and about the recent PBS presentation of the New York Open Center’s conference on ‘The Real Agenda of the Religious Right’ – it’s absolutely filled to the brim and running over with blood curdling facts about Dominionism and Reconstruction and The Council for National Policy and the fact that close advisors to the President really, really, really believe in The End of Days, really – and I wanted to write about how though Toronto somehow managed to pull back from the brink of allowing sharia law to form a legitimate part of Ontario’s judicial system, the same cannot be said for Iraq, where due to concessions made by the American government in order to enlist cooperation from reactionary religious leaders, the new constitution – when it finally makes sharia the basis for national legislation – will no doubt sideline Iraqi women more effectively than even they were during Saddam Hussein’s tortuous reign.
I wasn’t actually thinking of writing about Saddam’s trial because really, what’s the point?
But even with those other thoughts and issues swishing and sloshing about in my head (as you now know, I’m a water sign) as I read Brezsny’s book, all I can think of is how much better my time is spent pondering the implications of Lucius Cervantes’ contention (as quoted in ‘Pronoia’) that “… the higher a woman’s IQ, the more she is likely to be masculine in outlook. The higher a man’s IQ, the more likely he is to be feminine in outlook.” Cool.
Or marveling at the fact that a pig’s orgasm can last a full thirty minutes – or that the ladybird beetle has sex for up to nine hours at a times, wherein the males are capable of three orgasms in one session, each an hour and a half long. Yikes.
(It’s interesting to note that somewhere in the next few pages, Brezsny quotes Guneli Gun from her book ‘On the Road to Baghdad’: “the world is run by those who can’t make love, or those who do it badly. That’s why the world is in trouble.” Imagining the world run by ladybugs is at the very least... stimulating...)
Pronoia the book is simply stuffed with unusual and outrageous ideas for freeing up (or jettisoning entirely) your warped preconceived notions, your prejudices, judgments, negative fantasies and much of the material we cling to in order to justify whatever self-pity we indulge in at whatever rate of frequency we indulge. You simply cannot hold in your mind both the thought that life sucks and you never have any fun, when you learn of a man who writes an inspiring book with exactly one functioning body part – his eyelid. Believe me I’ve tried.
I’ve started making lists of the ideas I most like and am running out of yellow legal pad paper as the list grows longer with each turning page; I’m fascinated by the results of the poll that asked the question “Does reality exist?” and collated the answers thusly: Yes 42%; No 27% - and those leftovers who insisted that while their reality exists, no one else’s does.
Philip K. Dick said “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Did you know that Shakespeare coined 1,700 words, including: besmirch, dauntless, dwindle, gnarled, hobnob, lackluster (or, if you're Canadian, as am I, lacklustre) madcap, pander, rancorous, sanctimonious, tranquil, bloodstained, leapfrog, gossip and fortune-teller? I didn't. But I'm proud to say I've used them all... and I know they've made me a better writer. I've made up a few words in my time (or maybe just used alternate, though deliberate and unique spellings) but this information has given me the courage to create more. They'll be... Brezsnylistic - Brezsnylicious even!
I find it beyond fascinating (as did Rob Brezsny apparently) to contemplate Ray Kurzweil’s study of the nature of societal change. Centuries ago, people didn’t really observe the world changing at all – their lives, their parents lives, their grandparent’s lives and so on, all had more or less the same life experience – and expected that their grandchildren would live pretty much the same as well. We know things change – but as Kurweil relates, what most people don’t consider is the fantastic rate of change today. He writes:
“The whole 20th century was like 25 years of change at today’s rate of change. In the next 25 years we’ll make four times the progress you saw in the 20th century. And we’ll make 20,000 years of progress in the 21st century, which is almost a thousand times more technical change than we saw in the 20th century.”
This is what makes me want to live longer – not following the trial of Saddam Hussein, or the panel quizzing Harriet Miers on what she REALLY thinks about abortion and the Lord Jesus Christ, or even the final destination of Toronto’s much unloved, much bandied about garbage.
I want to study the life of Mitzi Nichols of Virginia Beach who anonymously donated a kidney to a stranger in 2001 and waited a mere three years for karma to deliver a $500,000.00 lottery win. Yay karma!
Or to rethink Lady Godiva, whose naked ride through the streets of Coventry in 1057 was not (as many have erroneously noted) to inspire leagues of university engineering students, but rather to live up to the dare her assessor husband posed – that if she did, he would abolish all taxes on the local citizenry. As history reports, she did – and he did.
Other naked acts of charity include the 600 women living in oil rich Nigeria, who launched a protest against ChevronTexaco, demanding they plow back some of their profits into the local impoverished community. Their method of protest was to commit a ‘traditional shaming gesture’ by taking off their clothes; Nigerians consider the nudity of women to be a damning protest that shames those at whom the action is directed. ChevronTexaco gave in and hired local workers to build schools and electrical and water systems.
These days I am being encouraged to fear everything from a terrorist attack to acid reflux to avian flu, but Brezsny (the intriguing bastard) has now elicited from me a desire to experience the mind bending fear known as ‘The Stendahl Syndrome’. The syndrome named after the French novelist who wrote about his own breakdown in 1817; a description that echoes down the years and still strikes individuals today, as visitors to the miraculous art treasures collected over the centuries in the city of Florence Italy, sometimes fall apart in the presence of such overwhelming beauty – panicking in front of a painting by Raphael or collapsing in front of Michelangelo’s David, before being ambulanced away to the psychiatric ward of the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital.
If this is an example of shit happening, this is precisely the sort of shit I would like to be deluged with.
Thinking about this stuff makes me happy. And happiness, (though bargain priced at precisely $4.9 million by researchers at Yahoo Personal Finance) comes free to me through the magic of the Toronto Public Library, the relatively small cost of the light I need to read it provided me by Toronto Hydro (who are planning to send me a rebate on my electricity bill) and the small brown dog who sits patiently by, pining for both a treat and a walk, but sensing my passionate intensity and attention to the page, only bugs me on average of seven or eight times an hour.
Bliss.
I’m sure the effects of my recently slightly sprung open mind will dissipate and I will start getting an upset stomach and a nervous twitch (sure signs I’ve clicked across images of the American President, or accidentally landed on CNN rather than The Comedy Network) and be anxious to read the op-ed page of the New York Times and to pump my fist and cry “Yes! Yes!” every time I even think about The Daily Show.
But for now I’ll just remain calm and think deep thoughts and accept that this mind of mine that cannot successfully hold two thoughts, (the test of a first rate intelligence according to F. Scott Fitzgerald is the ability to affect that balance) has for this moment anyway, merely a singular ambition:
To hold one really good one.

Life to Smoochy (War and Remembrance Part III)

2005-10-15T15:34:00.000-04:00

Yogi Berra said it’s not over until it’s over.
Never consider a story over until the very last page has been turned, the cover clapped shut, the author pronounced dead and the last nail driven forcefully into his coffin even as it is being lowered into the soon-to-be-sealed and paved over grave.
Because things might change. And the past might take on different and even new memories to reminisce over in the future.
Just this last July, in an absolute orgy of reminiscing, I wrote a few stories about my youth, focusing on my early teen years and my experiences in London – a time imbued with memories so vivid and clear, that even just writing of them made them feel nearly close enough to touch.
And it probably wasn’t the international location, or the experiences in and of themselves; I believe those memories are still so immediate because of the age I was when they happened. At fourteen (going on fifteen) I was just beginning that transition into adulthood… the part that included boys and kissing and first love and the excitement of the possibilities of all that that meant.
(Okay. Puberty. I’m writing about the breathless un-bosomings of an adolescent girl. Laugh if you like – or sneer in contempt; if you don’t have a few adolescent un-bosomings of your own, I’m just so sorry.)
On July 14th 2005 (you can check it out in the archives – ‘War and Remembrance Part II’) I wrote about the International School I attended and the travel perks that come with being enrolled in a school poised on the brink of Europe. The class French trip to Calais began the adventures, but the Swiss ski trip made the much yearned for possibilities real as I fell into an endless series of passionate smooches with the boy I most wanted to smooch.
It was so exciting (I wrote) that I was surprised that I didn’t explode or burst into spontaneous flames from pure excitement and joy.
It was that good.
But then it got that bad.
On the boat train back to London, Wade Cunningham (for that was his totally cool name) grew distant and by the end of the trip was flirting with another girl. My romance was over, my first love finished, my heart became a withered little organ that must have taken entire months to heal.
I wrote in July that though I was over it now (31 years later!) and I had since been kissed and romanced by men I came to love more, I didn’t think I’ve since felt so purely happy, or so completely heart-stoppingly, blood-thrillingly excited as I had on that school ski trip in 1974.
True story.
But then about two weeks ago the story came full circle as I reconnected with Wade (sigh) Cunningham through his sister (and my classmate) Caren, who found me on one of those High School Reunion web sites that have become so popular in the past few years.
Strangely, even rhapsodizing about all that dusty unrequited love that had long ago bloomed in my adolescent bosom didn’t make me search for him – to be honest, it didn’t even occur to me… or perhaps if I thought about it, I feared that I wouldn’t have remained even a faded memory to him. After all, he was seventeen! Way too grown up and mature to remember a skinny little kid like me.
But I would have been wrong to think so.
He remembered. He remembered things I didn’t remember (even with all my romantic and fevered rememberings) and he apologized for the past hurt (long forgiven, I assured him) and gallantly told me he’d ended our ten day love affair to protect his own heart from the pain of one day losing me. (Nice touch, eh?)
What a guy. Wade Cunningham. Sigh.
We’ve written back and forth and are still only scraping the surface of the mountain of experiences and memories that have played out between then and now.
And now we go on from here – he and I and his sister Caren and Lisa Bing and Rachel Younger and John Gross, (who we are aware of out there in the ether) and hopefully many more from back then; that patchwork group of disparate students who attended the now long defunct Dwight Franklin International School in 1973 and 1974.
We’re planning a reunion sometime soon and Wade has even offered to zoom up here to Canada to apologize for breaking my fourteen year old’s heart in person, but first he must go to the South Pole.
(Isn’t that interesting? I’ve been assured it’s not diversionary…)
So March, maybe March we’ll all get together in person and compare memories and current lives and describe the paths each of us took to get where we are now.
I’ve told Wade my heart belongs to another, but I can’t rule out at least a single nostalgic smooch – a smooch to remember the past and to celebrate the present, and to firmly place the smooch in future memories.
Who knows? It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

Cuddlefish

2005-10-02T16:49:00.000-04:00

Like the proverbial iceberg, the largest part of the story, the information and facts about the similarly mostly submerged Giant Squid are finally coming to the surface with increasing regularity.
Just last week a series of photographs taken by a couple of Japanese scientists from the National Science Centre and the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association, both in Tokyo, revealed Architeuthis in all his strange and usually secret glory, frolicking in the cold and dark waters of the North Pacific.
As shy and elusive as President Bush at the outset of the Katrina disaster, the estimated 59 foot carnivorous cephalopod made a surprise appearance and revealed himself/herself/itself to the scientists as he/she/it attempted to grapple with a baited hook equipped with a camera some 900 meters below the choppy surface.
The photographs show an enormous squid wrapping it’s tentacles (two) and arms (eight) around the line which eventually got the better of at least one of the squid’s appendages, offering the scientists a close up look at the be-suction-cupped tentacle, still writhing somewhat in its death throes, but fresh and pink and offering the first real glimpse of Giant Squid flesh not long dead and not washed up on a beach, the way most of the really large squid findings have by necessity taken place.
Then just a few days later came the news from another set of scientists observing the heretofore similarly mysterious sex life of the giant members of the extended mollusk family – the larger female and (slightly – these things are relative) smaller male who combine in their own unique age old fashion to produce tiny little baby Giant Squid in a mating ritual that sounds as dangerous as it does revolting.
According to today’s online ‘The Independent’, a series of Giant Squid washed up on a beach in Spain revealed details including the length of the male Giant Squid’s sexual appendage (a horrifying 8 feet of sharp and nasty squid passion attached to a further 18 meters of squidgey squid reality) with which, according to scientists, the male squid attempt to impale the female – piercing her on the arm in order to impregnate her.
As you can imagine, there’s a certain amount of thrashing about, as well as a significant amount of danger which includes male squids often accidentally piercing themselves, other male squids, or just about anything that resembles whatever it is about the female of his species that attracts his attentions so.
Eek. But it’s all information – more insights into the wild and wacky and downright weird world of one of the planet’s least known and or understood creatures. It’s all grist to my mill – I love the Giant Squid and have been fascinated by him/her/it since I became aware of the genus and was able to go online and research more beginning about eight years ago.
It’s not so much that I’d like to get up close and personal with this creature that belongs to the same family of invertebrates as the octopus, the nautilus and the cuttlefish – I have no desire whatsoever to cuddle one of those fish; but they’re so mysterious, so creepy, so weird and fundamentally alien that I can’t help but imagine their life and style of living.
I learned the legends – the tales straight out of Jules Verne that purported to be real: about squids grappling warships into the deeps, about sailors caught and eaten by a school of invertebrates that jigged for the men as easily as a fisherman jigs for a tame octopus. About monsters seen and measured by the length of vessel that the measurer was on – one hundred and ten feet thought the chap back in the early part of the 20th century.
I’ve read the speculation about the relationship between squid and whales – right whales and sperm whales and grey whales doing battle with the creatures whose tactic it is to drown the whales, pulling them down and down until the mammoth mammal suffocates. Until recently, the best way to guess potential squid size was by the size of the suction cup-scarred whale skin and enormous squid beaks found in the stomachs of the those orcas who survived at least that encounter with death.
In the last couple of years we’ve learned of the Colossal Squid – assumed to be larger than your common or garden (Octopus’s Garden one assumes) Giant variety, a pretty distressing sounding creature matching size with carnivorous power, sporting fully two razor sharp beaks and tentacles covered in sharp tooth filled suction cups.
There’s also a fairly recently discovered squid-type creature which comes equipped with ten indistinguishable appendages (in the regular squid, the tentacles and arms are easily recognized, the arms being considerably longer) which radiate from the body like spokes on a wheel. Each has a sharply bent elbow from which the rest of the arm hangs straight down. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something queerly disgusting about a tentacle with an elbow joint.
To complete this picture of the estimated 23 foot long creature only a mother could love (if she didn’t eat it first) it has two gigantic fins that stick out either side of its body and that flap like elephant ears as it propels its weird self along.
According to one of the scientists that had an opportunity to study photos of the peculiar animal back in 2003, “New species are a dime a dozen in the deep sea, and I suspect there are a lot of very weird things down there.”
No kidding.
But of course the reason we know so little about these creatures is because of the oceanic depths in which their lives typically take place. For the largest of their species, rising to the surface, losing the pressure on their bodies and blood so necessary to survival, the squid cannot really live in our world so close to the top, but as technology improves, we’re finding it little by agonizingly little, easier to find our way down to his.
But talk about weird, creepy and fundamentally alien – little as we know about what lives in the deepest darkest troughs of the ocean, would that we knew so much about the murky workings of the American Government, the specific methods and means used to run that government, go to war or respond to disaster.
I think we’ve all been assuming (hoping) that the current administration’s depth was similar to that of the iceberg or the Giant Squid – huge, hidden and substantial. But maybe the truth is that there’s less than meets the eye. Maybe the truth is as insubstantial and potentially invisible as icebergs at the North Pole, those that through global warming are melting faster than the truckloads of ice some friendly folk recently attempted to ship to Louisiana and points thereabout.
(Unfortunately getting to ‘thereabout’ turned into a runaround that ended with tons of ice being re-routed to cold storage where it’s being stockpiled for the next disaster. Current cost of the ice fiasco? About a cool one hundred million dollars. U.S. dollars that is.)
Consider the fact that in revealing the inadequacies of the action plan to aid in the latest natural disasters even with sufficient notice, the parties supposedly responsible were effectively about as useful as a squid on dry land. Or in the White House for that matter.
One of the weirdest images we’ve yet been privy to in the human world is the latest vision of the latest new, improved President – the compassionate hero who made seven trips to areas devastated by Katrina and Rita… the minute his approval numbers hit an all time low.
The guy who until recently was urging Americans to consume and buy as much oil and energy as possible has discovered conservation (hallelujah!) and is urging Americans to conserve – to drive less, form carpools, take public transit, turn down the air conditioning and turn off the lights.
The same President who continues to visit the storm ravaged homes and drilling platforms and refinieries down south in gas guzzling Air Force One ($83,000.00 to fill, $6,000.00 an hour to fly) or surrounded by an extended SUV driving entourage,eachof which sucks gasoline at the rate of approximately 22 miles to the gallon.
The President and energy conservation: it’s not a glove-like fit if you know what I’m saying.
And the Presidential tentacles reach nowhere near so far as where or when they’ve been needed; from New York to Afghanistan and from Iran to Iraq and now to the French Quarter, it’s clear now that neither his reach nor his grasp have come close to meeting or exceeding his cocky hubris.
Weird things down there? In Washington you mean? I’ll say.
So weird I think I'd rather smile and kiss a cuttlefish than grapple with a President whose mind and motivations are as creepy and alien – and still as mysterious to me - as those of the Giant Squid.

A Daddy in Aspic

2005-09-23T13:38:00.000-04:00

I caught a glimpse of my father the other day, which is a pretty neat trick seeing as he’s been dead for ten years.
I claim no special powers – I’m not psychic (though I did predict J.D. Fortune would win Rockstar INXS, but to be honest, that could have been a fluke), I am not a Ghost Whisperer, neither am I a Medium, nor one prone to intimate communication with The Almighty.
I am not a busty TV star or the President of the United States, but I did recently have an experience that brought me into full living, breathing contact with the reality of my long dead dad that has left me feeling shaky and unsteady days later.
And like most earth-shattering encounters, the circumstances could not have been more prosaic.
I was at a cocktail party as the guest of a friend who had recently purchased a condo in an as-yet unfinished development in North Toronto. Very swank and with all the mod cons, the event held in the corporation’s model suite was designed ostensibly for the future neighbours to meet and mingle, though as it soon became clear, it was actually purpose-designed to send a not so subtle message that discounts on ‘luxury upgrades’ would be offered to owners who roped in hot new prospects for the crack sales team. (A sales team whose crackling energy looked sharp enough to wound. Those folks were not fooling around.)
Still, it was a chance to support the friend and get a glimpse of her future condo’s future potential – and not incidentally to sample as much domestic wine and delish hors d’oeuvre as you could liberate from the attractive gay wait staff; what those caterers couldn’t do with a sprig of asparagus and a loop of chive I wouldn’t even begin to speculate.
There were tiny rare roast beef shavings sitting cockily atop miniature cornbread cakes, garnished with just a dot of fragrant aioli. Goose liver on some sort of miraculous buttery organic triscuit, topped with a trembling golden cube of aspic. And as for the bite sized mini mountains molded of braised shitake mushroom and sweet onion, well suffice it to say that you wouldn’t have wanted to come between me and them. Not and retain your dignity and all your fingers that is.
And thank heaven the food was good, because I wasn’t buying and there were certainly no romantic prospects circulating; apart from the tuxedo-clad, likely gay cellist plinking and sawing earnestly in the prettily decorated den (or second bedroom! or office! or gift-wrapping nook!), besides the friend and myself, virtually everyone there was of an age that suggested preservation in aspic might make an increasingly attractive alternative to further deterioration.
They were old is what I’m saying. Old and rich and practically counting off the seconds to the end of the current Toronto season, so they could wing it to Florida for the next.
All too soon the wait staff were absorbed back into whatever holding pen they’d originally emerged from (the source of all that was savoury and good) and the developers and sales team lined up in front of the miniature architectural model in the foyer so they could sing the praises of the development that by our listening constituted our payment for the supper.
Bah, blah, blah.
I never feel so completely adolescent as when I’m left stranded in a room full of grown ups listening to guff like this. I’m sure there was value in the various missives, but all I got out of it (in between trying to crack up the pregnant woman shifting weightily from one foot to the other right next to me: I wanted to see her bursting through the firmly rooted crowd like floodwater through a Louisiana levee in a headlong beeline to the bathroom) was that those who chose not to frogmarch relatives, friends and other suckers into the gaping maw thinly disguised as realtors, would be punished with cut-rate mismatched marble floors, paper thin granite countertops and the leftover wallpaper samples that would scream: ‘so last year!’ to the lonely unfortunates forced to make do with the 'Basic Plan'.
I don’t know how long the speeches lasted because somewhere in between elbowing the pregnant lady and trying to silently pop a piece of gum out of one of those blister packs that tend to explode like a gunshot in church (I simply did not have enough to share with the rest of the congregation) I saw my father.
Right in front of me, close enough to touch – I could almost imagine I smelled him: a combination of fabric softener (his housekeeper always put too much Downy in the rinse) and the Pear’s soap he preferred, subtly imbued with just a hint of medicinal mentholatum.
Above the collar of an Oxford blue cotton shirt (itself tucked into a pair of pressed khakis, held up by a tightly buckled belt – he’d never had any sort of bum to speak of) it was surely the back of his neck; a thick and ruddy affair holding up a giant bald head (the Wilson’s have giant heads, it’s a fact) ringed with a pure white fringe of hair, choppily trimmed and in desperate and immediate need of another.
I’d have known the back of those ears anywhere (after all, I was the one who had trimmed and styled his remaining strands…) all pink and bursting with a wild and wiry grey growth.
And his pate – a few stray hairs still clinging pathetically to his softly tanned scalp, the age spots and freckles like familiar landmarks on an otherwise blasted landscape. I could see the pores and the texture of his skin and the dynamic life force that in comparing the living to the inanimate is somewhat similar to identifying the real turtle soup from merely the mock.
I wanted to touch him.
I wanted to grab him and breathe him in and feel the solid warmth of life and energy. I wanted to look at his worn and funny face and deep into his faded blue eyes and I wanted to tell him so much that had just that moment occurred to me.
I thought I had done my grieving long ago, but I realize now that recently that grief was just as easy and tender as missing an old photo or home movie: a one or two dimensional twinge at the most. A softening – but a comfortable reaction, easy and familiar and nothing like this stab of reality that threatened to overwhelm me to the point of public humiliation.
I had difficulty swallowing and hot tears were building behind my eyes and I couldn’t believe I might very soon be reduced to a sobbing, braying heap in the middle of an expensively outfitted pretend apartment, surrounded nearly completely by elderly strangers. It was just too awful.
Because it wasn’t him of course. It was just some man. Some sixty or seventy-something old article, alive and pink, with blood coursing through his veins and breath sliding easily – so easily! – in and out of his lungs. And in fact beyond the skin colour and shape and shade of his silver tonsure, he was nothing really very much like my father at all.
(For one thing, dad would have let his trousers droop as low as gangsta rapper’s before he’d cinch in his belt. He was above all, a creature well aware of each and every physical comfort and he tolerated neither the chafe nor the squeeze...)
It was the magic of the flesh.
The glow and vibrancy and multi-dimensional corporeal reality of the living that made my past efforts in remembering him comparable to the literary similarities between Beatle Bailey and War and Peace.
I remember and miss him now. Not his memory and not his photo and not even the sly and funny (sometimes rude) and insightful letters he always wrote and mailed to me no matter the advances of technology. I remember the guy who wrote them, and right now, I miss him so much.
Back in the model suite I surreptitiously blew my nose on a cocktail napkin and pushed firmly through the crowd on my way to the exit. I wanted to come home and think about him and get to work on that little deconstruction project I’ve been neglecting for the last decade.
I’ve got to grieve the real man, not the dying or dead or vaguely remembered or charmingly posed and photographed guy.
My memories are emerging from the aspic now, and sharp and bitter as it is reliving this loss, it is also deeply nourishing. And even delicious.

Whores, heroes and hobgoblins

2005-09-13T15:40:00.000-04:00

People never change – at least that’s my unchanging opinion.
The question came up recently in a community of people I regularly speak with, and try as we might, we none of us could come up with a single instance of anyone we know who has actually made fundamental, character-core, personality-altering changes.
Sure, there’s a maturing process – people who buckle down after college… cut their hair… take on responsibility… don’t have to be told to take out the garbage or cut the lawn, or go to the dentist.
But the kid who would betray you in high school, pull the wings off flies, and bitterly blame others or cruel fate for every slight or disappointment, or in the alternative, always see the positive side of things (or at least be open to the hope that things might change) will likely continue to do so in a variety of more sophisticated ways, no matter the patina of respectability or grown-upedness they cloak themselves in as the years roll down that great cosmic bowling alley.
(My example was Doubleya; there he is I said, a former alcoholic, drug addicted, careless, spoilt frat boy, whose entire experience of the working world was both provided through - and subsequently bailed out by – his family; who quit cocaine and drinking, found religion, became President of the United States, yet hasn’t changed a whit or a bit. He’s still the same careless, self-absorbed, oblivious frat boy he always was. He’s just sober now.
(It wasn’t a lack of Jesus or a surfeit of alcohol that made him such an asshole back in the day – he was (and is) who he was. And is.)
Coincidentally, further proof of the axiomatic nature of character maintenance was revealed in a couple of stories published today in Canadian newspapers.
In one, a guy who was unjustly accused, tried, found guilty and imprisoned for the alleged crime of sodomizing and murdering his four year old niece twelve years ago, appears to remain the same confused and mystified young man at the age of thirty-four that he was back then; still trusting and believing in his mom, still missing the “.. smart, mischievous, funny” little niece who was “very special to me.”
That his life will never be the same goes without saying; that any potential the massively tall and goofy looking kid who didn’t fit in then (and surely won’t fit in now) has long been destroyed is an undeniable truth, and that his guilt was established by the consistently criminally mismanaged working practices of the doctor (Charles Smith, formerly Chief Pathologist at Sick Kids) who is responsible for rather more than a handful of similar horrors – and was solved by the same practice as were many of the others: by looking through his desk drawers for the exonerating evidence – is just par for this poor man’s particularly unlucky course.
One can only hope that his innocence, his exoneration, whatever cash settlement he receives for his wrongful incarceration and any subsequent civil cases his lawyers launch on his behalf against the deleterious doctor somehow allow him the peace and retro-kindness he deserves.
He probably won’t change, but maybe a little of his luck finally will.
And then there’s the other story; the story of a man himself known for the charming observation that “there’s no whore like an old whore” (and what does that little aphorism reveal about the aphorizer?) who is quoted today through his spokesthingy as being horrified, hurt, regretful, disbelieving, surprised, flabbergasted and shocked to the core that some of his choicest and juiciest (not to mention cruel and patronizing) opinions were published by the journalist with whom he shared them.
It’s just so bizarre to hear the moanings and wailings of a man forced to apologize to those whom he slandered – though whether he knew it or not, we pretty much knew what he thought; he’s not so subtle as he thinks – his excuse being that he thought none of it was for the record, that it was just harmless late night chitchat between two dear old friends.
Nice chat.
Nice friends.
The fact that this dear old friend was also the renowned author of a significant number of tomes that blew the lid off a significant number of pretty high profile people and institutions over the past couple of decades, and that at least some of the conversations they held were for the express purpose of laying the groundwork for a Mulroney biography, appeared to be beside the point.
Brian Mulroney, as he lies in his bed of pain, recovering from a serious pancreatic episode, now reportedly pauses only between bouts of clutching his belly and cursing the name of Peter C. Newman to pick up the phone and apologize to, amongst others, former Prime Minister Kim Campbell (she lost the subsequent election by being too busy “screwing her boyfriend”) Clyde Wells (a “son of a bitch” lacking in principle – pot! kettle!) and Pat Carney (irrational). He’d have to telephone the sons of the former Prime Minister, the late Pierre Trudeau to apologize for accusing their father of destroying Canada through his personal vanity, so that he, Mulroney would have to “come along and save it.” He might just as well save himself that unreturned voicemail – anything Justin or Alexandre might have to say was mercifully covered by the man who knew how to shuffle off his mortal coil unemcumbered by a series of late night unbosomings to a journalist well versed in the popularity of well-researched literary scandal.
‘The Secret Mulroney Tapes’, subtitled Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister by Peter C. Newman will soon be available for all to peruse; to measure the claim by the author that the bad is tempered by a number of anecdotes through which Newman believes people will interpret the lantern-jawed libeler as charming and likeable and good.
Personally, I think that particular ‘good’ ship has sailed.
You see nothing changes. Mulroney has been bitching for decades that no one appreciated him (if he had a brother, you know who mom would have liked best) but was certain that history would tell a different tale – that his accomplishments and character would be judged more fairly and squarely in the future than in the blistering heat of the unforgiving moment. That he would be loved and appreciated and recognized for all the great and good he did.
Just goes to show - there’s no fool like an old fool.

So I guess what I'm saying is "Ditto"...

2005-09-05T13:49:00.000-04:00

In ways and with methods more powerful than any speech yet made, the Bush administration has finally succeeded in demonstrating one of the most important tenets of the Republican philosophy: that government is surely the problem, not the solution.
If those devastated by Katrina needed any more proof that the last place they should have looked for assistance in their time of most desperate need was Washington, they have it in the absolute abortion that was the response from federal agencies, from the administration and from the President himself.
(One wonders if he’ll be able to enjoy another vacation in Crawford Texas, steeped as it will no doubt be in memories of the moment when the entire world went looking for leadership and found it literally on holiday. One worries that actually, he’ll probably have no problems with it at all.)
From the criminal time wasting of spending the first week screwing around deciding which agency, which jurisdiction, or which authority was either responsible or prepared to sign off to another, the south sank as the leadership fiddled around.
From the unconscionable decision NOT to send the nearby (at anchor off the Gulf Coast according to the Chicago Tribune) U.S.S Bataan in to help – a ship equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the technology to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, to the President’s own opinion conveyed through Diane Sawyer that any looting – be it for plasma screen TV’s or a tin of tuna – be considered a crime subject to punishment, each and every decision and non-decision has revealed the government of the United States of America to be at best incompetent, at worst, deliberately so.
When the appropriately funereal speed with which the President reacted to the Katrina crisis is compared to the urgency with which he flew to the bedside of brain dead Terry Schiavo, the priorities of this administration are as clear as the Mississippi is muddy – and now glowing red with the blood and human detritus that will be food for the catfish for decades to come.
But this President has always been more interested in the unborn or the near-dead than with the living or the suffering. While this government has sieved off the youngest and most vulnerable of the next generation of soldiers to fight terrorism thousands of miles away (“Better than fighting it at home” goes the contemptuous thinking) it’s now clear that terrorism probably couldn’t be fought at home – so decimated and depleted are the supports to genuine homeland security.
So what do Americans get for their tax dollars? Well, they don’t get a lot of disaster relief (at least, not if they’re actually living in the disaster; those who’ve lost business, property, and valuable commodities will no doubt be bailed out faster than a stranded Louisianan can out-swim an alligator) they don’t get to get on with their lives after serving an agreed upon time in the military (unless they never signed up in the first place, or in times past were able to avoid a draft – those folks can pretty much do whatever they wish) they don’t get to have a Supreme Court that reflects and balances the political make-up of the country (unless they’re right wing republicans – in which case, it’s party time for their team; btw: how quickly was John Roberts sent in to replace the late Rehnquist? Why, overnight appears to be the time frame – the President can move when it matters… to him) and they don’t get anything resembling affordable and equal access to health care (unless they already have enough money to actually be able to afford it out of pocket – then it’s free; sort of like all the free stuff Paris Hilton gets, that’s the way it works.)
But they do get a President obsessed with the morals and values of the population. They do get a government that in controlling the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court will soon be able to control a woman’s uterus, a human’s non-functioning brain, and the futures and fortunes of those who would have wished to marry within their own sex.
It’s when it comes to their outsides, their actual physical beings, their lives, their health, their future and on the most basic level, their ability to survive, that this government has failed utterly.
The proof is positive that it’s the private sector that can best help during a disaster, which is fortunate because the private sector was the only one that did. When you can organize Hollywood into a disaster relief telethon faster than you can get a sandwich to a starving Southerner, something is very definitely out of whack.
I’ve been reluctant to write about Katrina – the anticipation of Katrina, Katrina as the storm began, Katrina at full fury, Katrina in its aftermath… Katrina and what Katrina has meant to the people and to the President who ignored Katrina, and those Katrina has devastated beyond all normal human comprehension.
After all, so much has been written, so much has been said and virtually all of it – even that which has emerged from sources more accustomed to congratulating the President than vilifying him – has said the same thing: a criminal screw up, a monumental show of indifference and a now clearly defined set of priorities that in lack of action speaks volumes. “You say it best,” goes the song. “when you say nothing at all.”
And nothing is what the President has been saying – even when he speaks.
But from everyone else a tsunami of words – a storm of anger, a hurricane of emotional reaction. The levee (so to speak) has burst.
From The New York Times to FOX News, from the left to the right and everywhere in between, the President and those who advise him have been recognized in a way that even a thousand or so American dead, ten thousand or so Iraqi and Afghani dead, thousands upon thousands of injured, maimed and orphaned humans of all races (hard to tell the nationality of limbs blown off bodies – equality at its most fundamental) devastated and destroyed in a desert region in the name of a war that was mounted on a lie, couldn’t do: the pitiful, careless, unforgivable response to Katrina has framed this Presidency and this President in a way that will remain legend long after the history books that tell the story have long dried up and blown away.
The only good news in sight as the bad news mounts (“It’s going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine” said Home land Security Chief Michael Chertoff, in referring to the now thousands of corpses rescuers expect to find) is that the truth is now out. The indifference, the laziness, the contempt for those who ‘chose to stay’, the non-existent plan of rescue and support – and ware the finger pointing to local agencies: whatever their responsibility, by Monday, they were literally underwater – the unconscionable nerve of two former presidents appealing to the citizenry to financially bail out the rescue effort… all of it reveals a truth long ignored and long in coming.
And even the effort involved in draining the cities, rescuing the living and burying the dead won’t distract Americans from the underlying problem for long; and it isn’t the problem of a city below sea level – it’s the problem of a President beneath contempt.

Date with destiny

2005-08-28T13:06:00.000-04:00

If you haven’t seen TV star Jennifer Aniston’s brave little pixie face smiling stoically from the cover of virtually every magazine on your local newsstand save The Economist and Forbes (and that’s only because the financial details of her divorce settlement have yet to be announced) then you are either a shut-in, a coma patient, or seriously, seriously focused on your own life. In which case – good for you!
But even so, even if you are the sort of person who thinks that their own life is ‘important’, or ‘interesting’, or even ‘taking up most of your spare time’, as a Canadian, you’ve likely not missed the potentially more nationally upsetting headlines (which simply repeat and amplify literally dozens of similar headlines over the past 5 years) that Canada is now at heretofore unmatched loggerheads (not your piddling, low-key type loggerheads) with the United States over the most recent ruling – and even more recent disregarding – of the NAFTA ruling on softwood lumber exports.
In a nutshell, though NAFTA arbitrators have decided in Canada’s favour – and not for the first time – in the long standing dispute over exorbitant tariffs imposed by our US counterparts, resulting in a ruling that requires some five billion in unfair taxes be returned, US Trade Representative Bob Portman has announced the United States would ignore it. The ruling. The instruction. The decision. The dough. The end.
Go away.
Canada’s response was swift.
“I beg your pardon?”
Followed by various statements on various levels regarding how our government would argue/fight/punish those who work agin us.
(Best was Senator Pat Carney who got up and walked out of negotiations recently, saying, “What’s to talk about? We won. The Americans won’t abide by the rule of law.” Simple, elegant, Canadian.)
So we have a problem, and the problem isn’t simply softwood; our problem is what the US reaction to the ruling means – has always meant – to our relationship. We can’t ignore it anymore, can’t pretend we haven’t noticed, can’t fool ourselves into thinking it means anything other than what it means. We are not now, nor have we ever been, except in our deepest and sweetest fantasies, of any real importance to the United States.
We are Jennifer Aniston.
Oh sure, we’ve captured America’s attention from time to time, been described as each other’s family, even appeared to be as close as an old married couple. But really and truly, all it’s ever taken for the truth to come out was for us to fairly request something they simply weren’t prepared to give… and the jig was up.
Reading between the lines of the answers the resolutely stiff-(though intermittently trembly)-upper-lipped Aniston shared with Vanity Fair in the much ballyhooed September cover story, a new picture of Brad Pitt is beginning to emerge. A Pitt who contrary to the image he’s portrayed since the Pitt-Aniston marriage went awry, maybe isn’t all that nice. Or honest. Or blameless.
Apparently Aniston, though the opposite was implied, DID want a baby. DID want the marriage. DID want Pitt.
Now that she’s been treated to month after month of lurid stories, impossibly romantic third-world, AIDS fighting orphan baby-adopting Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie frolicking, complete with all the long-lensed photos to match (not to mention those purposely shot for Women’s Wear magazine’s 1950’s happy family fantasy – complete with kissing and nekkidness and kiddies and barbecues) Aniston is now launching her own public relations response, casting herself as the “wronged waif who nevertheless is picking herself up and moving on with her life, I-don’t-blame-Brad-but-hey-Billy-Idol-called-he-wants-his-look-back”.
(Geez. If a gal can’t snipe at the man who left her for Angelina Jolie, when on earth is she going to get nasty?)
Likewise, the embarrassingly public decision to brush Canada off has us recalling the UN all over again. In refusing to abide by the NAFTA arbitrator’s ruling, the US in the person of the President invokes deeply painful (not to mention revealing) memories of Bush demanding that the entire United Nations support the move to war against Iraq, and when stymied, simply rolled over the protests and God damn it, went to war anyway.
(And please, let’s not get into John Bolton; salt in the wound, kicking a guy when he’s down… having screaming, growling, animal sex with Angelina within hearing distance of the world’s microphones. Ouch baby.)
But we had some good times, right?
Millions upon millions of tons of lumber-based newsprint captured stories, complete with photos of American Presidents and Canadian Prime Ministers yucking it up, shaking hands, playing golf and having dinner together. Granted, not the sort of dates one imagines Brad Pitt on, yet solid and friendly and indicative of a genuine relationship – much like the snaps of he and Jen at the awards shows over the years.
Could it be all those images were simply for publicity? Staged for the newspapers?
But we tried did we not? Playing hard to get by refusing to join the war on terror, acting as if we really had an option to remain together whilst ardently pursuing our own hopes and dreams – whether it be taking part in peace keeping in Afghanistan or shooting a high profile, low paid indie movie about a bad girl called ‘The Good Girl’? Didn’t the message come through? Were we not bravely and creatively our own country/person?
Did we not win respect, and from that respect, solidify our relationship?
We did not.
We ignored the immutable first rule of high school: it doesn’t matter how cute, how sincere, how girl-next-door Canadian you are, when it comes to power, the captain of the football team will always gravitate back to the head cheerleader.
Jennifer learned this the hard way.
We’ve been learning this lesson for decades – though it must be said, there was no smoking Angelina Jolie to point us to the truth. All we had to alert us to what should have been obvious from the start was a dirty old man named Saddam Hussein and a shadowy bunch of powerful men called ‘American Corporate Interests’.
But before we throw up our collective hands, or press our tear stained faces into our pillows, we should remember a few of things.
1. High school doesn’t last forever; the Presidency has about 3 years to go. Angelina has a way of moving on…
2. Things change. One minute you’re the captain of the football team, the next you’re selling used cars… one minute you’re President of the United States, the next you’re a footnote in a history that finally manages to portray you exactly as you are… one minute you’re the handsomest guy in the world, next you’re wrinkly Robert Redford. (If only you were Paul Newman!)
3. The tide can turn dramatically. From loser geek to billionaire software manufacturer. From President to pariah. From Brad to Bob.
From softwood losses to oil sands gains.
Never forget we’ve got potentially the second richest oil reserves in the world. Not over there - right up here. Never forget we played fair even when you were screwing us. And then when you weren’t. Never forget that respect shouldn’t be limited only to those you feel are equal – which you may mistakenly judge is none.
Because we won’t.

Thank Weisblott

2005-08-26T13:59:00.000-04:00

You wouldn’t necessarily suspect how fond I am of Marc Weisblott if you’d seen me whacking him with a rolled up newspaper yesterday afternoon in the Second Cup at Yonge and Heath.
Far from being a bad dog, Marc (the blog bod in Toronto) is a thoroughly good egg; advising, suggesting, encouraging – egging me on – continuing in his self-deprecating, cynical yet hopeful style. It’s a nice combination – like tears through laughter, or warm sunshine on a rainy day. Sometimes it’s the contradictions that underscore the truth of a person’s character.
No, I wasn’t abusing Le Weisblott on purpose, simply fending off a couple of determined yet wily houseflies; a pair I assume had come down off their fabled wall so as to better listen in to our conversation.
In death, as in life, they didn’t miss much.
But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
You see, Marc and I don’t see each other often, our contact being generally through email. In fact, on reflection, I don’t think I’ve ever heard his voice on the phone. And now that I think about it, I don’t actually have his phone number, (mystery solved… so this is why his phone voice is such a well kept secret…) nor do I possess his address, beyond web.
(Crazy eh? Marc, for me, literally lives in cyberspace. How modern – how quintessentially millennial!)
We probably got together four or five times last year, and as few as two or three times so far this year. We talk about what we’re doing, enjoy catching up on mutual friends, (enjoy even more catching up on tales of mutual antipathies) and Marc usually surprises me with the scope and nature of his latest idea.
He’s always busy with a number of plans and projects and is, as far as I can gather, also an intensely private person. And though you wouldn’t know it just by looking, that’s a pretty apt description of me as well.
So maybe that’s why we’re drawn together. Rare as the occasion may be…
I’ve blogged about Marc before (‘Blame Weisblott’ November 28, 2004) and credited him with starting me on the blogging path, a path that has been one of the most satisfying of my life.
And all I’ve ever done for him was buy him one of those smoothie-type drinks at the coffee shop and smack him with a rolled up section of the New York Times for his troubles.
(I may also have purchased him the odd bun or brownie at Starbucks, but when you do the math, it doesn’t really add up does it?)
Yesterday for ince, he not only brought me two separate story ideas, bucked me up with his view of my potential: (“There’s the matter of getting your grander schemes in gear… just keep pushing the hook that you’re on top of things in a multi-platform sorta way… yours is a shtick deserving of an audience that goes way beyond the blog folks – not to mention all the people who don’t really know where to start in finding different ideas online…” pure Mozart to my clapped out sensibilities) but also provided me with a coupon so that actually, the smoothie I bought for him (when coupled with my own – a twofer you see) was essentially… well, free.
Free advice, free therapy, free drinks – oh, and did I mention he not only started my blog, but named it, essentially designed it, worked out the bugs, made multiple helpful suggestions and just recently helped me tweak it all over again?
No?
Well, he did.
Free technical support.
Free support.
So I’m just saying, Weisblott, I owe you.
Oh – and the possibly greatest thing about Marc Weisblott?
He won’t have a clue what I’m talking about.

Temperature's rising, polls are falling...

2005-08-18T19:24:00.000-04:00

Let’s face it. If you live anywhere near Toronto (or, as in my case, right smack dab in the freaking centre of it) this has been an absolutely appalling summer. Stifling, enervating, oppressive – it must be like being kidnapped and wrapped in a hot, wet, smelly brown blanket before being stuffed in an airless car trunk.
Except for the car trunk (my personal prison has been a non air-conditioned bedroom with only the slow, sluggish movement of an ancient, enfeebled ceiling fan to stir the air at all) I’d say the experience was pretty much the same.
Especially the held against my will part.
The fact that we’ve had a break from the humidity today reminds me of nothing so much as a sunny day in Seattle.
I heard a statistic once (and I’m hoping the mere mention of the extremely official sounding word ‘statistic’ is enough to substitute for actually research) that more people commit suicide on the sunny days than on rainy days in Seattle.
The reason?
Why, a sunny day simply raises once again (if only for a brief shining moment) all the dashed hopes and dreams that life might get better, that it might look different, or change; the suicide knows it won’t – counting the hours until the sky turns overcast and the rain begins to fall – and can hardly bear the odious comparison.
That’s us here in Toronto – a break in the heat, a cool breeze, a chance to breathe without the ever present suffocating brown blanket of air is just a cruel joke: any minute now the barometer will swing back into the groove it’s been relentlessly carving since the end of June and we will once again be suffering the tortures of the damned and returning to – as rumor has it – the Holiday in Hell now predicted to last until at least October.
Vacation you say? A getaway to cooler climes? Ha. Freelancers don’t take vacations – we eke out little snippets of time off between assignments. One project finishes, and as you search for the next you might take a day here and there, sleep in a little later, or skive off to a matinee – my personal favourite – until the next opportunity comes along.
The optimal situation is when a project is all planned and in the works and the time between where you are (or when you are) and it’s beginning is too short to do something else, but just long enough to sneak off to a borrowed cottage, mosey on out to visit the folks, or in the best, best case scenario, hop a plane to a Caribbean or Mediterranean location for some serious funny hat/sunburn salve activity.
For myself it’s been more matinee-mode of late, as nothing doable money-wise has materialized since June and the guilt of leaving even for a four day weekend (no properly work ethic raised gal would dream of rewarding non-rewarded non-work) has kept me chained to the computer, checking Media Job Search Canada, Jeff Gaulin, Mastheadonline and Marketing Mag with the same diligence I once applied to The Superficial, Defamer, Page Six and The Awful Truth. A couple of nibbles, but nothing to chow down on so far – and so it goes.
I sort of think of the President of the United States as the Freelancer in Chief, or better, the First Freelancer; with one or (tops) two, four year contracts for the short-term position of Leader of the Free World – secure once voted in, but limited all the same. And in that spirit, I think all freelancers should offer a respectful salute – a tip of the hat – to one of the most talented skivers our profession has ever seen rise from within the ranks; the man whose inspired gift for punching in late and clocking off early is becoming the stuff of legend.
As Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker reported August 2nd in The Washington Post, Bush has easily surpassed his father (a formerly formidable presidential-holiday-taking opponent) and is just days away (with still a couple of holiday weeks to go, mind,) from leaving current record holder Ronald Reagan in the figurative dust. The (literally dusty… and ashy) Great Communicator’s own vacay stats come in at an astounding 335 days off over a period of 8 years.
By the time Bush slaps those numbers down, he (and we) will still have 3 and a half more years to go on his current project. There’s little doubt he’ll be able to claim at least a full year off amongst his eight. The mind literally reels at the notion of a wartime president so easy and comfortable with ensuring his continued happy and rested sanguinity.
(Jon Stewart pointed out recently in a compare and contrast couple of photos how much better in fact the president looks now than when he actually began. In stark comparison, Clinton had the good taste to become more white-haired, drawn and wrinkly, his stress related red-nosed rosacia at critical mass by the time he left office, and even Reagan allowed a few strands of grey to populate his pumpkin near the end. But Bush looks like nothing so much as the social director on a western-themed Carnival cruise – browned and cheerful and always up for a game of horseshoes, a bike ride or a spot of enthusiastic brush clearing before lunch.
(Hoary though the analogy may be, one cannot help but look forward to what a future White House attic excavation will reveal in the way of Dorian Grey style portraiture of one of its former residents…)
Not that the Chief Executive/First freelancer doesn’t deserve a little r n' r – and not to suggest that many White House duties don’t simply shift to the Crawford Texas ranch location, where the President is regularly briefed and even shows up at occasional ditch-side press conferences, (likely more than he holds when in Washington, the Oval Office just steps away from his own personal Presidential Podium) passing comment on the news of the day, grimacing at the inevitable numbers of American lives lost in Iraq, the ongoing struggle for democracy and so on and so forth. Too busy though with barbecues and fishing trips and cross country mountain biking jaunts with Lance Armstrong to go further down the road to where another ditch-side dweller has been trying for the past 2 weeks to have a personal word with the President about her own dead American; a son killed in the war recently re-christened the ‘Struggle Against Global Extremism’.
(N.B.: no matter the fancy names you tart it up with, you don’t have to be a suicide in Seattle to recognize a truth that doesn’t change.)
Close (geographically) as the President is to Cindy Sheehan, the mother of one of the nation’s distressingly regular military sacrifices, Bush has announced he will not meet with her; that though he “feels her pain”, he also feels he must “get on with his life” – a reply so breathtakingly, obliviously self-serving that one just has to marvel again at the elevated-to-an-art-form brand of remote indifference that has typified so much of his presidency.
The mother though – the mother refuses to pack in her protest, gaining attention, and, as at a recent nationally organized vigil in support of her desire to get answers to questions surrounding the legitimacy of the war into which she delivered her late son, maybe as many as 100,000 adherents to her cause.
Mrs. Sheehan has become the flashpoint for a citizen’s anti-war movement, until now too sloppy and sketchily conceived to provide much of a voice. But now with the support of Moveon.org – the Michael Moore sponsored anti-Bush political action web site – a citizen with a righteous pedigree (born at the soldier’s death of son Casey) has been able to transform a shaky band of protesters into a united group with a legitimate figure to coalesce behind.
Bush the man may be quietly ignoring her presence, but Bush the president has fallen back on some traditional methods, involving some key thugs to send his real message; the conservative ‘Move America Forward’ group is organizing Bush support in the form of a “You Don’t Speak For Me Cindy!” protest scheduled to head out soon from San Francisco, culminating in a drum roll conclusion at a rally out front of the Presidential compound in Crawford.
(Shades of the Swift Boat Veterans who went on the attack against Democratic hopeful and war hero Senator John Kerry with a slick and cynical well-crafted vengeance during the election... )
The President needs support to protect him from a grieving mother?
The fact that a number of mothers of dead soldiers are throwing their weight behind continued support of the war in Iraq conjures a number of sickly sadistic images – just picture the inevitable confrontation in Crawford: placard-carrying mothers of the glorious dead from both sides of the issue attacking each other on the side of the road outside the President’s ranch. Screaming, spitting, breast beating and t-shirt rending?
Stomach churning enough for you?
The President and his advisors may have made a tactical error, underestimating the power of legitimate protest and the disgust many may feel for a strategy designed and executed not to oust a worthy competitor, but to shut up a grief-stricken parent.
‘Move America Forward’ has already begun a whisper campaign, branding Mrs. Sheehan as everything from a lunatic co-opted by the liberals, to a vampire exploiting her son’s death purely for the attention and political points. (‘War Mother’s Syndrome by proxy’?)
Rove may have fatally misfired this time.
Far from being the five week (five! week!) vacation in paradise Bush had planned, the temperature may soon be rising somewhere more reminiscent of a toasty Toronto-style Holiday in Hell.
Could something actually change? Could this creepy miscalculation, when added to the America’s steadily decreasing support for the President and the war finally get through to the man himself?
Could the heat wave finally end?
Hey! I’m starting to feel better already.
Cool.

President Hottie

2005-08-04T12:17:00.000-04:00

I don’t understand – I’ve been scanning the newspapers, listening in on talk radio and – yes, okay, but just a little bit – checking out CNN.
As far as I can tell, nobody’s talking about the top story.
My girlfriend called yesterday morning at precisely 8:01 am.
I was already sitting by the phone and wondering whether it would be appropriate to call before 8:15 (our usual approximate time of early morning contact) or whether I should just watch the moments tick by.
She may have preempted the call, but I got the first words in.
“Did you see him last night?” I enquired breathlessly. “Oh. My. God!” (Let me assure you I don’t normally speak like a stereotypical, vocab-challenged Valley Girl, but the events of the previous evening were still fresh and practically ringing (no – singing!) in my ears. I haven’t been this excited since Sephora opened at the Toronto Eaton Center – or even since my gorgeous ex came up from
New York to take me to a birthday dinner. Mrrrowww!.)
“I know,” she replied quietly. “I’ve been thinking of you. I know how much this means to you.”
We both let a moment of silence pass; the impact of Wednesday night’s announcement heralded an unspoken agreement to reflect the gravitas of the situation with a respectful quiet.
But how long could we keep our emotions in check?
“YaHOOOOOO!” she shrieked.
“WaHOOOOO!” I joined in. “Joe Biden for President? Tell me I’m not dreaming!”
It’s true. Wednesday night, Senator Joseph Biden, (D. Delaware and totally fab) announced his intention to run for President in 2008. He made his announcement (as I believe we can now expect all future important Democrat-type announcements to be made) on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Not the first – that would be John Edwards last year, the inaugural announcement maker – but as far as I’m concerned, the best, and for all I care, the last.
Joe Biden. A glamour boy intellectual: the most influential, experienced and respected voice of centrist reason in the Senate. Not to mention a total babe.
And then it got ever-so-slightly better: Biden suggested he’d be interested in sharing a ticket featuring Senator John McCain (R. Arizona – and like, totally heroic) creating the first viable non-partisan ticket in memory.
I was practically salivating. Okay, I was drooling. A little. This has been my dream ticket since last year’s ‘coma couple’ Kerry and Edwards had their asses (and essentially ours) handed to them in the 2004 election.
My friend was acting pretty het up too. If you’d told either of us a couple of years ago that we’d be giggling and sighing and ooh-ing and ah-ing over the possibilities concerning the future of two (relatively) old white guys, we’d have laughed in your face, and drooled not a drop. Not that we haven’t been deeply interested and vocal over the doings down south - but times have changed
and we along with them.
The events of the past five years have demonstrated in a way the history books will be unlikely to fully capture, the frightening (not to mention bitterly divided) state of the union. Not only have we experienced war and terrorism and hate and prejudice and constitutional issues concerning the overriding of amendments II, IIII, VI and VIII, (and possibly X and XIV as well) in addition to the thoroughly disquieting attempts by the President and his closest cronies to more fully link the church with the State, but we’ve witnessed the soft and hard abuses of power of Presidential power as well. The most recent abuse the completely legal - though ethically indefensible - Recess Appointment by the President of John Bolton as Ambassador to the UN.
The breathtaking contempt with which the President clearly views the UN, the rest of the world and in effect his own Senate, by appointing this nightmare of negativism would be bad enough, but he compounds his disdain by misstating both the reasons for waiting until the Recess and the purpose of the requests for further information the Democrats put forth. What the President was implying in refusing to supply the requested documentation was that they (the Democrats) didn’t
really want it - they were just persecuting a defenseless Bolton and employing unnecessary delaying tactics – and that anyway, the documents were far too sensitive to be seen by committee members.
Committee members, Biden was quick to remind the Daily Show audience, whose experience of the information in question, was likely far superior to that of Bush and his nominee.
(From Biden’s bio on http://biden.senate.gov/...
“For three decades, Joe Biden has played a pivotal role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. He has become respected at home and abroad for his well-informed, common-sense approach to International relations. Since 1997, Biden has served as either Chairman or Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he has worked on a bipartisan basis with the top Republican members. Senator Richard Lugar, who currently chairs the committee, said: "Senator Biden has a very strong commitment to a bipartisan foreign policy and serves as a good example for everyone in Congress. He has a very broad, comprehensive view of the world. He’s a good listener, but he’s also a strong and effective advocate of his position."
As Biden said the other night on Jon, the information they were asking for concerned vital details of Bolton’s communications around issues of arms proliferation - specifically WMD ‘proof’ he passed on despite vocal disagreement from experts who seriously questioned its veracity - communications whose positive nature may have played an important role in the rush to war.)
Biden’s been in government since he was 29; coming up on his 63rd birthday, the lawyer from Delaware is the fifth youngest person ever to hold Senate office. His experience and the esteem with which he is held probably explains his appointments to the (amongst others) Senate Steering and Coordination Committee, as Co-Chair of the NATO Observer Group, the Senate National Security Working Group, as Vice-Chair of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and as Member of the Congressional Air Force Caucus, the National Guard Caucus, the Congressional Port Security Caucus, and the Senate Biotechnology Caucus. He’s also the Co-Chair of the International Anti-Piracy Caucus – just one more example of Biden’s dedication to protecting Americans on land, in air and even on the high seas. Yo ho ho!
What I’m saying - and could it be any more obvious – is that the potential now exists for America to be led by an experienced, articulate, intelligent, funny, subtle, insightful, GORGEOUS leader. A guy unafraid of the possibilities of a non-partisan co-leadership, taking a strong and informed stand on the realities of war, the profound importance of education, health care, the environment, crime, punishment and looking gooooooood!
He intends to begin the process in the short term by traveling around, gauging possible interest and raising political money. For the long term, it will be an all out campaign to tempt McCain away from the dark side. A little experience of piracy may well come in handy…
Get excited. I see a change a coming – and it not only eases my fears, it’s easy on the eyes.