Another Aporia

Times Ten

2010-10-26T16:21:00.001-03:00

The first time he didn’t know what was important. He waited for the first one to ask the questions and answered them, clarifying when she didn’t understand.

The next time he wrote it all out and sat there, watching the second one as she read it, watching her reaction to each word.

The next time he performed what he had written. Still watching the third one’s reaction beyond the stage he had constructed for the occasion.

The next time he added a soundtrack to the performance, and burned a cd for the fourth one, so that when she listened to it, she would remember the performance.

By the fifth time he was getting tired of it. So he filmed it.

He watched the dvd and cuddled with the sixth one. He just gave copies to the seventh and eighth ones.

He gave his last copy to the ninth one. He didn’t realize until he had already given it to her and was too ashamed to ask for it back. So instead, he asked to watch it with her, and secretly setup a camera behind them to record it off the television screen. When he watched this copy later, the image quality was so poor that he could barely make out what was happening on the screen. Not only that, but he realized the ninth one had talked through the whole thing, critiquing his choice of music, his acting ability, his poor dialogue writing, the amateur scenery... He kept the copy but didn’t show it to anyone.

He shrugged at the tenth one and didn’t say anything so she left.

A Letter from a Fictional Character

2010-02-09T20:48:00.002-04:00

Hey,

Sorry it’s been so long. I have been swamped up here. And yes, that is unusual. Normally I have to find things to do when I come into the office. I drag everything out so that I don’t get more work. I make sure I drink from the smallest mug I could find, and still only fill it half-way so I have an excuse to get up and do something. But lately, the work has just been piling in. So much that I have been staying late at the office, something I have never done since I was actually getting paid to work. In fact, it’s been since we were in college together that I did any work after 5 p.m. Who am I kidding? 4 p.m. But now, Jesus, I can’t keep up. Yeah, yeah, I can hear your smart ass mouth now with some quip about my age, or even better, about my size, about me never really being able to keep up. But it’s worse, not just because I’m older.

What makes it worse is Kylie. I know, this is what you really want to hear about. I can hear you now over a pint as I rattle on about my shaking hands and the pains in my knees and the horrors of old age, I can hear you saying fuck the aging, fuck the work, tell me about the girl. I want to know about this young woman who’s sucking your cock.

Well, let me tell you, I’m no Leonard Cohen. I have no lines of poetry to keep her interested when my dick is soft and it feels like an effort to stay awake in my chair, let alone listen and speak and move around. I know, I know. If you could have a girl like her sharing your retirement castle/cell you’d have no complaints. You’d die a happy man exploding into her orifices, letting her swallow up the last bit of your life. You think it’s just a matter of me always needing something to complain about, something to sigh about.

Maybe you’re right. But every morning when I get up and notice how little hair I have left on my head, surprise myself at how large my belly has actually grown, every time I look in the mirror and see how the darkened skin under my eyes droops, I think that life is shit, no matter who sucks your cock. In fact, I think that it’s only a matter of time before Kylie gets tired of being woken up three times by my futile attempts to piss in the middle of the night, of my inability to stay up past 9:00 p.m., of my ineptitude at everything I can think of... fuck, I’m tired of it, why shouldn’t she be? I’m almost tired of her being around to remind me how far I’ve fallen. Correction, of what I never achieved in my best years. Of how far I have fallen short. Not that she does it on purpose. She never would. Just here being here is enough. It almost makes me want to kick her out and drown in my misery.

Almost.

Anyway, keep dreaming of a 23 year old sneaking into your tiny room at night to help you rediscover you pleasure. Something tells me we are both beyond that discovery.

Reg

Radio on the Way Home

2010-01-29T12:39:00.000-04:00

There’s an image in his head of a blonde haired woman pleading. An antiquated haircut from the early to mid nineties, complete with hairsprayed bangs. A white button up shirt with some kind of fancy black jumper/coverall thing. Either that or a pair of faded jeans and a plaid button up shirt.

It’s the middle of the night, soft lighting. Quiet everywhere else. Dark on the other side of the windows. There is an echo in the house, just before the pleading. An echo of yelling that seems to keep getting smaller and smaller but never goes away.

It’s been a day or a week of arguing with her husband. They are on the edge. The fighting is over. All that’s left is disillusionment. All that’s left is emotional exhaustion. They sit there, like sweaty roman soldiers depicted in an HBO special, staring at the scroll which contained the careful battle plans, the scroll torn and knocked to the floor, stained with wine and piss.

And in that moment she pleads. A simple plea. Something that, in any other circumstance would be the corny, cliché lyric of a pop love song, but in her tired voice, sounds like something else. As if preceded by a cracking, it reveals the something a little deeper inside, a golden chalice or a goo covered bird.

And before his response, it changes to a solitary figure, driving too fast down the highway, unshaven, sunglasses, clenching his jaw.

A Story About a Fan and a Vague Sense of Guilt

2010-01-22T11:31:00.003-04:00

He was going to write something last week. He thought about it Friday morning as he was ploughing through very short stories by Jorge Louis Borges.

He wanted to write something personal but metaphorical.

It started with a sensation. The sticky feeling when he has been sitting in one place to long. As if, what has started out as sweat has begun to evaporate, leaving behind a thick mixture of salt and whatever else is in sweat and only half the water. The stuff that makes a toddler’s hair cling to its head when it gets up from a nap. Or what glues his t-shirt to his back when he deboards a plan after a long flight.

Next was a smell. It isn’t musky because musky reminds him of big male bulls and muscular, dark haired, shirtless men, driving muscle cars, and stopping in a dessert highway to help a beautiful glowing women with shimmering breasts underneath flowing summer dresses. It also isn’t musty because musty reminds him of basements and attics, old books that no one has read for years that might fall apart if he flips the pages too quickly. Closer to musty than musky though.

And the chair. The chair is a black leather recliner. No. A black fake leather recliner. The kind that is comfortable, but that your legs stick to in the summer, the kind you have to peal yourself off to get up. The kind that you imagine a man positioning at exactly the right spot in front of a widescreen television, exactly the right spotto get the most out of a surround sound system.

Which is exactly what this man, this sticky, musty, young man has done. This sticky, musty, young man, losing his red hair before his time. This graduate student, reading Borges (whom he likes, even though he is frustrated with the framing devices in the stories at first, whom he is not sure where to place in the western tradition of thought... “You are uncomfortable when you don’t have things figured out aren’t you?” she says more than asks). Perhaps a wifebeater, boxer shorts, and back socks pulled all the way up is too far, too cliché. But the man is certainly in his boxer shorts. Perhaps wearing an ironic t-shirt. And glasses. Retro glasses that a creepy man in an overcoat might wear, but that this graduate student wears like a hipster lead singer of an indie rock band who is overweight but still attractive because he is the lead singer. It’s not quite clear how the man, a graduate student, can afford even a fake black leather recliner, a widescreen television, and a surround sound system, but those details will come later.

But what is the man doing there? Why does the man stay in the chair so long? Why does the man struggle with the decision of getting up or staying in the chair? Something to do with baseball, he thinks. He likes the idea of writing about baseball, but can never think of a way to incorporate it into a something he is writing. Not that he is writing.

It’s the off-season. The man is a fan (from Japan or Kzakhstan?). The graduate student/fan is waiting for an announcement that he is not sure will ever come. But he waits, so that if it happens, whatever it is, he will know as soon as possible. (“There’s something wrong with you” she says as he checks for the twentieth time to see if the Hall of Fame announcement has been made, partly to see if Andre Dawson, a former Expo, has been elected, but mostly to see if Tim Raines, another former Expo has increased his vote total, making it more likely that he will one day enter the Hall, producing more memorabilia for him to collect).

It’s not the Hall of Fame announcement though. The fan is waiting for a trade. No. A free agent signing. A signing that has been rumoured on the websites he checks on a regular basis. A signing that may well rescue his team from the mediocrity it has suffered for the last five years. A signing, that for him, will be a turning point, not only for his team, but, he imagines, a symbolic turning point for his entire life. Of course, the fan doesn’t admit this extra symbolic significance of the signing. Not even to himself.

The player is a star player. Probably an outfielder. He played on the fan’s favourite team a long time ago. A small market team. And while this star outfielder was on the team, it miraculously won a World Series and competed for several years. Then the star player became a free agent, and the team did not even offer arbitration let alone make a competitive offer. The player left for a bigger market and more money. He first thinks of Ken Griffey Jr., and the way he left Seattle and then returned. Although Griffey was traded, and the Mariners hardly experienced the same kind of fall off this team did. Or Vladimir Guerrero, although the Expos with Guerrero hardly enjoyed the success this team did, and Guerrero never did return. Instead, the Expos left Montreal.

This team began losing it’s star players from its golden era, and began rebuilding. A veteran first baseman with declining numbers and fielding range, a loveable utility player, and an aging relief pitcher is all that remains of those competitive teams. Instead, there is a crop of young stars just starting to blossom, offering exciting possibilities. All they need is some star power, some big threat in the middle of the lineup. The Griffey/Guerrero player.

This player isn’t as likable as either Griffey or Guerrero. Before he left the team, he clashed with the manager, and was benched in September while the team was in a playoff race during the player's last season with the team. This, rationalizes the fan, is because the manager was a dick. And since that manager is no longer with the team, the player will be able to succeed. The fan overooks the fact that, while with the big market team, the player clashed with the manager there, the media, even another star player. At one point he even criticized the big market city and praised his old team's city because they knew how to treat a ballplayer. For the fan, this is simply confirmation that the player belongs on his favourite team. He just doesn’t fit anywhere else. And if it wasn’t for the dick manager the player would have stayed with the team.

But now everything is going to turn around. Everything will start again. A new golden age that will begin as soon as the signing is announced, the signing that has been rumoured for days. The player has hinted that he would love to come back, and the GM had, in a typically and understated manner, said he was looking at all available free agents, especially those with star power. Reporters have been predicting this signing since before the season ended. Twitter posts have speculated about the number of years and money involved, most of them predicting a finalized deal within the week.

So the fan sets up in front of the television, laptop beside him, turns on the sports network, and waits. (“What’s the difference if you find out now or two hours from now or even two weeks from now?” she asks). Of course, it extends longer than the couple of days everyone predicted. And the fan starts to wonder if it is really worth sitting there. He isn’t getting through the Borges as quickly as he should. He really isn’t doing anything but waiting, and it occurs to him, that he doesn’t really need to wait, here in front of the TV. That if he went about his day normally, it really wouldn’t make a difference one way or another. The signing will happen one way or another. The only difference is his current inactivity. Perhaps this occurs to him as he peals his legs off the chair and a quasi-musty smell wafts upward. It’s in thinking about this that we begin to see the symbolic meaning he has given to the signing.

Maybe at one point, because he is reading Borges, the fan tries to imagine that if he dreams it, or concentrates hard enough, it will happen, or he will slip into an alternate universe where it has already happened, where his life has turned around. Or even where the player never left in the first place.

But that seems too pretentious and doesn’t really go anywhere. In fact, none of it really goes anywhere. He still has to deal with the problems of the fan using the bathroom and sleeping and eating. Obviously the fan has to get up to do those things, and doesn’t that undermine the whole image of him feeling stuck in the chair and wondering whether to get up or not? Undermines the feeling of immobility while waiting for something to happen? If the fan gets up to pee and get food and sleep and go to class (since he is a graduate student) where he interacts with other people, he really isn’t immobile is he? He could pretend to be sick for his classes, but it doesn’t solve the other problems. The biggest of which is that the story doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

A week later he thinks of an ending. After drifting off to sleep, imagining a Borgesian alternate dimension, the fan wakes up to find the player has signed with another, mid-level team. It is a big letdown in the end. But by this point, the story seems to have no teeth. No excitement. Nothing. Certainly no reason to write it.

Finally, a vague sense of guilt prompts him to write about thinking about the story.

Pause

2010-01-09T15:50:00.003-04:00

My writing projects don't seem to work so well. But here's another one anyway. A friend of mine and I decided to write something short (minimum five lines) every week. Kind of a back and forth. He is trying to be more ambitious and do it more often. I'll stick to once a week. Here is his first post, and a poorly transcribed poem which I read before writing this.

He sits at the table marking papers feeling vaguely guilty for neglecting to write something yesterday after he promised he would, and vaguely guilty that he doesn’t write anything at all ever, but only vaguely. Certainly not enough to make him pause and contemplate.

In fact, he thinks, as he reads a long, awkward sentence that incoherently talks about the symbolism of telephones, namelessness, perfect families, and lovers, that he has not paused in a long time to consider things. There have been no doctor’s bags or telephones, or letters from distant lovers. Or if there have been, he hasn’t noticed them. Or if he has noticed them, he has pushed them quickly aside in order to evaluate how well a paper supports its claim that Dr. Seuss books subtly reinforce particular left-wing ideologies.

The vague sense of guilt quickly morphs into a sort of panic as he crosses out an unnecessary and inaccurate generalization about the role of women in “olden times.” If he does not write now, how will he ever write? If he does not stop to contemplate, how will he have anything to write?

Of course, he does not take time to answer these questions. The questions aren’t even articulated clearly in his mind. They float around, unattached to words in a balloon of panic that grows in his head like a blood clot while he tries, instead, to articulate the problems with discussing the relationship between the novel and life as it really was in the 1930s without referring to any historical sources.

Theorize This

2009-06-22T22:33:00.004-03:00

Don't think because I haven't been writing I have figured it out. I haven't. Not even close.

After an agonizing process of waiting, reconsidering and negotiating, I am doing my PhD in English in Upper Canada. To prepare, I am brushing up on literary theory and D.

For the summer, then, I will be giving myself assignments and posting them on the blog. Boring literary theory stuff. Take a theory and apply it to something, briefly, in two paragraphs. Expect something by the end of the week.

To James Bladwin (Who’s Dead) While Drinking Garrison Brown and Knob Creek Alone At a Bar After Finishing a Complete Draft of My MA Thesis

2008-11-11T12:32:00.001-04:00

You look at me with wide eyes and raised brow as if I’m the one who is supposed to say something, but of course when I do, you waive your hand as if dismissing your servant, me, your servant, serving your ends, doing your bidding; you send me away, or at least what I say, and stare the other way at the wall, run your tongue over your teeth (I can’t see it, but I can tell by the way your jaw muscles rumble beneath your skin) and take one, deep, exaggerated breath, then turn back to me, your head rolling as if your neck has suddenly gone weak, and give me that same look, the same wide eyes, the same raised brow, as if it’s still my turn to say something.

Liberation Day 2008

2008-03-20T23:31:00.003-03:00

I have been busy working on my thesis. Part of my reading lead me to the following passage from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. In that book he describes his own conversion and participation in a Pentecostal church located in Harlem during the 1930s.

The church was very exciting. It took me a long time to disengage from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to "rock." Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying,as they said, "the Word"--when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs--they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them--and their cries of "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" and "Yes, Lord!" and "Praise His name!" and "Preach it, brother!" sustained and shipped my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar. (p 33-34)

From The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, published by Vintage in 1993

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

2007-09-18T16:55:00.000-03:00

Soundtrack[CLICK HERE]

I have felt the urge to pray lately, stronger than I have for a long time, maybe even since I stopped praying altogether about six years ago.

It happens mostly when I go to bed. I turn off the light and settle in and sudden fear squeezes my insides. The kind of awful fear I imagine you feel when you are slipping off the roof of a tall building.

I am stressed. And anxious. Mostly about school. I’m sure that is a huge part of what I am feeling. The pressure I put on myself to get good grades and to impress (not at all the same thing) is enough to crush me all on its own.

It is more than that though. It’s a kind of self evaluation at the end of the day, in the dark. You are alone, and you are suddenly faced with how you spent your day. And how you are spending your life. And what it all means. And how you really don’t know.

It’s different when you share a bed with someone else. There is a certain comfort when there is someone beside you, true, but it is more than comfort. There is readjusting, fighting over blankets, noises, late night talking and fooling around, all stuff that distracts you from peering into the void of life. Even when you go without someone there for a night or two, even a week, it feels like a pleasant change of pace rather than an absence.

When it’s longer though, when you have to get used to the idea of going to bed alone, the fear becomes more pronounced because you aren’t used to it.

And I’m not used to it. At all.

I resisted praying for the first little bit. I don’t believe in prayer anymore, after all. Don’t know if I even believe in God. So I willed myself not to pray, even though I felt the urge to call out. I squirmed and shifted, trying to wriggle free from the panic, until finally I just went to sleep.

Last night I caved. I prayed for the first time in almost six years.

It wasn’t much of a verbal prayer. All I said in my mind was “God.” And then I just imagined the colours swirling around me, like I used to imagine, diluting the fear just enough to make it bearable, and making me feel a little less lonely.

In the light of day, I still feel the fear, still feel alone, just as I have for the last little while. And I certainly am no more certain about the existence of God than I was before last night. I believe the same things about prayer. In fact, I am tempted to believe last night was all just a construction of my imagination to help me deal with my anxiety.

I have no intentions of praying tonight.

But it will be as hard to resist as a second drink for an alcoholic who has just had his first drink in years.

The Church of George

2007-08-19T21:01:00.001-03:00

(Chain-Chain-Chain, Exercise #41)

I set myself up for big falls with my writing. I thought, ok, I’m going to school in September, and I have three weeks off before then, I can finish a draft of my novel, no problem, right. Well, after being away on vacation and editing what I had already writing, and deciding to experiment with a few different formats, I couldn’t do anything for a week an a half except lay around. So I’m back to the freewriting exercises I should be doing anyway, even though writing at all seems pointless because I feel like I have nothing to write about anymore.

For this exercise, I was supposed to make a list of words, and then use them in the order I wrote them. I started off with the word “heal” instead of the crappy examples the book gave because then I felt it was at least partially related to the novel I’m not writing.

Here are my words and then what I wrote:

heal, preach, bible, tongues, hands, dress, pew, pulpit, microphone, hair, glasses, screen, baptism, choir, chairs, carpet, wallpaper, cross, foyer, offering, envelope, radio, car, heat, sun, suit, crumbs, baby, tie

George didn’t go to church to be healed. He didn’t go to hear someone preach either. Not to learn more about the Bible, not to speak in tongues, not to raise his hands and praise the Lord, nothing like that. He went to see the pretty ladies in their dresses. He found a pew near the back and sat there as early as possible so he could watch them all walk past and his eyes would be at the right level. It wasn’t as exciting once the service got going because everyone was focused forward, looking toward the pulpit, and if George got caught looking around at the women and their dresses someone might find him out. Someone might run up to the front of the church and grab a microphone on stage and tell everyone that he was a pervert who needed to be saved or asked to leave. He looked like a pervert, he thought, because his hair was thinning and he had a pair of cheap glasses that were kept together by a wad of duct tape. Even with those glasses he could n't read the words of the chorus everyone else sang which shone on the screen at the front of the church. So on baptism Sundays, he sat near the front, so he could see all the ladies raised out of the baptismal tank, their dresses clinging to their bodies, revealing the size and shapes of the delicious mounds underneath. He always hoped one of the ladies in the choir with a short skirt would sit with her legs too far apart, but he could never really tell. He imagined crawling underneath the chairs they sat on behind the pastor where he would truly get the view he was searching for. But when the choir was dismissed, and the pastor began to preach, George had nothing to do but stare at the patterns in the carpet and squint his eyes until it looked like an endless pile of women’s breasts, or take off his glasses and stare at the wallpaper where it looked like a woman’s vagina. Coincidently, that spot was right beside a wooden cross mounted on the wall. He always forgot this, and when he noticed, he felt so guilty he had to get up and walk out to the foyer to clear his head. There he could hear the ushers counting the morning’s offering in the church office, opening envelopes and emptying their contents into a big pile. The radio played quietly, some old time gospel songs, while the men told stories and counted. George often thought about leaving, about getting into his car and driving away and never coming back. It would be better for him to suffer there in the heat of his sun warmed car than in the heat of Hell. It would be better for him to burn his suit and never return to this place of temptation than to burn his soul in Hell forever. But there was always something, something other than the ladies that kept him from leaving, something like the crumbs of a baby’s cookies he saw on the foyer carpet. People often came to the foyer with cranky babies to try and quiet them. To help them, he would take off his tie and put it around his head, stick his tongue out and make a funny face. The babies would smile and laugh and the pretty young ladies would thank him, and George would giggle inside and out.

MA3: Back to the Masters

2007-05-24T19:16:00.001-03:00

Andy Connolly has finally found a team.

“It’s been a long , hard fight, but I’m just happy to have a place to play this year,” says the 31-year-old catcher, set to begin next season as the Lakehead Thunderwolves.

It certainly has been a long journey, one that hasn’t quite reached its conclusion yet.

Connolly was drafted in 1994 as a short-stop in the third round. While playing high school ball he demonstrated a great deal of range, a good arm, and an ability to hit consistently, but it didn’t translate well into his professional baseball career.

“He just didn’t have the range to keep up. He looked good in high-school, but when he got around tougher competition, he just fell below the bar,” says one scout.

Not only did his defense not meet the mark, his offence was inconsistent as well, batting .300 in his first two years at BA ball, and then reaching a career high of .360 the following year.
In his final year, however, his average dropped below .300. Not much a problem if you have a bunch of home runs to compensate, but Connolly wasn’t a power hitter.

“I’ve never been the kind of guy who goes up to the plate looking to smash it out of the park,” he says. “I just want to get a base hit and help the team.”

The team released him after his fourth year, but it wasn’t long before Laurier scooped him up to play at the MA level. The team asked him to switch to the outfield, where he would have more time to react to balls hit to him, and still use his above average arm.

The experiment had mixed results.

While his defense improved, his offence didn’t.

“We are looking for players to really show they have something to offer in the big leagues,” says former coach Peter Erb. “Andrew had his moments here, but he just wasn’t consistent enough to put it all together”

After hitting .358 in the first two months of the season, Connolly went for an 0-27 stretch, and saw his average dip to .270.

He hit well enough to raise it back up to .290 in the final month of the season, but it wasn’t enough to change his reputation as a streaky singles hitter, with no power and not enough speed.
It was Don Seamonne, the pitching coach for Laurier, who suggested that Connolly make the move to pitching.

“He had a strong arm, and sometimes, during batting practice, he would pitch. He was just goofing around, but he reached the low 90s on his fastball, and had what could have been a great slider.”

But Laurier didn’t need another pitcher, especially one that was making the switch from the outfield at the MA level.

Connolly had to look for another team.

Goddard decided to give him a shot. Connolly had a 14-10 record with a 4.50 ERA over two years with Goddard, and although he thought he was getting the hang of his slider, and starting to develop a changeup, the team cut him.

He was without a home again.

At that point, Connolly thought his baseball career was finished.

“The pitching thing just didn’t work out for me. I tried coaching, but there isn’t much work for a guy who has a spotty track record in the minors.”

Connolly had to settle for working in the booth, calling minor league games for the HPL radio system. He spent four years doing that, and realized, finally, it wasn’t enough.

“I needed to get back in the game. I missed it. I needed it.”

He started on a rigorous training system that included a brief stint with Dalhousie, to show off his talents. This time he was trying out as a catcher.

“It was my girlfriend’s idea,” he explains. “It lets me use my arm, which everyone has always said is my strength, while allowing me to use what I picked up while pitching. It’s sort of the best of both worlds.”

Connolly performed well during his exhibition stint, but when it came time to make the final cuts, Dalhousie didn’t offer him a contract at the major league level. They didn’t even offer him a minor league contract.

“They said it was just too much of a risk because of my past. That if I ever expected to play in the majors, I had to show I could hit with some consistency.”

So Connolly started looking for a MA team. He finally found a home at Lakehead, an MA team with no major league affiliate.

“A few other teams said maybe, we’ll have to see how things shake out, but they were the only ones who actually offered me a contract.”

It’s hard not to be despondent. After three years already at the MA level, Connolly feels like he’s retracing his steps a little. But at least this time he knows what mistakes to avoid.

“I know a lot more know. I know how to use my swing to make the plays, and I’ve learned how to control the pace of a game behind the plate. I think I can really show people I belong at the major league level.”

Connolly says he knows it won’t be easy, but he’s got strong motivation

“The General Manager at Dalhousie said that if I have a strong showing this year they would take a look at me for their major league team next year. A couple other teams said that as well. So look for me back here soon.”

Fighting for my Academic Life

2007-03-23T10:21:00.000-03:00

I heard back from two Universities (neither positive) so I decided to contact University A, my first choice since I submitted the applications. The Graduate Secretary informed me I was on an unofficial waiting list, but that it was unlikely I would be offered a place because my undergrad marks were pulling my GPA down.

I was disappointed, but Minako and others pushed me to go explain myself. Dr. Sylvester, the person I was hoping to work with and University A. He was very encouraging and directed me to Dr. Trogdor, the Graduate Coordinator of the Department at University A. Trogdor explained that my average made me ineligible for funding from the Faculty of Graduate Studies at University A, meaning the Department would have to fund me instead of funding four other MA students over the next four years, and that was unlikely.

So I called the Faculty of Graduate Studies. They explained that they take the past 20 half credits for my GPA, and that they will go back as far as it takes (i.e. it doesn’t matter that it’s almost ten years ago, and it won’t change ten years from now). However, there is the possibility I could enter as an MA student with the possibility of switching to the PhD program once my GPA climbed high enough.

I contacted Trogdor again and he is brining it to the admissions committee.

Meanwhile, I contacted University B, my second choice, and they gave me the same message: Marks too low. I asked if they would consider admitting me to a qualifying year, and they said they would consider it.

Offers to MA students have been made at both Universities, so enough people would have to decline or the Departments would have to make an exception.

My other options? I could take a year of undergrad classes to raise my average (funded by student loan) and apply once that is done (although that may not play as well with the admissions committees). I could also find an MA program still accepting applicants and go there. Ontario apparently has a lot of money to throw at Grad students.

On top of that, leaving Halifax and Minako suddenly seems like a very very sad thing. I mean, I always knew it would be difficult, but now it seems much more… just worse.

So after a week of going to meetings, making phone calls, pleading for my academic life, feeling rejected, not eating properly, I am taking a mental health day, which is also a day to catch up on the things I have been neglecting.

I am afraid. I am deflated. I am tired. I think I might be getting sick.

A small (big) part of me wonders if I’m trying to do something out of reach.

“…patience, yeah, yeah”

2007-03-08T10:47:00.000-04:00

Soundtrack[CLICK HERE]

I have a friend at work who asks me what’s new every week. Every week I say the same thing. Same old same old. Waiting. For everything.

Waiting to hear back from Universities is a major thing I’m waiting. My future is in the hands of admissions committees around the country.

I have heard back from one university so far (didn’t get in) and it was my safety university (the one you apply to, even though you don’t really like it, because you are sure it’s a slam dunk). They didn’t like my academic background.

And in the meantime I just bide my time. That’s what it feels like.

I suppose, technically, I am not JUST waiting. I am doing things in the meantime. I’m still working on my novel (well, starting again after a marking interlude of a couple of weeks). I even joined a writers group lately. I am TAing a class (thus the marking) But it all feels like different ways to pass the time while I wait.

Because, whether I get into the local school, a further away school, or no school, there will be dramatic changes. I can’t work another year at the McLibrary. I almost applied for lower paying jobs in the library system a couple of weeks ago, but decided to stay. I do, after all, have a trip to England in the summer to pay for, and if I do get into school I will need all the money I can get. So I bide my time.

Wait.

I hate waiting

Academic Anxiety 2

2006-12-11T07:51:00.000-04:00

I took a week of vacation to work on that term paper I mentioned last time.

I may not have mentioned that I think my academic future hangs in the balance. The paper is worth 80% of the mark in the class I am taking. I am taking the class, paying $800 plus, to show that “hey, I can do grad English courses ok, and get a good mark too, who cares that my degree was in Religion and my marks were mediocre, that was then, this is now.” If I get a good mark, I can ask my prof for a reference, and I have a much better chance of getting into the program I want at the school I want (where I am taking the class).

But if I DON’T get a good mark I am pretty much screwed. It will mean I haven’t progressed since my mediocre marks and perhaps I need a little more seasoning in the English department as a special student, paying for classes out of my library workers wage (or generous donations made possible by various relatives), or worse, perhaps I'm just not PhD material.

So, you know, a little bit of pressure. I spent the week not showering until 5pm, reading and reading and reading, pacing and pacing and pacing, staring at Minako when I was too freaked out to write, and finally, finally, FINALLY, getting it done.

Here’s my summary of the paper:

This one poem, by Henry Vaughan, if you look at it, like, as if somebody was just telling you a story about how they got born again or whatever, and you read this stuff written by thsi other guy, William James, to help you understand what happens to somebody when they are, like, born again, then it, like, totally makes sense.

My brain is fried now. But now I have to do Christmas things (like shopping and being social) which, honestly, don’t seem as bad as the paper.

Oh, and I get to wait nervously for the mark. That will be my favouritist part.

Academic Anxiety

2006-11-20T17:06:00.000-04:00

One of the casualties in my blogful neglect has been my manifesto. As you may recall, I started out strong, deciding I needed a new manifesto that I would base upon the principles of love and honesty as I understood them.

But even as I started to work through when and how one should be honest and what that actually meant, I started to feel overwhelmed, and I sort of gave up.

Starting my path back to academics hasn’t helped either. So many philosophers, theologians and other thinkers spend so much time studying what other people have said about these principles (and others) and then spend the rest of their lives working out new thoughts. How could I possible think to come up with even a working manifesto in the face of that? What could I possibly contribute to the discussion when I don’t even know what has already been said?

(When teaching undergrads about the importance of research I liken it to coming into a conversation late: you have to listen a while to find out what other people are saying before you add you thoughts or you risk looking like an obnoxious self-important blowhard).

In the academic world, it means you have to slog through lots and lots of stuff and try to a) find where your thoughts fit and b) make sure you are thinking something other people haven’t already written about. It’s extremely disconcerting and overwhelming. I’ve had to do it recently with a dissertation proposal and a term paper. I enjoy doing the research, and thinking the thoughts, it’s preparing the justification that bothers me.

And I couldn’t do it anymore with the manifesto. It felt amateurish, ignorant and poorly constructed.

That doesn’t mean I’ve given up on love and honesty as good things to strive towards. I’ve just given up nailing down exactly what that means. Maybe later I will pick it up, but for now I’m just going to muddle through in my inconsistent stumbling way, trying to do what seems closest to honesty and love in each situation whenever I remember to think about that.

Hallelujah Update… Finally

2006-10-09T21:54:00.000-03:00

Yeah, so here’s the deal. Trying to balance a lot right now. Not thinking to much about my ethical manifesto. Not spending too much time on personal reflection about my past. Just trying to do the work in front of me. Reading Renaissance Lit. for a class. Preparing applications. Writing my novel. Getting through work at the library. Watching baseball playoffs. So guess what suffered? Yup. The blog.

So here’s what I’m going to do. Little updates. Just tiny snippets. And maybe some deeper reflection down the line. We’ll see. But don’t hold your breath.

In the meantime, Mike Knott has recorded a version of “Hallelujah” and posted it (along with a few other songs, mostly covers) on his myspace site [HERE]

Go [HERE] and [HERE] to see why that is important.

Ode to a Middle Reliever

2006-06-14T16:57:00.000-03:00

Scott Downs had a big future in front of him in 1999. After bouncing around a little in the minors, everyone expected him to be a major league starter, a left handed starter at that. Left handed starters are a little more valuable because they are more rare. Theoretically, it's harder for a left handed hitter to face a left handed pitcher. Something about the arm angle.

Downs was so valuable that the Cubs traded him to Montreal for Rondell White in 2000. Now, White had some injury troubles, but he was still the kind of players who had power, speed, could hit for average and hold his own in the outfield. The Cubs were trying to go for the post-season and Montreal was looking to build for the future. They hadn't had a consistent left handed starter for years.

Unfortunately, Downs didn't fit the bill.

Not long after coming to Montreal, he had injury problems. He didn't pitch for two years, which is an eternity for a young prospect. He bounced back and forth between Montreal and the minors for a little while until Montreal finally released him in 2004.

He had nothing. Some minor league success, but it hadn't translated to major league success. He didn't turn into the left handed power house that people expected him to be. He signed a minor league deal with Toronto, and eventually worked his way into their bullpen. Now he's a middle reliever.

Let me explain. In baseball, there are many types of pitchers.

There is the starting pitcher, the guy who starts the game. A good starting pitcher will go for at least 6 innings in a game (that is called a quality start... anything less than 6 lacks quality...). They get a lot of Innings Pitched, Wins, and if they throw the right kinds of pitches (hard fastballs as opposed to lots of breaking balls), lots of Strikeouts.

There is the closer, the guy who comes in for the last inning or two, usually when their team has a lead of less than 4 runs. In other words, if there is a chance the other team could win it in three at bats, they call the closer. The closer gets Saves.

There is also the setup man, the guy who comes in just before the closer. Often times this is a young guy, chomping at the bit to move into the closer role.

Finally, there is the middle reliever. He's the guy that comes in when the starting pitcher gets injured, or just really sucks out, and it's too soon to bring in the setup-man, or the game isn't worth wasting their time. They are the garbage men of baseball. Middle relievers are guys that aren't good enough to start or close, but are good enough and cheap enough to be a part of the team.

These guys aren't all guys who are "just happy to be there." These are guys, like Scott Downs, who were going to make it big in a world where starters get paid as much as $14 million US to play baseball for half the season, almost $3.5 million a game.

I have seen more Bluejays games lately because I got a new big TV, and it's better watching big baseball than small baseball on my computer. I remember the Rondell White trade. I remember the hope the Expos had for Scott Downs. I remember the disappointment that faded into forgetfulness because of all the other shit that happened with the Expos.

But what about Mr. Downs? I mean, there's a chance he might start a few games for the Jays (he already has started a few games) but he won't replace anybody if everyone is healthy. He doesn't have the stuff to become a closer. He's stuck as a middle reliever. The expectations, the dreams are all gone.

This is part of the reason motivational speakers make me so mad. Dream big and peruse your dream, don't let anything stop you. Well, you know what, sometimes you can't help it, sometimes things stop you and there's nothing you can do.

At the same time, Scotty is pitching in the majors. Sure it's in the role of the garbage man, but still, it's the majors.

I wonder how hard it is to maintain perspective. To accept a lesser role. To accept your limitations, and worse, accept what other people perceive as your limitations, despite trying as hard as you can. How do you do that? How do you lower your expectations and still be happy? How do you settle?

I am worried that I might have to settle. Maybe doing a Phd. is settling. Maybe I will have to settle on the program I pick. Maybe I'll end up settling in the work I do for the rest of my life. And is there really any point of me setting a line that don't want to cross (i.e. working at the library for the rest of my life). All it takes is the mental equivalent of a torn rotator cuff and I'll be looking at a career in the bullpen whether I like it or not.

So right now, Scott Downs is my hero. He blew a couple of games recently. He's stuck in the bullpen. But he's in the majors and, to the media at least, he's happy about that.

I Don't Remember (Exercise #3)

2006-05-18T10:46:00.000-03:00

Companion Exercise to I Remember (Exercise #2)

On a side note, I’ve been terrible at keeping up my freewriting. Get too distracted by my own stress and anxiety about making sure I get interest relief on my massive student loan, what I’m going to do now that my in-between dream job is out of reach, whether I have completely lost my ability to play slo-pitch softball with a bunch of beer gutted alcoholics, and whether I am ever going to figure out how to do the things I think are important without getting distracted. I think I need to do more freewriting.

I don’t remember the peace or the comfort. Not really. There were moments, sure, but they were filled with awe. And when they were over, there was strife and conflict. There was, above all, struggle. What decision to make, how to deal with teenage heartache, what toll my sin would take. Hardly a peace that passeth all understanding.

And what about the loving arms of your church? I don’t remember those either. I felt a part of something bigger than myself, sure. But what part? Don’t give me that shit about all parts being important, or all parts needing each other. I was a part, but a separate part. I felt important. I didn’t feel integrated though.

I don’t remember trusting my church family. I don’t remember feeling like I could tell them anything. Yes, my bug confession to Prime was an important breakthrough, but rather than lead me deep into the arms of your Grace, it lead me away.

I don’t remember the miracles. No healings (really), no windfalls of unexpected money, no unanticipated jobs, no supernatural rescues from disaster.

I don’t remember feel satisfied. There was a continual promise that Revival was coming, that God would use me mightily. The inflated sense of importance. The anticipation of being one step away from something of such magnitude that you held your breath and braced yourself. And like a cartoon, you slowly opened your eyes and relaxed because nothing happened.

Search Your Feelings

2006-05-09T15:48:00.000-03:00

Soundtrack [CLICK HERE]

I had another discussion with the Chicken Lover recently (see here for previous discussion with Chicken Lover). He was saying he wished there was more openness and honesty around our mutual workplace. I disagreed.

I know. Seems to go against my new manifesto right? Well, sort of, but not necessarily.

I suggested that pure, unadulterated honesty was not a good thing, and that people weren’t emotionally stable enough to handle that. For example, I said, if everyone said that (insert random co-worker here) was freakin’ weird and told her that, than how would that be a positive thing.

I actually picked a co-worker who everyone did think was quite weird, and who was clearly emotionally unstable. Not only that, but Chicken Lover has been working with this co-worker with his crackpot new-age theories to help her (hasn’t worked).

Chicken Lover suggested that once that was out in the open, it could be addressed. And that’s more of his crackpot new-agey thinking, that if everyone’s negative feelings towards each other were just voiced, then you can find a way of dealing with them. Wrong. And out of someone else’s mouth, that sounds like a brainwashing threat.

But it does present an interesting conundrum to my manifesto. I really do believe people cannot handle unaltered, pure honesty. Either speaking it or receiving it. It’d be nice, but it just can’t happen.

At the same time, if we wait until everyone around us is enlightened and emotionally stable to be honest and authentic, then we never will be, and people around us won’t learn how to deal with it.

Here’s part one of my solution:

Be honest with yourself first.

No, the Chicken Lover did not get to me. This is not a crack-pot new age theory. Just listen.

For example, I get really annoyed by certain people. But instead of allowing that to float out of my mouth when I experience that annoyance, I should take sometime to think about why I am annoyed. Lot s of times it’s because something else is really, really bothering me and I am ignoring it.

Writing helps me get at these things. Freewrites especially. Lately, when I do the freewrites, I’ve been seeing that it turns into an argument with God, or at least, me yelling at God. Perhaps there are some unresolved issues there, hmm? So, I’m trying to address that. Trying not to ignore it.

Let me tell you, it’s hard to deal with stuff you’d rather ignore. I suppose that goes without saying, but I think it is an important first step in being honest with other people.

Blasphemous Meditations on the Cross

2006-04-30T15:48:00.000-03:00

I went to church on Good Friday. Sat through the Anglican version of the meditations of the cross and left before the service was over. I found the catholic version and rewrote it to reflect my experience.

Guys, guys, what did I do to piss you off? Answer me! I mean, for Christ’s sake, I rescued you from slavery in Egypt and gave you freedom, and what did you do? You freakin nailed me to a cross!

Jeez, you really are a great guy, who has done a lot of great things. I’m really sorry all that happened to you.

You know, after Egypt, I led you around for Forty years protecting you and stuff. I gave you stuff to eat, gave you a nice piece of land, but you still nailed me to a freakin’ cross.

Like I said, I’m really sorry that happened to you, but, well, I wasn’t going to say anything before, but, I wasn’t really around back then when you were rescuing people from Egypt and leading them around a desert. I also wasn’t around when they nailed you to a cross either. I’m not even related to those guys. You know, just so you are aware. I know I don’t do the right things, but, you know, seems like you should be talking to somebody else about this stuff. Don’t get me wrong, you are a really great guy.

What more do you want from me? It’s like, I planted you in a vineyard and you gave me sour grapes and vinegar to drink. And then, after that, you stuck a huge spear in my side.

What more do I want? How about some evidence you are actually there? How about some clear direction about what you want and all that? I mean, Christ, you don’t really think the Bible counts do you? After all that has been through? And how people use it? I mean, come on. Is it any surprise some of us have a little sour grapes? Most of us don’t believe you planted anything, and some of us who do are a little pissed off that your sort of let things go. I mean, isn’t part of gardening taking care of things around the plants? Maybe you should think about what you did that gave you sour grapes and vinegar, hmmm?

I took the people that were your captors and kicked their ass. I mean, I killed all their first born sons, and instead of thanking me, you bring that ass whoopin and put it on me. I mean, I drowned them when they were chasing you, but I made sure that the water was open for you to get across. And as thanks, you cut me open all along the side with a spear. I mean, imagine that, a big freaking spear cutting your side open while you are on a goddamn cross. What in the hell did I do to deserve this.

Look, it was a terrible thing, no question, but as I said before, I wasn’t around. I had nothing to do with it. In fact, if you believe all that shit in the Bible and stuff, you did all this to yourself. Don’t go blaming me. This is your shit. I wasn’t there. I have never been to Egypt or Jerusalem. I live in Canada. So go talk to some people who have been dead for a while. Maybe they have some answers.

I led you around and kept you safe. I mean, I manifested myself as fire and clouds to lead you around. Remember that? But you led me to court to be sentenced to death. I mean, come on, do I deserve that?

Ok, I remember the whole fires and clouds thing. I remember looking at stuff and thinking that I felt you. But it’s not like that was clear at all. Do you think I knew where to go because I stared into a camp fire or a candle? Do you think that I knew what to do because I stared up at the clouds? Do you think I felt safe? Besides, what have I done really? I didn’t do any of the stuff you are talking about.

When you were out there, in the desert, I gave you stuff to eat, and water to drink. But you, well, you gave me that sour wine. And then I made sure there was a way for you to go, and you put a crown of thorns on my head. I mean, I gave you all the power you needed and you stripped away everything I had.

What? Ok, really, fuck you. You have some serious fucking problems. Are you even listening to the things I am saying? Are you going to respond at all? Do you even realize how ridiculous you sound? You gave me power? I don’t feel like I have a whole lot of power. But the worst, I stripped away what you had? How is that even possible? Fuck this, I’m leaving.

Fighting the Insurgence

2006-03-18T12:30:00.000-04:00

For background information on Liberation Day [CLICK HERE]

Yesterday, I decided that if I had a massive hangover today I would start this post by saying that it felt like coalition forces were fighting insurgents in my head. I’m not that hung over, but I didn’t want to waste the line.

Though I feel liberated from the Evangelical church, there are still pockets of insurgents that strive to undermine this liberation. My intelligence can readily identify two of these insurgent cells.

The first is a feeling of emptiness. Being an Evangelical gave me a way of understanding the world and a sense of purpose. When I decided Neither one of those things fit me anymore (or I didn’t fit them) I left. But I didn’t go on to anything. Is till don’t have a comprehensive way of looking at the world, and I find myself torn and uneasy about moral judgements, often waffling because I have no rule by which to judge right or wrong actions. People I know who have left the Evangelical church have found ultra-liberal Christianity, Zen, Paganism and Marxism. When they show their excitement and their love for these new systems, I think it’s cute and endearing (as haughty as that sounds) but also sad and envious. I find it hard to believe in anything except the most basic of principles. Even as I try to develop more (like the honesty thing) I get tripped up by my own thoughts. The insurgents exploit this weakness by planning sneak attacks that suggest perhaps I would have been better off staying an Evangelical, because then I wouldn’t feel this empty.

The Second is a feeling of loneliness. As an Evangelical, the church was like my second family. The people I considered my real friends were there. Older people took me under their wing, younger people looked up to me for advice. When I left, I left most of that behind. I don’t belong to a group anymore. There’s nothing that draws me closer to a group of strangers and gives us reason to meet week after week. The insurgents exploit this weakness by planting bombs of loneliness that explode and make me long for the days when maybe I had more people around to support me, friends who I would see every week.

Liberation Day is the day I strike back. Liberation Day is the day that I remember why I left in the first place, and why my life is better because of it. Part of that celebration is doing things that I considered sin. I used to feel such enormous guilt, particularly about masturbating, not because I thought God would punish me for it, but because I thought it was wrong and that I shouldn’t do it, but I did it anyway.

There is, of course, more than just a lack of cosmic guilt which makes my life better without the Pentecostal Church. This year, I am making an offensive strike against the insurgents and shore up my weakness.

I may struggle with the emptiness I feel as a result of a lack of clear purpose and world view, but I felt empty when I was in the church. At least, unsatisfied. I felt I had to pretend that the ideas and purpose the church gave me was enough and it wasn’t. Now I can explore other things. I can take bits and pieces from here and there to figure out how my life is meaningful. It’s hard, fucking hard, and it makes me not want to try. And when I get bogged down with the mundane pressures and detail of my life, when I feel that everything I do is meaningless, it’s not because I left the church. It’s like an alarm system going off in my brain that indicates I need something more in my life. When I am able to crush the insurgent attack that often accompanies the alarm, I can go about exploring different way of doing more. Finding meaning in my own life. Without the church, my options are so much more wide open, and often more daunting, but I let the excitement of those possibilities be overshadowed too frequently. I need to remember that there is a world of possibilities I can explore.

I don’t have to fit into a group where I feel I don’t belong anymore. That’s what happened in the church. I felt different, and the more my doubts and questions emerged, the more different I felt. Now I am free to explore other relationships with people outside the church boundaries. I haven’t done this well, but the possibility is there. I don’t have to look at non-church friends as people who might go to hell and a symbol of my failings as an Evangelical. My friends aren’t always reliable, aren’t as close as I would like them to be, but what keeps us from being close and reliable isn’t a belief system. I bel3eive there are many obstacles between people. Leaving the Evangelical removes one of them. I need to work on the other obstacles that are my responsibility and accept the obstacles other people struggle with without taking it personally. Going back to the church wouldn’t change that.

How’s that for a Liberation Day “Swarmer” for ya?

I Remember (Exercise #2)

2006-02-12T21:03:00.000-04:00

Begin with the phrase "I remember" and start writing. It doesn't matter whether you stick with one memory or list several. YOu can retrieve memories from as far back as childhood (or past lives!) to as recently as yesterday. If you get stuck just keep repeating the phrase "I remember," in writing, until something else forms in your conciousness. Don't even be conserned with the authenticity of the memory. Just record whatever comes to you. Don't stop until you have filled two pages.

I didn't fill two pages, but some book can't tell me what to do, especially when it has "or past lives" as a suggestion for my free writing exercise followed by a damn exlamation point.

I remember your touch on my forehead, as if someone had licked that one spot and a cold wind blew all over me, making that one spot so cold it burned. I remember the rocking back and forth, waiting for the final push, waiting to be blown over. I remember the thin orange carpet I lay on for hours after the service was long over. I remember getting up as if I had been asleep and slinking away. I remember, while I was down there, mouthing words I didn’t know, feeling as as speaking them any louder would interrupt whatever was happening.

I remember touching someone’s forehead and feeling them wobble. I remember feeling as if you were filling me up and it was spilling out my hand into the other person. I remember feeling as if you got mixed up in my breath, so that when I whispered those words, you travelled out of my mouth on to the other person’s face, like a wave crashing on a shore, and he, like a feeble stick planted in the sand, could not stand, and tumbled into the arms of someone standing behind. I remember covering my mouth, feeling as if I had just been a part of something so holy, so holy.

Manifesto

2006-01-23T22:00:00.000-04:00

Soundtrack[CLICK HERE]

Back in my Christian days, that song by LSU (Mike Knott with an interchangeable backup band) was a favourite of mine. It reiterated how Evangelical Christians gain what they perceive to be some sort of freedom from the shackles of sin, some sort of liberation into God’s grace, only to sacrifice it in order to look good for other Christians. Instead of talking about their faults, their struggles, and their doubts, they hide them away, ashamed and embarrassed by them. Those who don’t hide them are often ostracized.

I preached on this once. I remember doing a sermon on the role of the “watch” from Ezekiel. It was the watch’s responsibility to blow his horn if he saw the enemies coming, so the Israelites could prepare for battle. If he didn’t blow his horn and the camp was slaughtered, the blood was on his head. If he did blow his horn and people ignored it (why would you do that?) then it was their won fault. In the Bible, this is likened to the role of the Prophet, to whom God gives a special vision of the future consequences of certain actions. I likened it to Christians, who I thought had a similar responsibility to spread the good news of atonement to all who had ears to hear.

But it didn’t leave it as a simple “if you don’t tell your friend about Jesus they’ll go to Hell and it will be your fault” message. I admitted how hard it was to share, and how awkward it was. The solution, I thought was for Christians to be honest about their experiences with God. This is extremely hard, so to practice, we should start in the church, where there should be a strong supportive environment.

To illustrate, I took my brothers trumpet and blew. Out came a horrible, awful sound. I didn’t know anything about playing the trumpet, after all. Then my brother played something, and it sounded much better because he had practiced.

As I have explained elsewhere, the entire foundation of my Christianity has deteriorated, leaving me with little to build on. I have the notion that expressing Love to each other, a respectful, empathetic sort of Love, is important. But that feels sort of vague.

I am prepared to reattach another piece, with a few modifications.

I hereby state that I believe open, honest discussion about feelings and experiences are an important part of expressing and receiving the kind of Love. Furthermore, any attempt to shroud or hide this, especially behind a guise of objectivity, damages that expression.

This came up in a debate I was having with Minako recently. I was talking about how I thought news anchors should be free to express their opinion and experiences about whatever new story they were covering, and that to abstain from clearly expressing said opinion/experience is simply expressing it an a more subtle and deceptive way. Minako feels that this is entirely unethical, and that objectivity should be strived for in journalism. As so often happens in debates with Minako, things continued to spiral away from the original topic (Why didn’t the two fictional anchors on Sports Night name the players who they speculated had been traded by the Dodgers in the fictional deadline deal?) and ended with how can I say these things if I don’t follow the news and don’t do anything to back up or support those who agree with me. I was, of course, perturbed by this on many different levels, but it lead me to this addition to my personal manifesto.

First, I firmly believe that it is damn near impossible to escape our subjectivity when talking about a topic. Even if we state something that is a clear, agreed upon, and verifiable fact, the way we state it, the tone of voice, the words we choose, and the order we place the ideas, betray something about how we fell about the fact. Or even worse, is an attempt to fool the other person into believing that you feel a certain way about something when you don’t feel that way at all. Objectivity is the worst impression, in my mind, because it is so razor thin that no one can really achieve it. The laugh of a news anchor, the tone of voice in which he/she reads the intro, the placement of the story in the lineup, even the particular adjective he/she chooses to use, all paint the facts with a certain tint. And if the general masses believe that tint to be Objectivity, then they believe something entirely false.

But beyond news anchors, what responsibility do the rest of us have to tell each other what we honestly think or feel? I mean, is it any of their business anyway? What right do they have to my inner thoughts and feelings about things?

Well, none of course. Which brings me to the clause that I have added to the whole honesty thing: honest acceptance of your failings. You could also word it as “lowered expectations.”

We live in a society where people don’t trust each other, where people too often view each other as enemies, threats, or a means to an end. If someone suddenly spoke in an unrestrained honest manner about everything he/she thought and felt it would be the equivalent of martyrdom. They would be crucified for poor manners, inconsistencies, and anti-socialism. We live in a society that can’t handle the truth about each other.

Brave people can shrug this off and lead a live in which they are completely and brutally honest with everyone they meet. I am not that brave. I am not even half that brave. I suspect most of you aren’t either. But rather than beat myself, and you, up about that, I try to be as honest as I can in every situation I think of it. I try as often as possible to reflect on questions that people ask me and give honest answers when I think they are appropriate. I need to work on phrasing things more accurately, and in taking more time to reflect, but I am working on it. There are also many, many times when I don’t answer honestly, when I say something to gain an advantage over someone, or protect myself, regardless of whether it is an accurate reflection of my own thoughts and feelings. And I am learning to accept that as part of my faults.

I am also writing this blog. I try my hardest to express as clearly and honestly and as possible the things I am thinking and feeling here in this blog, even if it is gross, unpopular, or compromising.

I strongly believe that, as people strive for more honest interactions, we will see each other as human beings, worthy of Love, and able to give Love in return. I may not being saving people from Hell with my brother’s trumpet, or giving editorials about the election results and the state of Canadian politics, but I believe each time I try to punch through the masks with something honest, I make it a little easier for people to Love each other, for me to Love you, and you to Love me.

Fishing

2006-01-10T23:22:00.000-04:00

I still have lots of freewrites from the book, but this is one that just came out tonight.

I don’t like the way you look at me. Out of the corner of your eye, as you walk through the door, rush through the door, through the room. I don’t like the way I want to stop you, to hold you still, to keep you still, until I get my bearings, until we can move in concert, until we can perform the choreography so seamlessly, the audience isn’t sure if we are actually two separate people. I don’t like the way you walk ahead of me, just two steps, and glance back from time to time with an upturned lip and a grunt, as if I were the thing that kept you from going to where you wanted to go, or at least kept you from getting there as fast as you wanted. I don’t like how you try to hold your breath so you don’t make any noise when we are in the dark together, or how, when you can’t hold it any more, you open your mouth as wide as you can and breath as slowly and carefully as you can so that it makes almost no sound. I don’t like how your turn on me when I finally make you too slow, when the hooks I have sent flying toward you finally catch in your skin and dig deep enough that you can’t go forward without ripping your flesh open. You snarl and show your teeth, your eyes wide with rage. You crouch down, threatening to pounce on me, and I have nothing to defend myself except this expensive light weight fishing rod that your dad bought me (which I still don’t know how to use properly). I promise you that I am only a sport fisherman, catch and toss back, just for a moment, just to hold you in my hand and enjoy the catch before I throw you back and cast my line again, hoping you will take my withered and saturated bait, hoping that you will grab hold of my line, hoping that you will come to me when I real it in, struggling just enough to make it fun, to make it seem like a sport, flapping just a little when I hold you in my hand and when I gently remove the hook, maybe even rub salve on the wound so it will heal. I only want to hold you for a little while, before you frantically swim away from me again.

Soundtrack is Now Working Again

2005-12-17T18:27:00.000-04:00

Check out the "Go To Hell" post with the music :)

Dr. Weezie Tagged Me

2005-12-16T10:40:00.000-04:00

Read THIS first. I’ll play along out of a sense of duty, but I’m not tagging anyone else so there.

1. When I am late, I gradually lose my ability to logically and mathematically reason a course of action. If, for example, I miss my bus, I reason that I can catch the next one, or get a cab. And then I think, I can combine the two, get the bus to a certain point and then get a cab, to save money. But I have to get money first, and then I have to walk 15 minutes to catch the bus, and the bus leaves in 13 minutes, but somehow, I think I might be able to make it and still save money, so I walk, sometimes run, not entirely sure of how it will all fit together, but somehow convinced that my moving will bring me closer to getting to work on time.

2. I keep things that I will never use and don't really like because I think it might have value to someone somewhere. Lots of times I try to figure out a way to sell these items, but not always. I'm also happy giving things away to people who will also value them. I just find it very VERY hard to throw things out. It might have a use, value, something that I hadn't considered. And worse, if it's something like underwear, I have to replace it!!!

3. I continually pretend to swing an imaginary baseball bat, or pitch and imaginary ball when I am waiting for something. I do this in malls, at work, in someone's living room, anywhere really. I do different players, trying to figure out how their swing/wind up works. My favourites: Ichiro, Hideo Nomo, Dontrell Willis and Freddy Garcia.

4. I can't just watch a TV show on my own anymore. I have to be doing something else. I usually watch stuff on my computer, so I'm chatting, scowering ebay, reading about the latest baseball trade/free agent rumours, all while a television show that I love is playing in one corner of the screen. I don't have the attention span anymore. I try, I do. I maximize the show so it covers the whole screen, and then I squirm and shift, I think of something else I should do, and keep squirming until finally I can't handle it and go do whatever it is I thought of. That usually takes 10 minutes or less, if I'm not eating or sorting through papers or something.

5. If I can't sleep, I imagine one of two story lines in my head. One is like a scene from Alien, where the team is creeping through a big, dark tunnel, looking for the Alien. Each one is carrying a machine gun (I am one of the team) and the only sound is the slow, constant drip of water. The other is like a scene from Thin Red Line. A team of WWII soldiers is creeping it's way across a field of tall grass. They are couched or crawling. It's a sunny day and the only sound is of birds singing and crunch of ground beneath the soldiers. I'm usually asleep before any action happens.

Heal (Exercise #1)

2005-12-13T19:21:00.000-04:00

Pick a word that has strong significance to you or your characters. Start by copying the word and quickly, without stopping for any reason, continue writing until you reach the end of the page. Making sense is unimportant. Your goals are speed and endurance. If you get stuck, repeat whatever word you've just selected until something new spills out.

This exercise turned out a little more angst ridden and drmatic than I expected, but rather than edit that out and add humour and cynicism, I decided to leave it as is, to give you a raw look at what came of the exercise.

Heal the broken, the sliced, the thin cut that is just relaxing around the edges enough to for a little blood to escape. Heal the shock that comes with the initial slice, the fear that follows, the warmth after that. Heal the feeling of dizziness, the feeling that the world has turned sideways. Heal the place where you stick your hand out to brace your fall, the place where your elbow that crashes down. Heal your eyes falling back in your head, the vomit that spurts out of your mouth and lies stinking beneath your nose and soaks into your hair and your shirt. Heal the shaking, the convulsing. Heal the clarity at the end. The sense of understanding. Heal the feeling of your head splitting in two so you can make room for what you see, what you understand. Heal the feeling of being lost in the light that you see.

Heal my pacing. My obsessing. My frantic fear of nothing, my need to link it to something. Heal my anger at feeling this way, out of control, sad over nothing, or worse than nothing, a fucking TV program or some fucking thing someone says. Heal my frustration. Heal my inability to move beyond the stupidest things. Heal me.

And once I am healed, once you have healed me, I will testify to the world, share my story with the world who also needs your healing. I will tell them, careful not to tell them what they need, or how to seek healing. For how did I seek your healing? How did I find my way out of this? What did I do that you might heal me? I don’t even know yet, for I still suffer, and in my suffering, I know, I remember that your healings are not the same. My healing would not be the same as yours. That’s what I will say. “You too can be healed, I do not know how, or why, or what you must do. I do not know how to find that out. I do not know that hope is important. I do not know this knowledge, that healing is possible, that it might be waiting for you, is even helpful. I do not even know your healing is out there, or in here, or whatever. I only know that I am healed.”

And of course, I won’t know that. I won’t know, truly, that my healing is complete, will I? This is not a true healing. It is an in-between healing, a quasi-healing. I am healed of a feeling, and emotion. Which I do not want to be healed of. Which I want, which I crave, which I desire. I want to feel unsatisfied with my life as it is because I do not want to stay as I am. This pain, this fear, this self-torture moves me on. It moves me. I am moved by it.

Heal my severe wounds, the ones that cripple me, but leave me to suffer with the small ones. Leave me a struggle. Leave me my dissatisfaction, only temper it with satisfaction. Let me feel the contradiction in my bones. Let me feel both at once, tugging at each other. Let them both tug at my heart and my lungs and my mind and my penis.

Let me heal. Let me be your healer. Let me walk through the streets and be blessed with your sight, your vision. Let me see the wounds around me, the gapping sores that they are unable to cover, nurse, treat. And give me the knowledge to help them, the ability to walk over and give them the difficult surgery they need by touching their head, their chin, their lips. With these tingling hands, let me push out the wounds, the fear, or at least push it back so that it is only a lining for what goes in afterwards. Let me heal.

Just write a Page a Day

2005-12-09T15:34:00.000-04:00

I made the mistake one day of telling a co-worker about my writing related anxiety.

Let me explain that first. Writing is hard. The actual writing is only half the problem. When you sit down to write, you have to face all sorts of self-doubts about yourself as a writer (maybe I’m not, maybe I’m not good enough to be a writer, etc.). If somehow you push beyond this and start writing, you deal with a whole new set of problems (how is this going to fit in with the rest of my novel? That sentence was really good what if the next one doesn’t live up to it? Is this character too one dimensional) and sometimes, even worse (Do I think like that? Am I like that? If people are like that to each other, how the fuck can we ever be intimate with each other?). And when I’m done, even if I get a significant amount done, it’s always worry about the amount (If I keep writing at this pace I will never get my novel done. All I need to do is sit down and write, and I can’t even do fucking that. I work part time, and don’t go out much, why the fuck can’t I write more than that? What is wrong with me? It’s so close, all I have to do is sit down and plug away, and I can’t do that. Jesus!)

As you can imagine, there is often overlap, and often, all of those feelings/thoughts are mixed together all at the same time and feed each other. If I’m not careful, they spin together and I get myself extremely worked up.

I can’t remember why I was like that at work. Maybe I spent my supper hour trying to write, or worse, planned to spend my supper hour writing and ended up looking at ebay instead.

In any case, I said something when I came back on the desk. My co-worker Goofy is a fucking middle-aged yuppie Unitarian who has bought into some crap businessy way of looking at problems and solutions and cites this “co-operative learning” consulting group he is a part of as his source for his ideas. He said. “All you need to do is sit down and write a page a day, and then at least you’ll be 365 pages further ahead at the end of the year.”

First, let me explain why that is complete bullshit.

When you are writing a short story or novel, you write things in drafts. The first draft, while hard, is the easiest draft to write. Afetr that, you are changing things and you suddenly feel this huge weight of everything you already have. Anything new has to fit in somehow. Writing a one new page just isn’t an option. More often, you sift through several pages, changing a few things here and there, changing the tense or the POV, adding a character, or taking out a description. A new page isn’t always going to help.

Furthermore, this can actually be detrimental to your writing in the long run. Everything I’ve read about writer’s anxiety suggests that A) you need to take frequent and long breaks from writing projects B) Only work on the project when you have something to write and C) when you are working (especially on a first draft) stop just before you run out of things to write, in the middle of a sentence even (that way you have a place to pick up at later). Lots of other helpful suggestions about making time and room to write, and scheduling and all that, but I won’t go into that now.

So I tried to shrug him off. Offered what I knew were impotent excuses about time, about how writing doesn’t work like that, but he kept pushing and pushing. Finally he said “You know what your problem is? You think you know better than everyone else, and you’re unwilling to consider anyone else’s opinion.”

Funny, but when you are fighting off anxiety, someone telling you what your problem is doesn’t seem helpful. I don’t remember how the conversation ended, but it did.

While I do need help managing my writing time and anxiety, Goofy’s advice didn’t help. I think he had good intentions, but he didn’t help. And knowing he wanted to help didn’t help either.

I don’t talk to Goofy about my writing anymore. If it comes up at all, I tend to give one word answers and change the subject.]

The worst thing about it is that I know I do similar things. Pooh is the best example because she is trying to figure out how to handle other people’s unwanted advice, including mine. In the past, I have forced my advice on her and become frustrated when she doesn’t listen, because I think I know better, or at leas that she should address the problems I raise. To me. Then.

On the other side, I remember Huckeleberry Hound and the way he used to give advice like he was perpetually in a therapy group. “May I comment on that? May I make an observation? May I share something?” FUCK I wanted to punch him in the head every time he opened his Goddman mouth! My favourite was the few times he lost his temper and the therapy language disappeared. He didn’t punch holes in the wall or become too insulting or anything, but it was good to see the layer of pop-therapy-bullshit dropped.

Anyway, there has to be a compromise, a middle ground where people can give each other helpful ideas and support without being overbearing or sounding like a sedated talking doll. I haven’t found it (still on the overbearing side) and I find myself forced to temper my annoyance and frustration because other people around me haven’t found it either.

In the meantime, I, um, er, am going to try to write more often. Maybe, even, um, a page every weekday.

I’ve got this book. Room To Write. Little writing assignments. Going to do more of those with the hopes it will make regular writing easier. Look for those to show up beginning tomorrow.

Go To Hell

2005-11-24T22:46:00.000-04:00

Soundtrack[CLICK HERE]

I finally got a chance to talk to my Mom. She took it pretty well for the most part.

We sat in the kitchen of the church basement and talked over tea. We made small talk at first, and then I asked her if she had any questions about what I told Dad. (I knew Dad had talked to her already)

She cried. “I can’t help what I believe,” she said. “And because of what I believe I am concerned for your soul. I mean, if you died today, where would you go, at least according to what I believe.”

I appreciated that she corrected herself, but it still made me tingly all over. You know the kind of feel of sheer terror when you literally feel something drain out of you.

It wasn’t because she was upset. It’s never a great thing to see your mother cry over you, but it wasn’t that.

I’m still afraid of Hell.

I’m sure some of you will be delighted, almost gleeful, because of my ardent objection to the theology of Atonement. Ironic that I have a closet case of Hadephobia.

I have very sound reasons for not believing in Hell, or a punitive God who would set up our need for Atonement. But it doesn’t take much for that careful reasoning to fall away like a trap door and cause me falling into a deep pit of fear.

It doesn’t take much really. What if? What if they are right? What if Hell does exist? And from there it’s all panic and fear and oh shit what the fuck I don’t know what is going to happen when I die and even if there is no Hell then what is there heaven or just nothing how is that any better oh shit I’m going to struggle through my life and then I’m going to die and either go to Hell or nothing oh shit oh shit.

Happens every time I think of death and every time I’m in an altar call.

That fucking bow your head and close you eyes nobody looking around bullshit where they tell you this could be your last chance to get out of going to Hell. After-life fire insurance for those who prefer not to burn. So Goddamn manipulative and so fucking effective. The tension. The twisting and turning. And if someone else goes up and breaks the ice, and people go, there’s less attention, less of a show. All you gotta do is get up and go and this sick feeling in your stomach, this impending doom, this future in Hell will be averted. Just come back. Just come back. It’s the only way to get out of this thing you’re locked into.

I can’t sit through altar calls very often anymore.

Speaking of deep pits, I had a lot of time to imagine what Hell would be like. No, I don’t imagine it like a place filled with fiery lava with devils and pitchforks. I always thought that was metaphorical.

No, imagine yourself stripped of your body, stripped of your senses, your ability to communicate and experience external stimuli. Then add in the sensation of pain. Physical (even though you have no physical form) emotional, all kinds. Eternal. No screaming, no passing out. Just pain.

Makes me want to cower in a corner right now. Actually, on second though, take away the pain, and just have the eternal solitude. That right there makes me want to drink myself to sleep.

That’s the best part. The way I stop it, the way I slam the door shut on the bottomless pit is not through careful reasoning and calm meditation. It’s distraction and avoidance.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get a drink and go to bed and try not to think about this anymore.

Your Turn To Play Editor

2005-11-15T20:07:00.000-04:00

I intend to submit a short story to a local writer's federation contest, but I need some people to edit it for me. If you are intersted, let me know in a comment including your e-mail. I won't publish the comments, but if I select you as an editor, You will get an e-mail with the story in the body of the e-mail and a Word document attachment. Mark your comments in ALL CAPS and send it on back.

I am particularily looking for places where you have questions (even if the questions are answered later), places where you think the detail might be a little boring, and places where you want more.

Thank you all in advance.

I WIll Top It Like This:

2005-11-11T19:56:00.000-04:00

The other day, I told my father I didn’t believe in Atonement any more, and that if God had a place in my life, I had no idea what it is.

Of course, in the course of the conversation, I couldn’t remember the word “Atonement.” Instead I had to say “I don’t believe that Jesus died for my sins.”

I was nervous. Very nervous.

Minako, who encouraged me to have this conversation, told me that they loved me, and that they wouldn’t be overjoyed, but they would accept it. Short-Fuze (my brother, for future reference) said they probably already knew and understood. They weren’t stupid.

I spent a lot of time avoiding questions, being evasive, just so I didn’t have to say it, just so I could avoid the awkward exchange.

What was I worried about? No, I didn’t think they would yell and scream. I could have handled that much better, because I could yell and scream and argue back. Plus, if my parents were the kind of people who would do that about something like this, I would care a lot less about what they thought.

But, because they are the kind of people who actually care, who can be sensitive in delicate situations (when they want to) and most of all, because they said and demonstrated that they cared about me and loved me, I was worried.

I didn’t want to disappoint them. I didn’t want them to feel like failures as parents. I didn’t want them to view me as less than what they thought before. And in this don’t-ask-don’t-tell thing we had going, they had their suspicions and I neither confirmed nor denied, allowing them to remain in the dark somewhat.

Turns out not so much.

My dad, of course, knew that I wasn’t keeping an evangelical relationship with God. He theorized, and has in the past, that this was the reason I decided to marry Wilma. If I had a closer relationship with God, prayed about my decisions more, God would give me better direction, and I would be able to avoid situations which were harmful to me.

He also theorized that my inability to form close friendships was a major factor in my disbelief.

That’s hard to hear from your Dad.

He thought that if I had closer friends growing up, it would have given me a better starting point with God. Evangelical relationships with God are sort of like really close friendships, after all. My examples were generally pretty poor, in his observation. It’s not that I didn’t want or try to get close to people. It’s just that the people I wanted to be close to didn’t or couldn’t be that close to me (we rehashed some of the Optimus Prime stuff from the last entry). Because of that, I had developed a habit of being rese4rved, and only opening up to people when they demonstrated some interest. And, well, even in an Evangelical setting, it’s rather difficult to have an understanding of God.

Now, I brought up several other factors: my conversations with Optimus Prime, University study of religion, a desire to distance myself from church politics (but still get a good enough seat to watch and take notes for a novel or something…) And he acknowledged those.

And also acknowledged his own lack of close friends. Seems it’s a family trait.

After that, I finished up lunch, brushed my teeth, and my father drove me to work. Sort of anti-climatic, but I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Some reservations I had about moving on with my life and certain aspects of it dried up because I had somehow managed to cross this major hurdle.

It’s not completely over yet though. I haven’t talked to my Mom directly yet, but that’s coming. She knows. My Father says “She’s not excited, but she’s ok.” And then there’s the grandparents, and the filtering through the rest of the family.

But I feel like my parents are in my corner, even if they don’t like where I’m going. And right now, that feels pretty good.

Will You Be My Friend?

2005-10-28T16:43:00.000-03:00

Soundtrack[CLICK HERE],

A few people I know have had a friendship crisis lately. This, combined with my own set of lackluster friends has led my to ponder on the nature of friendship itself.

I even did some research, but I figure it will take me a little bit to get through it, and I wanted to write something sooner rather than later. Perhaps I’ll respond to it in a later blog. In the meantime you’ll have to read my own, uniformed opinions.

“Friend”, I figure, is an arbitrary term. There is no clear definition of a friend that everyone accepts. No code of conduct that says “if you do this you are friends, if you do this you are not.” Makes things particularly sticky when two people enter this relationship with two different definitions of what friends should be. Or at least, what these two people should be to each other.

In that sense, I figure, friendship is a sort of negotiation between two people, with terms that are constantly in a state of flux, constantly renegotiated. Even worse, these negotiations are often unspoken. Which makes the chance of confusion, disappointment and hurt even worse.

It also makes trusting someone harder. Pooh Bear has gone through several tough times over the past few years. She had a confidant, a friend she shared things with. During a recent tough time, this friend of hers disappeared. No explanation, no excuse, leaving Pooh wondering what the hell happened. Turns out this friend decided that her tough times were too much to handle. They finally starting talking about it, after a month or two, and are trying to rebuild their friendship. But I imagine Pooh will think twice before sharing another tough time with her friend.

I’ve had very few dramatic friendship alterations. Instead, I’ve had a series of generally unfulfilling friendships really.

Chief among them is my friendship with Optimus Prime. I’ve told stories of him elsewhere, but let me re-iterate: we have made plans to do things throughout my life, and at the last minute, he backs out. Most memorably is my 7th birthday, when I was allowed to have one guest, I chose Prime, and he backed out that day, leaving my friendless on my birthday.

When he isn’t backing out of our plans, he’s refusing to make them in the first place. Most notably here is the time Wilma told me she wanted to go to Vancouver on her own. I’ve told this one before too. I was delirious and called Prime from a pay phone. He didn’t want to come see me, and did not make plans to come to see me at all. He had a wife who was due in a month, but he made no effort.

I haven’t talk to him much at all in the past year. A few lunches here and there. I’ve tried more than once to make plans, and he agrees that we should do something soon, but does not want to commit and never tries to contact me to do anything. He hasn’t met Minako, who I’ve been seeing for almost a year. He hasn’t seen my apartment where I have been living for over a year. When I ask him when he will get a chance to do those things he says “Probably never.”

Here is a case, not of someone abruptly changing the terms of the friendship, but reluctant to change them at all. Prime has always been this was. And may always be.

The rest of my friends are, for one reason or another, reluctant to hang out as well. I talk to Pooh Bear on MSN all the time, which often leads to misunderstandings due to lack of face-to-face activity, but she is working full-time, and finds it hard to bring herself to get out. Speed (you remember him, don’t you?) is relatively new as a friend, and like Prime, won’t commit to things. He said, at the beginning of the baseball season, that we should hang out and watch a game sometime. After several attempts to get something together, baseball season is now over, and he hasn’t been around. Rockzilla is a go with the flow guy whose efforts have been thwarted so many times that, if he does make an effort, it’s either on a whim, or on a commitment he made on a whim. I appreciate him, but he’s not exactly the go to guy when I want to just hang out. Hanging out with him is more of an event. Phil Ken Sebben is AWOL most of the time, but he lives in Southern Ontario and is only there half the time because he travels on business all the time. And then there’s…

No wait, that’s it.

Shitty.

In moments of hurt and disappointment, I think my friends are shitty assholes. But really, they aren’t. They just want different things from our relationship, or don’t feel like they are in a position to give me what I am looking for right now.

Which is what exactly? Here’s my checklist for my wet-dream of a friend:

Someone I can talk to about baseball, romantic entanglements, sex, writing, religion, etc. Doesn’t have to be knowledgeable in all categories, just interested enough to talk about it. Could even do without one or two.

Someone who is interested in hanging out from time to time, going to see a movie, going to see a band, getting together with a group for drinks, etc.

Someone who will call and ask me to do things. Different than the last one. I have had so few friends who actually initiate encounters and I am tired of chasing people.

Someone who wants to come over and just hang out without big plans or fanfare.

One of the things I read somewhere is that, as adults grow older, they increasingly view their friendships as expendable, a luxury that isn’t necessary, something that can be sacrificed. While there is a higher percentage of men who feel this way, women are not far behind. Maybe in another blog I’ll rant about how it is a combination of capitalism and the exploitation of the Puritan work ethic by corporations that leads to this perception of intimate relationships outside of romance.

Right now I’m just sad.

Have You No Compassion?

2005-10-10T14:34:00.000-03:00

Soundtrack[CLICK HERE],

Compassion was a big part of the Evangelical Christianity that I grew up with. Most of the time it was called a “Passion for the Lost.” Translated, that means your desire to try and get people saved.

I know, that doesn’t sound a whole lot like compassion, and sometimes it isn’t. There were plenty of people who tried to save other people because of pride, or because they needed to reinforce their own beliefs by convincing other people.

But there were some, I’d even be willing to concede a minority, that did it out of real compassion.

Put yourself in an Evangelical’s shoes for a moment. You truly believe that there is a hell, where people suffer eternal pain without hope of escape. And unless the people around you accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they will end up in that terrible place when they die.

I remember praying at camp once, during an altar call, and having some kind of vision/daydream about everyone I know who wasn’t a Christian burning in Hell. Screaming in agony. I wanted to help.

But I understood that it wasn’t simply a matter of presenting people with the opportunity. I was already filled with doubt, and accepting Christ as a personal savior simply for after life fire insurance (for those who prefer not to burn) wasn’t TRULY being saved at all. I concluded, therefore, that I had to emphasize the true benefits of becoming a Christian, while acknowledging the hang up and doubts.

This did contribute to me leaving the Evangelical sphere eventually as I spent a great deal of time examining and facing my own doubts until I realized I had nothing left but doubt.

I feel like there is some connection between this and Compassion in Buddhism.

Buddhists, in my limited understanding, have a slightly different idea of compassion. In their view, everyone is suffering because of their desire. The Buddhists who are closer to enlightenment become more and more keenly aware of the suffering of those around them. And everyone suffers until they reach enlightenment.

Now, while both Evangelicals and Buddhists have a solution to the suffering they perceive (salvation from hell, enlightenment from desire) Buddhists don’t feel the compulsion to “save” people. That’s because they understand that enlightenment is a personal journey that requires commitment and perseverance, and without that, all they can do is help to make things a little easier.

Or not.
Buddhists often feel compassion without the compulsion to do things. They simply perceive the suffering of someone else.

As you know, I don’t believe in enlightenment, but I certainly think everyone is suffering. Certain suffering is much more evident, and much easier to feel compassion in those situations. People who have their houses destroyed by hurricanes and starve because a stupid government won’t give them any food. But what about the moron in your office who parties every weekend, gets shitfaced drunk and brags about it Monday morning? What about the person who is always trying to shove some mantra about how to live down your throat? What about the asshole who cuts you off in traffic, or the gas mogul who has all the money he wants?

See, I think all these people are suffering and deserve compassion as well. I’m not going to send the gas mogul money to help him out. But then, I’m not sure how much money helps the crying woman who has lost her son under a collapsed house.

I really, truly, and honestly think it’s more important to recognize that people everywhere are suffering. Many, many, many people make poor decisions, and some people even make callous decisions that increase the suffering of others. But those people are still suffering, and I strongly believe that suffering of all kinds deserves a certain amount of compassion.

Desire [also] Leads To [...] Suffering

2005-09-02T16:19:00.000-03:00

Soundtrack[CLICK HERE],

I bought my second Buddha on a whim. I was in the Black Market with Minako looking for something entirely different and saw the army of wooden Buddhas assembled behind the counter. Most were fat and laughing. Enlightenment is happy, after all. But those Buddha’s never appealed to me. There was one on the end, a skinny one with what looked like a blank expression at first, but the more I looked at it, the expression seemed more peaceful than blank. That's the one I picked.

Now, if you ask Buddhists, they might argue that there is no difference between blank and peaceful.

I have a limited understanding of Buddhism, and what I do know is mostly the bastardized North American version of Zen Buddhism. The long and the short of it seems to be that the reason we are unhappy is that we desire things. Not necessarily material things. They can be circumstances, or situations we want to be in. Those who are motivated among us set goals and try to achieve these goals in order to get whatever it is we want. We think these things will make us happy.

Of course, they don't really.

Either you don't get what you want, or when you get it, it doesn't actually make you happy.

The NAZB (North American Zen Buddhist's) solution to this is to eliminate desire. Take away the want in the first place, and accept the situation you are in, and then you will be happy. Accept that things change, and that circumstances can be different, but nothing is really better or worse. Just different.

(Ironically, many Buddhists get hung up on the way to enlightenment and the elimination of desire by wanting enlightenment too much. You can only achieve enlightenment if you don't want it...)

I like a lot of things about this world view, but there is one piece I can't and won't accept: that a person is capable of eliminating all desire, and that this person will then better off than before. I agree that desire is one of the foundations of suffering and major block to happiness, but I think it's one that people everywhere have to struggle with. I don't think anyone achieves enlightenment. I think people can recognize that their desires are nothing more that a bizarre combination of hormones and chemicals and upbringing and cultural influence (etc.) But that recognition does not allow people to live their lives free of desire. A person's desire is part of what makes them unique as an individual (Buddhists wouldn't argue this, they just don't value individuality in the same way I do). The challenge, I think, is to navigate life without being driven solely by your desires (for love, sex, money, stability, the complete set of 1969 O-Pee-Chee baseball cards, etc.) but without ignoring them either, giving into them once in a while. Not at all easy.

I bought my second Buddha to remind me that no matter how much I want to write my novel, and no matter how much I finally want my apartment to be clean, and no matter how much I want to be the guy with all the cool sports stuff people want to buy, none of it really has any lasting significance. All of those things are valuable to me, and I will keep working at them, but none of them sum up my value or essence as a human being. Nothing really can.

And if I sit on my balcony from time to time, thinking about how my ass feels on the chair, and noticing how the wind moves in the trees, and how the old ladies hobble along in their walkers and how the garbage in the bushes is disintegrating, I can remember that, and feel like I am not completely ruled by my desires.

RELAX!!

2005-08-15T12:42:00.000-03:00

So, given my last entry you'd expect me to have a whole bunch done on my novel, or at least, be relaxed and have a more concrete perspective, right?

Nope.

The foreign sportscards thing is still there, eating up bits of my time, but I think there is a deeper problem.

I realized this as I was sitting outside of Mianko's Parent's cottage/retirement castle. She was talking to them privately and needed some space, so I had a few hours to kill.

"Relax," she said.

I brought my book and my notebook and sat down in the sun. I didn't stay long, because the sun was too hot, and I moved to the shade. It was too early for an afternoon nap, so I got my notebook. Instead of doing some journaling or something like that, I did some computations about the profitability of purchasing certain items and reselling them. Then I thought of how to market certain items.

That took well under an hour.

I read about three pages in my book.

I wrote the date in my notebook, intending to journal, but I couldn't.

I stared out into the trees, trying to pay attention to what was there, trying to lose myself in the scenery, but I couldn't.

So I got up for a walk. I thought about the sportscards, about my divorce papers, about cleaning my apartment, about playing ball, but couldn't enjoy the surroundings. I wasn't particularity stressed about anything, my mind was just busy.

You see, I realized I have trouble relaxing.

This may be a surprise to some, since I preach relaxation, meditation, and taking time just to sit to everyone who talks about their stress. It's good, I say, it will help you deal with the stress, I say, It won't be easy it just takes discipline, but it will be worth it.

In fact, that's why I bought my second Buddha. As a little reminder to take time out and relax.

I was really good at in the fall. Wilma was newly gone, and I was reeling from the loss. I didn't give myself any extra jobs or tasks aside from recouping. I sat on my balcony lots, and just sat. I relaxed. It was great.

It furthers my theory that tragedies can actually be very relaxing. All of a sudden you have this wild card that releases you from all your other responsibilities and concerns. You can just sit back, and experience the tragedy, free of other concerns.

But when my tragedy seemed to end, when I started to get over the loss of my marriage, things started piling up. I wanted to do more things. And yes, there have been times where I have freaked out due to the overwhelming mess I have left to deal with after I start one of these task (often an actual mess since my new project is so much more interesting than house work), most of the time I am not stressed.

I just can't sit still.

My parents find this as no surprise. As a child I could never sit still. My father says "if it doesn't have explosions all the time, he gets bored."

One troubling memory I have is my parents trying to take a photo of me in a little red suit. I can't remember how old I was, but I remember how difficult it was to stand still. I remember crying when my parents got frustrated, and I never stood completely still. In the best photo of the shoot, my feet are still twisting, and I'm sure there are the gleam of tears in my eyes and thick triangles of wet eye lashes around them.

But I still believe sitting still is good, and that it requires discipline.

So I pledge that tomorrow, my day off, I will sit for at least twenty minutes, ignoring the sportscards I have to process, ignoring the urgency of the divorce papers that need to be filled out, ignoring that packing I have to do for the flea market this Sunday, ignoring the stretching I have to do for the ballgame tomorrow night, and concentrating on how my ass feels on the chair.

A Tale of International Intrigue and Neglect

2005-07-15T10:30:00.000-03:00

I recently decided I would sell some of my baseball and hockey cards. I’d been planning on selling some of them since I started collecting way back in the late 80s, but never really got around to it. A trade or two here, an Ebay sale there, but nothing really too serious.

What spurred me on now was a combination of organizing and ambition.

My cards were in complete disarray. One shelving unit filled with boxes and binders of cards. So I set upon the task of organizing them. I wanted to keep my Expos cards (still collecting them) some rookies which might be more valuable later, and a few former Expos whom I particularly liked. Everything else I sorted into cards I would sell as singles (anything worth more than a quarter) and cards I would package in a team lot (20 cards of your favourite team for a low low price of…). It took quite a long time, but when I was finally finished, I had about $2,000 worth of cards and sports memorabilia (according to Beckett price guides). I packed everything up and brought it to a Flea market, and took in around $100.

It inspired me to take my business idea even more seriously (the ambition part). I bought more and more stuff to sell, so that I spent the money I took in and a little more, in an effort to try and make it self sustaining.

Minako raised wise objections several times to my spending. I was takings risks when I didn’t need to, I should wait and be patient, wait until I actually MAKE some money before I spend it. She has been very helpful at tempering my reckless enthusiasm with some practicality, but the understanding is only now setting in.

See, I eventually wanted to move into sport memorabilia from outside North America. Hockey was where I would start, since there is a growing interest in European Hockey cards. People want Euro cards featuring players from the NHL who played there during the strike. I spent hours and hours searching the internet for suppliers of hockey cards from Russia, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, and I found sources for almost all of them. All I needed was the money.

Last weekend, I sat my Grandparents down and asked them to invest $2000 in my business. I had already calculated how I would spend it before I asked (this many wax boxes from Sweden, this many from Germany, this many sets from Russia, etc.) But they declined, for the time being anyway. They said they’d let me know.

It deflated my balloon a little bit, but it made me think about why I wanted to do this in the first place. It certainly isn’t going to make me a lot of money. If it is self-sustaining, I’ll be happy. It is a lot of fun, tracking things down, and it’s exciting taking a risk of certain cards, hoping they will sell for more than what I paid for them (Minako says this is like gambling, but I think it’s more like the stock market…)

But it’s also about pride. I want to be the guy that find the Swedish cards for a good price, the guy who finds the Mcfarlane chase figures hiding on a shelf at Walmart when no one else can, the guy people come to when they want to expand their collection of Jarmoir Jagr cards to include stuff from the Czech Republic and Russia. Pride.

And in my pursuit of pride, my apartment-cleaning project has suffered, my writing has suffered, and possibly my correspondence has suffered as well. I spend too much time looking at things to buy, searching for distributors, trying to figure out how to put a web site together, and drooling over my wonderful plans.

Really, this is supposed to be my hobby. The thing I do during my free time, when I’m not doing the more important stuff (like writing, cleaning, and corresponding).

So I’ve scaled my plans back a little. Instead of trying to launch a marvelous website in the next few months, I’m selling stuff on Ebay (visit my Ebay Store and get 10% off by mentioning my blog!!!!) and scaling back my massive purchasing plan. I have contacts at least in those European countries right?

So even though the window of interest is closing (NHL players won’t be playing in Europe next year since the strike is over) I think I can still creep my way to making a go of it.

And in the meantime, I’ll spend more time on my novel.

The Teachings of Mr. Ed

2005-07-07T16:04:00.000-03:00

The other day, Minako asked me how I did in my last game. I play in a recreational slo-pitch league (aka a beer league, so named because over half the guys drink beer throughout the game).

I said ok, but there were things I wish I could have done better or differently. I swung at too many first pitches, wasn’t patient enough at the plate, let my hands get ahead of my hips, and as a result, grounded out weakly in most of my at bats.

I’m hard on myself. I’ve always been hard on myself.

Mr. Ed saw that and decided to help me out. Not by telling me to enjoy that game, but by teaching me how to play.

Every summer, my family went to a Pentecostal Camp in Debert. It was two weeks long, and often my parents did not stay the entire time, but I did (at least until I got a job) and so did my brother. Aside from the possibility of making out with some girls we’d never met before (which he did far more than I, for which I was extremely jealous) the highlight of camp was ball.

Every afternoon (except Sunday, because sports was apparently too much like work, and we shouldn’t work on Sundays) we went down to the ball field, picked teams, and played until it was suppertime. Nobody kept score. There were often more than the required 10 players. But it was still fun.

Mr. Ed was a regular at camp and at the ballfield. He was older, probably in his forties or fifties, but he still managed to keep up with everybody. He saw me being hard on myself, and gave me advice.

-When you hit a ground ball, don’t watch it, run for all your worth. It slows you down when you watch it. And don’t give up if you think you’re out. Major League players throw balls away all the time, how much more than will amateur church camp players?

-Pay attention to where players hit when they are up. Most players have a favourite place they tend to hit the ball too, and if you can adjust, you may have a better chance at getting to the ball quicker.

-When Playing the outfield, play back a step or two farther than you think you need to be. It’s easier to run in on a ball than back.

-When you are hitting, never swing at the first pitch unless you are absolutely positive you can hit it hard where you want to hit it. The pitcher is just as likely to throw a strike as a ball, and if you get a ball, you get some more breathing room. If you are impatient and swing at a pitch you can’t handle, you will likely ground out on a weak dribbler to the pitcher. If the pitcher isn’t throwing strikes, take the walk. A walk is as good as a hit.

-Don’t try to smash a ball over everybody’s head every time you are up. You will pop out more often than you accomplish that feat. Instead, try to hit a grounder or a line drive out of the infield. Those are the kind of hits that will get you on base more often.

-Don’t give up. Not on a pitch, not on an at bat, not on a ball that goes through your legs, not on a ball that goes over your head. Keep going, hard, and it might just turn out your way, especially if the other guy thinks you are going to give up.

Lots of people didn’t listen to Mr. Ed when he doled out his advice. They looked at his dentures, his pastel tank tops and his thick wooden bat and decided that his advice was irrelevant. I listened, and learned that baseball isn’t just a game of athletic ability (although I wish I had a little more than that). It’s a game of patience, awareness, perseverance and, maybe, luck.

"This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball."

2005-06-22T22:43:00.000-03:00

In the Hubley league, I was a homerun hitter, mostly due to the fact
that I was older than most of the kids in the neighborhood.

This didn't translate so well into other leagues.

For example, when I tried out for the Junior High baseball team the first year, I was in the first round of cuts. The first thing we did was warm up by throwing the ball back and forth. All around me was the smack of the ball hitting leather gloves, and I suddenly felt the pressure to throw the ball hard and make a similar smack on my partner's glove. I wasn't used to this kind of throwing. There was very little of it in the Hubley league. If you didn't catch the ball in the outfield, there was a good chance that all the runners would go home. And if you got the ball in the infield, there was no one to throw it to. By the end of the "warm up" my arm was numb.

The second and third years I tried out weren't much better, but the third year was the heartbreaker. Students in grade nine got priority over the other students because it was their last year in Jr. High. I had designed my own weight system. Practiced ground balls by bouncing a tennis ball off the side of the house for hours and played as much as I could in the Hubley league. And even though I thought I did better, I still didn't make the team.

I tried out one year in High School. I switched strategies a little. I chose second base as my position because I figured fewer people would try out for that position. I was and am most comfortable in the outfield, but it was already crowded there. After the arm killing "warm up" we took infield practice. The coach hit ground balls to us to field. Everyone else was like a well-oiled machine, and I felt like a cracked gear messing things up.

You see, I understand now that no matter where the ball is hit, every fielder should do something. If the ball is hit to the left side of the infield, the second baseman covers second base. If it's to the right side, and the first baseman gets the ball, the second baseman runs over to cover first. If it's hit to right field or right-centre, the second baseman goes halfway between the infield and outfield to act as a cutoff man (an in-between guy because the outfielder isn't likely to make an accurate throw from far out). And if it's hit to left field or left-centre, the second baseman covers second while the short stop acts as the cutoff.

I know that now. But then, I stood bewildered while everyone moved around me. No one told me this stuff. How was I supposed to know?

A few years ago, I bought Wilma a book called Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball. It was a selection of writings about baseball by female authors. The deal was she would watch baseball with me if she could read the book. At the time, I was trying to interest her in baseball. It didn't work, but I did come across some interesting articles.

In her introduction, Elinor Nauen says that women can enjoy baseball more than men because they don’t have the looming sense of failure related to sports that men have. Men feel as if they are watching professional baseball because they are unable to play it, where as women don’t feel the pressure, and can therefore simply enjoy the spectacle.

While I’m not sure that women don’t feel the pressure to perform at a sport they enjoy (or, instead, feel a certain amount of resentment that few of their gender participate at in the sport at a professional level) I do know that I personally feel that sense of failure. Even though I love baseball, watch games, follow players and teams, collect cards and figures, play fantasy baseball online, computer baseball games, and on a beer league slo-pitch team, I still feel that nagging sense that, in some way, I have fallen short. Not only did I fail to make it to professional baseball, I couldn’t even make my junior high softball team.

The Hubley Baseball League

2005-06-13T22:37:00.000-03:00

I did like baseball before the elementary heartbreak.

Me, my brother (Short-Fuze), my cousin (Daffy Duck) and a few other people in the neighborhood played baseball almost everyday. Two to three people were on each team.

At our field (the backyard/driveway/road), if you hit a ball into the nearest ditch, it was a double, and if it was into the furthest ditch, it was a homerun. The distance to the far ditch was probably just past second base on a regular field. We played so often that there are still dirt patches where we had the batter’s box and pitcher’s mound.

The other field was the road outside of Cousin Daffy’s place. We stretched out the bases on the gravel-covered road, and made the ditches on either side the foul lines. It forced us to learn to hit up the middle. It also taught us to keep our eyes on the ball and not guess where a groundball was going to go. Inevitably, it would hit a rock and change direction.

I wanted to play all the time, but it was like pulling teeth sometimes. Daffy, especially, was a bit of a whiner when it came to playing. The games had to be on his terms, had to fit into his schedule, and he wouldn’t play if someone he decided he didn’t like that week was playing. He also often quit if he was losing too bad or got a little hurt.

There were sometimes he stayed when he seemed hurt. I say seemed because Daffy was very good at being over dramatic when he fouled a ball off his leg or skinned his knee or something. He laid on the ground and rolled around like he was in severe pain, and then said he was going home. We had to plead and beg to get him to stay.

I’m not sure how it started, but somehow, chanting “Jesse Barfield” encouraged him to regain his strength and desire to play. For those who don’t follow baseball, Jesse Barfield was a former outfielder for the Toronto Blue Jays On more than one occasion, Daffy would say his foot hurt too much, forcing us to plead and beg and finally begin the chant. Then, he would start to jump up and down, pounding his feet on the ground and gritting his teeth as hard as he could. Apparently, this silenced the pain and gave him the ability to continue playing. It was like something straight out of the WWF.

After my elementary heartbreak, I not only became obsessed with reading the sports everyday, but I also wanted to be as close to a professional ball player as possible. This included the way they chewed gum (I stuffed my mouth with as much black licorice gum as possible, made a ball in my cheek, and spit out the black saliva it made on a regular basis… I didn’t understand the ballplayers chewed tobacco…) the clothes I wore (I bought wrist bands, tried to make my own baseball pants, and pulled my socks up over my jogging pants) and what I did while I was getting ready (I scratched my crotch when it wasn’t itchy, fixed my hat when it didn’t need fixing and whipped sweat from my forehead where there wasn’t any).

Things in the Hubley Baseball League sort of fell apart when two of its members joined real ball teams and the fields got too small. There wasn’t enough people to play on the field at the High School up the road, so we made up games to play that were as close to baseball as we could get with two to three people.

I Love… Sports

2005-06-01T20:54:00.000-03:00

Remember how I said I had a string of bad luck with relationships?

It started back in elementary school. My girlfriend was my cousin’s best friend. I did the elementary school thing and asked my cousin to ask Lady to go out with me. Lady said yes, on one condition: I couldn’t tell anyone at school.

So my first “relationship” had to be kept a secret. We talked on the phone, I delivered Valentine ’s Day gifts to her house, and when she stayed over at my cousin’s place, we hung a bit together. We never kissed or anything like that. But it was still important to me.

But the secrecy was killing me. I didn’t have much self-confidence in elementary school. I felt like everybody ganged up on me all the time, so I used to try and defend myself by exaggerating, which, by the way, never worked.

One clear example I remember was in the playground, a group of kids making fun of the way I smelled. I put gel in my hair back then, and I knew that’s what they smelled, but I didn’t want to admit this for some reason. They said I had stinky shampoo, and I responded that no, it couldn’t be that because I hadn’t washed my hair in a week.

As you can imagine, this only escalated things.

I don’t remember the circumstances, but I was trying to defend myself one time and I bragged about Lady being my girlfriend. It spread throughout the class, and got back to Lady. She was embarrassed and broke up with me a little later.

I remember the phone conversation. I didn’t have a phone in my room, so the only place I could go for privacy was my parent’s bedroom. She broke up with me over the phone, an d as soon as I hung up, I went out to the living room and decided sports would fill up my time. I got out the paper and read the sports pages for the first time in my life.

Now, I had been interested in sports for as long as I could remember, but I didn’t really follow it. I picked up names from friends and relatives, but I didn’t know anything. That afternoon was the beginning of the change.

It was also the beginning of my obsession with Major League Baseball.

Desire Leads to Hate

2005-05-30T07:39:00.000-03:00

The Professor of Desire by Phillip Roth: a Personal Review

[CLICK HERE FOR SOUNDTRACK]

Way back in my first year of University, I learned that some people think the notion of romantic love didn’t actually exist until medieval times, and that the story of Lancelot and Guinevere is actually the first love story. Previous to that it was all about sexual attraction and desire.

When Wilma left, and I had a new apartment, I decided to indulge my desire. This mostly took the form of an all out porn binge. I also toyed with the idea of some one night stands, even posted a profile on the “intimate encounters” part of Lava Life, but nothing really came of it except an introduction to a woman I wasn’t attracted to in anyway.

After a while, the porn got a little, well, repetitive. There are only so many times you can watch strip tease, followed by blow job followed by cunnalingus followed by missionary followed by various positions including doggy style and anal and finally a cumshot. All done by porn stars who either overact or look incredibly bored.

But I still wasn’t ready to go out and have random sexual experiences with people, admittedly, because I was too scared (if I had been braver, I might have, and might have regretted it too…) So I looked for other methods to stimulate myself.

I was introduced to a wonderful website during a training session at the Library where I work: allreaders.com. If you do a “detailed book search”, select “style” as your search parameter, and check the box that says “Sex in book?” it presents you with the option of finding literature that includes “vague references,” “descript. of female anat. (the big B's),” “descript. of female anat. (the big V),” “descript. of nude males (the big P),” “actual description of hetero sex,” “use of artificial tools,” “male homosexuals doing their thing,” and more!

Delightful, I thought. Now I can pique my desires AND feel smart at the same time. I set about making a list of deliciously erotic literature. At the top of my list was The Professor of Desire.

It did not disappoint. Lots of graphic descriptions of swinging breasts, shoving members into mouths, threesomes, tying down women as the writhe in pleasure, and even a facial.

By that isn’t the point of the novel.

Professor David Kapesh is composing a lecture for his introduction to literature class. The focus of the literature he has selected is desire, specifically, sexual desire. So he decides he will chronicle his own experience of this desire. And while it is titillating at first, when he is in London in a torrid three-way affair with two luscious Swedish women who dream up all sorts of sexual adventures, it soon turns into a painful cycle that Kapesh endures.

He desires a woman, peruses her, becomes obsessed with her, particularly having sex with her, finally has sex with her, and starts to develop a relationship with her. And just as he thinks he is finally satisfied his desire, he begins to feel cold and dead inside. He misses the desire itself. He becomes mean, belligerent, and neglectful, eventually driving the woman away. He tells himself his desire is dead, and now he must go through his life without desire, a drudgery, he tells himself. And then, low and behold, his desire is aroused once again by another woman…

By the third time he enters this cycle, having two ex-wives already, it is almost unendurable. He tries for pages upon pages to see the positive benefits of his relationship: this latest woman adores him, but is able to converse with him; she gives herself to him completely during sex, without giving up her own pleasure; she is beautiful (especially her swinging breasts above him while they have intercourse… I think that particular line left an impression on me…) and so on. All the while, readers know what is coming. Knows he is trying in vain. Knows he will eventually drive her away.

The novel ends there. He decides he cannot continue the third long term relationship, and is just on the verge of realizing that he is caught in a cycle. What stands in his way is his indecision about what his predicament means. Is it simply his nature to desire? Is his ultimate desire is desire itself, a desire which will leave him perpetually unsatisfied? Or does he simply needs to find a way to accept a life in which desires come and go and do not need to be followed?

An appropriately unsatisfying ending.

Kapesh is not a slimy asshole who takes advantage of women, he is a drama queen who over thinks everything and makes bizarre conclusions and decisions based on his desires and restlessness. Perhaps that is just an asshole of a different sort…

So while I may have been titillated by a few scenes here and there, I still returned to the redundant, repetitive porn as the staple for my arousal.

C'est L'Amour

2005-05-27T20:26:00.000-03:00

[CLICK HERE FOR SOUNDTRACK]

Last weekend I went to Canada’s Wonderland in Toronto. I went on a handful of roller coasters and stood in lots of lines. And in terms of that thrill, that rush, that feeling as if all your internal organs are melting and going to explode out of your chest, it is the most intense feeling I have ever had. Better than the pathetic roller coasters at Upper Clemens Park, better than the time I pushed my car to 180 kmph on the highway and better than the time I told a girl I loved her for the first time.

I spent a week working up to it. I told her, over the phone, that I had something to tell her. And for every night the rest of the week, I sat petrified, unable to get it out of my mouth. I tried a few times, and instead of saying it, I was silent for a long time, and then the moment passed.

When I finally did, it was a big weight off of my shoulders. Like when the roller coaster finally comes out of one of those loops, or starts to level out after a big drop.

But she didn’t say it back, which brought on an altogether different kind of drop.

I seem to have bad luck with relationships. My relationship with Minnie, the girl, was a private one. We talked for hours and hours on the phone where I fell in love with her, but when we were in public together, she gave me the cold shoulder. It was awful and heart breaking, but I kept calling and coming back for more.

On a positive note, that was probably the worst “I love you” experience I have had. I have told five girls that I loved them. In at least three cases, and probably four, I felt that roller coast rush before saying it the first time. I didn’t suddenly understand what love, in a romantic context, was, but I felt like something was inside ready to explode and I had to say something to indicate it was there, and love seemed to be the best word to communicate it.

Ironically, the only time the feeling wasn’t there the first time out was with Wilma. She had just come up to Waterloo to meet me and travel back to Halifax with me. I decided, already, that I would wait until a few months before saying it. Our relationship had been mostly over the phone, except for some pretty hot make out sessions over the Christmas Holidays. I wanted to make sure.

But in a drunken stupor, after vomiting up all the food in my belly, and laying down beside her in my bed, it just came out.

That’s not to say I didn’t feel it other times with Wilma. There were times when she was working in the living room on one of her thousand projects, or curling up beside me in bed, and I was overwhelmed with that feeling. It was that way with four of the five actually (the one left out was a crazy short lived thing). That was often when I said “I love you.”

It wasn’t the only time I said it though. There were times when it was a reassurance (we just had a fight, and I said it to confirm that the fight hadn’t destroyed my feelings/commitment/whatever for her), a casual reminder (on the way out the door or something) or a response to her “I love you” (to let her know it’s a mutual expression of whatever it is). Probably more times than that too.

But it feels like there is a little something extra in saying those words when you have that feeling. It may not always be as intense as the Drop Zone or Top Gun, but it lasts longer, has more benefits, and has no lineup.

Moving On...

2005-05-16T21:52:00.000-03:00

[CLICK HERE FOR SOUNDTRACK]

I had the good fortune of seeing Rockzilla last week. It's been a little while. Rock is transient, moves from place to place, from job to job and from phone number to phone number. Very hard person to get a hold of to make plans with. The only time I see him recently is when his heavy metal tribute band is playing and I see it advertized.

This show wasn't that great. Not his fault though. He had make up and a wig and a great singing voice. He even came out of a coffin to start things off. Unfortunately, it wasn't the right crowd for his band, and the bar staff cut his set short at the end of the night.

I met Rockzilla at a church, of all places. Odd place to find a prince of darkness mimic. He was a worship leader back then. Husband and father of two. I got to know him in a different church, where again, he was a worship leader. This time though, his marriage and his faith were crumbling.

We started to hang out more when things had fallen apart, just before I was married. His marriage was pretty much over by that point, and he didn't go anywhere for church. We met for beer and got drunk while we talked about God and spiritual experience and our relationships. It was a pretty regular thing for a while. He found his rebound relationship and I lost track of him for a little while. He resurfaced when that ended, just in time for the end of my marriage.

I remember meeting him in Chapters, him explaining his wild nights with the rebound and how it ended, me with the story of my marriage. No beer this time because neither of us could afford it. Chapters closed and we still weren't done, so we went outside and walked around the parking lot while we flipped between God and women.

I was (and still am really) trying to figure out my life after Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism. We were talking about that while we sat on a picnic tabl, watched the stars and the suspicious couple who drove up in separate cars.

I told him I wasn't sure I believed in God anymore, and I wasn't sure how to figure out what to do or how to think about things if God didn't exist. When I had God, and religion, I had a list of priorities and goals, or at least, a way of determining those things. Without God, I felt like I had none.

He asked me how God's existence would change the situation we are in on earth. Based on our previous conversation, I clearly didn't believe in divine punishments or plans, so what was the difference. Either way, wasn't the point just to try and love other people (the Corinthians way)?

He immediately said he wasn't sure what Love really meant anyway, but that somehow when he did what he thought was supposed to be love, then somehow it made him feel better and other people feel better. It helped both people. And without God, it makes our lives more endurable, maybe even enjoyable. And with God, isn't that what He would want anyway?

It seemed simple. It was like the first step out of the mire of chaos for me. I tried to stop obsessing over what I should believe or do, and tried to relax and treat people as fellow human-beings. I decided that was more important than beliefs anyway.

Love is a Verb

2005-05-06T20:57:00.000-03:00

I was taught lots of things about love while I was going to church. Most of them were not helpful.

For example: God is Love.

This might have been beneficial if I had a clear understanding of Love or God, but since neither were very clear to me, it didn’t help define anything. It was like saying Nothingness is Infinite. Two concepts that are extremely difficult to understand used to describe each other. Not helpful.

Another one was Love is a verb, as so eloquently described [HERE], by DC Talk.

(For the record, I have never owned a DC Talk record, or enjoyed listening to DC Talk. In fact, my only exposure to DC Talk was through Optimus Prime, who routinely put together a group of boys in the youth group to sing acapella a la boy band during youth conventions and camps and such. Of course, all the girls swooned and I was, as always, jealous).

While “Love is a verb” is trite and essentially meaningless, it is based on something slightly more helpful: I Corinthians 13

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away.

That was read at my wedding…

I believe that this describes the way people should treat other people. And that essentially means I believe we should love everybody.

Now before you go around passing out flowers to everybody you see and singing the Beatles, the KJV has a different translation of the word “love” in that passage. There it reads “charity”. Someone who knows about biblical translation will have to help me out, but I think there are all kinds of different words for love in the Greek language, and this is just one of them.

So how do I describe the difference in my relationship to my family, or a woman I really like (aw, shucks)?

My dad’s favourite cliché is that Love is a choice. When you love someone, you simply choose to treat them the way the Bible describes in Corinthians, and the difference, I suppose, is how hard you try and the commitment you have to each person.

A very firm, very clear definition. When I am kind to someone, I love them. The more I love them, the more I am kind to them, and the more commitment to being kind to that person I can express. And so on.

But that all seems too cold, too cut and dry as a definition for Love.

To me, Love seems like a mysterious thing that seems to overwhelm you without completely revealing itself, leaving you wondering if it even actually exists.

Hallelujah

2005-04-27T00:59:00.000-03:00

I've been to the Metro Centre a few times recently. Each time a pass by a series of ads for Maxwell's Plum, promoting themselves as "beer heaven". Things like "sinners welcome" or "145 kinds of beer on tap. This is what heaven must be like".

And "Hallelujah! Praise Jesus and pass the beer."

When I saw the last one, I stopped, and read it over a few times. I was genuinely offended.

Now, it's not that I haven't used the word Hallelujah in vain, so to speak. I have said Hallelujah and Praise Jesus when looking for keys (and finding them) having a shit, stubbing my toe (ironically there) and seeing a girl I thought was attractive.

In fact, I remember one time on a bus full of a Pentecostal Youth Group, singing an altered version of "Look what the Lord has done" in reference to a girl all the boys thought was very pretty.

So why did this bother me?

Well, I think part of it is my protectiveness of Evangelicals.

Yes, I know, it sounds strange. I have left Evangelicalism behind, and counsel others to stay away. Despite this, I feel the general public misunderstand Evangelicals. They have become an easy target for distain and mocking. When I see or hear that, I feel as if my heritage, my family, and my previous experiences are mocked as well.

It's more than that though.

I went on a "Hallelujah" binge a while back. Leonard Cohen wrote a song with that name[LISTEN], and it has been covered a whole wack of times. Most notable was Jeff Buckley, whose version is Leonard Cohen's personal favourite.[LISTEN] Buckley uses a more plaintive voice, that has more range, and according to critics, suits the song better.

There are two versions of the lyrics as well. Cohen's recorded version here is the revised version. Buckley chose the original.

As I was listening to it over and over and over, these lines stood out:

"...love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah"

And then later:

"Maybe there's a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya
And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah"

It jsut so happened that, while I was in the midst of this binge, I was thinking about "Love" and what that word really means. And I was quite happy with Cohen's definition.

Love isn't triumphant and bright. It's cold and broken.

And maybe when I saw Maxwell's Plum's crass sign, I felt that my discovery of Love had somehow sullied.

I know, I know (supplemental)

2005-04-17T08:08:00.000-03:00

It’s been a while since I posted but I have excellent excuses: the term is ending and I have a stack of papers to mark which I am approaching at a leisurely pace, and I’ve been keeping Minako company while she dog sits.

I have not forgotten or given up the blog. I have excellent posts in the works on Maxwell’s Plum new ad campaign, Leonard Cohen, The nature of Love, the importance of faith in God and a visual guide to characters I have introduced so far.

Stay tuned for more. It might be another whole week till you get it, but check back.

Please?

Christians as Cannibals

2005-03-30T19:14:00.000-04:00

In the church where I grew up, communion was little squares of Ben’s white bread and a small plastic glass of Welch’s grape juice. I remember when I was really young being jealous of everybody who got a special snack in the middle of the service. Jealous enough that, once my parents were done with their grape juice, I used to sick my tongue in to lick up the last little bit of juice.

One particular Good Friday Service, when I was almost through being a teenager, sitting with Optimus Prime, my brother, and various other young guys from the church, and trying to stifle laughter through the entire thing. A woman with terrible terrible hairspray hair had just finished singing a horrible version of some Sandi Patti song, and someone made a joke about the bride of Frankenstein, and that started the chain reaction. It’s amazing how trying to stop laughing because it’s so inappropriate only makes it worse. And just when we thought we had it under control, a pastor with a strong Scottish accent prayed over the communion, and it started all over again.

Pastor Goofy, from the Art Church had some interesting ideas about communion that sort of spiraled out of control. He thought the purpose of communion was to eat together, not just remember the death of Christ. In that sense, he argued, any meal you have with a group of Christians was communion. To illustrate his point, we had communion with coffee and a muffin. Those who weren’t entirely offended just thought it was lame.

The night before I moved to Waterloo, I had communion with Optimus Prime in a rock overlooking the harbour. We had real wine, and French bread. We served each other and said the little “this is my body, which is broken for you…” stuff, but both of us agreed by that point that we had no idea what that actually meant, or if we believed it at all. A wave of fog came across the water and I joked that this is where everything fades to black and the credits come up. I was leaving and this was over. It was a little freaky. I ended up at home that night, with almost a full bottle of wine, and packing yet to do, but I couldn’t leave the wine behind. I decided the best thing to do was finish it off. I would drink it slow, I thought. It would be ok. But since I was an inexperienced drinker, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I spent the next day with my first hangover, in the cab of a pickup truck with my brother and my father.

I stopped taking communion a long time ago. I figured it was dishonest to commemorate something I didn’t really believe in, and that if I did participate dishonestly it would dirty the experience of everyone else around me. Plus, I didn’t want to participate in a religious ritual just because I was embarrassed not to. I was still uncomfortable, so instead of defiantly passing the tray along when I went to church on a communion Sunday, I conveniently left to go to the bathroom. The first time I did this at Wilma’s parent’s church, she was very upset. We were actually at come sort of camp that her church was visiting. I told her I couldn’t do it because I didn’t believe in atonement. That, if I were to take communion, I would have to reinterpret it and have everyone present understand that I was reappropriating the symbols. She went and got two glasses of grape juice and two hunks of break (since in this church people ripped pieces off a huge loaf of bread… interesting symbolism, the church ripping the body of Christ into little bits and consuming it…). We had communion together by a stump overlooking a lake.

This Easter Sunday, I was trapped between my Grandmother and my parents when I suddenly realized there might be communion. We were sitting in the front row, listening to my cousin-in-law Pastor Arthur preach about the deception of pluralism, and I had already gone to the bathroom. I have never told my parents, or any of my extended family that I don’t believe in atonement anymore. They aren’t blind, they see I don’t ever go to church anymore, but at least some of them think I have just backslid, that I still truly believe, I just don’t act it. I prepared myself to come out to my family. Finally, a big holiday controversy that I hear so much about on television and movies. My family never has those, and now I would be the first. I was the official black sheep. And then I realized that there was no communion on Easter Sunday. That was on Good Friday. So my secret was preserved for another day.

Oh God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

2005-03-29T20:59:00.000-04:00

Another song I played all the time on my radio show was Sarah Mclachlan’s Dear God.

It’s a cover of an XTC song, which is clearly anti-Christian. In the video to the song, a boy is screaming the words of the song to a bunch of people sitting in a tree, shaped interestingly, like a cross. And at the end, when you get the strong beats, he chops down the tree.

But clever person that I am, I turned it around. Prayer should not be interrupted by doubt or waning belief, I said. Look through the Bible, at the Psalms, at the Prophets, at Job, even Jesus Himself. They all prayed without doubt, all cried out to God asking for explanations. But the important thing, I said, was that none of them stopped praying.

And years later, that is exactly what I have done.

It’s a gradual process this falling away. It starts with questioning, leads to escape, and then to disbelief.

I used to pray. Even after I left the church. As I have said, I left the church because it didn’t match with my perception of God. I used to pray all the time. Every night.

I started using fewer words, and spent more time speaking in tongues. It was around then I wrote the piece I had published.

Then I started meditating more. Not saying anything, just remaining open.

But I can do that all the time, I thought. I don’t need to use a candle. So I didn’t.

And if God isn’t some mean old man keeping track of how many times I “pray” (for by then it was surely only a vague relationship to what most people refer to as prayer) then in the long run, it doesn’t matter how many times I pray. So I prayed less.

And when I did pray, I didn’t know why I was praying. The “opening myself up to God” thingy seemed like a worthless exercise. What’s the difference between that and, say, whacking off? Except that stroking my pole gives me a sense of pleasure and euphoria. So I tossed more than I prayed.

Slowly, I started to question my belief in God at all. I mean, everything that I felt when I prayed could easily be simulated, and seemed to lead people in contradictory directions. I had read lots and lots about how people are manipulated into experiences of spiritual ecstasy, which made me trust those experiences a lot less. The Bible wasn’t really a good reason to believe in God anymore. Logic didn’t support the existence of a God (or at least, no more than the lack of a God). What was left? I certainly didn’t have that driving sense that there was a God. I had nothing. Praying seemed pointless, so I outright avoided it.

There have been a few times when I have prayed in the past few years. Still no words. And not times of desperation, as one might expect. Times of quiet contemplation. I feel something, but nothing that solidifies a belief in God. It could be my charkas aligning for all I know (although I doubt that since my posture is still awful).

That’s part of the reason my lack of faith feels like a loss. For the longest time, I have had no firm beliefs to replace it with, no spiritual sense of the world, and no clear, concrete one either.

I have become a wanderer, in a dark woods, without even the Lord to guide me.

The Jesus That Just Wouldn't Die

2005-03-28T19:01:00.000-04:00

A personal review of Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

Both Flannery O’Connior’s novels feature characters who are trying to escape their faith. In Wise Blood, Hazel Motes tries to escape his faith in Jesus.

First, he tries to show everybody that he doesn’t need salvation, that he doesn’t need to be saved from his sin because there is no sin. And to prove it, he decided to buy a night with a hooker just to prove he can without any guilt, since there is no sin.

When that doesn’t work out so well, and leads more to him feeling embarrassed, he decides what he needs to do is start the “Church Without Christ.” He stands on top of his car and preaches that people don’t need salvation. People stop and listen for a while, but he only garners a handful of followers: a con artist who pretends he’s blid to get money, his daughter, and Enoch Emery. The con artist begins to corrupt Hazel’s idea of the church by asking for money, while Enoch feels like God is leading him to something and just follows “his blood,” which in the end, leads him to present Hazel with a replacement for Jesus in his new Church.

Hazel is disgusted by his lack of success in the church, as well as with his followers, so he decides to move on to the next town. He is excited by his new plans and stops to think about what he will do in the new town. He ends up drifting off to sleep, and wakes up to find a police officer near his car, which rests at the top of a hill. Hazel, unwilling to submit to any authority but his own, talks back to the police officer, who promptly pushes his car down the hill. Hazel watches dumb struck as his car, his church, and his means of escape crashes.

Without an escape, he finally succumbs to the wild ragged Jesus in his head, calling him off into the darkness. He blinds himself, and spends the rest of his days following the Jesus in his head, all the way back to Jerusalem where Jesus is born.

Yeah, he sounds crazy, but this is the kind of faith I respect, and sometimes even envy. The kind that you can’t escape, the kind you fight against but can’t get rid of, the kind that haunts you when you try to ignore it, the kind that will make you miserable until you give in to it.

Few people in the evangelical world have this faith, or at least, few people show this faith so others can see it. They prefer to show a faith that makes perfect sense, that makes everything better, and is perfect. They prefer to think of doubt and contradictions as enemies and obstacles.

But those few, those who when presented with the doubt and contradictions simply say “I know it doesn’t make sense, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s right anyway,” are the people whose faith I sometimes want.

I seem to be on the other side. Or at least I was for a little while. I wanted faith, wanted it badly, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get past the doubt and contradictions. Any faith in Jesus as my savior seemed false. And when I finally accepted that, I didn’t feel victorious. For a little while, I felt liberated, but with that liberation came a sense of loss. Not only because I would never find comfort in the church, as I had hoped, but because it seemed I had given into something I was fighting against.

So even though I ended up on the opposite side of Hazel Motes, I understand the quiet resignation to a belief system (or lack thereof) you have been trying to avoid. It may feel right and natural, but it still feels like you lost the game.

Jesus of Fire

2005-03-22T10:04:00.000-04:00

Giving up on Evangelical churches isn’t the same as giving up on God, or even Jesus as a divine figure.

In fact, it was my belief that God was a particular way that lead me to leave the Evangelical church in the first place.

I still prayed, although a little differently than I used to. And I still believed Jesus was, in some way, divine.

I got it in my head that the historical Jesus mattered less than the figure of Jesus. Even if Jesus was a fictional character, at that point, he still helped me understand God better. I saw it as a skin God could walk into.

Ok, here’s my cheesy Sci-Fi analogy. In the crappy crappy series Babylon 5, the Vorlon Race of aliens are always in an “encounter suit” because no other race of aliens could handle or understand what they really looked like. But with the suit, they could interact with people.

This was how I viewed Jesus. A character people could relate to. A starting point for understanding God.

My idea of Jesus had morphed quite a lot over the years. But at some point along the way, I wrote a poem. At the time of the poem, Jesus was especially representative of what I thought was divine inspiration to write:

Jesus

Night
And a hand
Fingers burning like candles
A body barely separate from darkness

Reaching
Touching Me
Lighting my fingers
And a choir of moans and sighs and shrieks

Closing
Now a fiery fist
Pushing between my ribs
Flames rolling against the roof of my mouth

(1997)

Liberation Day

2005-03-17T21:26:00.000-04:00

This is a cliché.

On March 17, 1999, I was getting ready to go to the Campus Church, and I was dreading it. I had already decided not to go to the Grape Church
anymore, but I hadn't given up on all Evangelical churches... yet.

But I started to think about why I hadn't. Why was I going to these churches and trying to be a part of them if I clearly had different beliefs. I couldn't authentically participate in the activities they held, and at the same time, I couldn't protest the activities without looking like either a backslider, a troublemaker or both.

So then I decided to stop. Stop trying to be an Evangelical. I had been thinking about it for a while, thinking that this was my last chance to figure out a way to fit in there. And on March 17, 1999, I realized the chance was over.

George Michael's "Freedom" was on Much Music as I got ready to go to the Campus Church for the last time.

Afterwards, I sat on the sunny deck of the grad house bar with some classmates and discussed my decision, and my intention to get drunk that night. We also discussed the role of secrecy in society and whether religion was really "the opiate of the masses" or whether there was something more to it.

We discussed this, of course, over beer.

Through the course of the night, I drank more beer than I ever had before. Eventually, I couldn't taste it anymore. But I was happy.
This was the first time I had intentionally gotten drunk.

I also picked up. Unfortunately, I was too drunk to notice.

I went home with a very sexy, very available classmate, but I was so drunk, that when she kissed me, all I could do was smile dumbly at her. It didn't occur to me until the next morning that she was interested in more than a goodnight kiss.

I spent the next two days nursing my hangover, and other than that, feeling pretty damn good about being Evangelical-free.

Churches

2005-03-16T21:38:00.000-04:00

1. Family Church: I once wrote a poem, as part of a writing exercise that summed up my relationship to this church in my youth. It wasn’t particularly poetic, but it was able to sum it up in a few ideas: that my parents brought me to church two weeks after I was born, and I didn’t miss a Sunday unless I was sick until I was in high school.

But that is only partly true. When I was eight, the church split, and my family went with the Pastor who was kicked out. We had church at the Wandalin Inn for almost a year. Then we went back. At the time, I was just happy to see Optimus Prime again (his family stayed), but now that I’m older, I realize that the families who left were mostly lower-middle class and the ones that stayed, the ones who got the Pastor kicked out in the first place, were upper-middle class.

If I knew what was going on, I would have been disillusioned by church a long time ago.

Instead, I joined the youth group, and then the youth group leadership. I took ,y role seriously, especially when Pastor Donald Duck became the youth pastor. He made me believe that a revival was really going to happen at the church, and it would start with the youth group. But he was also a loud mouth who liked to get people riled up. I ended up being the go between when he offended people because I wasn’t afraid to stick up to him. We had that kind of relationship him and I. He thought I was wise.

When he left, and there was no revival, I started to feel like maybe it was all hype. Well, the feeling started before he left, but it grew even bigger when was gone.

I was also involved in sound (which was a big deal for this church) ushering and various other duties.

I still go back now and then. One summer, after I stopped going to church, I even filled in for my Dad cleaning the place. Very weird to have all that time alone in a place where you literally grew up, and then essentially rejected.

2. Art Church: Pastor Goofy seduced me with talk of a church that would be open to sharing all kinds of ideas and forms of worship, a church that would emphasize art and artistic expression. I was enamoured. Unfortunately, Goofy was a salesperson. He knew what to say to everybody, what everybody was looking for in a church, and there was no way it could live up to all those expectations. As a result, a lot of the people who helped start the church left unsatisfied.

I stayed after the first exodus because I had a job there (working on Aporia). It didn’t help. Goofy couldn’t concentrate on any one task or idea long enough to make any concrete plans, and my frustration with working for him helped feed my dissatisfaction with church in general.

I left because I moved to Waterloo, and I visited when I went back (I even met Wilma there) but I never felt a part of it again, and when I moved back for good, I stayed away.

3. Campus Church: This wasn’t really a church, it was an intervarsity group, but it was all I had the first few months I was in Waterloo. I was church hopping then, looking for something. This gave me stability. But it also made me feel out of place. I had given up on atonement and the Bible, and that didn’t sit well with those people, so I had to either keep my mouth shut and play along or leave. I eventually picked the latter, and had the balls to tell a few people whom I had developed friendships with why I made my decision. It felt similar, I imagine, to coming out of the closet.

4. Grape Church: I actually attended a Vineyard church in Waterloo for about a month. That’s where I met Peter Parker. He was a Catholic who had a girlfriend that attended the church. The relationship didn’t last, and we both decided that we didn’t belong in an evangelical church anyway. So instead, we spent lots of time wandering through downtown Waterloo and Kitchener discussing atonement, the bible, hell and Catholicism. AND we are still friends.

5. Hungry Church: This was an Anglican church, and I really only went a few times, but I was a regular volunteer at their soup kitchen. It was the time I felt most useful to other human beings, not because my cutting of vegetables was so valuable, or my expert dish washing abilities were miraculous, but because when I sat down to eat, I sat down with people nobody else would, and I tried to have real conversations with them. And it seemed like, at least for a moment, they didn’t feel so alone. I actually made an impact on somebody else’s life. Even if it was a little one, and a fleeting one. The director of the soup kitchen talked to me about religion and my beliefs and prayed for me and hugged me and accepted me.

6 Mystery Church: One Sunday I wandered through the snow, not really sure where I was going, and I came across a church. I don’t even remember what kind. But I remember feeling like God was there. I remember feeling like it didn’t matter where I went to church, or if I went to church, I could find God anywhere if I just looked.

From Aporia to Aporia

2005-03-15T21:45:00.000-04:00

I decided to continue working on Aporia after I left for Waterloo. The church had pretty much abandoned it to me anyway. I enjoyed writing opinion pieces, and I was starting to get submissions. Putting them togehter so it was visually attractive was fun too.

Unfortunately, by January the following year, I was getting so busy with school that I had spent three days without sleep and fucked up a major assignment in the process. So I decided to pare back on the things I was doing.

Aporia was one of the things that got cut.

By the end, I didn't believe in attonement or a literal interpretation of the Bible, and I was starting to feel a little disillusioned in my search for a church in Waterloo. But I still considered myself a Christian, just, a post-modern one, or an alternative one, or something different than what most Christians were.

Here is my last "My Word!"

Aporia: A Final Word

It's been a year and a half since Aporia began. I intended it to be a place where people could talk about the struggles they faced as Christians, not necessarily so they could get passed them, but so that they could have some company. I thought, and still think, the difficulties are inevitable, but knowing you're not the only one struggling makes them a little easier to endure.

To a certain extent, Aporia has done that. Submissions weren't as high as I would have liked, but what did go up allowed me and a few other people to share what they were thinking. And I received a few e-mails thanking me for the site and the articles. Despite this, I found it hard to keep my excitement about the site, and often focussed on other, more immediate projects that were demanding my attention.

Now I feel pulled in even more directions, almost all of them away from Aporia. So rather than try to fight it I've decided to give in and cancel any future updates for Aporia.

But that isn't really the end. There is a group of people (including myself) that is developing a web site/discussion group for people who struggle with their faith, and when it's ready, I'll be sure to post a link here. I will also be creating two new sites of my own, one focussing on writing and faith and the other on photography (I'll post those links when I'm finished as well). In the meantime, feel free to browse the archives of Aporia. I'll leave it up as long as I can.

Thank you all for visiting and writing. If nothing else you helped me to remember I'm not the only one struggling.

(2000)

The First Aporia

2005-03-14T21:40:00.000-04:00

After the disappointment of Fires and Clouds, you’d think I’d leave the idea of a religious paper alone right?

Nope.

The summer before I left for Waterloo, I convinced the church I was attending to apply for three grants for summer employment to start a multi-faith newspaper. They only got approved for one position so I started to try to put together another paper by myself.

After just a few weeks, I decided it was impossible, so instead, I proposed an e-zine. The church approved, and Aporia was born.

Unfortunately, after my hard drive crashed a couple of years ago, I lost most of the content. All I was able to recover was the first and last editorial (cleverly called “My Word!”). I’ll post the first today and the last tomorrow.

“Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads to dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend”

Those lines are from a Bruce Cockburn song called “Pacing the Cage” on his Charity of Night cd. They puzzled an early reviewer who interpreted them in light of Cockburn’s Christian faith. She couldn’t understand why the best map (which she assumed was the Bible) would not guide a person or how darkness could be friendly, since in the Bible darkness is almost always used as a metaphors for evil or a fatal lack of understanding.

But it made perfect sense to me. It ties into a theory I’ve had for a long time: Christianity is hard and doesn’t always make sense.

Of course I didn’t make this up all on my own. I had a lot of help from a woman named Flannery O’Connor who wrote a few novels and essays about that very theory.

In one of her novels, Wise Blood, she introduces the world to Hazel Motes, the son of a Southern Baptist minister who is trying to run away from God, but is having a little difficulty. He sees “Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. Where he wanted to stay was Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling a familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose.”

O’Connor’s reference to walking on water might help put this all into perspective for some of you who are still a little sceptical. In Matthew 14, Peter steps out of a fishing boat and starts walking on water towards Jesus. Before Peter gets there, he realizes just how big of a storm he is walking into and he starts to get scared, and when he gets scared, he starts to sink.

Hazel has this in the back of his mind as he’s running away. For him, following Jesus means setting aside all the things he’s certain of and perusing something he doesn’t know down a path he’s unfamiliar with and can’t even see. He doesn’t have to see the storm to be scared. The unknown is frightening enough.

In the end he does give in and moves into the dark to persue Jesus. That’s where the novel ends, but somehow I don’t think it would be smooth sailing from there on in. Somehow I imagine Hazel Motes still afraid of the water, still not really sure where he’s going and how he’s going to get there, still cautious about taking another step deeper into the darkness, even though he is moving towards Jesus, “the pinpoint of light.”

This whole process can be summed up in one word: aporia. Aporia is one of those neat Greek words that means a whole bunch of different things at the same time. It’s when you don’t know where to go next; when you can’t see any path at all; when there are so many paths that you don’t know which one to choose; when you realize which path to choose but can’t or won’t take it...etc.

Somehow it describes my own faith as well. For me, being a Christian means not having all the answers, not understanding everything, not really knowing where I’m going and how I’m going to get there, but still perusing Jesus who I don’t really understand or know very well. Every once in a while I think I understand things, and I’ll try to put all the pieces together and make sense of everything. Then something usually happens that destroys all my theories and I’m left in the dark again, more confused than ever, more scared than ever. Sometimes, in those situations, I feel like giving up, or just staying where I am. Eventually, Jesus comes to me, swinging in the trees of my mind, calling me deeper into the darkness, towards Him. And I finally take another step.

That’s when I feel closest to God. When I’ve stopped trying to understand and explain everything, and I just give in.

And that’s why, sometimes the darkness is my friend.
(1998)

Tied Up in Knott

2005-03-09T18:54:00.000-04:00

Anyone who knows me well will have heard me mention Michael Knott at least once. He was, of course, a mainstay on my radio show.

I can remember drooling over the new release of Aunt Bettys, Knott’s newly formed “secular” band. When I saw it come in to the radio station one afternoon, while I was on the air I nearly jizzed my pants. I scrapped whatever it was I had planned for the show and dedicated it to the new album.

Mike Knott has been playing music since the late 70s, although back then it was cheesy garage band stuff. Eventually it morphed into cheesy Christian garage band stuff, mostly under the name of his band Lifesavers.

However, in 1986, he came out with a new band and a new album that made people in the Christian marketplace sit up and notice. The band was “L.S.U.” (which stands for Lifesavers Underground), and the album was Shaded Pain. While some of it was still the cheesy Christian Rock people had come to expect, some songs explored some deeper issues of Christianity. The title track in particular took on the tendency of Evangelical Christians to hide behind a fake mask of happiness, and pressure others in the church to do the same.

While there are many fun songs in Knott’s repertoire, a lot of them after that point consisted of Knott putting his own flawed and painful Christianity on display. Throughout his career, Knott has experienced a divorce, disillusionment with the church, alcoholism, bankruptcy, and critics who constantly attacked his faith.

So when Knott attempted to leave the Christian Music Industry with the Aunt Bettys (originally Aunt Betty’s Ford, but was sued by the Ford Motor Company) he recorded "Jesus". The song begins in almost exactly the same way as a song he had put out just a few years earlier which was a desperate, quiet song of prayer by a man who had lost his girlfriend in a car accident. This song, however, featured a brutally honest Knott asking Jesus for money so he could stay out of jail, or at least a drink so he could forget about it a while.

Through all this, Knott maintains a Christian faith, one that holds firm to the idea of atonement. Again, something I respect, but don’t share.

I repeatedly held him up as an example, on my radio show, as someone who was able to maneuver the difficulties and contradictions of Christianity without losing his faith.

Another song, which sticks out in my mind, comes from his Grace Shaker album, probably my favorite. It’s called "Double" and it features Knott pondering the failures in his own life, and in those of the people around him without offering any simple way out. In fact, the only consolation for Knott is that Jesus accepts you anyway, no matter how much you drink and fuck up your family.

Turn the Tables Over and Get Out the Whips

2005-03-07T22:48:00.000-04:00

I tried hard to play as many different songs as I could on my radio show. In fact, I kept records of which songs I played when so I could avoid playing stuff too often.

But I made some exceptions.

Sage’s “Den of Thieves” was one of those exceptions. It was on a Tooth and Nail sampler, and it is the only song I have ever heard by this band.

But it seemed to capture, more so than any other song, the righteous anger I felt when I was faced with how Christianity was marketed.

In my most Evangelical days, I never ever thought it was great that there were so many Christian trinkets for sale about everything, and I certainly never bought into the idea that Testamints were a form of ministry.

I even worked at a Christian Bookstore for four years under someone who believed it was a ministry. I was angered frequently at the commercialization of what I considered a sacred and valuable belief system.

Not to mention that my boss was a raging homophobe, who actually made it on a local gay paper’s list of top ten threats to the gay community in our fair city.

My point then, and still is, that evangelical Christians aren’t all materialistic wackos who think that everything that has “Jesus” on it is somehow beneficial for humanity. In fact, the people who produce that stuff are similar to the money changers in the temple.

“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”

I was a firm believer that commerce and spirituality should be kept separate. It still makes my skin crawl when I see a TV preacher selling something he says people need to make it through their lives, or pass by a Christian trinket store and see the latest product rip-off (a-la Jesus in the style of the Pepsi logo on a t-shirt).

I’m not in any position to do it, but I would sure like to see someone put together “a scourge of small cords” and teach those capitalists a lesson.

Matches and Rain

2005-03-03T09:32:00.000-04:00

At some point, I became enamored with Christian rock music. It was definitely after the early 90s, because I remember having Nirvana and Pearl Jam albums that I purged in a fit of guilt for having music that might have a demonic effect on my life.

I really thought this music was great, and I still do. But I found that most other people thought it was derivative trash. So, I dreamed of having a radio show where I could present my music to the world.

Eventually, I did get a radio show at the college radio station.

By the time I did, there were more reasons I wanted one. First, and most selfishly, I wanted to get free music. Second, I wanted to find some way to use the journalism skills I was learning. And thirdly, because I felt like I could do something that people weren’t doing.

My original idea was to intersperse music with stories from Christians I interview. They would describe the highs and lows of Christian life. My theory was that Christianity was hard, and that if Christians acknowledged that, instead of pretending it was all roses, they could better explain the benefits of Christianity to others.

Unfortunately, I had a bit of a break down before that idea took off. I was just finishing my paper (Fires and Clouds), I was trying to lead a campus Bible Study (“KCF, nothing to do with chicken”… boy I’m clever), I was still on the leadership committee at my church’s youth group, working a part-time job, oh, and I was trying to work on my bachelor degree. All this without the use of a car, relying on my mom and dad to truck me around. Finally, my body said “nope”, and my doctor said I had to pay attention.

So, I started to scale back. I remember going into the program director’s office and explaining my situation, and proposing a new show where I would spend more time talking about my own experiences instead of interviewing others. He agreed, and my show was born.

I named it “Matches and Rain”, essentially, what came in between the revelations of the fires and clouds.

My theme song was “Harder to Believe Than Not To” by Fleming and John. The haunting, strained vocals of Fleming McWilliams combined with the crunchy guitar of John McWilliams gave the song an added sense of turmoil which I liked.

The song was a cover of a song originally recorded by Steve Taylor. Taylor's version was accompanied by an orchestra, giving the lyrics a sort of quiet desperation. He was a controversial Christian Rocker because, although he was a staunch evangelical fundamentalist, he frequently criticized the church in his music. In fact, in one song (“I Want To Be A Clone”), he takes on the tendency of the church to encourage conformity rather than diversity.
I read somewhere that the song was inspired by something in the letters of Flannery O’Connor. This was how I first discovered the brilliance Ms. O’Connor. I dug through a copy of her letters and finally came across this passage from a 1959 letter to Lousie Abbot:

“I think there is no greater suffering that what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

“What some people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must do at least this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”

This became the overarching theme of my radio show.

When I was explaining this to Sylvester later, during my Religious Studies degree, in a somewhat drunken and timid state, she shocked me.

“I don’t believe that,” she said. Sylvester was an older woman who was going back to school because she didn’t know what else to do with her life. She was a left-over hippy, who had, by her own admission, done too many drugs, was only casually into Wicca and native spirituality, enough to have a few icons around her house, but not enough to really be a “member of anything.

“I think life is hard whether you believe or not.” She said it laughingly, and somewhat drunk herself. But it completely changed how I viewed faith and Christianity.

Fires and Clouds

2005-03-01T11:03:00.000-04:00

Nine years ago, when I was still struggling through my bachelor’s Degree, I decided it would be a great idea for me to put together a Christian Literary paper. I took on the task of collecting submissions, editing submissions, soliciting advertisers, doing layout, arranging a printer and distribution.

Boy was I an idiot.

I have never been so stressed in my life. My girlfriend at the time said I was almost intolerable. I got her\, and anyone who would listen to me, to help out just a little. I finished it in the end, and when I look back, I’m actually pretty impressed I was able to pull it off.

There was only one issue. After that I decided it was impossible for me to continue.

Here is my first and only editorial for Fires and Clouds:

The Pillar of fire and the pillar of clouds were more than God’s method of directing the Israelites after they left Egypt. The pillars were a constant reminder that God was with the Israelites, that God had led them out of Egypt and was still leading them, that God was going before them. If the Israelites had any doubt, they only had to look up and see the pillar of fire or clouds.

Whenever I watch a cloud mutating in the sky, or a fire consuming a pile of wood, I am reminded that God is with me. I know it’s not quite the same. God didn’t set the fires and clouds in the sky in order to remind me that He is there, but whenever I’m faced with these natural phenomena my thoughts eventually drift to God and I seem to enter into an intimate interaction with Him. God doesn’t use the fires and clouds to lead me in a physical direction, but while I’m watching them the things I’ve read in the Bible or heard in church begin to make a whole lot more sense to me. I gain an understanding that I didn’t have before which helps me make decisions.

I have the same kind of reaction to some of the poems and stories in this newspaper. They may not make a direct reference to God, or suggest a specific course of action, but somehow I end up thinking about God. I end up being drawn closer to Him and He shows me how to see things more like He does. It’s not the poems or the stories themselves. They’re just catalysts.

Of course, not everyone reacts to catalysts in the same way. A poem that strengthens my link with God may cause someone else to grimace and dismiss the work as useless gibberish. In the same way, a story that doesn’t have a big effect on me may lead someone else to the biggest revelation they’ve ever had. That’s why I’ve included some poems and stories that didn’t do a whole lot for me. The only real qualification that I had for submissions is that they were well written and different… and I had some help deciding that.

I put this paper together because I wanted to help other people find their own fires and clouds.

(1996)

The Bible as a Story

2005-02-28T09:32:00.000-04:00

A long time ago I used to really really like Madeleine L’Engle.

So much, I wanted to name my first daughter after her (and nickname her “Maddy” and hope she was a tomboy who played baseball and…)

My first exposure to her was Walking on Water, a book of meditations on the intersection of Christianity and art. She cites all kinds of ideas and stories from philosophers, artists and theologians and brings them together in the context of her own writing. Among the ideas she introduced was the idea that the Bible was a story.

Now, it’s important to differentiate what L’Engle means by story and what a fundy would mean. To L’Engle, stories can be true, even fiction ones. Especially fiction ones. And trying to figure out whether the details actually happened (how many people were in that army, what happened to the sun in that battle, how many animals, how big…) is a waste of time. If you open yourself up to the story, you will see part of the deeper truth that it is trying to reveal.

The Bible, for her, is not the definitive and authoritative Word of God, but an icon, and a very good icon. She spends a whole book (Penguins and Golden Calves) talking about icons, and icons taken too far (idols).

Icons are like windows. You look through them to see what’s outside, but you only ever get a piece of what’s outside. And what’s outside when you look through icons like the Bible is God. When you read the Bible, and you open yourself up, you see little pieces of God. Horribly incomplete pieces, but more than you had before.

The Bible isn’t the only icon for God though. Nature, good art, and even some bad art are all icons L’Engle uses to see a little bit more of God. It’s all about being open.

I used to read the Bible all the time. It’s been almost six years since I’ve actually sat down and read it, and probably longer than that since I’ve been open to seeing a little bit more of God through it, or anything except an ancient text which has had a huge impact on Western Literature and thought.

Part of that is because, when I’m open to see pieces of God, I have other familiar places I go: outside on my deck to sit in the sun, to read The Sun Magazine, to John Coletrane or Bach, and to a candle (though it’s been a while for that one as well).

It’s also partly because I’ve been less open, period. It’s hard giving up the notion that I have to be sure about God before I try to initiate any kind of spiritual experience that may or may not be related to some kind of divinity. So what if it’s all a bunch of chemical, emotional and sociological responses that have nothing to do with a “non-existent spiritual realm.” When I do open up in this way, ever so rarely, my life seems a little less chaotic, things seem a little less pressing, I gain some sort of blurred perspective where as before I had none. I finally can make out that there is something beyond what occupies my time, even if I can’t quite make out what it is.

Maybe it’s time I read the Bible again.

The Bible as the Infallible, Literal Word of God

2005-02-23T17:37:00.000-04:00

The slippery slope began with a religious studies class that Optimus Prime took in University. He learned of alternative ways of interpreting Jesus and His death. And he stopped believing in atonement.

He shared this with me one evening during a youth group meeting. Pointed out things in the Bible, but I couldn’t accept what he was saying. If I did, it would start to unravel everything.

Prime also began taking on Fundamentalist Christians who believed that the Bible was the unfaultable, authoritative word of God. He did this mostly on the internet. He had excellent arguments, but when it finally came time to talk to his family about it, he relented. He was better than I, in that, he actually talked to them about it. Used the same arguments he did with the nameless, faceless internet people, but he didn’t push as hard and gave up when he saw his parents and siblings becoming upset.

Then I took my won class. The Bible as Literature. We looked at scripture through the eyes of an English student. Point of View, language differences, theories on origin, stylistic difference… and all of a sudden it became impossible for me to see the Bible as fact.

I think the kicker was the stuff about Abraham and Sarah. There’s some verses in there about what Sarah did in her tent, alone, and didn’t tell anybody. How did the author know for sure what happened in that tent if Sarah never told anyone?

Sure, you can use the argument that God revealed it, which is always the fall back. But put it together with certain inconsistencies in the Bible (numbers, geography, etc.) and it is hard to believe that God revealed everything and that it was recorded perfectly in the Bible and handed down to us through the generations.

When I mentioned some of this to my father, his response wasn’t to argue the reasoning behind continuing it to believe that the Bible was the infallible Word of God, but to point out the consequences.

If I didn’t believe the Bible, my faith would unravel until there was nothing left.

And that’s almost what happened.

Unexpected

2005-02-22T23:30:00.000-04:00

Optimus Prime disappeared when he started dating Bumblebee.

This was particularly disturbing considering I had sort of started dating her first. I say sort of because it never really got off the ground. A coffee or two, some phone conversations, that was all. I was still hung up on another girl. So Prime moved in.

But I also missed hanging out with Prime, the little that we did. Actually, just before he started dating her, we seemed to be in the same place a lot and hung out a lot. Then it all stopped.

So while their relationship flourished, I got more and more pissed off. I distinctly remember having a fight with Prime, over the phone, while the New York Rangers were winning the Stanley Cup.

The solution was I hung out with both of them a little more. It was still very rare. They tried to set up a few double dates, but nothing materialized for me.

Then one day, Prime told me Bumblebee was pregnant. I didn’t believe him. It was April Fool’s day, after all. He picked April first to tell me his girlfriend was pregnant. I listened to him asked him questions, and waited for him to break and say “April Fools!” and I periodically reminded him that I remembered it was April Fools and that I didn’t really believe him.

Eventually the reality set in. Prime was going to be a Daddy.

This had serious implications. We were, after all, good Pentecostal boys, and Bublebee’s pregnancy meant that they had clearly had pre-marital sex. This was a big deal, considering Prime and I were both on the leadership committee of the youth group.

That sounds much less important than it did back then…

In any case, Prime resigned and explained the situation to the whole youth group. A very emotional time. Some of the kids were disillusioned because Prime and Bumblebee were the very example of a good Christian couple.

Prime’s mom, meanwhile, went into damage control mode.

“Oh they only did it once, and they were on their knees right afterwards, begging for forgiveness…”

Prime confirmed that it was only once BEFORE they got pregnant… and few times after…

It’s funny though, the way the church protected its own. Nobody talked about it except his mom. It was swept under the rug, all the while, preachers condemning the promiscuous generation that we lived in. And later that year, everyone was all smiles and tears when a big bellied Bubmblebee walked down the aisle in her wedding dress.

Not the first time an extra martial pregnancy had been ignored in our church, I learned. Several couples in the church, now older, good, upstanding supporters of the church, had conceived out of wedlock.

I want to call it hypocritical, inconsistent with the morals the Evangelical church tries to promote. These people had sinned, and a sin that was condemned all the time. But everybody pretended like it didn’t happen.

I also want to call it a perfect example of the way a church should be. Loving, forgiving, understanding.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t either of those things. It was decorum and embarrassment. It was social faux pas and false acceptance.

And it played a part in the escape Prime, Bumblebee and I eventually took from the church.

Worst Birthday Ever

2005-02-21T23:27:00.000-04:00

Optimus Prime has a history of crapping out on me. The best example was when I was seven.

I was only allowed to have one friend over for my birthday that year. My parents said they couldn’t afford a party every year, so this was the compromise. Of course, I selected Prime. We were, after all, best friends.

On the day of my birthday, we were waiting for him to arrive. My parents had supper ready, and my cake sitting in the other room. My presents were there too, all that was missing was Prime. It started to get late, at least, later than we normally had supper. So I called.

Prime told me he wasn’t coming.

There’s this photo of me on my seventh birthday, looking up from my birthday cake with the most awful look of disappointment. In fact, I didn’t even have a piece of cake right away. I just went to my room.

This wasn’t the only time in our long friendship that he has done this. Many a time we have planned things only to have him crap out at the last minute. It is at times irritating, and at times depressing. We have argued about it, joked about it, but it really hasn’t changed much.

There is a slight variation now. It arose in the past eight years or so, around the time he was getting married. He just doesn’t commit to doing anything, and often outright turns me down.

Part of me understands. A wife, two kids, one brand new, a house, one car, a suburb far away from my apartment. It all makes it difficult.

But part of me thinks he’s a huge dick. I didn’t see him once between the time Wilma told me she was leaving and the time she left. That was two months. The night she told me, I called him, delirious, begging him to come and get me to do something, to talk me down. From a pay phone I called him. He didn’t. He said he couldn’t leave his wife with the kids. He tried to talk me down from the payphone, and it worked to a certain degree, but I still feel like he was a dick. For fuck’s sake, if you can’t come to the aide of your best friend when his fucking wife is leaving, when can you come to his aide?

It wasn’t until I talked to Minako about this that I saw another dimension to this whole thing. I could go to him. I know, it sounds stupidly obvious, but I always waited for him to invite me and when he didn’t, I invited him over, but he couldn’t come. So when I suggested I come over, on the bus, he agreed. He could drive me home, but he didn’t have to worry about juggling after-school pick-ups and car negotiations, etc.

And I finally got to see his brand new baby.

Sometimes I think I should just explode on him and call him a fucking dick for all the times he has ditched me all the way back to when I was seven, but then I think that I just have to accept things the way they are. I wish Prime was there for me when I needed him, I wish that we hung out more, but in the absence of that, I’ll take what I can get: an occasional lunch conversation, brief phone chats, and a rare visit to his house to play with his kids.

Critibot

2005-02-16T19:16:00.000-04:00

I have a habit of being too critical. But it’s not because I think I’m better than everybody else, or think everybody else sucks, it’s because I’m worried about what other people think.

For example, my frequent critiques of Wilma were supposed to help her avoid the distain of her peers, not damage her self-esteem. I thought she was good at (most of) what she did, but I was worried what other people would think, so I constantly pointed out how she could improve.

This wasn’t restricted to my marriage. As far back as I can remember I was doing this.

I have known Optimus Prime since I started school. I criticized his singing, the jeans he wore, the way he talked to girls, the way he played baseball. Basically everything.

He remembers. Especially the jean thing. We were in my parents car, still preteens, extra sensitive about just about everything, and I told him that he should get some new jeans that were a brand name, like Levis or something. Mostly because I was extra paranoid about my own clothes. People made fun of my clothes when they weren’t brand names, so I begged and pleaded and cried with my parents to get brand names so people wouldn’t make fun of me (of course, back then, I didn’t cop to the last part). My Mom looked through second hand stores because she said she couldn’t afford brand name clothing (NOW I believe her).

Optimus Prime reminded me of this story when we were in University. He was crushed, but tried to shake it off. It hung over him for a long time.

The ironic thing is that he was the more popular one. He was charismatic. He had more girls pursue him. He did things I would never do because I was worried about what other people thought. And I could see flaws in what he did. But everybody else loved it. They lavished praise and affection on him. Of course, I was horribly jealous.

I have gradually learned that people are more forgiving and accepting than I gave them credit for, especially in social situations, especially if they like you. I have also learned that lots of people generally like me. Not quite the lavish affection and praise that Prime received, more like “he’s a nice guy” and occasionally “he’s a nice guy and he’s cute.”

Yet, every once in a while, the worry rears its head. Usually with hot buttons. I start to perceive strangers, others as threats, social threats, people ready to judge and damage and hurt. I clam up, and I try to take people I like with me. Try to protect them from the doom. Wilma seemed to excel at hitting those buttons.

It’s amazing how rarely they get pressed now that she’s gone…

Charismagic

2005-02-11T15:45:00.000-04:00

Optimus Prime’s sister-in-law, Starscream, is getting married this spring. I used to have a crush on her (like every female I mention in here, it seems… I have a crush on every girl…) but Prime says I would no longer. Apparently, she is very very evangelical now. Into the whole Blessings thing. Not the Toronto kind, the self-help get-rich kind. He says she believes that if you pray a certain way for a certain amount of time, God will bring you blessings. Never mind trials and tribulations. Never mind the sick and the hungry. God just wants to bless people who pray the right way with material goods. That sounds about right.

But this brought up a deeper issue. Prime feels that the whole Charismatic movement is close to woo-loo-loo magic bullshit. Just like all “supernatural” experiences.

See, Prime has theory: if God exists, there is no reason for Him/Her/It to interact with human kind. God either created the world in such a way that it is already exactly as He (excuse my lapse into Pentecostal notions for the sake of brevity) wants it to be. That any interaction with human beings is more like a beacon God has set up. It send out the same message over again, and if we’re lucky, we catch bits and pieces from time to time. God doesn’t care where you go or what you do specifically. She (mixing it up) just knows the general guidelines for the best way to live since It created the Universe in the first place.

Or, Prime’s other theory is that God is not all powerful, and is someway prevented from intervening with the everyday life of human beings. This means that God is restricted by some higher law that He didn’t create. Raises a whole new series of interesting questions.

I'm not sure I buy either of Optimus Prime's theories, but I'm a lot closer to accepting them than I am to the idea of a God who sends encoded messages to people through animal noises or different languages.

Vineyard/Barnyard

2005-02-09T17:10:00.000-04:00

Back in the early to mid 90s, something happened in Toronto that was a little bit different. At the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church, people started to do things like bark, cluck, roar, groan, laugh hysterically, squirm on the floor, all “in the Spirit.” Apparently, this was accompanied by a more intense interaction with God. It was labelled “the Toronto Blessing.”

People started to make up meanings for the different sounds. Like, if you roared like a lion, it was the lion of Judah, and if you clucked like a chicken, you were giving birth to something spiritually new. These sound extreme, but they were serious interpretations of what was going on. There were more moderate ones, but those ones didn’t get the press.

And there was press. The National, Time, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, and many more did stories on the Toronto Blessing.

My Pastor at the time wasn’t impressed. He did a four part series on why the “Toronto Blessing was inappropriate, citing verses from one of Paul’s epistles and using, what seemed to me, very faulty logic. After all, how can a church that believes in Speaking in Tongues and being “slain in the Spirit” have such a problem with these other things? My pastor did his best to base his argument on the Bible, and while I certainly wasn’t into the Toronto Blessing at the time, or any time, his arguments failed miserably in my eyes.

Meanwhile, across town, another church belonging to the PAOC was immersing themselves fully into the Toronto Blessing stuff. IT was know, to us, as the church people went to when they were pissed off at us. There had been a long, terrible relationship between the churches stemming all the way back to it’s beginning, and this only served to drive the wedge further between us.

Eventually, the Vineyard itself had enough. It booted the Toronto Airport Church out of the denomination, but it was careful not to discredit the supernatural happenings. It simply stated that the Toronto church was putting too much emphasis on the manifestations of the Spirit, and not enough on the other aspects of Christian life (ie. The Bible, fellowship, etc.)

By then, I was in journalism school, and I wanted to be a religion reporter. I trekked down to the local Vineyard church to get a local reaction. Most of them didn’t care. One person was particularly dismissive. This was Rock Zilla, and when I met him again a few years later we developed a strong friendship.

What I took away from the whole experience was this: unless you believe in the Bible as a literal, exclusive account of how God can interact with people (or some other document/credo), there is no concrete way to decide what is a spiritual experience and what is craziness. To make it worse, the experiences often seem to send contradictory messages or no message at all. So what you’re left with is a big jumble of different experiences that may or may not be spiritual, that may or may not have something to do with God, that may or may not mean something, and may or may not be a representation of a person’s loose grip on reality.

And since I have no firm theology or ideology with which to interpret them and sort them out, I have a “what the fuck?!” attitude toward all spiritual experiences now, including my own.

The Power of...

2005-02-08T08:23:00.000-04:00

I have stood at an altar and been prayed for, one man in front and two behind. I have felt something well up inside me. I have felt my knees weaken and give out as I fell into the arms of those behind me.

I have stood at the altar alone and felt the same feeling well up inside me, and felt my knees buckle, and fell to the floor with no one to catch me.

I have lain on the floor for 45 mins, whispering secret prayers in a language unknown to me.

I have stood at the altar and felt someone push me more than once. Sometimes, a hand on the forehead, lightly, other times jerky. Still other times, I have felt someone push my shoulders back. And I have resisted and remained standing.

I have resisted the draw to go up to the altar in the first place, both before and after I gave up on Pentecostal Christianity because I have recognized the manipulative altar calls designed to guilt people into coming forward.

I have preached a sermon to a youth group and issued an altar call that would lead to several people coming forward, possibly employing the same guilt trips I later learned to despise.

I have prayed for a young man and felt something pass through me into him, and watched a feeling well up with in him, and his knees buckle as he fell into the arms of my best friend and my brother who were standing behind him. And I have been overwhelmed with the idea that God used me to give someone else this kind of intimate spiritual experience.

I have seen visions, or at least, imagined things that I thought were visions while kneeling at the altar and asking God for direction.

I have felt something on my forehead as I prayed at the altar, when there was nothing and nobody around, and have interpreted it as the finger of God touching me in some way.

I have watched people jump up and down as high as they can, spin around in circles, laugh hysterically, roll and moan on the floor. Sometimes I have laughed. Sometimes I have looked on in wonder. And sometimes I have looked on disapprovingly.

I have listened to several people who have told me they have had a word from God for me. Sometimes I have been humbled and encouraged. Others I have been confused and amused.

I have issued warning to specific people that I believe came from God.

I have been driven home from the grocery store by an old, bearded stranger after I secretly pleaded with God to provide some miraculous way of getting me home with all the food I had purchased.

I have walked aimlessly more than once and ended up in an unfamiliar church where something has happened that seemed particular to me, something that made me feel like God was still around and interacting with me.

I have felt God in the wind, in the heat from a fire, in the warm rain of the summer, in the kiss of a girlfriend, in the emptiness of a black night and in the brilliance of a single flame atop a candle.

I have questioned all of this, endlessly and have reached no conclusions. I can see logically, natural explanations for each of these things. Yet in each case, they seem unsatisfying and incomplete. Still, I cannot give myself over to the notion that these were all the doings of the God Pentecostals believe in. Or any God, for that matter. I am rooted, firmly, somewhere in the middle. Unsure of what to make of all these experiences, and content to let the mystery remain a mystery.

My First Publication

2005-02-07T11:03:00.000-04:00

It started off as a free writing exercise connected to my novel. My prof. read it and suggested I edit it and submit it to an anthology she was working on. And it became my first publication.

Speaking in Tongues

I Was a Pre-School Racist

2005-02-02T17:07:00.000-04:00

In Sunday School, all the kids would get together and sing songs to start, and then we would break up into separate classes based on our age group. I used to love singing Father Abraham, probably because I got to punch and kick the person beside me (usually a boy, often Optimus Prime) and blame it on the actions of the song.

There were a few times when I was late (due to running the halls of the Church no doubt) and I would have to sit up front, beside almost nobody.

And near the only two black kids in Sunday School.

They were sisters, and had a lighter complexion, close to that of molasses cookies. So, for some reason, I decided they smelled like molasses cookies, and when I did have to sit near them, I held my nose.

I don’t remember my parents having a chat with me about that, probably because I never told them. Somehow I grew out of it, without somebody explaining it was wrong.

The only connection I can think of was, years later, when there were many more people of African decent at the church, and my Grandmother was complaining about the perfume a particular Lady was wearing. She said black people wear it to cover up their smell. Apparently, my Grandmother thinks Black people have a smell.

Now, I do know that many of the recent African immigrants in the church came from a place where deodorant really isn’t an issue. As a result, many of those who have recently arrived, or refuse to conform, have strong BO. They see no problem with body odor. To them it is natural, healthy, and not unappealing, but often arousing.

(I think this because a friend who moved here from South Africa frequently ranted about how North Americans try to hide behind deodorant and perfume instead of letting their real smell loose).

But this wasn’t the phenomena my Grandmother was referring to. She just thought the smell had something to do with the colour of skin, not different cultural practices.

I ran into these sisters years later. At least, I think it was them. I worked with both of them on separate occasions.

I wonder if my early racism had any effect on them. If it was just a drop in the bucket, or if they even noticed. I wasn’t self aware enough to notice their reactions, and it was so long ago I wouldn’t be able to remember if I did.

I don’t think I will ask though. Some things are better left in the closet.

Saved!

2005-02-01T19:35:00.000-04:00

I can no longer consider myself saved.

I did have a conversion experience, back when I was three. I don’t really remember it. Back then it would have been inviting Jesus into my heart and accepting him as my personal savior. I was taught that everybody sins, and that unless they said the sinner’s prayer, they were going to burn eternally in Hell.

It took my brother longer. He was five. I clearly remember pressuring him, and somehow it doesn’t feel like it was out of concern. It was more like… impatience. I knew he was going to do it eventually, I just wanted him to hurry up and do it.

My desire to Evangelize pretty much ended there. It didn’t seem right to peddle Christianity as after-life fire insurance for those who prefer not to burn, but at the same time, I couldn’t accept the fact that being a Christian made my life easier.

Then things fell apart. With the help of the questioning of Optimus Prime, and a few University classes here and there, I came to view Salvation as either illogical or cruel. Why would God create people who are predisposed to disobey rules, which He also created, and then punish those people when they do what they are predisposed to do? And to solve this problem, God manifests Himself as a man and punishes Himself in place of everybody else (because according to His own law, someone had to be punished)? Oh, but there’s a catch: you have to believe, truly believe that’s the way it is. With only an ancient document to guide you. If you don’t accept it, then you still get punished, and not just a regular old punishment, ETERNAL punishment.

How the fuck does that make sense? Either God is cruel, or that’s just not the way it is.

I chose the latter option.

Crying in the Chapel

2005-01-31T11:18:00.000-04:00

I went to church yesterday, the church where I grew up. It was by special invitation from Professor Xavier.

I haven’t attended the church regularly for seven years. And each time I go back I see what I miss.

I don’t believe in atonement anymore, that Jesus died for my sins, or that the Bible is the infallible Word of God. I hate the idea of “preaching the Gospel to the lost.” But I miss the people.

Some of the people anyway.

Some people are aggravating gossipy power players who feel the need to engage in backroom politics to protect “their” church.

But some people are like Professor Xavier.

He made announcements during the service. The church is doing a lot more socially responsible things than when I was last a member: collecting clothes and food for the needy, raising money for Tsunami relief, and accepting money for poorer families in the church who need a boost. It was his job to remind people about that.

Then he wanted to share something personal.

It had been 17 (17, not seven, as I told minako last night) since the Prof. had moved to Halifax with his family. He didn’t really want to come, but being here shook him out of a funk he was in. he learned to trust God. Learned that God will work things out. Learned that trusting God to take care of the things you worry about is easier and safer than doing it yourself.

The Prof. almost lost his job. Lots of layoff, and by rights, he should have been one of the people laid off, or at least, relocated. But he wasn’t. And he attributed this to God. Not in a pompous kind of way. In a humble kind of way. He said that it must have been God. That he didn’t understand it. That He didn’t know why God would do this. But that he was very thankful.

And he read a passage from Matthew 11.

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

He encouraged, almost pleaded, with those who were going through a rough time to trust God.

He was crying by the end.

I don’t remember thinking, at any point, that the yoke of believing in fundamental, charismatic Christianity was easy, or that the burden of resolving the contradictions inherent in that belief system was light, but I miss being around people who do believe and really care for those around them, people who care so much that they cry about it.

Soundtrack CLICK HERE

Eight Signs of a Doomed Marriage

2005-01-21T06:47:00.000-04:00

1. The first leg of my relationship with Wilma was long distance. After a very meaningful, intense Christmas vacation in Halifax with her, I moved back to Waterloo, and began a relationship over the phone. After a couple of months, after we decided we were “seeing each other as much as two people possibly can without physically seeing each other,” and that we weren’t seeing anybody else, a female friend of hers was over at her apartment, talking about masturbating. Wilma has always had a problem with that, and this other girl figured she just wasn’t doing it right. Discussion of technique lead to demonstration, and then interaction. She called me early the next morning to tell me, and I was in a state of shock. I told her I wanted some space to figure things out. Everybody said this was a sign, that I should get out now, and nobody would blame me. While I was figuring out what to do, she send me two mix tapes, and a bunch of little notes talking about how sorry she was, how ashamed she was, etc. And I forgave her.

2. The other day I found a letter she wrote me after I had moved back to Halifax. She was contemplating ending the relationship because I made her feel like shit. That I didn’t do what she needed to make her feel good about herself. I can’t remember exactly when that letter was written because we went through that conversation so many times, and each time I convinced her things would be ok.

3. The first time we had sex, as I was entering her, I looked at her and said “Do you know what this means?” She said “Yes.” Apparently we weren’t quite on the same page. We were virgins, and we had talked about the context in which we would have sex: when had decided to get married. We hadn’t quite decided that yet. I thought this meant that we were going to have sex anyway. She thought it was a proposal. It was a year into our actual marriage that she found out about the discrepancy.

4. Almost immediately after we starting having sex on a regular basis, Wilma developed TMJ. It was so bad at one point that, while waiting for the bus, she bit out a false tooth that had been surgically placed in her mouth.

5. While we were engaged, Wilma bought a set of shot glasses that, to me, looked like used up condoms. On each one was a word: love, friend, joy, peace. One time while I was at her apartment, I was throwing a roll of tape around, as I seem to do often, and as a joke, I tossed it to her, expecting her to catch it. Instead, she batted it away, and it flew to the table where the shot glasses were sitting. The “love” one fell over and broke.

6. We wrote our own wedding vows, together:

As your Husband/Wife,
I promise to love you and to share my life with you;
to be honest and compassionate with you;
to treat you with respect and kindness
to accept you with all of your strengths and weaknesses;
to encourage and support you
to care for you in times of need
to be patient in times of difficulty
to have faith in your integrity
and to be loyal to you
through the best and the worst of what is to come,
in all of the changes of our lives
for the rest of our days.

She stumbled on “to be loyal to you.” She said it was because it was awkward the way the rhythm went, like there was supposed to be something else there. She was probably right, but everyone joked about how I better watch out because she didn’t seem sure about that one.

7. On our honeymoon, her vagina started to feel sore, mostly around the opening. At first we thought it was chaffing due to a lack of, or poor quality lubricant. Unfortunately this was not the case. As our marriage progressed, she got more and more sore till, some days, it was difficult for her to walk in tight pants. She was diagnosed with Vulvar Vestibulitis, and later with Fibromyalgia (the two were connected apparently).

8. Just after she raised the possibility of us separating, we went out for supper, what turned out to be our last “date.” She spent half the time talking about which of her friends would make a good match for me. She was practically setting me up with her fucking friends and we hadn’t even decided to separate yet.

The Six Virtues of Wilma

2005-01-20T07:16:00.000-04:00

1. She was very driven. I know this is related to some of her vices, but it was a positive thing sometimes. When she decided to do something, she did it, and got it done. And she decided to do a lot of things, and so she got a lot done. Everything from a film, to a dance show, to home improvement, to a Soiree. If she faltered along the way to her goal, it was only part of the process. She always got it done.

2. She was resourceful. Her projects couldn’t always be realized with what she had, so she tweaked her projects until they fit the material she had. And as often as that happened, she just started off with a little of this and a little of that, and somehow found a way to bring it all together into some amazing works of art.

3. She tried to be honest. I have to qualify it with “tried” because I think she lied to herself often, and then passed those lies onto other people, convincing herself it was the truth. But she rarely, consciously lied to people. Even if it would be detrimental to her in some way, or cause a fuss, in my mind, unnecessarily, she would tell the truth and be forthcoming with it. She only lied to me once that I can remember. It was a biggy, and it was near the end, but up to that point, she always tried to tell the truth as she saw it.

4. She could talk to anybody about anything. She wasn’t afraid of people. Or rather, she wasn’t afraid of approaching people and talking to them, introducing herself and making friends. She continually amazed me with her ability to make somebody intrigued and interested by simply talking to them. No subtle games to pique their interest. Just openness.

5. She really cared about her family. She constantly worried about her brother, who was often reckless and injured himself more than once; who seemed emotionally stifled and unable to relate to people; who had somehow fallen in with a bunch of guys she thought were below him. She desperately wanted to connect with her Dad and made an effort to ask him about things she didn’t care about so much just to talk to him. She went to her grandparents house and listened to them talk, even though the stench of smoke hanging in the air choked her up, and the conversation was fairly dull. She took her nieces out to do fun things every chance she could.. etc.

6. She had faith. It was a mangled, partly neglected faith, but it was strong. She tried to get rid of it, apparently, to please me. She tried not to believe in atonement, tried to imagine a world where there was no cosmic punishment for sin, but couldn’t do it. So finally, she just accepted that she believed Jesus died to pay the price for the sins of humanity. She thought I was disappointed or looked down on her for that. If she only realized how much I respected her for it. I tried to tell her, but she didn’t believe me.

The Seven Vices of Wilma

2005-01-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

1. She expected too much of everybody, including herself. She needed to be the best, needed to feel special, and needed things to be perfect, but they never were, so she was constantly disappointed with herself and the people around her.

2. She pushed herself too hard. She had several medical conditions which were made worse by stress and insufficient sleep, but despite that, she stayed up all hours of the night to do this project or that project, constantly wearing herself out. I tried to counsel her to slow down, to stop it, and when she wouldn’t listen, I got angry. So I became the controlling husband.

3. She was messy and didn’t see it. I’m messy too, but at least I see it and recognize it as my mess. She seemed to think it either wasn’t her mess, or what was hers wasn’t messy. When I cleaned out the apartment, I found tons of her mess and dirt she had left behind, and I cleaned it up so we could get the damage deposit back.

4. She over-reacts. I do too, but when she over-reacts, she also acts. She always wants to call somebody up and confront them, or whip off a yelly e-mail when she’s upset. I was constantly advising her to give it time, to wait, to be less confrontational in her language. Which, of course, added to the sense I was controlling.

5. She had no sense of planning for the future. Not in money, not in time, not in resources, nothing. That left the burden of constructing how we were going to pay for things and organize things (not physically, I mean) squarely on my shoulders. Not fair at all. I was always the bad guy, as a result. No, we can’t afford that now, no, we can’t use that for that, it has to be used for this, no we don’t have money to get that, and do this too, no, we don’t have time to go here, and go here, and do this, and get this done.

6. She couldn’t take criticism. Terrible combination with me, who doles it out too readily. Example: she was playing an REM song on her guitar, and it didn’t sound quite like the original. I asked her if she did that on purpose. She said that’s how it sounded. I wanted to go out and get the cd and show her. I’m sure I said that if she did that way on purpose, that was fine, but it wasn’t like the original. She cites that as one of the lasting scars. She says she couldn’t play the guitar in front of me after that. I swear I wasn’t aggressive, wasn’t condemning, just trying to make conversation.

7. She wanted specific, but contradictory things. She wanted me to be loving, caring, husband, who did special things for her constantly, like run her a bath with candles, bring her supper, hang out with her while she did her work, come to her to hug her instead of asking her to come to me (even if the distance was less than a foot, and where I was would have been less awkward for everyone), the husband who is very concerned about his wife’s safety when she travels around at night, who financially and emotionally supports his wife in her decision to quit her job and focus on her art work. At the same time, I couldn’t make any demands on her time, especially in the middle of a project (she was always in the middle of a project), I couldn’t ask for anything in return (cause then it would feel like the only reason I did anything for her was to get something back) I couldn’t talk about financial restraint, or ask that we discuss our major expenditures, I couldn’t try to do something special and fuck it up, or, do something special that wasn’t the kind of special she had in mind, I couldn’t get upset when she traveled through dangerous parts of town, by herself, walking, late at night.

Next Time: The Virtues of WIlma

The End of the Trixie Story

2005-01-18T09:55:00.000-04:00

(As a made for tv movie after the series was cut short due to viewer outrage)

Maybe I over think things.

In the beginning of December, I went out to lunch with Trixie and Speed. Trixie was ribbing Speed about whether or not he was seeing anybody, and when he last went out on a date. Then she turned to me.

But I said, you first.

She declined at first, but later, when we were on the desk together, she let a few details slip. She was still seeing the guy she was seeing before, although now the possibility of it developing into something serious/exclusive had dissipated, so she also had others on the table. Or at least that’s what she lead me to believe. She’s very good at saying just enough to make you wonder, but not enough to make you sure of anything.

Then it was my turn, so I told her I had a date just the night before. I wasn’t too forth coming on details (she, of course, wanted locker room talk, and I didn’t give her any).

See, I wanted to tell someone about Minako. I wasn’t talking to very many people. Speed wasn’t really an option, although he knew. I dragged my feet telling my brother, and Optimus Prime is always fighting the Decepticons or looking after his kids, and Pooh Bear was far away (EDIT: or maybe I was afraid of what she would think about me seeing someone new so soon). And I wanted to tell someone. I thought things were going well. I was happy. So when Trixie displayed some indication of being friendly again, I let little bits and pieces out.

Later in the month, at the work Christmas party, I took Trixie out for a smoke. She asked me if I thought Rabbit was attractive. It was the third time Trixie had asked me about this girl, about whether I thought she was attractive or whatever, so I asked her if there was some reason she was asking me about Rabbit. She said no, no, and then said, if she knew something she would let me know right away, if it was 4:00 am, she would call me up and let me know.

And that was my chance.

I said, I wasn’t sure if she would. I wasn’t sure if she would do that kind of thing anymore, or even call me at all.

I hope it sounded less guilt trippy than that.

Anyway, she said that I wasn’t the first person to feel that way with her lately. She explained that she’d been going through a lot lately, turning 30 and all, plus some other shit she didn’t want to get into, and she didn’t want to burden anybody with it. I assured her it wouldn’t be a burden, but she said she wanted to leave it at home, she didn’t want to come to work and have somebody there who knew about it.

We hugged and made up.

Still not as close. I think that is over. I think she wants to leave me as the work friend she hangs out with occasionally, and I’m fine with that. At least I feel like there’s not this open ended “what-the-fuck?” hanging between us now.

I Forget

2005-01-17T15:36:00.000-04:00

My Grandfather also developed Alzheimer’s.

Apparently I was the last one to know. Everybody thought I knew, so no one said anything. Then again, I have never been very good at listening to my parents or grandparents talk about their health issues. Have to try harder now because there are more of them, and instead of being a kid, I am someone who can actually lend support.

My Grandfather got worse and worse after his stroke. One night he cried because his mother died, even though his mother had been dead for more than twenty years. More than once he demanded that someone take him home. He insisted that my Grandparent’s house was not his home, and that he had no idea who my Grandmother was. One time he even giggled about how bad they were being, sleeping in the same bed, and that if his mom ever came in and found them, they’d be in trouble.

Eventually, he was starting to get violent. Threatened to hit my Grandmother one time if she didn’t let him out. That was when she called the cops. My Grandfather was walking down the road, headed “home” while my Uncle Foghorn walked behind him, trying to reason with him. My Grandfather threatened several times to beat up my Uncle, even swung his cane at him once, but eventually, he realized he had to go back.

The cops were waiting for him, and they took him away.

My Grandmother tells me stories about how he is doing now. Sometimes he is angry and violent, and it takes several nurses to calm him. He is drugged up most of the time. He has to be fed, because he can’t do it himself. And when he gets angry, he’ll spit his food out over my Grandmother, or my Aunt, or whoever is feeding him.

My Mother, his daughter, won’t visit him. She says it’s because she has a weak stomach, and she would throw up if he spit his food out on her. But I think it’s because she doesn’t want to see her father like that, doesn’t want to be faced with her father as someone she doesn’t recognize, or worse, herself as someone who isn’t recognized by her own father.

I went to visit him once. He could barely stay awake. At one point, he took off his glasses and wiped a tear away from his eye as he stared out the window. He stared a long time, until my Grandmother asked him something, and as quick as that, whatever was making him sad was gone, lost somewhere in the mess of memories that are jumbled up in his head.

Keys

2005-01-12T14:58:00.000-04:00

For a moment, the key was a glowing white hole in the darkness. It reflected the light drifting in from the small window just above the garage door. Then the key turned and disappeared into the ignition, into the blackness.

There was a click, then a slow growling and grunting that came and went like the squeaking of an old rocking chair, then another click, and the noises were gone, except for the echo which hung in the air a little longer. Then the noises started again.

There was also the sound of shuffling in the passenger seat. Slowly the light traced a line around a pair of glasses, a thick nose, a hat, a face, then an arm and a shoulder, finally a neck.

The growling and grunting switched to a deep rumbling accompanied by the sound of a little girl straining to get one last taste of pop through a straw, only a little more mechanical, a little more powerful.

"Do you hear that Charlie?" asked the driver.

"Eh?" responded the older man, turning his head away from the light so that his voice seemed to come from a patch of darkness.

"I said, do you hear that?" said the driver speaking a little louder.

"Hear what?" said Charlie.

"That sucking noise," answered the driver. His voice lowered again. "It sounds like somebody trying to suck up water from the bottom of a bucket with a vacuum cleaner."

There was a pause. Charlie leaned forward, back into the light, and opened his mouth to say something, but all he said was "Hmmm." He inhaled loudly as if he were about to try again, but stooped, distracted by the glare on the windshield as they pulled out of the garage. It blocked out everything outside the van. Charlie tried to cover his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt

"Sun's bright today, what?" he said, peeking over the top of his arm.

"I can hardly see where I'm going," said the driver. "Almost enough to blind you."

The van came to a stop sign, and the driver leaned forward, tugging at his thin, blond mustache. He looked left, than right, than left again, but the van didn't move. Charlie pulled up the sleeves of his tan coloured shirt and began to look left and right too. He lifted his hand, motioning for the driver to go, but stopped when he saw a car drive in front of the van. Charlie looked left and right again, this time a little longer, adjusted his thick rimmed glasses, and began to raise his hand again. Before he finished his motion, another car drove in front of the van. Charlie rubbed his pants and stared at the dashboard until the van finally started to move.

"How's your great granddaughter doing?" asked the driver. He glanced over to make sure Charlie was listening. "I didn't see her in church Sunday."

"They were away," said Charlie.

"So you had some peace and quiet this weekend, eh?" said the driver. He reached for a cup of coffee on the dash. "No little feet running all round above you."

"Eh?" said Charlie. "Don't notice them up there much at all." He reached over and hit the drivers arm, almost spilling his coffee. "If I do, I just turn down my hearing aid and I don't hear a thing." He started to laugh, looking up to the roof of the van and opening his mouth wide. The driver , who had just taken a mouthful of coffee, swallowed it quickly and starting coughing.

He was still coughing when they reached a traffic light. He put his coffee back on the dash, and reached into the back pocket of his dark jeans, finally pulling out a cassette tape. He slipped the tape into the van’s stereo, then looked up at the traffic light which had just turned green. The van started to move again, and without looking back down, he turned the stereo on.

"Pastor Phil!" said Charlie.

"What?" said the driver with a smirk that distorted the shape of his mustache.

"What's this?" ask Charlie.

"It's music," said Pastor Phil. "Don't you like it?"

"It's just a bunch of noise!" said Charlie. His eyes were wide and his eyebrows raised. "I could sing like that if I wanted." He closed his eyes and started howling. Pastor Phil laughed again and Charlie began to smile.

"Sounds like you're yodeling to me," said Pastor Phil. He turned off the stereo.

"It's a bunch of confusion," said Charlie. His eyes widened again and his smile started to fade. "God's not the author of confusion, says in the Bible. That leaves the devil." Charlie noticed his shiny brown pants that had become infested with wrinkles. He tried to wipe away the wrinkles as he spoke. "The devil's the author of it."
"Bible also says to become all things to all men," said Pastor Phil. His voice seemed to push against the windows of the van, looking for a bigger audience. "Go home and read first Corinthians chapter nine. We have to do all we can do to save souls, and if that means putting the Gospel in rock, that's fine with me."

"Hmmm," said Charlie, his head still bowed toward his pants. Charlie had not been able to read his Bible since his stroke four years ago. The words would switch places in his head, or he would forget what the beginning of a sentence said by the time he got to the end of it. His granddaughter had bought him some Bible tapes a few years ago, but Charlie couldn't use the tape player very well and he didn't like the voice of the man who read. Too high and mighty, he complained.

Charlie was still rubbing his pants, but the wrinkles wouldn’t go away. He stopped and stared at the wrinkles on his pants, then the ones on his hand, before speaking again.

"Marla says music makes things make sense, even when they don't normally." He looked back to Pastor Phil. "And when it don't, it ain't music. It's just noise."

"She used to play, didn't she Charlie?" Pastor Phil’s voice was a little softer than before. He had come to the city a year ago, just after the funeral for Charlie’s wife. When he first arrived he heard stories of all the wonderful things Charlie and Marla had done for the church, and how sad it was that she had died and left Charlie alone. He had wanted to visit Charlie ever since, but there was just so much he had to do. It was his secretary who suggested he bring Charlie along on this errand.

"She used to play the piano for me all the time," answered Charlie. "We've a big piano in the living room, and she used to sit down every night and play. Almost always sat and listened, except when I had to work outside. Then I could hear it coming through the windows. Always played classical music. Beethoven and Bach, people like that."

"My wife just plays cds," said Pastor Phil, reaching for his coffee again. "Old Hymns and Gospel songs. But I'd even miss that if she died."

"Hmmm," said Charlie. He turned his head and began chewing on his bottom lip.

They had reached the highway now, and Charlie looked out the window. He tried to watch the trees on the side of the highway. He wanted to pick a tree and follow it, but he couldn't decide which tree. They all looked the same. Every time he picked one, another would catch his eye and he would change his mind. After a while, he decided to just stare straight ahead. All he saw was a blur of green and black. He didn't like that either and decided to look at the dashboard again.

His eyelids began to droop by the time the van pulled off the highway and into a driveway. Charlie looked up to see a building with several large garage doors. Pastor Phil turned off the motor and opened the door.
"I'll be right back," he said. "You'll wait here?"

"Hmmm," said Charlie.

Pastor Phil slipped the key into his pocket as he walked into the building. After a few minutes, he came back out with a woman in overalls. She was muscular, and had dirt smeared on her forehead. They talked, and Charlie could see their lips moving, but he couldn't hear what they were saying. As they got closer to the van, Charlie could hear their voices, but he couldn't make out the words.

By the time they got to the hood of the van they had stopped talking anyway. The woman stood there shielding her eyes from the sun while Pastor Phil climbed back into the van. He pulled a leaver and the hood opened. Then he put the key into the ignition and turned it. As before, the van whined a little. Pastor Phil tried again, and the same thing happened. When the van finally started, he got out and spoke with the woman again. Charlie turned up his hearing aid, trying to hear what they were saying, but all he could hear was the rumbling of the motor.

Pastor Phil shut the hood and shook hands with the woman. She smiled, waved, then walked back to the building.

"Well that's that then," said Pastor Phil as he shut the van door.

"What'd she say?" asked Charlie.

"Well, one of the parts inside is broken, and the van needs that part to start. This van is so old that they don't make that part for it any more. None of the new parts will fit. Guess we'll have to get a new van."

"Hmmm," said Charlie.

"Yeah, we'll have to get a new van," said Pastor Phil.

****
Later that evening, Charlie sat at home, watching television. He squinted as if he were trying to see something. He looked past the man and woman, past the parking lot behind them, past the window in the apartment in the background, but before he found what he was looking for a closeup of the woman's face appeared on the screen.

Charlie turned the television off and left the room.

He came back with a record of Beethoven and a long white candle. He turned on the record player and gently lowered the needle. The sound of scratching filled the room as he fumbled with the plastic wrap around the candle. Once the candle was uncovered, he placed it in a golden candle holder. While he lit the candle, someone began playing a piano. Charlie sat in his chair and closed his eyes. He forgot everything else, the sucking sound in the van, the stop sign, the tape, the trees, the voices. The music drowned it all out. He pictured his wife's fingers pressing the keys of the piano, thin and pale, so pale they seemed to be glowing. Her hands floated away from the piano, still pressing invisible keys as they drifted around the room, easing closer and closer to Charlie's head until they opened it up and went inside, and he felt her music in his belly.

Soundtrack CLICK HERE

1998

Cerebrovascular Accident

2005-01-11T10:31:00.000-04:00

My Grandfather was stubborn, and not just when it came to arguments. When he had some work to do, whether it be in his garden, or fixing up the shed, he would work at it until it was done. If there was something he couldn't do, he would just try harder and harder until it worked.

This didn't work so well after he had a stroke.

My Grandfather didn't lose any motor function or physical ability, didn't even slur his words. But his mental capacity was severely diminished. He could figure things out the way he used to. He would forget things and get confused. And because he was stubborn, he would plough ahead anyway.

My Grandmother tried to reason with him, tried yelling at him, tried pleading with him, but when my Grandfather decided it was time to mow the lawn (even though he had done it three days in a row) there was no convincing him otherwise. When he decided he needed to remove a tree from the yard, no one could talk him out of it.

The result was that my grandparents garden started to deteriorate, their lawn and hedges became a mess, and their yard a disaster area.

After a few more strokes, and people badgering him about how hard he was pushing himself physically, my Grandfather finally scaled back on the yard work. But instead, he took up house work. He vacuumed the house everyday, sometimes twice a day. There was never a dirty dish, because he would wash and dry it right away. He would make up things to work at sometimes, and wouldn't listen to my Grandmother, even though she had done the house work for almost 50 years prior to that.

It was both sad and scary. This was my prime example of male aging.

And the worst part, was one time, after school, when I was prepared to play the chicken game with my Grandfather over the television, I came in the room to find him down on all four, scratching at the carpet like a dog. He looked up at me when I came in with the strangest look of bewilderment and fear that I have ever seen on an old man's face.

So I left the room and got my Grandmother, who promptly told him to get up off the floor. She treated him like a child, and part of it made me uncomfortable, but I certainly didnt have any alternative suggestions on how to treat a stubborn, confused, self-destructive old man.

I wrote a story based on my Grandfather not long after his second stroke. I'll post it tomorrow.

... Without You

2005-01-10T01:19:00.000-04:00

Soundtrack CLICK HERE

This was my first Christmas without Wilma.

It was also my first Christmas without my Grandfather.

People were pretty good about both parts though. At my extended family's Christmas Eve get together, my Uncle Foghorn Leghorn asked me how I was holding up, but that was as close as anyone came to bringing it up at Christmas. It never occured to me that the evening would be problematic until I was in the car, on the way there, with my parents. I was sure Sylvester’s kids (Foghorn's grandkids) were going to say something about Wilma not being there, but they didn't, and I was thankful. On Boxing Day my cousin Babs (another of Foghorn's daughters) asked me about why Wilma left, what reason she gave. Babs was concerned because her husband had broken up with her for crazy reasons, but they ended up getting back together. That's not going to happen with WIlma and me. Which is what I told her.

I feel humiliated when I talk about it now. Like a cuckold.

I tried to stay beside my Grandmother on Christmas Eve, so we could have some sort of unspoken "being without people this year" bond. It only partly worked. She was rushing downstairs to the bathroom every few minutes because she was suffering from diarea. And everybody else was clamouring for her attention too. She’s very good at trying to spread it around so no one feels left out.

Foghorn almost stepped on toes about my Grandfather not being there too. On Christmas Eve, Foghorn is always Santa. He hands out presents from my Grandparents, and inter-family presents (immediate family stuff gets put off until Christmas morning). On all the presents from my Grandparents, my Grandmother had left the from spot blank. When Foghorn asked, rather discretely, I might add, everybody who was in the know hissed at him to ignore it, because my Grandmother had intentionally left it blank.

She wasn’t sure if my Grandfather would still be alive by Christmas Eve.

My Old Man Hat

2004-12-23T10:46:00.000-04:00

One Halloween while I was in High School, I wanted to dress up as a reporter. It wasn’t much of a stretch, since most of my high school years were spent pouring over the beleaguered high school newspaper. Plus, I already had the overcoat. All I needed was the fedora.

My grandfather wore fedoras. He had a whole bunch of old ones too. So I asked my grandmother if I could borrow one. She went and pleaded my case to my grandfather and he agreed to let me borrow it, as long as I took care of it.

But when he saw me, the day I dressed up, he said “That looks pretty good on you. Looks good on him doesn’t it mom?” (he called my grandmother mom, we were all sitting around the kitchen). “Well, you might as well keep it. I got my new one.” And then he left the kitchen. My grandmother’s eyes were as wide as I had ever seen them. He hardly ever gave anything away.

During the next two years of High School I frequently wore the hat, not just as dress up or as a prop. I was proud of it, partly because it was cool, and partly because my grandfather had given it to me.

I used it one time at a Grad social. I was the MC, and did a This Hour Has 22 minutes type routine with a friend of mine.

But I also performed this poem, with my hat. It was originally about how frustrated I was with the entire student body who was content to grumble and complain about the school, but not to speak out so people could hear them (i.e. in the student newspaper I edited). But it ended up being more about my grandfather somehow. More about how I felt like I imagined my grandfather feeling. And when I read it with his hat on, I felt at once proud to be like him, and scared I would end up like him.

Old Man In A Rocking Chair

I'm getting old you know
And it doesn't look that way
Because only yesterday I was young
But I know I'm old
I can feel it in my eyes
Soon I will be wearing brown pants
And complaining about my back

I'm going deaf you know
It happens to old people
They start to miss things
When I'm deaf
Will you hear for me?
Will you hear that music
That floats in the air
Waiting for MY ears?
Will you hear the screams
And listen to the whispers?
Even though you say you will
I know you won't

I'm going blind you know
It's part of being old
I can't read the writing on the wall
That has inspired me for so long
When I was young...
I can't see all the beautiful faces
Or even the ugly ones
I can't watch the fire dance
I will never see the clouds
Paint the sky....
Will you see for me?
No, you will not

I'm getting cranky you know
And no one listens
To a cranky old man
I used to know what to say
Articulate
I could explain to people
I know what they should do
I knew
And now I don't
Because I'm cranky
Will you speak for me?
No! Of course not!
You've never said a word in your life!
You just sit there
I know you see
And I know you hear
You just..

You see
I you I was cranky

I'm tired now
That's another part of being old
And I've got such a headache
I think I'll take a nap

(1994)

Marriage of the Matriarch

2004-12-20T23:19:00.000-04:00

If it was anybody else, I would think it was an oppressive, sad relationship.

My grandmother couldn’t be on the phone too long because my grandfather would get upset. She couldn’t go anywhere by herself because he would get jealous. She had to give special treats or money to me and my cousins in a clandestine way so he wouldn’t find out and get mad about her wastefulness. He would never listen to her when she told him things about the yard, the garden, money, or anything else. He always thought he knew best, and if something went wrong, it was always somebody else’s fault, usually my grandmother’s. My grandfather told her he loved her only three times in their whole relationship.

I asked my grandmother about her marriage one time, probably in the middle of some high school romance drama I was going through. She said it didn’t matter to her that he never told her he loved her, she knew he did. She understood that it was hard for him to talk about that stuff. She also knew that when he got upset, it was less about him wanting control, and more about him feeling left out.

When he got upset, or mad, he would storm around the house, but say almost nothing. Just a few quips here and there. One of his favourite things to do when he got mad was go to bed early. And he would make a production out of it, making sure to walk past my grandmother as much as possible while he was getting ready, sometimes he even said “well, I might as well go to bed since nobody wants me around here.”

He treated other people the same way, but to a lesser extreme. My aunts, my uncles, people at church, they all suffered under his tantrums, if they noticed. Sometimes, he would get pissed off at people, and they wouldn’t notice him purposely giving them the silent treatment, and of course, that would make him more angry. He was never threatening or violent, not until the Alzheimer’s took control of him.

I’d like to blame it all on the Alzheimer’s, or his strokes, but his immature behavior extended back beyond those incidents.

My grandmother deserved better. She deserved a husband who wouldn’t get upset when she wanted to catch up with an old cousin on the phone, or wouldn’t throw a fit when she wanted to go out to visit somebody when he couldn’t go.

But I still can’t view my grandmother as a poor, underprivileged house wife. She saw what he was, and accepted him for it. She loved him, and took on all that went with him because of that. I could see it when she talked about him, when she had to clean up the mess he made in his pants when he started to lose control of his bodily functions, how she consoled him and read to him when he lost the ability to read, and how lonely she feels now that he’s gone and she can do all the things she couldn’t before.

And I’ve always thought of it as a beautiful example of love and understanding.

Maybe I’m deluding myself, because I don't want my entire world turned upside down. But I just can’t bring myself to see my grandmother as anything but the strong, compassionate matriarch I have always imagined her to be; someone who knowingly, willingly, and lovingly made sacrifices to be with her emotionally crippled husband.

Golden

2004-12-17T15:05:00.000-04:00

I went to a different Jr. High than everyone else in my neighborhood. This is because I wanted to take French Immersion. It's not that the local Jr. High didn't have a French Immersion Program, but rather, they didn't think I would cut it. My parents thought I could, so we visited the next Jr. High over, and convinced them to let me in.

Fortunately, a bus driver for the school lived just up the street from me, so I would meet him and his bus just as he was leaving home, and take the long bus ride to school, and then back after school.

One day, at the end of school, I really needed to piss, but if I took the time to do that, I would have missed my bus. So I decided to hold it. I squirmed the whole ride home, and when I was let off, I walked as fast as I could to my grandmother's house. I always went there after school, but it was also closer. By the time I reached her driveway, I had one hand on my crotch, pinching to keep the urine inside. Unfortunately, halfway down the driveway, even that wasn't enough. I pissed myself as I walked down the driveway to my grandmother's.

My Aunt and Uncle lived upstairs, and when my grandparents weren't home, I would go in through their door. I couldn't do that on this day, and my grandparents weren't home. So I went down to the shed, built over the basement door and paced, trying to figure out what the fuck I was going to do.

I had those faded jeans that everybody wore back then, so not only was I wet, it was pretty clear that there was a yellow tinge to the wetness.

Eventually, my grandparents came home, and I almost scared them half to death, lurking in the shed as they came in with their groceries.

When my grandmother saw what had happened to me, she took me into the basement, gave me a pair of my grandfather's jogging pants and washed my jeans for me.

She asked a few questions, to make sure I was ok, healthwise, and then let it go. Didn't ever bring it up again.

Runaway

2004-12-16T08:33:00.000-04:00

I fought a lot with my parents when I was growing up, mostly because they were very restrictive, and I was very argumentative. They would decide that I couldn't do something (like listen to the pop radio, go to a movie, go to a dance, go to a party with friends, etc.) I would come up with all sorts of brilliant arguments about why I should be able to, and they would either ignore them, chuckle, or loose patience and get angry.

When I was younger, my big wild card was threatening to go live with my grandmother. My parents never really took it seriously, but I usually ended up in my grandmother's kitchen complaining about my parents.

My grandmother was very good at being in the middle of things. She listened to my complaints, no matter how ridiculous, and pointed out where I was overlooking something, or where I needed to let up, or how my parents had their own issues going on. And she would defend me to my parents.

As recently as two years ago, my grandmother was trying to patch things up between me and my mother after we had a fight. Wilma had dyed her hair blue, and my mother freaked. It was just before my cousin's wedding, so the whole family, and probably the whole church would be introduced to my wife as the freak with the blue hair.

In fact, I clearly remember somebody preaching from the pulpit that dyed hair was a symbol of rebellion a year or so before this.

I wonder how the little old ladies with unrealistic brown or black hair felt about that...

Anyway, my grandmother talked her down, till she was at least ok with the possibility. At the wedding, my relatives poked fun at Wilma for her hair, and she poked back, all in fun. And my mother was ok by the end.

My grandmother, meanwhile, tried to explain defended my mother's reaction to me, explaining that she was just concerned about what other people would think, and that she just didn't understand why someone would want to do that to themselves. My mother is always makeup free, dye free, perfume free, earring free, and almost accessory free. But despite her aesthetic, my mother had agreed to accept Wilma's hair, just not like it. My grandmother explained that I needed to give her time to accept these sorts of things. That it took my mother a while to adjust.

I wasn't the only one. My cousins all ran to my grandmother too. They complained about the fights with their parents, or their siblings (my brother and I just fought it out, no need for intervention there...) She was at once, the concilerie and the boss of our family.

Absence

2004-12-14T02:37:00.000-04:00

The only experience with death that has had a strong impact on me came before I started school. All four of my grandparents are still alive, all my relatives that were alive after I was born are still alive, I didn't know anyone in school who died. So when I think about it, the death of my Uncle Rupe is really the only one I remember.

Uncle Rupe was Aunt Pauline's husband. They weren't my real Aunt and Uncle, in fact, I'm not sure exactly how I was related to them. Some distant relatives somewhere on my Mom's side.

Uncle Rupe wasn't as cranky about me watching TV in his house as my grandfather was, partly, because he was too busy working on something in the garage, often a car or truck or something. That is about the only memory I have of him. In his work suit, covered in motor oil, pushing his thick rimmed glasses up on his nose as he made some lame joke that adult males make to little kids.

But when he was gone, it left this kind of sick empty feeling inside. I cried for weeks when I went to bed. I was scared. I didn't understand how someone could be there one day and gone the next. It just seemed wrong. And when my thoughts eventually drifted to what would happen to me when I died(yes, drifted rather than progressed, since I was still quite young, I didn't make the connection to my own mortality right away)I was even more afraid.

In addition to crying myself to sleep, I decided to be extra good. After all, at that point in my life, I still had a strong concept of hell, and since it my options were heaven or hell, I had to make sure I was going to heaven.

My parents, especially my mother, were pleased with my improvement in behavior. Apparently, I was quite the little mischievous and rebellious boy, always trying to find a way to make my work shorter or easier, or sneak something and get away with it.

My goodness ended one day and my mother freaked. I don't even remember what I did, I just remember her chasing me down the stairs. And when she caught me, she pinned me to the floor, with her knees on my shoulders, and squeezed my cheeks, crying, and asking me why I was back to being bad.

She felt very guilty about it after, for a long time after. She apologized about it every time it came up when I was in elementary school, and I probably over-used it as a wild card to save me from trouble.

Clearer Picture, More Channels, Better Reception (?)

2004-12-13T08:53:00.000-04:00

When I was growing up, most of my relatives on my mother's side lived with in walking distance of me. So I played with my cousins a lot, and visited my grandparents a lot.

At first, my visits to my grandparents were primarily for their television. My parents did not have cable, and did not have a colour television, so as a young, preschool boy with a growing obsession for the flashy box, I had to find alternative venues to indulge.

My grandparents and my Aunt Pauline lived side by side, and both had cable and colour television. So I visited them both on a regular basis, often one right after the other.

Eventually, I stopped visiting my Aunt Pauline, and just visited my grandparents. When they got a VCR, I think I used it more than they did. I taped movies, mostly, and watched them when I came home from school. My grandmother would feed me leftovers and/or cereal while I talked about my day, and then I would retire to the TV room to watch whatever crappy movie I had taped.

This is partly because I felt like I had to catch up. My parents didn't let me go to the theatre, they didn't get a vcr until I was in University, they still don't have cable, and I didn't visit anybody's house on a regular basis when I was a kid. So, in elementary and junior high, when talking about the latest crappy movie or crappy TV show is really the only way to relate to your peers, I didn't want to be left behind.

And my grandmother understood.

My grandfather, on the other hand, frequently complained that he didn't see why they had a TV and vcr since I used it all the time. There was more than once when we would have a stand off. He would be watching something he didn't understand, or really didn't want to watch, and I would wait patiently for him to leave so I could watch what I wanted. I never asked, although, my grandmother would frequently intervene on my behalf.

When I got older, I made more of an effort to watch what they wanted to watch, and watch it with them. But it was hard because my grandfather always had to ask questions like "who's that feller?" and "what's he doing?" and when I tried to explain it to him, I inevitably had to repeat myself three times before he heard, and even then, he didn't understand. A few times of this and he would get frustrated and leave, grumbling under his breath.

Oh yeah, that (supplemental)

2004-12-11T17:33:00.000-04:00

Soundtrack CLICK HERE

When I started this blog, I intended to add new entries only on weekdays. I am breaking that rule for this special supplemental.

It appears that some of my new readers have taken offense to some of the things I have written, and I would first of all, encourage those readers, from time to time, but always in a respectful matter, to question my logic (or tone, or content or anything at all). If you are offended by something I've written or implied, or feel that my jumps in reasoning are not logical, tell me so, and I promise right here and now, no subject will ever be taboo, except of course my intelectual capacity, or my moral viewpoint. Feel free to suggest that I may not have considered everything in one of my post, that in my haste to write my thoughts, I may have overlooked something central and important, or conversely, that I have misinterpreted something. But don't say I didn't think about it at all. I do try to think about my posts carefully, and I will respond to your objections in a respectful and careful manner as well. However, if you are inflammatory or insulting, I'll collect you're fucking head.

Now, to address some of the concerns which have been filtered through the vines, I must first explain my intention in writing a blog. Practically, this was a concession I made because I read someone else's blog, and I thought it was only fair to allow that person the same access to me. But my blog is a confessional blog, in the tradition of confessional writing that extends all the way back to Augustine's confessions, and is continued in the poetry of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, the feminist confessional writings like those of Alice Walker, and the "new man" confessional work like that of Nick Hornsby.

A major feature of this form of writing is that it contains very personal, intimate, sometimes shocking information about the author, often implicating himself or herself in something he or she is angry about. Often times the subject matter is taboo, so that in early confessional poetry, sexual desire, promiscuity, and anti-governmental feelings were often present, while in "new man" confessional work, women are often described as objects of desire.

If you read these latter works too superficially, you may see them as condoning that view of women, when actually, it is not. It is simply acknowledging that it does happens, and not only that, but that the author himself (since I am speaking of the "new man" stuff here, written exclusively by males) is guilty of this. And not guilty in a celebratory way, but in a self deprecating way. A way in which the author feels pathetic, stupid, and wrong for viewing women in that way, and sometimes struggles against it.

It is in this spirit that I said that I imagined fucking Trixie's brains out, or imagined her in just a pair of high heels hoes sucking my cock into oblivion. Not because I think women, including Trixie, as holes to cum in, but because I lusted after her and it affected the way I related to her. I did not act on this lust, and felt guilty, because I felt that I, in some way, contributed to her fucked-up-ness of needing sexual interaction to escape the emptiness of her life. I tried to be her friend, not another booty call. Even though I continued to lust, and continued to be jealous of her booty calls, I did not act, and felt moderately guilty about having those feelings to begin with.

I say moderately, because I think sexual desire is a legitimate feeling, and it is not always accompanied by an emotional attatchment. You can argue about whether that kind of sex is healthy or not, but the fact is, people lust. I lust. And I'm not going to hide that here. I also sometimes feel guilty about lusting, and I won't hide that either.

This is my confessional blog, and if I confess something that offends you, there's a good chance it might offend me too. But it exists none the less, so I am going to write it for you to read.

Happy Birthday Wilma

2004-12-10T09:04:00.000-04:00

Today is WIlma's birthday. I haven't bought her a gift. I haven't prepared a special dinner. I haven't sent her a card. I haven't even send her an e-mail. And I'm not going to.

I hated Wilma's birthdays. She always expected so much, and I always fell short. Not that she wanted all kinds of expensive presents. She wanted the day to feel special. SHE wanted to feel special. And no matter what I did, it was never quite enough.

The best I did was the night I proposed. I took her out for dinner, and gave her the initial gift, which was a two tickets to a dance performance (I generally hate modern dance as much or more than I hate musicals, but I was willing to go anyway) and a copy of Emily Dickinson's poetry (it's her birthday today too).

Then we went for a walk down by the waterfront, till we found a place to sit down. It happened to be beside the submarine used in the film K-19, which was shot here a few years ago (Wilma and I always said we would watch that movie on our anniversary sometime, but we never did). The snow was gently falling, and I took out the ring we had picked out together and asked her to marry me. Then, to celebrate, I had my own rendition of communion: port and Belgian wafers.

Afterwards, we went back to my place and exchanged oral sex... except, that just when she started, she realized she had a cold sore. At first, I was disappointed that she wasn't going to finish the blow job, but as the blood returned to my brain, I realized that larger issues involved. We srcambled to find a doctor's number, got a prescription that cost $100 (didn't have a medical plan back then, and she didn't want to put it on her parents plan) and thank God, nothing developed.

But even after all that, she picked at how it wasn't as good as I could have done, or that didn't make her feel special enough. Years later.

My reaction to this was two fold. Inside, I felt like shit, like I was an inadequate husband. Outside, I got angry and yelled about how she was a spoiled brat who expected too much of everyone, including herself, and that if she was just more realistic, she would be happier. Of course, this didn't help the situation any, and can be chalked up to another thing on my list of things I did wrong.

I tried to make things special, I swear I tried, but eventually, it became a resentful, despairing kind of try. Which of course she picked up on and added to the failure of any of my attempts.

So Happy Fucking Birthday Wilma. I hope you're happier on your own.

Fallout

2004-12-09T08:44:00.000-04:00

I had a party, a house warming party for my new, lonely apartment that I moved into after Wilma left (left me). I invited people from work. I considered them supportive friends, or at least, like distant family members.

Three people showed up. Trixie did not. I called her to find out what was going on, since I had talked to her multiple times about the party, and how important it was to me, but she just said she had company.

So a few days later at work, we were avoiding each other. I just didn't know how to talk to her. I was hurt and disappointed. She came over and asked me if I was mad at her. I said no, but I was disappointed. She got snippy and made some sarcastic remark. Later, I went over and told her I didn't want her to withdraw because of something stupid I did to make her uncomfortable, and she told me to stop acting like a girl.

So, over the next few weeks, we politely said hello, and avoided each other. She didn't call, didn't invite me out, didn't come over for lunch, didn't even ask me how things were going.

I tried several times to patch things up. None were really successful, and some were bigger failures than others (see below). I would ask her how her weekend was. I would tell her a funny story. I would ask her a question about work stuff that I already knew the answer to. But she was short, and sometimes snippy.

All the while, the little Buddha she gave me was sitting on top of my computer at work, a constant reminder that someone I thought was a close friend was now shedding me like excess weight.

So one day, when I had tried one more time to make a bridge, I took the little Buddha off of my computer and stuck it in my drawer. I decided that I always knew she was the kind of person who would rather withdraw than face up to things, and that in my... damaged state, I couldn't be the strong one who stood up and took that. I need to hang out with someone who had a little more compassion, a little more empathy, a little more understanding, a little more patience.

And then someone like that came along.

Things I Did Wrong

2004-12-08T07:43:00.000-04:00

1. When I was in Montreal, I bought Trixie some souvenirs: a t-shirt and some Playboy trading cards. I know, I'm a moron. But there is a context. She was forever making lewd comments about other women, saying what she would like to do with them. AND she told me a story about her and Lucky watching porn on his computer together. It was supposed to be funny. A joke. But I still shutter when I think of the look on her face as she opened the pack of cards while sitting on my couch.

2. One time at work, when I was the supervisor, a friend of Trixie's (Twigy) wanted her schedule changed so they could have lunch together. They asked me in the staff room, in front of some other staff. Trixie said please, batted her eyes, and pouted. I said we'll see, but I was pissed. If I am supposed to be a supervisor, I have to have some respect from the people I supervise. They can't think that I will bend over backwards for Trixie anytime she bats her eyes.

(Although, there was this one time, when she played chicken with me and won: She said that if I let her go home early on a Saturday, she would take me in the back room and give me a blow job right then and there. I didn't do it, but I couldn't even bring myself to say no).

So I reprimanded her. Away from everybody else. She thought, at first, I was being protective of her, concerned about what other people would think about us, and as a result, her. She said she didn't care about that. And when I clarified, stating that it was more what they thought of me as a supervisor, she got pissed. That was the day of my party.

3. I called her one day, from work, and asked her to go out of her way so I could spend an afternoon with Snoopy, a friend of hers I also had a crush on. This was after she didn't show up to my party, after she had been snapping at me or ignoring me for days. I really wasn't THAT concerned about spending an afternoon with Snoopy, I just couldn't think of another plausible excuse to call Trixie. She called me a pervert several times, and hung up on me.

Before Sunset

2004-12-07T10:07:00.000-04:00

Trixie was very good to me when Wilma left (left me). She listened while I talked about it. Called to make sure I was ok. Came over to hang out a few times. Invited me to hang out with her band of cougars. Came with me to see movies and hear concerts that she would not have otherwise.

One time, when we were both high and drunk, she even got me dancing. Apparently we dance for three straight hours. But, still being me while high and drunk, we didn't actually touch each other, except for once, when I put my hand on her hip. It was enough to make me take a deep breath, right there on the dance floor, and every time I think about it.

I slept in her bed twice, but not with her. Her under the covers and me on top. Even then, we didn't snuggle or cuddle or anything. When we got up, we went for breakfast and talked more.

I think the biggest thing was that she talked to me about her life. About how she was tired of keeping secrets from her ex-boyfriend; about her one experience with knifiness; about how she was tired of late-night booty calls; about how her and her mother had a terrible relationship; about how worried she was about her brother; about how she really liked this guy, Lucky (the leprechaun).

And I got to give her advice, or just listen, depending. And she listened to my advice, and told me that I was a good friend for listening.

Meanwhile, as Wilma's departure spread through the ranks at work, a rumour about Trixie and I having an affair gained momentum. Neither of us addressed it directly, however, several people approached me about how I should consider a relationship with Trixie, and that it might be a good idea. Trixie reported the same. But we dismissed it as meddling.

And now that I recall, there was one night when she asked me flat out if I was falling in love with her. Huh. I had forgotten about that. I said no, and she said good, ok.

Huh.

Oh Speed

2004-12-06T08:56:00.000-04:00

Soundtrack CLICK HERE

Meanwhile, I found out Speed and Trixie slept together. Each of them told me, on separate occasions, thanks to my probing questions.

I suppose I should clarify. Speed's name has nothing to do with his performance. By all accounts, he took his time and performed admirably. In fact, I have never known Speed to go faster than necessary or be even slightly reckless. He has lost at least one race, that I am aware of, because he did not act quickly enough. So the name is perhaps a little ironic. Plus, it goes with the soundtrack.

Speed is also a little younger than Trixie. A little less experienced. Could use some schooling perhaps.

So when I determined that Trixie would be interested in another go, I tried to encourage him to pursue that opportunity. By this time though, Speed knew I had a bit of a crush on Trixie, and also knew that Trixie was sleeping with another friend of his, so he wasn't as interested. I didn't let up for a long time, mostly because I wanted to live vicariously through him.

One time, while I was drunk, I called him a fucker because he could have what I wanted and didn't take it.

In the end, Speed finally sat Trixie down and explained that he just couldn't do anything with her again. Trixie still played those chicken games ("So Speed, you wanna come over and have some fun later") and Speed would try and keep up, but eventually, he would squirm and back down. And she knew he would, she just did it to watch him squirm.

I guess I'm a bit of a sucker for a tease.

Ode to Trixie

2004-12-03T10:57:00.000-04:00

“I don’t know. I just can’t handle it. I just stop, turn my feelings off; that’s it.”

(As she raises her hand in the air, as if her feelings were outside of her, coming into her, and she wanted them to stop. And turning her head so she doesn’t have to see them anymore, so she could pretend they weren’t even there, so she could pretend they were some lame ass drunk college boy she was rejecting, and he would stumble away, and call her a bitch or a lesbian or something, but quiet, under his breath, so only his friends could hear, so no one would turn and look to see what was going on. Her feelings would never cause a scene.)

May 02, 2004

Me and My Questions

2004-12-02T10:18:00.000-04:00

I had a huge crush on Trixie for a long time. The kind of crush you can't keep to yourself, but not the kind you have to act on.

Not that I didn't frequently imagine fucking her brains out, or her in just a pair of high heels, squatting in front of me, sucking my cock into oblivion...

What?

I think it started when I forgot my lunch one day at work. She offered me the food she had, and in return, I made her a home cooked meal and brought it into her as a thank you.

Trixie has always been flirty and suggestive at work, but that put me on her radar. She flirted with me more after that, and eventually we went out for a drink. She has a way of playing chicken with people, making suggestions, lewd suggestions or otherwise and not backing down until the other person does. So when she mentioned us going out for drinks when Wilma was out of town, I didn't back down, and we ended up in a bar.

I swear I didn't want anything to happen. I was just getting out. And asking questions about her. Partly under the guise of building a character on her, and partly because I sort of get off on finding stuff out about other people. So she told me how she cheated on her last boyfriend of eleven years, how when she left him, she slept with lots of guys who would call her up in the middle of the night for a fuck, and she would agree, and how she did it all because she was lonely.

And at the end of the evening, I told her she drove me crazy. She was a little surprised, and we went down to the waterfront to talk about it. She said she had never fucked a married man before. I explained that's not really what I was going for. I didn't even know why I was saying it. It just had to come out.

Wilma and I had been having problems for a while, but I made sure that Trixie understood that this wasn't my way of making a move on her. I had an example, friends of ours (Wilma and I) who accepted the fact that marriage does not prevent crushes, and that crushes should be acknowledged rather than ignored. And that, when you tell someone you have a crush on them, generally, they feel better about themselves.

None of this was a secret from Wilma. I told her all about it when she got back, and she didn't have a problem about that. There were other things on her mind then...

I also wrote something for Trixie that night when I came home. I'll post it next time.

My First Buddha

2004-12-01T12:08:00.000-04:00

Trixie gave me my first Buddha, so it's really more about her than a path to enlightenment. It's small, about half the size of my thumb, made of plastic and painted maroon. It's a chubby, smiling Buddha, with an open mouth and I used to wedge my fingernail in between his lips as a nervous habit.

The Buddha was a souvenir from a trip to Montreal that Trixie went on, by herself. A big deal for Trixie since it was the furthest she'd been from home, and the first time she'd been on a plane, and the first time she'd gone on a trip by herself, etc. She thought the little Buddhas were weird and exclusive to Montreal, and was somewhat disappointed when she found out they were available in abundance in our enlightened city of Halifax.