a world gone mad

human beings are strange creatures. there i said it.

but still i am constantly surprised at people's lack of tolerance, the ability to dehumanize others until they are nothing but stripped-down labels and expectations, and all the ways that humans secretly hate each other because they have been conditioned to do so. and that there is not a moment for everyone when they can see with their own eyes, hearts, and brains, that most of what THEY have been telling you your entire life is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT PURE GRADE BULLSHITE.

i am lucky enough to live in a small universe made up of people whose eyes/hearts/brains are attuned to view the constructs of popular culture for what they are: templates designed by and for a very white, very rich, very conservative, classist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, and so on, demographic.

so it should be no surprise that so many of the humans i love best on the planet are people that by no means fit the mold of what we have been told we are supposed to be: we are not the demographic that TV wants to reveal.

i live in a beautifully crafted universe where not everyone looks the same, where not everyone eats the same way, where people like to have sex in different ways and with different types of people and with creativity and kink and power and equality, where to be a man doesn't only mean one thing and to be a woman doesn't only mean one thing, and to be in between or to go back and forth between two notions is just fine. is normal. is great.

where to be fat doesn't necessarily mean to be lazy or indulgent. where feminism isn't a dirty word and where people, by and large, try their best to be inclusive and full of empathy and interested in the rich, vast tapestry and potential that can abound in the human experience.

but. so.

there is a human i know whom i love beyond possible articulation. they are intelligent, sensitive, funny, generous, full of life, full of energy and dynamism and charm, creative, powerful, strong, wise, and SO ON. point blank: an awesome, awesome human whom i constantly feel lucky to know and who affirms to me some of the basest feelings of friendship, kinship, and relationship.

they have a blog called DON'T MIND IF I DO on tumblr. have a wee look here:

http://queerfathungry.tumblr.com/post/772737804/ice-cream-with-gummi-bears-in-it-and-one-super

it has to do with not having to apologize for being fat, for liking food, for ENJOYING food, for all of the above, and creating a space that represents their particular brand of being.

the ethos of the blog, along with the fabulous photography and glorious food and all-around life-affirming, positive feeling about the whole thing, resonates with me particularly, because fatness, body image, self-image, self-loathing, shitty relationships with food, and so on, are all things that have been a part of my life for as long as i remember having thoughts. in fact i recently found my first journal, given to me in 1991, on my ninth birthday.

the journal looks like this:


in it i wrote an entry about not wanting to go to a pool party someone was having because i didn't want anyone to see me in a bathing suit. there are entries in my little juvenile scrawl of just lists of things i could do to look more like the way i was apparently supposed to look:

wake up and do push-ups and sit-ups in the morning before school,
say a prayer before bed for my nose to shrink, my teeth to straighten out, my newly-mammoth breasts to shrink, my hair to darken to a nice rustic brown, to curl where once it was straight.

that was the same year i shaved my legs for the first time, to my mother's great disappointment. but i was the only girl in my class with breasts and leg and armpit hair, and the difference between us in pubescent progress was astronomical.

in pictures with my classmates that year i look more like a teacher's assistant than another fifth grader. towering over everyone else, blazingly red hair unruly and flowing down past my ass, massive breasts, hips and ass like the almost-woman that i was soon to be. i was bigger than everyone, different than everyone, the only red-head in the class, and so on.

anyway, the point of all this is to say: THIS SHIT WAS ENTRENCHED IN MY BRAIN so young, it breaks my heart. the feeling that i was just
WRONG
hung around my neck like an iron cape. too chubby, too different, crooked-toothed, redheaded, and later, the realization that i was also
QUEER
to add to the list of ways that i wasn't right.

i have a feminist, awesome, all-powerful, critically thinking, infinitely accepting mother, and my father was a man of incredible perspective, love, and respect and these two people, for all the ways that they created a beautiful, safe, loving universe for my brother and i, for their monitoring of the media we ingested and staunchly limiting the amount of television we watched and so on, and encouraging us to think intelligently and with our own minds about everything,

still couldn't stop my little spongy brain from listening to what pop culture aggressively wanted me to believe was real and unreal, was ok and not ok, was right and wrong. and it has been a deep chord of neuroses for me ever since, one that even now, with my mostly grown-up, educated, critical brain and heart, i still spend every day trying to eradicate in myself.

and today, in a weird and distant turn of fate, someone i vaguely knew, in a different time and place in my life, before the people who i love most on the planet knew what there truly was to know about me, when i was still more or less convinced that to reveal my true self to them would mean certain disaster. that no one would love me if they knew that i had secret eating disorders and some pretty serious depression and anxiety and last but not least that i was secretly queer,

this person whom i knew vaguely in a different life re-posted the below entry from DON'T MIND IF I DO on her own blog with this comment:

"like any self-respecting fashion-magazine-reading straight-girl i feel a little bit bulimic after seeing this picture of a deep-fried mars bar…"

---------------------------------------------

this statement says/implies a veritable miasma of things that i feel are just intrinsically wrong. i keep trying to make lists of my myriad deconstructions of its implications, but what it comes down to basically is just a lot of stupid, ignorant assumptions, prejudices and perpetuations of exactly the kind of mentality that has told me i am somehow wrong for who i am for my entire life.

and i suppose really the whole point of this rant is that it still intrinsically hurts a part of me deep down inside when people say things like the above. when human beings say stupid, narrow, insulting things. it makes me want to take some ropes and tie them up in an uncomfortable chair, and face them towards a black board on which is written their own little golden nugget of shitty observation, and then myself and a team of other interested and qualified parties would deconstruct their statement, stripping it of reason and tact, and revealing to the writer of the words, the thinker of the thoughts, just how wrong in every way they really are.

but i've been writing this, ranting about this, for more than an hour now, and as i sit in the slowly rising pile of dust left from churning all this stuff up, the emotion i'm left with is no longer vengeance or rage or shock or horror. instead, it's just plain old gratitude.

that shitty comment about that wondrous blog is like an embodiment of exactly what i have spent 28 years figuring out is wrong for me. in one poorly composed swoop her statement showed me how lucky i am to know so many humans on this planet who don't share those shitty sentiments. who 'get it', so to speak.

she doesn't get it. i imagine the writer of that shitty comment sitting down at her desk to draft a universal telegram, a communication to be dispatched to the very farthest reaches of space, time and existence, as the summation of her experience as a human being. i feel one hundred percent confident that it would read:

EVERYTHING I EVER SAW ON TELEVISION WAS ABSOLUTELY TRUE.

welcome back

well it's been a while. this is the way it goes with me. i have journals from when i was twelve years old with enormous gaps in time and history and each entry begins with a lament on my sporadic writing. some things never change.

drove out to the airport tonight to pick up a lovely friend. they were just back from the femme conference in oakland, and we had a very lively ride home on the empty freeways and overpasses, full of stories and anecdotes and secrets and escandalos. i wished i'd had a cigarette to smoke while i waited but i am doing my best not to smoke so much anymore. i have whittled it down to about 20 cigarettes a week, which still seems like a lot when i write the number 20, but seems like nothing when i consider what i was smoking, about 50. i lost an entire packet of cigarettes the other day after only smoking one, and rather than taking it as a sign to stop forever, i bought a new pack ten minutes after realizing i lost the old one. so i suppose the battle is not entirely won.

the wee kitty babies had their reproductive parts snipped out last week and i have been watching closely for any changes in them personally and there are none. I don't know exactly what sort of change i was expecting. they both have strange incisions and bald patches now, and are safe from deformed brother-sister babies. we don't have any need for that kind of action up in here.



a couple of months ago my mother shipped all eight boxes of my worldly possessions to me from bc to toronto and in those boxes, among other things, were my beloved vcr and collection of vhs movies. i love the vhs, and not because it's hip to like retro technology, but because it's just so fucking durable. i'm much better suited to cellphones like zach morris's on saved by the bell, vhs tapes--boxed up in hard plastic and incredibly hard to ruin, and boom boxes with big knobs and buttons than the tiny, complicated, infinitely delicate technologies of today. i break things, i lose things, i drop things. a lot.

also i worked a thrift store for two years that sold vhs tapes for 3 dollars and i got a 50 percent discount. so there you have it.

and yesterday i watched, for probably the twenty-fifth time, ferris beuller's day off. it's one of those movies i can remember the first time i watched, and quotes from it often make their way into my every day conversation, gems such as:

'bueller... bueller... bueller...'
'you want a gummy bear? they've been in my pocket so they're real warm and soft.'

and so on.

but the scene that tops it all off for me is the parade in the city, when ferris gets on the german float and sings twist and shout, and the german floozies on the float are dancing, and the soul brothers and sisters do their routine on the steps, and the crowd all harmonizes the chorus in a great, uplifting, sweeping crescendo. i got fucking goosebumps! sometimes john hughes really knew what he was doing.




adieu.

drumming with a paintbrush: always a good/bad sign.

i've got a friend who's a drummer. she's not professional, but she's very rhythmic.

i'm full of red wine and energy drinks and beer and diet cola and cak (sic) and various potato bi-products and the like. in short, wasted. what're you gonna do, judge me?!

anyway.

it dawns on me tonight, on the birthday of one of my nearest and dearests, that i am infinitely lucky. i have friends who tease me and know me very well. friends who call me on my shit and applaud my ridiculousness. it's a good life, all told.

the lover sleeps in the next room. the night is wild.

as usual, our street is full of riff-raff and malcontent. i call it the intersection of screaming women, where we live, mostly affectionately. there tends to be much unrest.

i'm writing a story about sadness and grief and depression and self-destruction and love and lust and all the rest. and so i'm thinking a lot about all those things.

and then i spend an evening with some peeps that truly redeem every cynicism i have about the human race. i have known them all since i was basically a child. i have grown up in front of them and shed some baby fat and gained some adult baggage and through all the worst periods of my evolution they have stuck there; hilarious, intelligent, brazen, dynamic; i love them like i love my mother and my brother.

and my father, who is dead.

this post didn't start out being about death but on this night i feel i must address a certain terrible happening in my neck of the woods. this terrible happening is the awful event of willful suicide in a human being.

in the last year i have been connected, however removedly, from no less than three cases of suicide. one of my nearest and dearests, one of my favorite souls on this planet, lost a mother to a case of suicide last summer. all of a sudden, there she was with all that reckoning, and here she is now, 10 months later, still reckoning.

there is a friend on the west coast who lost a nearest and dearest (not one of my own) to an overdose of opiates and alcohol. the girl who died was bi-polar by nature and troubled at heart, and now she's dead.

and tonight, a friend i've known for 10 years and counting, was here in the wake of the suicide of one of her childhood besties.

and i don't know. i'm sorry. i don't want to be a downer. but fuck it, sometimes things are a fucking goddamned downer.

there is great sadness around. it creeps up on the faces of our nearest and dearest's and the best we can do is be there to witness it. Most of the people in my living room tonight bore witness to my father's diagnosis with the Big C and the following four years of his slow and drawn-out, painful death.

and so it goes.

five people left my apartment tonight about whom i can say the following, honestly: know me, accept me, love me. '

it's pretty good, no?

this from people who've seen me at the depths of despair. when my every moment was filled with wondering if that would be the day he would die; when every phonecall was a possible deathtoll.

and on the day it happened, i watched the movie NAPOLEAN DYNAMITE with 3 of the souls here tonight. and halfway through the screening my phone rang and it was my mother telling me the nurses at the hospices were saying he (my dad) could go at any time. in the lobby of the cinema i laughed gregariously into the phone. the nurses had been saying that for weeks and his death just never came. i went back in to watch the movie.

afterwards, at sunset, one of the besties drove me westward from the city toward the hospice in the suburbs in her family's red pick-up truck. the sun was golden and calm and we listened to music and smoked cigarettes with the windows wide open.

at the hospice everyone was there. my aunt and uncle--my father's siblings--my cousins and my mother and my brother. my father was calmer than usual, his breathing steadied. we all sat around and spoke in whispers and watched his heaving chest. at 11pm my mother and brother and cousins and i all decided to depart for the night. his brother and sister would stay for the evening shift with him. everyone left so we could say goodbye. he was lucid for the first time in days and days. i went to him and pressed my face against his clammy cheek. he gripped my hand and called my name. he hadn't recognized me, or anyone, in some time. 'i love you,' he said. 'i love you, sweetie pie,' and we both cried. i held him for a long time.

my brother drove my mother home in one car and i drove the other. i blared music from the speakers and smoked cigarettes and sped along the country roads, racing for home.

my brother went out to meet a friend at a pub. i went upstairs to ready for bed. not fifteen minutes passed when the telephone rang and i sat on the edge of the bed, poised and waiting. in another moment, the intercom buzzed and i depressed the speaker. 'you're not going to believe this,' my mother said.

and he was dead.

we drove together back to the hospice at midnight. i searched for music to play but none was appropriate. the moon was full and ripe over the road and we both were mostly silent. there was nothing to say. he was dead.

together my mother and i observed his body. he looked unfathomably small and delicate on the neat white bed. we pulled the sheet back and stared at his naked body. his face was peaceful for the first time in months and months and months. we touched his cooling skin; held our faces against his; said our goodbyes and that was that.

and that was that.

and so, now, in this month of april, in the year two thousand and ten of the christian calendar, after spending a night amongst the people who have seen me to the edges of darkest (in)sanity and drawn me back again. who were there after i saw things i never wanted to see. who held me on nights when his morphine terrors had been particularly bad or my mother's grief was too much for me to bear. these are the folk who poured my whiskey's and rolled my joints on the darkest nights and days.



but so it goes.

i'm very happy now.

but even in my very grateful acknowledgement that the days have brightened and i am

finally

fine again,


i feel compelled to pay a respect to the friends i know that have had people close to them die this year.

it's never going to be easy, and it's never going to be ok, but even so,

baby,

it gets easier with time.

you should drink your coffee here:

this is the bellevue. it sits, appropriately, at the corner of bellevue and nassau streets in kensington market. apparently many other business have held reign at this location in the past, and apparently when these three guys leased it for their own purposes, it was little more than a flat white box.

now inside it's warm, cozy, made of wood; there are baked goods, there are hot sandwiches, breakfast; there is fresh warm pie with cream; there are french pressed batches of what they affectionately call 'cowboy coffee', for its dark, thick, strength and potency. there are also any number of foamy espresso drinks crafted meticulously by the tall drink of water counterman; sugary treats, a lite-brite, a typewriter, and cds for sale. there is just the right amount of hot steam in the place so that the windows get a bit fogged up but not too much.

soon, there will also be booze and music and nighttime fun.

for now, they are waiting for you from:
8-5 on wednesdays and thursdays and
8-6 on friday, saturday and sunday.

if you're anywhere nearby anytime soon, you should really go.

just another sunday afternoon at the office

with my headphones on and the volume loud i hardly notice the commotion out on the street until it must have been in full tilt for some minutes, because the noise of the yelling and carrying on finally got so loud that i took out my earbuds and had a look out the open second floor window of my little office.

up the street about 50 feet on the other side of traffic from our house, a long, thin woman with scraggling fake long yellow-blonde hair was hunched over screaming herself hoarse against the pane of a basement window. i squinted to see past the sun and could make out just a fragment of a pale soft male inner forearm and heel of hand of the person the blonde beanpole was spitting venom at on the other side of the glass. he was gesturing. possibly lewdly.

what ever it was he gesticulated made the woman on the street catapult up and out in an all-out explosion of hair and hands on the ends of raving arms and legs akimbo and purse and bags flying out then in again. she leaned in real close to the window. the man inside must have moved back some because i could no longer see any hint of skin there through the reflection.

“No!” the woman screamed. “You don’t FUCK me, force me to SUCK your DICK, then toss me out like i’m your GODDAMNED FUCKING WHORE.”

She collected her things from the pavement and began to stalk off the side of the curb, still screaming as she crossed the street through heavy, fast moving traffic. She turned back with a final venomous burst to leave him, and the rest of us on the street, with these words hanging strange and ugly before us for the rest of the afternoon.

“YOU have FUCKED with the wrong fucking BITCH, my FRIEND.”