Another dusk run through High Park to melt off the day’s malaise in the oppressive, comforting humidity of mid August overgrowth. On a previous outing a fellow runner extolled as we crossed paths, “watch out for the toads!” such was the saturation level.
The air is just as thick this night, the light equally faint – the trails better understood by feel than sight. Approaching a rise, a voice calls out with a sharpness assumed to be the common call for an errant dog. Clearing the rise, ambient yellow light breaks intermittently through the burdened foliage. At first the effect is similar to catching sight of a luminous deep-sea jellyfish, its pulses bobbing into and out of view. Soon though, structured geometric forms begin to take shape and bind onto the growing voices.
Closing on and passing the twilight theatre that sits on the high ground to the south of the trail, actors, congested on an illuminated stage project their personae onto the audience but also out into the surrounding trails.
Sweat falls in oppressive pools down my spine and stomach.
One foot striking in front of the other.
One grizzled knee compressing a battered shin into an ankle,
a noticeable “click” emanating with each foot’s weathered turn pushing me forward at a pace too fast to fully enjoy the world.
Who are these people, presently defined by artifice and luminescence? Who am I to believe my own structured and collapsing existence is any more valid, any less fleeting or any less of a show?
Lying on the roof above the patio seems somewhat illicit, up above the sanctioned patio strata. From here I could hop along roofs all the way north to Bloor St. But at this moment, expanding the world is far from what I need.
Lie down eyes closed, feel the tar, tiles, gravel as they offer up the day’s accumulated heat. Opening my eyes and cupping a parenthetical hand to each side of my face creates a zone of exclusion that destroys the city, leaving only a massive solid and shining blue sky all around and above.
Staring upwards becomes gazing down into an infinite pond, a passive, lifeless sea. It is a singular, eternal moment brought to the present by the silent passage of a commuter plane. Passing across this zone of exclusion, from one hand to the other, I feel like I am watching a fish that, having stumbled into this dead sea, is breaking some cardinal rule, is as unaware of the universe as I am.
* * *
The afternoon is dwindling and clouds have returned to punctuate the sky. Above me, grown out of an isolated contrail, a stitch has formed and has taken on the task of holding the sky together.
I do my best to help, willing it to keep all that it surveys intact but all it can possibly keep intact is the person looking back at it.
I wake on the sofa with a start, sure I’ve forgotten something, something… something unreachable. Leaning against the bathroom counter with no equilibrium, lop-sided and top heavy in the night’s humidity, the last of the day is peed away before crawling into the too-large bed.
A pink night gown is crumpled on the far side and, it should be said, I’ve been keeping it by my face at night, nuzzling in just a bit. But rolling onto my side, pulling a comforter close, the scent shifts and I real back from something far too reachable. The smell is undeniable and a roll of toilet paper is enlisted to pick out the cluster of cat poo in the bed’s centre. There is also pee I realize.
I love the cats, their neediness, their aloofness – their contradictions – but will admit to a glimmer of relief at soon having to contend with only my messes and desperate emotional deposits. What we have here, on this page, however, is not a discourse on scatology but on domesticity.
My fear is of silence and stasis. In one of my soon-to-be-a-shut-in panics I consider populating my new apartment with a cluster of small, cute and well considered taxidermied animals that might make no sounds but could be used to generate mean-spirited anthropomorphic dialogues within my mind. I need something to remind me of failures recent and ancient.
The silence of my upcoming house equals failure and the cats are the last audible mewlings that might deny such a future. A stuffed badger offers no response to my opening the door and crossing the threshold. There is no leg rub, no pleading outstretched paw, languishing hairball or calling out for wet food. A groomed and stuffed chipmunk or otter though, well they couldn’t offer a salve but might be a sort of mammalian masochism made real – furry reminders or taunts of a family lost.
“Hey dude, yeah, you in the burgundy track pants. [click-click of incisors] We’re dead and so is that idea of family you thought you were worthy of.”
or
“Hey fucker, yeah you with the bowl of soggy Corn flakes, there’s some dust on my coat. You used to empty kitty litter and make a school lunch daily and now [tail slapping on particle board] you can’t even keep a static otter dust-free.”
The new content on this blog is probably going to slow for a while as I'm starting to compile, edit, hack and otherwise muck around with what exists in the hope and plan of this project as book underway. With that in mind, there are some writings and artwork done earlier that I'm incorporating into this. Some of those stories are about my being a lame kid. While the writing still needs some editing, here, below is one piece with an illustration done last night. I'll leave the context hanging and just put the piece up as is. For your consideration:
.177
Really, who could blame ‘em? As a typical Canadian response to townhouses, strip-malls and snow banks, my parents began to take annual Caribbean winter vacations. Formerly family affairs, these getaways became parent only furloughs. More to the point, in their absence I became the house’s benevolent dictator, ruling over my sister and our dog Charlie with a gentle but power-hungry hand. Mum also left a freezer stocked with TV dinners for Shell and myself. The Hungry Man entrées an appropriate size to assuage her guilt at leaving us to trudge through dirty snow banks, dreary school days and each other’s company while she topped up on sun burns and pool-side margaritas. Surely though, she knew they wouldn’t be the only ones knocking back the booze.
I couldn’t care less about the basement shin-digs Shell invariably threw. She had her role as ne’er do well libertine and I had mine as curmudgeon in waiting. Still at the Peach Schnapps and sparkling wine stage, the carnage that might have been unleashed seemed minimal, but just to be sure I spent those evenings on the living floor with a machete. Watching horror movies with the crudely fashioned but sufficiently intimidating blade laying across my chest, the young’ns had to step over my display of passive canine territoriality to gain entry.
Dear friends of my sister,
Do not fuck around. I’m in charge of the house, the dog and the fridge full of food. Also, you might have noticed I’m working my way though a stack of boob-munching cannibal flicks, and I’m wearing tiger-striped camouflage pants.
Thanks, her older brother
On this night though, the party stepped up to 80 proof and the Crown Royal pulled the Byron skids in like ants to road-kill raccoon. Whatever the fuck went on below was of negligible interest to me, but Shell at least had the sense to try and kick out some of the more antagonistic skids before holes were punched into unfinished drywall. Muffled yelling rose from the basement and they came upstairs but, emboldened by the hard and sweet rye, wouldn’t leave the house. Pressing pause on Cannibal Ferox, maybe I threatened them with the machete.
“Okay guys, out you go.”
“Says who, you?”
"Me and Mr. Pointy, yeah. C’mon, take it down to the river or somethin’.”
“Dude, we’re not going anywhere. That machete has fucking tassels on it.”
“Oh, Jesusfuckingchrist, just go okay!”
And even though they did leave the house, it was only to gather at the parking lot’s battered dumpster to smoke and nurse their anger. Taking matters in hand, up to my second floor bedroom, Shell and her cohorts were left to stew over teen house-party-disaster yet to be averted. Flicking off the lights and climbing to the top of my bunk bed, I quietly lowered the window facing the parking lot, now with a clear line of sight to the dumpster.
Lying on my belly in the dark and reaching down, I pulled up the Russian air rifle – a memento of Montrose’s expansive landscape.
Tugging the barrel sharply downwards, the rifle revealed the breach and charged its single lung. Opening the ammo tin I plucked out a mushroom shaped .177 pellet. Popped it in the breach, closed the barrel and was ready to go. Clean and simple.
Rolling back to the window, I lined up my target in the iron sights. Partially exhaling and squeezing the trigger mechanism past the spring release, there was a click and a sharp pop as the .177, spiraling across the parking lot, hit one of the kids below the “O” of his DIO t-shirt. He yelled out, and in my darkened room I rolled away from the window feeling fairly pleased with my accuracy and also feeling adrenaline’s twitchy side-effect disrupt my attempts to continue my regulated breathing.
This is the skill and discipline that any trained killer needs to master.
Since finishing Patrick Lane's There Is A Season I'd been searching for something equally as rich to sink into. Out of this little quest I found my way to the sort of embarrassing, A Briefer History of Time. The embarrassment comes only from my buying the illustrated and abridged version rather than the full and heavy, serious business version of Hawking's masterpiece. I have to be honest and practical though, I probably wouldn't read the full book and also I'm using it for inspiration rather than actual knowledge, for poetry as much as science.
Also though, Miranda July's No one Belong Here More Than You is what I'm now almost done. This little peach of a book is where I am currently drawing most of my reading joy from. Perhaps I'll write more about the book later, but for now (as I am about to head out the door) a couple of quotes which have stuck with me over the last few days:
"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real."
and
"There are some great reasons for resisting language and one of them is Love."
* * *
Lastly, and only slightly apropos of today's writing:
My friend Jim and I were walking the alleys of my neighbourhood last night, ambling along for research purposes as well as to enjoy the fading day. In one garage with a door in partial collapse I peered over the top and found Jesus...
This is not to be cynical regarding that overly punned and prodded turn of phrase, but sometimes, well, there he is, amongst the rubble of someone's accumulated life.
