Moments of clarity can be heartbreaking. Life with the veil off, reality as refined and resonant as jarred crystal. Moments when you can see the verge the mundane teeters on. A vision of glory, a glimpse that is quickly folded back into the immense design of things.
First time awareness of something better: boring school days, helping ‘Sister Conchetta’ fold smocks in the creepy chaple anteroom, chalk dust in my nose, the smell of old incense like alcohol bitters, the sub-audible drone of halted time you find in churches. But outside the tiny window: hot yellow sunlight on the laurel leaves. A quality of light more heavy than gold.
It happens often, it’s always welcome, but as time goes on it seems harder to hang onto the feeling, that comforting sense of removal. More recently: Boxing Day, the Burrard Street Bridge, looking up at a cloud of birds, really seeing them. Sparrows like the scrawled Ms children draw, black forks against a sky white with cold.
Are humans even part of the greater plan? It’s been the off-hand moments in nature that makes eternity seem benevolent instead of a doom: the energy, hopes, loves, dreams and good intentions of humanity already being submerged and drowned as time rolls forward unconcerned.
Rather than endure the simple motivations of the self-based organism I’d rather inhabit those rare moments of expansion even at the cost of self, that tedium of self. The eternal quest for the next small pleasure, the next good feeling, the next sweet flavour. The blessing of comfort and ease also sounds a death knell, softened, a blow against cotton. I could be better utilized elsewhere but how and where? Angels guard drunks and children. The universe rewards the brave. But there is no guarantee of protection. People can go their whole lives buried.
As kids we have no choice. We are forced to do everything.
Later, we do have a choice. We can fail. We flirt with inaction. It becomes our lover and our friend, our savior. But then after many refusals have saved us from many indignities we begin to suffer the accumulation of our losses: Because we were saved the indignity of filling out a form and sitting in an anteroom and being gazed at with cold, dispassionate judgment, because we were spared the discomfort of competition with others, because we were allowed to hang back while others suffered the indignities of competition and judgment, we found ourselves one day without recommendations of any kind, without certificates, without awards, without credits, without a plan.
-carey tennis
My teeth are killing me. My mouth is swollen, my head aches, and everything tastes shitty. I’ve been trying to scorch them into submission by drinking lots of hot stuff. It feels soothing, but is probably only making them madder.
This morning I tried to eat a bowl of cereal and it hurt, like crunching through a bowl of broken ceiling plaster. Mostly what I’ve been eating are the over-ripe bananas at work, where we’re kindly provided with snacky things to keep us going, like fruit. Alongside the kiwis, which no one ever wants, the bananas sit neglected, beginning to freckle.
“I don’t want those things smelling up my office like a dang kindergarten,” says one girl in Sales (who otherwise happily eats everything, including burnt toast with butter spread as thick as icing. It’s fascinating to watch her in action). This objection to composting banana odour seems to be the general rule. I basically have all the bananas to myself. They’re approaching the “baby food that you peel” stage.
Four wisdom teeth trying to quit this bitch. Blegh. I’m scheduled for their extraction in two weeks and this time I’ll keep the appointment. In the past, my teeth have always felt fine by the time the appointed date drew near and I’d jam out. The human body easily dismisses pain once it’s not hurting any more, and voluntary surgery when nothing feels wrong never topped my to-do list. The chunky deductible was also a deterrent. In any case, this time I’ll man up to flavour and set them free. They want out of the fang gang? Fine. We can roll without those nerds.
Are my wisdom teeth giving up the ghost because I didn’t provide them with all the smarty input they need to stay sated? Did I spend one too many afternoons sitting in the sun with a doctored Slurpee and Daphne du Maurier when what they craved was black coffee, a dim study carrel and Spinoza?
The New Year is off to a layabout start. Slept in til noon, not for any recovery purposes (celebrations last night were low-key) but out of sheer surrender. I woke up every hour or so with a vague feeling of ambition that couldn’t coalesce around anything of the worldly realm. There was also the disheartening sound of heavy rain falling on the roof, a thudding as portentous as nails being driven into a coffin.
There’s a burden in my psyche somewhere. I haven’t been depressed in a long, long time and I don’t remember if this is how it goes. I feel functional and useful, just thoroughly sick of operating for the continued momentum of the organism known as Hunter.
In any case, sleep seemed the friendliest option for the day.
Since important transitory passages were self-imposed mid-year or so, I thought I’ve been being careful about my life choices. Not trying to fall into habits that depress me. I hope that’s not what’s happening. Hopefully it’s a one-off deal. For now I’ll blame New Year’s melancholy overlapped with pending birthday melancholy…too many mortal reminders in one fell swoop.
Miscellaneous observations to follow below.
*
Already I have regrets: This will be year 2 of missing the polar bear swim at English Bay, so I guess officially I can’t include this in my mental roster of Things I Like to Do anymore. Too bad, because nothing makes things feel as newly minted as finding yourself in over your head in the icy ocean, eyes open in a subaquatic netherworld where detail stands out clear as something preserved under glass.
Outside: clouds of sparrows standing in the trees are shrieking, happy with the rainbath.
Inside: there’s inobtrusive bits of evidence that I am not the only one using this living space: a stack of text books, a package of wet, grape-flavoured gum drying on the counter (it went through a jeans pocket in the wash). Odd bachelor-ish groceries in the fridge, like deli coleslaw, canned protein shakes, and a pink carton of Dairyland. The container advertises a contest (‘must drink more to WIN!’), a kitschy incentive that strikes me as more suited to pop or juice than something so utilitarian as milk. These belong to my brother who is prematurely back from traveling and until he is settled he’s been intermittently couch-surfing at my apartment.
Misgivings: My personal leave ends this weekend and on Monday it’s business as usual. I am returning to work at my job of shipping and receiving, and forlornly tinkering with simple electronics. Random dream from my lazy-ass sleep: upon my return to work, my new duties involve all of the above, plus keeping the tide out of the building. For some reason we are now located on the ocean’s edge and encroaching seawater is proving to be a hell of an issue. It’s coming in under the doors and compromsing the foundations. I’m given gumboots and sandbags and told to do my best…
Random memory from the distant past: I used to live on a fairly rural island. No pavement, no water, no electricity. The roads were sandy gravel. Like all vehicles there, our small truck rapidly fell prey to sand. It clogged the filters and dusted the seats and clung to the exterior like dirty paint. Was it sand that caused the old tape-deck to jam, trapping a cassette of Beck’s “Odelay” inside? That thing played for years whenever the engine was running. You couldn’t turn it off. The eject button didn’t work. We were resigned to the backdrop of Beck’s hip, nonsensical deadpan playing at mid-volume whenever we ran errands. Odelay, Odelay, Odelay! To this day, ‘Devil’s Haircut’ still has the potential to drive me to a cackling mess in 3 seconds. One day we were waiting at the dock for the water taxi, mid-winter and the engine running so the bird wouldn’t keel over with cold. Suddenly, for the first time in years, “Odelay” stopped. With a small gasp the player ejected it. Instantly, my partner opened the door and hurled “Odelay” into the ocean. I don’t think we even interuppted our conversation. It just seemed natural.
To-get list:
new gym shoes
a calendar
pomelo
prescription-strength monocle
image: the white cosmonaut by jeremy geddes
“Where does the difference between the past and the future come from? The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future. Yet there is a big difference between the past and the future in ordinary life.
You may see a cup fall off of a table and break into pieces on the floor. But you will never see the cup gather itself back together and jump back on the table.”
Stephen Hawking.
What countermagic can undo the snare
Which has stopped the season in its tracks
And suspended all that might occur?
-Sylvia Plath, ‘Prologue to Spring’
This time of year can be exhausting. Not “I just boxed 10 rounds against a kangaroo” exhausting, but exhausting in a creeping sort of way, like invisible gas seeping under the door from the neighbor across the hall who has his head in the oven and the dials cranked. Headachey and weary and a little dizzy and you can’t pin-point why.
Ohh God. Sylvia Plath and gassing yourself all in the same breath. Too much? I can’t tell anymore. My blood sugar is so effed from low-end chocolate I have lost all gauge of tastefulness.
I am leaving this in because I am a bad person and I feel I try and hide this fact too strenuously. It’s time to put it out there and maybe that way it can be conquered. Expose the full extent of my sophomoric wit to the universe, maybe it can dry out to something sweeter like grapes in the sun. Grace is only a tattered rag I pull around myself with conscious effort.
This week between Christmas and New Year is just a phone-in for most people. As a result, not much of interest is going on, in terms of innovation. In popular media we’re inundated with best-of lists and “end-of-year roundups” and other such tedious filler. At workplaces everywhere, skeleton crews are running the show. If you need any sort of bureaucratic call-and-response, if you need an answer, you won’t be getting satisfaction until January 4 at best.
Curse the New Year, and all the accompanying “this-time-I-mean-it” gamut of resolutions and good intentions. If only the New Year inspired a self-revelatory process more involved than “Diet starts Monday!” You suck, I suck, the whole world sucks and we don’t even know why. Joing the gym is not going to help.
I didn’t join in family celebrations this Christmas. A refreshing first. It would have involved some travel, and ostensibly I am still “recovering” from my operation. So I played that card, although secretly I am feeling super-duper. I had a great time instead with my friends. Beach walks, bike rides, and sunshiney deserted cityscapes versus…gloom and madness!
My family is mostly matriarchal, but not in any wholesome way; boiled down, it is really just a bunch of Judeo-Christian witches who have driven their menfolk either to drink or the grave with their unceasing lunatic shenanigans. My brothers ventured up, more fools they. Upon their return they dropped in at my place for coffee and a visit, as unkempt and breathless as two tourists pulled from a den of rabid lions. They report the usual gamut of missed ferry sailings, incessant nagging, the unending barrage of advice for clean living, and (insult to injury) nothing to eat that any normal person would enjoy but only a surplus of dinner mints, frozen heels of bread and Lean Cusines. They also brought me a tawdry bounty of chocolate. Every aunt far and wide sent down chocolatey things, and my mother and gran sent boxes of it. Rotundness is the rule rather the exception in my family, and my effort to maintain some semblance of trimness is a source of comedy for them.
Hunter: It’s like giving an alcoholic a barrrel of rum. I can’t keep
this in my house. Why does everyone wish to destroy me???
Brother: God, get over yourself. Chocolate is everywhere this time of year and they just need to get rid of the extra.
Other brother: God, they’re just trying to be nice.
I already Zip-locked up grab-bags of Black Magic, Russell Stover and After Eights and left them on Dumpsters in the neighborhood for the numerous bums who collect cans first thing in the morning. Out of sight, out of mind and best of all, out of gullet.
from ‘the Rut’
To all outward appearances, Debbie was just another housewife who put up with more shit than many women would. She drove an ancient station wagon that coughed blue smoke and had fake wood panelling, bought off-brand soup by the caseload from Wal-Mart, and kept house for a husband who refused to go outside, not even to water the lawn, which was scorched white. She was about 20 years older than me and favoured dirty angora sweaters with sequinned appliques and had a gigantic dyed-blonde bun that was always coming loose.
In the manner of rural comunities, she became a friend on the basis of proximity moreso than commonality. Her crumbling brick two-story was next to ours on a quiet street that was otherwise occupied by families and one centenarian shut-in. Through a quirk of 1920s-era zoning, our houses were much too close together, separated by only a sliver of a breezeway. I was sure she could hear us arguing.
On the first day of our acquaintance she asked me to help her get some stones out of her car. Normally her husband would assist with this much, she explained, but at the moment her garage was full of bottles so she’d been forced to park in the driveway, and it was too exposed for him.
“Wow, what are these for?” I asked, lugging boulders of a strange waxy substance up her stairs.
“Soapstone,” she said. “I have plans for them.”
“Oh, OK.” Each stone probably weighed 30 pounds. Whatever her plan was, it would be an ambitious undertaking.
We had coffee that day and several times after on her screened-in front porch. This was Debbie’s personal zone, a no-man’s land between indoors and out where she could relax out of range of her husband’s claimed territory but still technically be enjoying the domestic comforts. She clipped coupons here, and painted her toes, watched Judge Judy on the small TV, and puffed on thin lady-like joints.
It was pleasant to visit her, but also strange. I didn’t know what Debbie’s deal was and how they both managed to get by. Nothing I knew about her could account for her always-accessible good cheer. She seemed content with her lot, and happy self-containment fizzed from some mysterious internal acquifer.
Despite the mildew smell of her home and her assortment of extravagantly fake jeweled rings, she probably thought I was the dubious one. I sensed in her a diffident sort of hyper-awareness of what people were really all about. I felt my front of confidence, designed to deflect the concern of family and friends, did not actually have her fooled for a minute, so I was grateful another trait of hers was a vast and happy indifference to the external world. She took things as they came and didn’t ask me very many personal questions. Instead, she was content with gossip.
“Hey!” she said about a week after the stone moving. “I finished some bears. Want to see?”
“OK,” I said, not sure what to expect. I prepared myself for whatever a woman in a cat sweatshirt with rhinestone eyes could be about to show me.
“Brad?” she called into the house. “We’re coming in!”
We went through the narrow rooms to the kitchen. Brad was no where to be seen, but many scuptures were. And some paintings. In fact, the house was laden with art and it turned out all of it was Debbie’s. Nothing looked arranged or permanent. It all had the air of freight waiting to be moved.
Debbie was part Coast-Salish and she was interested, it turned out, in traditional nature art. There were carved otters, eagles and whales captured painstakingly, frozen in stone in an otherwise organic-seeming undulation of motion. The bears she was talking about turned out to be a cluster of grizzlies, each boulder transformed into a slump-shouldered ursus arctos horribilis reaching out his claws towards invisible prey. The waxy texture of the rock had been polished to a pristine and glossy finish, like ice.
The sheer physical fact of those slabs’ rapid transformation shocked me. To me, art was hemming and hawing. Having secret works in progress, indefinitely. My own inclination was to idealize concepts into inaccessibility. I overthought bits of inspiration until they lost their pliability, and became too important to be touched. Grand visions sat in my brain like inexcisable tumours.
It seemed remarkable to know a woman of a completely different sort. We had just been watching a gameshow together, an activity that always made me restless and aware of time being lost to me forever with an almost audible rushing sound, like a sucking chest wound. And now with no fuss or fanfare it turned out she was actually a prolific and talented artist. To me, watching Bob Barker work a screaming studio audience was a form of chosen torture. I doubted my own creativity. And I was lazy, sensing the hard work that would be required for the excavation process. So I drowned motivation in such masochistic inanities as television and obsessive housekeeping. Fuck writing; if there was any gunk around the sink or the rug wasn’t spotless then no one would like me enough to indulge me the time and space I needed to pursue more esoteric things. Between work and my superficial preoccupations, I hardly ever got anything done.
Debbie didn’t entertain such convolutions of spirit. She simply worked because she enjoyed it. Bob Barker was a spot of leisure for her, not a tormenting devil. Some morning laziness was her due right after untold hours of hard work.
“These are all sold already,” she explained. “I’ve got deals with galleries in Whistler, Germany, the States. You name it! I keep really busy. It’s a couple in Osoyoos that are waiting for the bears.”
Of the artists I was acqauinted with, I was accustomed to a different sort of behaviour than Debbie’s unassuming productivity. The ones I knew had something to prove. They took pleasure in the indulgences society affords artists, or our notion of them: they put on airs, were evasive, and liked flaunting their unconventionality, and fell all over themselves talking about how they felt and how they saw things. Actual production seemed incidental.
With Debbie this was reversed. She never talked about her projects. She seemed untormented, and she also did amazing work. At that stage in my life, this combination was food for thought and went a long way towards defusing the artist mystique perpetuated as a comfort bubble by thwarted creative types.
(Today Debbie has her own successful gallery and mentors local carvers, in addition to maintaining an annual production that can be measured both in beauty and sheer volume. But her husband Brad has yet to leave the house.)
*bear image: Desire by DeeDee Cheriel
He hates conventionality or so he says. He says he doesn’t live for comfort. But like anyone, even geniuses, there is a routine to his thoughts; he expects certain graces. A comfort zone, and a reliance on small indulgences.
There is a thread to his thinking that I can see but he doesn’t know it’s there. He would deny it, and say I am seeing something of my own design. By this implying I am attempting to corral the wildness of his thoughts, feeling my conventionality challenged.
That sort of accusation just sounds like an easy way to wiggle out of something, so usually I don’t say anything. Instead, I just begin to wait for the visit to be over.
Actually, I don’t find his thoughts wild or unconventional in substance, but his surety astounds me. His theories themselves bore me and even though I can’t follow everything he says, under all the frosting his words seem like more reactionary mumbo jumbo. I know that after the _____ complaint will come the ____ complaint. His voice is querelous, demanding and absorbed. He will not endure any interupption, any attempt to short-circuit the rill of scorn flowing from him in predictable if wide-ranging patterns.
He is obsessed by disordered aggregates of minutiae and they are the realest things to him. Being sick allows him a zone to elaborate on these unchallenged. Nothing else is to be expected from him. In illness he has the luxury of fleshing out his own stasis, like he is terraforming an atmosphere that can sustain only one.
Several decadent pounds of chocolate were recently rescued from a neighborhood Dumpster by some enterprising citizens, alerted to the crime-in-progress by the glitter of foil under streetlights as umpteen boxes of Turtles, amoungst other sweet eatables, were unceremoniously heaved off the stoop by a bored store employee.
The recovered chocolates are all of brands normally
considered ‘desirable’ by consumers.
“I was only following instructions,” the staff member claims upon questioning. “I guess you get so used to food just laying around that when they tell you it’s no good, or it’s damaged, you just start to believe them.” The employee also blames his apparent indifference to the chocolates’ plight by recalling a time in which he was almost shit-canned when security cameras caught him pocketing a handful of salted almonds from a broken box in the loading bay. “There’s a zero-tolerance policy in effect for staff attempting the rescue of any items that have been slated for disposal. ‘Just keep your nose clean and look the other way’ they tell us. They say we’re lucky to have the 20% staff discount.”
The recently expired, bashed or otherwise ‘defective’ confections will now enjoy a natural lifespan including being eaten at midnight, as meal replacements, and in moments of repose, in addition to being foisted off on strangers and friends who may themselves be experiencing a chocolate deficit in these recessionary times.
Observers estimate the street value of this sweet score to run between $50 to $80.
A woman in Starbucks is holding up the line. It’s lunch time on a weekday and the soberly-suited executive types of the downtown core want their caffeine fix. The woman is taking her time with the unselfconsciousness of the very wealthy. She is allowing her daughter time to choose.
I look at the girl, about 11, already so confident with in the world of business transactions. Today hot chocolate made to order, tomorrow: executive takeovers. She is claiming her due in irrevocable increments, already unruffled and blonde and serene in her expectations, somehow bypassing completely the throat-clearing, stringy-haired furtiveness of normal adolescence. Then the line is being processed again at a brisk pace, and a minute later the girl is lapping at a drink topped with a puff of cream and syrup.
It strikes me odd and I’m not sure why. I don’t remember going to cafés with my mother, at least not this sort of café designed as an end in itself. In small-town BC, in the early ’90s at least, cafes were still places of waiting, not luxury. A place to sit until your bus came or a prescription was filled or the bank opened. Or, you were retired or unemployed, and fleshing out the hours of the day with gossip and hot plain coffee. It would not have even occurred to my mother to allow her children to consult the menu. If it seemed necessary to order food, it would be something automatic and stop-gap like a grilled cheese sandwich.
Though it occurs to me places like Starbucks, with the syrupy drinks and heavy handedness with the whipped cream, are well-suited to the taste buds of children, like this girl.
I can’t help but admire the way she is treating the expensive concoction as her due, probably as just another treat in a day of innocuous luxuries. I am not able to recall being to treated to any such things without the nagging reminder overhead of what they cost or of how lucky I was. Or not without a lot of pleading or bargaining on my part, which even at my most childish and greedy I never really had the heart for, because the knowledge of sacrifice on my mother’s part weighed too heavily; there was always too little money. Anything won by pleading would never be savoured, it would be only be swallowed hastily, without pleasure, as if disposing of evidence.
Greed versus expectation. The former is laden with guilt and insatiability, the latter manifests itself confidently, as a matter of course – the so-called laws of attraction never having been disproven. It’s curious how we engineer our personal satisfaction. At 11 it seems this girl has one up on me somehow.
