My “pen name” is now generally known at work, where I came out of the closet as a writer by sharing some stories and zines. A few of my co-workers – not surprisingly as this is life, after all – are also involved in the arts in various capacities. Writing, or music, or what have you.We were receptive to each other’s extracurricular activities and traded notes.
I got sweaty-palmed anyway and for one day I took this site offline, intending to purge it of all work-related content. It’s one thing to know that your co-worker is a poet, or an underground radio host, or a stripper on the side. But on this site I reveal a lot more that can be used against me, I think.
Then I looked at the scope of what I’ve written and work talk is everywhere. I got really lazy, basically. I’ve left everything as-is. Hopefully I can trust my colleagues, should they stumble across this hot mess. And hopefully I will become less divisive when it comes to my arbitrary and delusional “this is real life (writing)” VS “this is FAKE life (working)” dichotomy.
Plus, all names and locations have been changed, edited, or otherwise half-arsedly disguised. To protect the innocent!
Hunter4086 will be offline for a few days! It will appear to be “private” but this is not the case.
morning
Sometimes in the mornings I wake up for work very early, and R is still too much asleep to manage a goodbye when I leave. On many days our schedules line up so we can manage coffee together, the percolator fizzing on the stove and releasing a succulent caffeinated scent that props the eyes open. Our semi-coherent morning conversations are about dreams just ended or the books we fell asleep reading. Such mornings mean a lot to me because I easily feel isolated and disoriented with no one to talk to, which is most mornings and days. Having a boyfriend helps me stay rooted in the present, even though sometimes it is also a burden, this having-someone.
On alone-mornings I climb into the cycling gear needed to keep me dry/illuminated/warm, eat a half-assed breakfast, dash on some lipstick to feel dressed-up although it will be licked off by the time I navigate traffic and arrive at work. I dream my way through the faked urban wilderness of the Greenway, swerve around slow-moving buses on Commercial Drive and envy the few people I see populating the JJ Bean at 6 in the morning, absorbed in books or papers and warmly getting caffeinated behind windows dripping with condensation. I hang counter-intuitive rights that go contrary to the bike lane and so earn me some honks – but the buttonhooks conveniently lead me into the heart of Vancouver’s shit district, the downtowneastside – all one breathless word of paranoid projection and cliche. Where I do have to dodge minivans, SUVs, a gamut of family vehicles driven by furtive men with their hoods pulled up, suburban family men with a need/taste for winter a.m. prostitutes in clonky Payless boots, crack acne, thin jeans caked around thin thighs and a harsh, begging glow in their eyes.
And I arrive on time, with 15 or 10 minutes to spare but no one notices or says hello. I just take up my post: 4th floor, a quarter-acre of hallway and bathrooms and a smoking room and 1 weak library conisting of Danielle Steels and cowboy westerns that smell like mould. As a housekeeper I am not one of the ‘looked-at’ woman of society, I am the ‘back-drop’ person, someone who is invisible until something isn’t done. Someone who doesn’t take it personally when residents piss with the door open, piss on the floor, spill their coffees as they race up the stores in a jacked-up delirium; they ash their endless cigarettes all over the floor with a demented-offended “Fuck YOU” if you say anything.
And I ride through the dark streets with the city neon providing more illumination than any threat of dawn. It’s still dark and I am going to work at a ‘casual’ job. that is, a position that belongs to someone else and I’m just making ends meet while they go on holiday or call in real- or fake-sick. And my own impulse to write-off the day is very strong. I would like to call in sick and be drunk by 8 am on mimosas, or some other acceptable morning beverage at a breakfast dive, as I write in my notebook. I’d like to read my book for an uninteruppted 3 hour span with my coffee getting cold beside me. Wouldn’t we all?
There is something threatening about the touch of dawn on the massed-but-not-yet-bleeding rainclouds. In the morning I am always reminded of a loneliness that I’ve always felt haunted by, a feeling that threatens to shout gangway and trample my head. A creeping, sneaking loneliness, and it’s nothing so eloquent as ‘solitude.’
in the neighborhood
Usually I bring lunch from home but lately I’ve been eating vietnamese sandwiches at a nearby dive run by a friendly mother-dad-and-kid team. Tofu, daikon, cilantro and hot peppers on a crusty Parisienne bun, a nod to imperialism, but so tasty. Eaten at the window, looking out at pigeons squabbling over some dropped crusts or, one day, a whole apple pie. The things you find on the ground in this neighborhood are strange.
One of the best florists I know of turns out to be in a shop I thought was abandoned. The lady inside wears a scarf and gloves against the cold, weaving exotic flowers into large bouquets for $10. She also sells limp silk plants and wreaths for funerals or restaurant openings.
If I didn’t see them in the daytime when things are bustling, I’d assume half the storefronts in the DTES are abandoned. At night the grocery stores roll all their displays off the sidewalks and park them in the aisles. The noodle houses, clothing stores, Chinese bakeries and take-away joints pull down the shutters, which have been tagged with graffitti and rusted by rain. Many are out of business, but dirty windows and litter piling up outside don’t necessarily indicate this state.
work
So I have a real job. Real as in regular. Real as in benefits. Not so regular that I’ll go crazy and quit, but a guaranteed income. It’s with the same sprawling organization I already work for, but with a department that is almost completely self-contained, so hopefully I will be provided with escape from the scullery gossip and pettiness that plagues my current environment. But who am I kidding? Gossip and pettiness are part and parcel of every job on Earth.
I’ll be a support worker at a women’s shelter. “Support” is an encompassing term, embracing ‘advocacy’ but not excluding ‘crisis resolution’ or ‘cleaning up vomit, piss, trash, and needles.’
love in the time of cholesterol
Imperceptibly, the time has come where I’m worrying less about appearances and more about arteries. All the cake, cookies and sweet things R. eats have to be going somewhere. It’s nowhere on his lean frame. I sit on the bed sometimes and watch him going through his morning routine of stretches, sit-ups, and push-ups. When he twists sideways I’m alarmed at the bladelike span of his torso. Especially in contrast to me.
Are his arteries crusting over with a fine sugar-glaze? Is the propulsion of blood through his veins becoming syrupy? I am somehow reassured by my own irrepressible body fat. At least my gustatory indulgences show up for roll call.
“You should start going for an annual physical, or something,” I told him. “Blood pressure, cholesteral.” He looked over and responded “Yeah? Maybe,” and for a moment we stared at each other, the first hint of mid-life entering into the context of things like a falling leaf.
“This is the human heart!” I exclaim to myself.
It looks so small! The specimen floats in a disc filled with preservation fluid, hanging on the wall like a clock.
I pictured a more vigorous red hue. This heart is anticlimactic: a tepid brownish-gray.
This small bit of flesh and gristle is the poetic source of so much emotion? Looking at this heart the supposition of romance, torment, passion, longing – they all seem far-fetched. They seem like products of wishful thinking, not biological possibility.
I look at the heart for a long time. I can’t imagine it beating steadily as an engine, capable of keeping the human animal alive for close to a century, moving us through our rote days and wild veerings, indifferently nourishing both idealistic exertions and self-abuse.
The room is filled with displays of other body parts. Livers, lungs, kidneys, brains and bones are on display. Some indicate disease like cancer, cirrhosis, or aneurysm. Many indicate the crimes that felled their host animals. Stab wounds, bullet holes. Helpful tags indicate what striations in pickled organs are the result of kill-force trauma. Entry wounds and exit wounds are indicated in cross-sections of flesh.
There is even a fetus, curled like a comma, suspended in embalming fluid like a bug in amber. It was found in the woods of a local university campus.
There are autopsy tables in the room still, canted at efficient angles toward stainless steel drainage sinks. The tables are cold metal islands, incongruous on heritage tiled floors. Everything gleams a hopeless gray in the winter light filtering through the skylights. There are no windows.
Everything that is inside of us is hanging on the walls here! The hidden bits, more vital than our hair and eyes and everything we can look at and take for granted and become inured to.
Perversely, seeing all these bits and pieces of bodies makes me want to laugh. There’s actually no mystery. There’s only engineering, not art. Being inside this room is like reading a tell-all book of magicians’ secrets.
On the wall, this inscription: Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.
“This is the place where death rejoices to help those who live.”
the new fancy
Now I don't have to ride my touring bike everywhere! I'm back to buzzing like a bee with my IRD single speed freewheel.
Finally I have a picture of my Christmas gift, although this background and that clump of wet…toilet paper?…is very unstylish. I call it Huxtable, after Claire Huxtable. It’s a Kona Roundabout. What an appropriate name for a commuter bike!
When I was out of town for a few days R built this all up for me, and it was posing in the living room when I came back.
The bicycle is not exactly stock, as R harvested many valuable parts from my demolished Sekine: fenders, Sturmey-Archer drum brake wheels, dynamo lights, single speed free wheel, the Portland Design works leather grips we got at the factory when we were in Portland, and my nicely ass-grooved Brooks B17 saddle. And as a present-within-a-present he installed the subtle bling of a Cane Creek 110 headset which took some riding all over town to pin down, I gather.
It was especially nice of R to do this for me since I destroyed my other commuter by crashing into him and taking us both down (to the delight of passing traffic, I’m sure).
the waking dream
I have a terrible job.
If you ever find yourself wrist-deep in dirty suds, or wrangling bloody bedsheets, or picking up used syringes with old sugar-tongs, then you might just come to this same conclusion.
When I look in the classifieds for new jobs, I am only eligible for the terrible ones. The ones that read “will train,” “good English an asset,” or “start tonight!”
I don’t know how this happened. I know exactly how this happened. I am a sleepwalker in my own life.
Normal avenues of escape seem inhospitable even though they offer obvious comforts. By rote, I still work on upgrading so I might apply to college in the spring. My enthusiasm for this ebbs and flows. I don’t know if I am up to 3 years of intense study and expectation and debt. But I want more from myself. I don’t want everything to hinge on my writerly leaning. I might write 300 words in a day. 100 words. Sometimes I don’t write at all, fed up with myself. In my own skin, I often feel like I have no place to go.
What I identify as right now is not on the radar of anywhere. Rejection letters. Or worse yet, not sending out anything at all. The world seems far away and I don’t feel like part of it. I can’t picture anyone reading my stories. Nodding their heads. This month I’ve broken up more arguments over what to watch in the TV lounge than I’ve written stories.
Lately I’ve walking to work. It takes an hour. I jog part of the way and walk some of it. Usually I get there with a half hour to spare, just at sun rise.
I’ve been parking my ass in the 24-hour cafe across the street, diligently writing in my current wirebound notebook.
(I fill up three or four of these a year. Hilroys, $1.49 at the drugstore. They look like shit from being carried around; all their pages falling out and the covers peeling. There is nothing to distinguish one from another. No dates or even linear page sequencing. )
I have lots of good ideas when I’m walking. I often smile to myself and mutter sentences, practicing them and memorizing.
At the cafe I’m surrounded by free papers, already smudged and with crumbs in them. Well-dressed people and vagrants. People sit staring straight ahead. Bums doze over small paper cups of coffee, sacrificing $2 in begged change in exhange for this warm space. Construction workers sit on the curb outside waiting for their rides. They look cold.
I write, poorly, feeling squeezed by the longhand of the clock as it creeps closer to the hour when I am expected elsewhere.
I am desperate to squeeze in a semblance of productivity before I go to work. It helps me feel less bad about what I do for a living, if what I do on the page is OK. Am I a “writer”? Or am I “‘Hunter’, in the kitchen” or “the lady who cleans the floors”? I am a background person. The residents ask my name all the time, not remembering me whenever I switch roles.
I have coffee with my coworkers every day. No one knows I write stories. How or why would this come up? Conversation is fueled by gossip and TV reality shows and diets, or is impossible due to language barriers, except for smiles and gestures.
I am a background person. I don’t mind being a background person. You can see a lot. But it bothers me. Stupid people end up in the background, getting smiled in their role of wallpaper for others’ better lives. I am getting older! I work with women who are doing my job, who are 20 and 30 years older and still doing this job! I haven’t made any friends. I work alone mostly, and bristle in turn with anarchistic thoughts and longings for unproblematic comfort.
In the evenings my feet hurt. My shoulders ache. I am a labourer whose feet hurt. I am not a writer. It is a fucking ridiculous enterprise. It feels presumptuous. Presuming on what or whom, I don’t know. The universe laughs and so do I – but I wonder what it’s all for. Where does strength to fail come from? The endurance to succeed? It’s the same place, probably.
“cocksucker”
Today I broke up a fist fight between two of the residents. It was a slow-motion arthritic fist fight, and one man was sitting down, and the other man only had use of one arm, but still.
“Behave yourselves!” I said to them, dismayed at the slow grappling. I pushed them apart and they separated like staticky towels. I pointed to the standing-up man. “Sir, walk away. “
“He started it!” he exclaimed furiously, and resumed his weak pummeling.
“Cocksucker!” the seated man laughed, not noticing the blows.
“Sir, do shut up,” I told him. I held a tray between them until the blows tapered off and security helped them away.
I hear “cocksucker” so many times a day at this place it makes me sick. Seriously, there’s nothing more obscene than hearing people screaming “cocksucker” first thing in the fucking morning. Cocksucker if someone cuts in line, cocksucker if the pop machine eats a quarter, cocksucker if it’s pancakes for breakfast and not sausage. Cocksucker this, cocksucker that. For the love of God.
empties
Christmas Day is a good day for getting away with things. R and I took advantage of the quiet to explore a few abandoned buildings in our neighborhood.
One, a 1940s-era home slated for destruction – we are fascinated by this phenomena, in Vancouver and presumably everywhere, of old-fashioned bungalows being bulldozed to make way for giant, ill-constructed, fake-stuccoed outsized homesteads. Contracting companies replace the efficient Craftsman-style constructs (that comfortably housed lifetimes’-worth of families in their happinesses and sorrows) for larger, shoddier, more ‘well-appointed’ homes, of a quality destined to dissolve in these rainy elements like sugarcubes in 20, 30 years.
A $1,000,000 pending tear-down in Vancouver
An abandoned house goes through stages:
The For Sale sign comes down. Any trees (for they must be retained – there are bylaws) are cordoned off by plastic orange fences. The house is disconnected from the grid. (A tangle of electrical cable dangling from the roof.) A “Will Build to Suit” sign goes up for any one of umpteen building contractors. Scrappers gain entry to take out all of the copper, making holes in the wall and dismantling the plumbing and appliances. The contracting company has swampers empty the house of any leftover furniture and trash and throw it all in the backyard. This action makes the yard a sort of waste-nexus for the area. Old mattresses and other bulky items of garbage begin to appear, tossed into the mix by neighbors. Everything will eventually be cleared away before the house is razed. In this market, razing happens usually before a squat occurs or very many windows are broken and the facade tagged with grafitti. One morning bulldozers will appear and punch the house over in a flurry of flying shingles and beep-beep-beeps. Within a month or two of being sold (or sometimes just a week), an old house can vanish and the foundations for a new one laid.
And somewhere in the midst of any of this, you can take advanage of a quiet moment to pop inside and look around at everything that isn’t there anymore. The pulled-up flooring, the echoing rooms. The odd litter left behind. We looked at the unexpectedly fine tiling job on the kitchen counters and commented on the tininess of the rooms. Society’s expectations for our homes has changed so much since the trim post-war years.
We then explored the grounds of the former ‘young offender’ prison a few miles away in Burnaby. My breath tightened like a lasso around my lungs at the sight of the tall chainlink and mouldering anti-climbing devices that sloped over the tops of the tall fences. Like with all humans, my fear of being trapped and imprisoned is potent. Barbed wire and iron-barred windows bring out a dizzying sense of claustrophobia and helpless, directionless anger.
We climbed a gate and wedged ourselves through a peeled-back section of fencing. Dormant prickle bushes snagged on our clothes. The ground was richly, wetly mossy. It sank like graveyard soil beneath the feet.
We tramped the untended grounds of a place that is now empty and forlorn but once was an area of concentrated activity. In the stark-treed grounds of the detention centre I was reminded of my emotions when we checked out the old Woodlands asylum, the stub that was left after the fire in 2008 (which even now has been bulldozed, as of a few months ago). Imagining how eternal and relentless these structures must have felt to the inhabitants. No physical way out – only a matter of time, slowly taking it’s toll. Everything closes and moves on, eventually.
Like anything, even cages are temporal, and without care they rapidly are handed over to the diligence of mould and damp. At the empty detention facility a slick of scum was growing against the panels of ‘Securit’-brand shatterproof windows, and the wide lawns were running to seed.
In one area I pressed my faces to murky glass and stared into what was visible of a residential wing. There was writing on some paper that had fallen and was wedged against the glass from the inside. I read it upside down:
“Fuck this place Fuck the world.”
I wondered about whatever “Young Offender” wrote that, and how life was treating him now that his wish was coming true. ‘This place’ was old and abandoned and yes, essentially fucked. And I wondered where Fuck The World was on this Christmas Day however many years after writing his note.
Homes are knocked over and institutions are closed; it’s dizzying to wonder where everyone goes.
Friday night at the supermarket:
“Attention shoppers. The Christmas trees for sale outside are now free. Help yourselves and happy holidays!”
We were there for eggs but we went home with an 8-foot pine tree too. Why not? Better our house than the mulch pit.
It was a lot of tree. Strapped to R’s bike, it looked like a medieval battering ram.
We pushed it up the hill to our house a few kilometers away.
R decapitated the tree, and we set up the top 3 feet in our front window. We put on lights and made some decorations.
“We’re like real people now!” I exclaimed happily, as we drank in our handiwork. An odour evocative of northern forests filled our tiny suite. We haven’t had a tree before. Traditionalist pride swelled in my heart.
Odd how observing conventions can sometimes make me feel like I am on the ‘right track’, that I am not too far gone. But they also have a tendency to feel slippery and false, like singing along to a song where you don’t know all the lyrics.
I suppose the key word is ‘observing’ the holidays – watching and thinking and not being carried along by traditionalist impulses to the point of stress. Instead, take what joys one can from the fallout of the ‘season’… such as it is.
obligatory ‘sorry i’m stealing this’ corner: image courtesy of r’s flickr
the runs
I’ve started running. This isn’t the first time. I’ve frequently “started running”, in my life.
A couple of years ago I belonged to the local branch of the Hash House Harriers. It lasted until I busted my shoulder in an unrelated activity and then decided not to go back, figuring if I wanted to drink beer while listening to older men talk in double entendres I’d go to a family reunion or something.
Other times I started running out of sheer muscular ennui. Bored and antsy, a primeval part of my brain would shout for fresh air and movement. Silly brain! I’d lull it back to complacency with liberal servings of Crush cream soda while reading novels with my feet up. Eventually I’d begrudge myself a few miles of lunging movement, awkwardly executed.
And ‘executed’ is the right word, because I never stuck with it long enough to develop a lasting habit.
Then I got a bike. I immediately became more active. The trade-off was that covering any ground a-foot became a tedious chore. I became the cycling equivalent of the person who drives to the corner store. I ride my bike anywhere that’s more than 100 metres away.
Bike riding is exercise, yeah, but it’s not as engaging as running. I know this is a fact, because even though I’ve come a long way since being 250 pounds when my main physical activity was biting my fingernails, I still am wary of undisguised exercise. I try not to do it. And that is definitely one of the definitions of ‘running’: undisguised exercise. It’s just you and your feet. You can’t ever coast along, looking down and admiring the sunlight glinting off your steel steed that’s bearing the brunt of the work. And even when you’re biking hard, or long, it’s not the same sort of all-body involvement. Or even body awareness: I’ve ridden my bike with one hand while eating pizza with the other – runners don’t do that shit! At least it doesn’t occur to me to do that, while running. I’m too busy.
But as I get older I am noticing something creepy. I am getting tired of expecting the minimum from myself. I am tired of my shit status quo. “Not actively sick? Feelin’ pretty OK? Well! You go, girl.” (Note: I have never actually uttered ‘you go, girl’ either mentally or out loud).
So I’ve been upping the ante on myself. Cutting out drinking so much (ie. not every damn day – shit, when did that happen!?). Working harder on submitting stories instead of just letting them sit in the limbo of my drafts file. Actively seeking knowledge instead of being such a superstitious ass.
I’m stuck being myself. There is no escape. I’m tired of such a notion distressing me. I want to run away from the knowledge that ‘this is it.’ And running has been an obvious start.
laundry mark
Folding things, I get pissed off looking at the Hill House laundry mark that’s been stamped on by some other staff member: crooked and put down any old place, even right in the middle of a sheet or pillow case sometimes. It looks clumsy and institutional. Bright red ink reminding people that not even their pillows belong to them. Might as well stamp NUTHATCH all over everything. That shit should be discreet. On the hem near the tag is a good place to put it.
itemization
it puts the lotion on it's skin...
There is sorrow and hilarity in the items kept on the staff table in the housekeeping room.
Individual servings of “Truffle Pig” chocolates, half-filled in sweepstakes forms, the free paper folded open to the horoscopes page. Used-up pens, used-up chapstick, old mysterious keys.
Lots of lotion: an industrial-sized vat of St. Ives – I left that there, having learned quickly what a day spent folding linens and towels will do to the hands. There is also a pathological little bottle of something pink called “Sheer Seduction” that Kringle must have left. Just add sweat and Clorox and it smells like her.
Housekeepers never evoke ‘seductive’ anything.
On the wall calendar the days are marked, not with any special events or birthdays like a home calendar, but instead with the dates when the Ecolab formula in the wash machines was changed, and reminders to check the “Premium-Scented Linen Fragrance Blocks” that clip into each dryer. We used Premium-Scented Linen Fragrance Blocks to make everything static-free and smelling good – ‘Tropical Breeze’.
