it's so easy in the future thinking about the past
watch what you say I am a doctor! a lawyer an indian chief!
I am a lonely lowly low brow lap lugging piece of meat
here is my skin here is my liver don't make me quiver
come hither you can be free
forget about the hum drum being part of the aculium of scum
that we wash from our boots
I could have been a lonely lowly low brow lap lugging
assistant's assistant just doing my job
just making my way
in a sea of black carcass tapestry
without a clue to impending catastrophe
but that's the way of the present
it's so easy in the future thinking about the past
On north american tv you will witness people being mutilated, blown up, torn apart but the showing of domestic animals getting similar treatment will not be tolerated. On the commune human mutilation of any sort will not be tolerated either.
On the commune we all work together for the farm, the enterprise, for the sustainability of free spirit. There will be feasts and famine, binge drinking by the gallon, fornication, intoxication and indoctrination. I am your high priestess and I can save you. Please take a number and have a seat. A sister or brother will be with you shortly.
Please note: smoking and spitting on west side only
It was meant to be, right I mean, everything happens for a reason, we choose our parents and our reality, the ball of cotton gets knocked off the table by kittykat and unwinds and unwinds and unwinds the long story of all of us, each individual, stories up our arms, symbolic reference to everything and everywhere, if god meant baby to die, baby dies, who's to doubt or deny, our footprints were made long before we learnt how to walk, all walks having been walked, all thoughts having been thought, this age is of xerox, repetition, reproduction, yes, there is originality as each person has their particular psychological take on baking a cake, dressing a bird, writing a book, tattooing a leg.
There is a strong cyclic force and it goes round and round and round and we may be seduced into thinking that it's a sphere but I tell you sister and brother, this ain't no circle but a beautiful arduous spiral where we go round and round and round always with a little edge, always a little different, always similar enough to recognize ourselves, our movement, the pattern. And jesus we may moan when we eclipse on the the dissolute that we are back here again, again, again damn it, didn't we learn anything, but I swear by the teeth in my mouth that it ain't the same it is a transliterated shift, it's a subtle trans-migration of the body and the mind.
So it is like this that I find myself in a foreign land, learning the trade of the needle.
It's official. I've quit one of my most difficult and horrendous jobs. I did learn so much from the experience- directly, indirectly- reflectively. I mostly had a miserable time and during my next to last shift I spent much of it in the bathroom sobbing to my dead mummy. Nevermind the fact that I was so inexperienced in understanding, determining and acting upon life threatening situations. That would have been enough. But to exasperate the stress level by tenfold, I was working in a very difficult environment, with people who had issues bigger than the Eiffel tower.
Taking a place in any other household is always difficult. There are customs and attitudes and idiosyncrasies that are always particular to each grouping of people, klan and peculiar to our own. It is said that birds of a feather flock together but I wonder rather, that flocking together binds birds together.
a small home, immaculately kept, terse conversations, closed rooms, no kitchen table kitchen table the place to sit, congregate, break bread, share. People here eat alone, sit and sleep alone. Silence, rather than an introspective zone to lay back and collect, engulfs itself into a mausoleum of sorrow and solemnity. A narrow word rises up from the smoldering melting metal of barbed wire and it is austerity. Here, we work by detail, always hidden under the shadow of bigger than, wonder, imagination. Put this there. Do this that. Shhhh! And, "in this house, we don't share anything!'
It's a tragedy really, not sharing. Sharing is the biggest thing- from food to shelter to love to knowledge.
Barren community space, solitary living amongst others, no hello no how are you doing no what are you thinking about- just detail: put this there do this that shhhh!
Nonetheless, the defacto line of nobody shares anything in this house- we have nothing to do with each other is in fact, cataclysmically untrue. A caretaker who has living in her house for a decade, her employer, a paraplegic man, indeed has a relationship. That's what we humans do. We have relationships. And the longer we spend together, and the less interference from the outside, the more inclined we grow to each other.
An agitation grew for me from a difference in predilection. How difficult it is to all get along! I was thrown into a system of dogma and stoicism that I have adverse reaction to. Those that know me will be quick to say that I am no chatter upper and that I am definitively serious and introspective but that my senses do guide me. I am open to surprise and humble mistaken whoopsies. I have ideals and beliefs and am optimistically wired. I am a compatriot (bread breaker!) to the underdog. I am an underdog.
But you know, dogma just gets to me right to the bone in a most unpleasant sort of way. Dogma can guide us and give us resource or recourse. It is not a replacement for truth. Dogma can take a hold of an entire life and perhaps thats what it's for; to fill the void of skirting; running away from the reaching out, asking questions, looking in the mirror. Dogma is always right. it's the individual who pulls the trigger.
in the back country I used to walk . or sometimes I would take my bicycle-if it was increment weather with the snow and ice or if I was tired or just lazy ass I would take the public transit and we would be squished together like an international soup tasting a little like srilanka in one seat and greek in another and maybe a little algerian standing up
here in the frontier land I need the machine and I have three beasts but this gloria is my favourite she makes me warm and comfortable and safe- sometime I will know the ways of the people and learn how to hunt and fish- I have my own rifle from my daddy and will use it on birds and squirrel- here there are not so many people- here it is the land- the rivers and cliffs and the bear and the mountain goat- here it is the grouse and quail and osprey- here is me and gloria.
What do I think of when I am driving home from work over early morning vistas of golden ochre, naples yellow, french vanilla, burnt caramel- humps of dry tuft, sticks of artemesia, burnt umber; samphire becoming at one with the universe.
I think of her, you, my mother I think of how it aches to miss you to miss you so badly and about how you drove me to ignition on so many occasions how it's all a convolusion the incongruous melange of both reticence and boldness that made so much of you that which is intricately incorporated to the inside mechanism of what makes me do the things that I do. I was a kid so as kids we make mistakes, so many mistakes, so fucked up I wish so much that you could have taken better care of me, made me feel like a girl was just a regular strong and powerful thing but you couldn't, your limitations too strong to fight, and fight I remember in my early teens when you went back to school and on the side lines learnt about Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and all of that bra burning jazz. How you had no one to rebound with- just silence from your man, where's my dinner and beer woman, words shrouded in more sophisticated middle class talk. It was a liberation for you and you, after such years of female drudgery were so eager to imbibe- finally some real food and clean water. Our nuclear world was still consuming miracle whip though so your struggle was lost to to the ears of what people were chattering about: the weaker sex, the darker mind, the mysterious female- don't try and understand'em-don't trust'em with the pocket book, eh-hehe and on the continuum of cheap formula it goes, not withstanding; ladies first- yea right- how you always made sure everyone else came before you.
scene #3100- hospital take- my father in emergency recovering after morphine overdose that a doctor poorly requested, I am placing your foot in the stirrups of the wheel chair from your car in the parking lot to take you to see him and you wince with pain- I scoot up your skirt to find gigantic ulcerated holes in your calf that you haven't told anyone about- no no it's ok I'll go to the clinic tomorrow it's alright.
It's alright-sure- way back in those conservative suburban years of the late 70's you delicately and clandestinely and in increments, put your excitement of rebirth emancipation back on the shelf and really only took it down again during torrid fights with your husband. Philosophy never shines in battle.
You see, I have to grow up and forgive you-forgive you for teaching me the ways of the second class sex. I have to stop blaming you for my failings and my incongruous melange of both reticence and boldness that makes so much of me- that which directly stems from an intricate osmoses of the inside mechanism of what made you do the things that you did. I wish that I had been braver for you and braver for myself and braver for my daughters. For my daughters and I, I have the time. All the time in the world. I love you and miss you so much.
It's a tough thing to look at yourself blatantly. My ego is an erupting mountain of me and my refuse; the sensitive child, the broken colt, the beaten animal. If only people could see, right. If only.
I have just started work-training with a paraplegic man. It's a sometimes scary sometimes acutely uncomfortable position. I have little experience and I am relearning the wheel. I overcompensate, I am clumsy, awkward, feel sorry for myself when I don't do well. My image is everything. this is not about me. I look like a loser. I want to impress. rack up those points, collect the golden stars. rockstar. I find it difficult, sometimes too much. This is not about me. I was driving in to town yesterday morning thinking about quitting. A few things stopped me. I am not embarrassed to say that duty and obligation were two of them. Everyone is afraid of the paraplegic man. The doctors and nurses, the taxi drivers, bank tellers, the caregivers. When the paraplegic man a comes around everyone runs, everyone quits. No one wants to be the one, in case something happens. Not on my watch. But it's not about me. It's about having the opportunity to learn humongous dangerous leaps of real life. I have no choice, if I want to be decent, to say ok. Ok then. I'll take the chance, the challenge to watch to listen, to be there to give, share, be aware, care, dare, struggle in the learning process of green neophyte clumsiness that is so full of humiliation because making mistakes is something we adults are twistedly not supposed to do. So rather, be still, be safe, settle. an entire planet of settlers
What's in paraplegia? What's in normal, abnormal? I thought that I had a pretty good grasp on notions of suicide, euthanasia. I was so openminded. Man, if somebody doesn't want any more of this honeyless jive live ass shit then jesus, go. Go on and end the agony. I also figured that if I was in a hypothetical accident that left me paralyzed from neck down and if it was too horrible for me to make the transition then hell yes, please let me end it now and jesus don't give me a hard time because it should be obvious that no one should live under these kinds of circumstances. Or so?
Interesting how we judge self sufficiency and physical freedom as the primordial defacto raison d'etre of human life. We believe this, we know that though we may be discontent, if we can wipe our own ass, and walk down a street, if we can function as a regular person in our system, no matter how empty we may feel, we are doing what we are opposed to be doing. When regular people talk about suicide, we want to get them help and if that help is refused we may find them rather selfish and irresponsible.
If a severely disabled person does not want to continue to live, we console and condone them and their way of thinking. If a severely disabled person does not want to live their life in an institution, does not want to lose their sense of individuality, their tastes, ideas, thoughts- if a severely disabled person says yes! to life and asks us to help them live it on their terms, we feel that they are unreasonable, selfish, a burden.
In fact, between us- don't we hear it all the time- how the retarded shouldn't procreate, how it would be a burden on the system and thus iresponsable. How, if we had the boldness to say, we abort fetuses because we find them to be a burden to ourselves and the system. That we aren't so much interested in their level of happiness or lack of, that we make such decisions. But that it's more of what an imposition it would be on us.
Even with the now so-so accepted feelings of openly gay- lesbian- trans-ness, we still wouldn't want to wish it upon our kids would we? We want perfection for our kids because struggle is evil, sticking out is a humiliation. Rather than addressing our uneasiness we would rather not have to deal at all. Me included. Fuck I wish I was perfect I wish that I didn't have the problems that I have and I wish that they would just go away. I wish sometimes for all the things that ultimately have nothing to do with happiness or contentedness or connectedness or understanding or awe or life or any of the real reasons that make me happy to be alive.
All these thoughts are in support of why I did not quit my training yesterday morning. I am not grateful. I am excited and this maelstrom is keeping me committed because what's in it for me is a whole new awareness and understanding that I never would have dreamed of.
I followed him as best as I could, both of us staggering between cement blocks, concrete pillars, steel girders, in the sunken city deep into the night. He stopped to make a beautiful golden arc of projected vomit before lurching forward again. I said wait. He said I need water.
Black cut outs of disapproving men and women passed us by. Revelry was a protestant affair and meant to be done in carefully measured stitches. I looked profoundly into the night sky and watched a river of stars rage, twisting and bubbling, falling and flashing across the urban glass and metal human decorations that adorned the bottom of the landscape. I need water, he repeated. I looked up again and saw the stars were gone. There were fleets of aircraft hovering high above us and they were dropping gigantic dynamite sticks wrapped up in candy cane ribbons. I looked closer as they tumbled towards us and realized that they were not dynamite sticks at all but christmas lights. Christmas lights! Pretty red and green and blue bulbs with the twirl of plastic green cables flailing down to the ground. We ran for cover, finding an apartment complex we stumbled in.
We knocked on various doors and one of them opened and the strangers inside let us in. It's raining christmas lights. Yes yes please, we need some water. There were kids. They were up and jumping around. Christmas lights! Christmas lights! Yes. Can we please use your bathroom? Of course, follow me. This way.
He was already in the tub, steaming water blasting from the nozzle. I don't like it one bit he said looking at the reflexion of lights streaming down the wall from the falling christmas lights through the window. I was sitting on the toilet peeing.
We heard the balcony door open in the next room, the children wild with delight were retrieving the fallen christmas lights that lay over the rail. We heard one of them cough and then the other and soon they couldn't help themselves they were heaving wretched scraping dryness from their throats.
Something had hit them and they couldn't rid it from down their throats. The christmas lights. The adults in the next room began to cough. It was an unwieldy range of mucusy dislodging of phlegm to the final sordid struggle of air. The lights were making the people cough to death. We now heard the agonizing sounds from the street below. He started to get out of the tub angry, agitated, aggressive, his eyes following the falling of lights. What were any of us to do? Fight the christmas lights? They were all around us. There were a billion more up in the sky. Falling in cascades of colour. The doors have already been open. There was nowhere to go. I told him no, let's stay. Let's stay here. We have each other. I got up from the toilet, flicked my pants from my ankles and used them to stuff the crack between the bathroom door and floor. I added a couple of towels and then with my shirt on I got into the tub behind him. We're gonna be ok I said . We're gonna be ok. Burying his face between the tops of his thighs as he held his knees together with his arms, I held him from behind my face ensconced between his back and my arm. As the steam hung in levitation, enshrining our bodies, we waited. From the coughing and choking in the room beside us we waited. We waited. Between the retching and hawking and convulsing from the streets below we waited. We waited.
Organic freestyle cycle. Like a redneck's front lawn, a gypsy's camp the morning later. Like the cargo residue of the irish, the convicts and the french peasants, the chinese and the korean, the negroes from the darkest of Africa. And too, the boys and girls and women and men of fashionable religion, colour, shape of the time, scapegoats with their war torn limbs strewn along beachways, sand dunes, city centres, in the jungle, strung up in trees, pulled behind the wheels of pick-ups, rolled over by tanks.
Animals live in the raw and open, no shame in sex no shame in death. When we have had the luxury of giving space to our emotions we bury and burn our dead. Our skin consecrates the thinker's life. The more enlightened the more artistically fragmented and dislodged we become from the cycle. We proclaim to be above the cycle but there is no above or below there is but this absorption. This is our connectedness.
The last time I fished was thirty five years ago. Remarkably, it was here in these waters. I bought my adult fishing license a few weeks ago along with a rod and reel. We deliberated for a long while about whether I should go for a salmon stamp and longer rod. We decided not to this year. We wanted to play it quiet and spend the season learning how to fish. My first try I cast the entire reel into the river and waded waist deep to retrieve it. I may have snubbed my nose at the government stocked trout prior my fishing debut but catching one of these will thrill and delight me to no end.
But salmon fishing is the real superstar sport in this area. Historically they provided food for the entire winter for the Secwepemc, the Stl'atl'imc , the french trappers, the british colonists and the americans who inundated the area during the gold rush. Surviving the winter was superstar living. Perhaps this is in part why salmon fishing has become superstar fishing.
Thirty million salmon are expected to run these next two months. They appear in streams unto themselves. Salmon red threads fighting the raging upstream between the round rocks of the shallow river beds. When we scuttle down the embankment we have front row seats.
265 feet from the first set of rails to the the doorstep of our trailer. My feet that is. Size 9 women's, 7 men's, 40 European. I walk past four other trailers to get here. There are three more on the other side. We all have dogs except the first unit- she has cats. We miss our cats and will get a new one soon.
We have said hello to everyone except the cat woman. There are two brothers living here in separate units. The brother who has lived here the longest lives in number 8. It's a choice lot adjacent to the tracks. He has only one neighbor on his north side. His southern exposure is wide open. He gets a spectacular view of the trains, the gorge that hides the raging Thompson River, the town and the caramel brittle rolling mountains. He's quiet though we see him out and about, putzing, fixing something or bbqing. He calls his brother Brother.
Brother lives in trailer number 6. an extrovert with vigor to kill. When I told him that I was interested in getting my hunting license he rushed us inside to show us two deer heads and an entire bear skin hung on the paneling in the front room. He's an avid hunter and can't wait to get out there the minute season is in. In the meanwhile, he likes to smoke big fat doobies. Most of them smoke here. They all call it dooby. Is this a BC thing or just a trailer thing?
The blond woman living between the brothers is pretty quiet too. She seems happy. We've said a quick hello to her while she was out walking the dog but we have made several observations. The front of her trailer is decorated with antlers and skulls. She has a mate. We have seen her smoking doobies at the neighbor's behind us who live in a regular house. The man of that house ducked in quickly one dusky afternoon when he saw us up the ladder against our roof panning the panoramic beauty that we live in.
Maybe people don't do that kind of thing here. It's true though- news is getting around: with population hovering just over a thousand, there's a new couple in town. They got California plates but one of them is from Montreal. How funny too then to find ourselves neighboring with trailer number 2- a Quebec ex-pat who has retained his accent though he hasn't been to the homeland in more than twenty years. He was very welcoming, offered us a mattress (all our furniture is in Montreal waiting to be shipped), some bowls, glasses, a fan and a rug washer. We hung out with him for an evening with his little bisson frisse and smoked a token dooby from his pipe. He openly declared himself depressed and last night when we felt Celine Dion's voice vibrating on our trailer floor we thought of making an intervention. But we didn't. Instead, we washed little bisson.
On our other side lives a trucker. Though he has been welcoming, we have seen very little of him. We did see him in town and we waved from our vehicle windows. Everyone drives pick ups here. Our little mustang won't make the winter roads that's for sure.
The trains are intense. CNR and CP both run past our court along the river, CP runs on the other side of the river and it's like a rolling lullaby. CN is on our side. 265 feet from our trailer door. It roars and thunders night and day. Wakes us up with it's whistle and blow. It's crazy. I have never lived in such an exotic setting.
If I had my choices, I would rather not carry the knowledge of my impending demise however laid before me it may be. It is a gratuitous form of torment don't you think. However composed in theory, the weight of inevitability oozes into your pores like a humid morass of coagulated gumbo. Or drying cactus paste closing up your nostrils in successive rays of sun beating on a sheet of glass.
I'd much rather have it happen to me without any fanfare or presentation. Nothing to faun about, worry or gaggle or discuss or misunderstand or regret. No sorting out no pining no whining no tickling or jiggling. No u-turn.
Because I find once I am in the move, in the action, whatever gets done gets done. Everything takes care of itself. And if it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters in the end. In the end, nothing is the end of the world. We traverse from life to death by mystery.
In the end, there will be flies. The flies will take care of any uncertainty.