Life. It's Flashing Before Your Very Eyes

Many years ago, when I was a university-aged student, I attended a show at the behest of a friend. It was at the beginning of my "art as exploration" stage and, like now, I was trying to open myself to the myriad of ways in which art, and artistry, could change people's perception of their world. It should be noted that the artist whose show we attended, Annie Sprinkle, had an eclectic aesthetic: she was a performance artist who used to be a porn star. Sprinkle's goal, we were told in the program we were given before the show, was to "use the vast frontiers of sexuality to explore, share and document my experiences and findings with explicit films, photography, writing and performance." The art world, she went on to tell us, was a refuge, where, surprisingly, she was made to feel quite welcome. "There was much more creative freedom, less censorship, and more legal protection." Who knew, I thought, to myself as I settled to watch the show.

(SPOILER ALERT! From this part forth, those of you who are squeamish or may want to skip forward to the next paragraph. It ain't pretty!)

Halfway through her performance, Miss Sprinkle inserted a speculum and invited the audience members to line up and each individually have a look with the aid of a flashlight. Although, I was enjoying the show, I decided to decline. (I was 19 and from a small town outside of Sudbury, for Christ's sake! Baby steps, right?) This was followed up with a beautiful ‘sacred sex magic, masturbation ritual’ that included, a board in which giant dildos were attached. Miss Sprinkle went on to show us the best ways to... AGH! You get it, right? I was shocked but, by the end of the show, felt that I had experienced something that was shocking, yes, but artfully executed. It also dawned on me that if we had attended this show 25 years previous, we probably would have quickly found ourselves arrested, found guilty of breaking about half-a-dozen obscenity laws and possibly have gone to jail. Success!

As we exited the theatre, I was enervated. I turned to my friend in order to gage how he had enjoyed the show. He was white as a sheet and looked incredibly disturbed. Are you all right, I asked him. He nodded in the affirmative and then told me, with a worried expression spilling over his face, that he was  afraid that one day - when he died - that the image of Annie Sprinkle's cervix was gonna pop in to his brain and that, no matter how hard he tried,  he would not be able to banish the image from his psyche. I assured him that such images did not, as far as I knew, come to us on our death beds. It took myself and several of our other art-loving friends the better part of an evening and several pitchers of cheap beer to get him to switch his thinking otherwise.

But the theory has stayed with me ever since. Is it possible that images that leave us disturbed or confused could pop up randomly to us on our death beds? And, if so, is there some way to counteract it? Was there a way in which we could hedge bets and find a way to seek out good images that might outweigh the bad? And so, this is what I have done. Over the years, I have made a mental list of images that I can conjure up when needed. The hope is that one of these might, when the time comes, help stave off, or at least outweigh, the image of a porn-star-turned-performance artist going down on a board of pleasure implements.  I wanna suggest you do the same because you never know, right?

Here are a few examples:

• The sparkle in my son's eye when he's telling me a funny story
• Sunset at my cottage
• My father's handwriting
• Seeing my friend, Dave Brown, try to water ski off the dock from a standing position and too much lead rope. 
• A raspberry
• My first bike
• A clean kitchen floor
• My husband rocking my kids to sleep
• Seeing the Rockies from an airplane
• The look my sister gets on her face when she's exasperated
• Water moving swiftly over a rock
• Poppies in bloom

Time to start your own......

Happy Thanksgiving, Mofo.

cat with dead mice, a photo by pyl213 on Flickr.

Oh! Good Morning, Cat.

Sheesh! I didn't see you there, five inches from my face. Nice to see you.

And what's this you're trying to place on my bed where my husband has only just left his peaceful slumber? A dead mouse? Lovely. And thank you for removing the head for me. I always find that to be such a nuisance to do on my own. Maybe I'll save it for later.

Oh! And please do not take my screams of terror as a sign that I'm not grateful! Maybe I've seen The Godfather one too many times but I am pleased that you thought to bring me something as interesting and useful as a dead mouse. Really! I know you enjoy eating them and leaving them all over our property for my bare feet and lawn mower to enjoy so I should be grateful. Plus, it's food, right? And a present, correct? I love both of those. Plus, I give you store-food, water, and affection, and this your way of returning the favour.

So, thanks.

Oh! Hello, again, cat. What is it that you find so interesting with our bathroom sink? How endearing it is to be heading towards this area with the hope of washing the sleep out of my eyes only to find you staring into the drain as if it contained the answers to the mysteries of the universe. You are a thoughtful one. To avoid disrupting your peaceful meditations, I will wash my face in kitchen sink instead. Carry on!

Oh, Hello again, Cat-Who-Lives-In-My-House-And-May-Soon-Sleep-With-the-Fishes! What is this crazy thing you are doing with your water bowl? Slapping, slapping, slapping the water and spreading it all over the floor for every- and anyone who passes by? There is no sea creature in that shallow bowl, you silly beast! No animal, vegetable or mineral in there that will clog your throat passage and keep you from swallowing yet another mouse's innards. Drink it up, you scamp! Oh, and don't you worry a moment about these cashmere socks! They will shrink in no time from the water you left everywhere.

And why are you scratching near this bowl where we keep your store-bought grub? Are you trying to bury it beneath the linoleum? There is no need! It will be here like it is every day. Same place. Same time. Remember yesterday? And the 1200 days before that? Not gonna change, Mofo. Not gonna change.

What is this? Why are lying peacefully in my lap sharing your warmth with me as I try to avoid watching a cooking competition show? Again. Is it that you see that I was contemplating your death after you spilled my wine onto the carpet? No, you purr in response. It's because I love you and I want give you my thanks in the only way I know how.

Sigh. All, right, God dammit! I give.

Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.

Trend Spotting. You're Welcome.

Of late, I have noticed a trend among menfolk in the western world. I have spotted it in city centres on a Friday night, on my Sunday morning hikes, in the line up at Canadian Tire and atop tractors in the corn fields near my house (Just so you know, the trend-spotting that I do for you never, ever stops. I am constantly on the look out for what's hot, what's not, what's up, what's down. It is an obligation that is a blessing for you and an exhausting curse for me. Just wanted you to know)

This trend knows no age barrier or demographic limitations. It is favoured by the tall and the short, the wealthy and the less financially favoured. The only common denominator to these diverse if misguided folk is that they are all, to one, "barber-challenged". I am speaking – through clenched teeth and tearful eyes – of the comb-forward.

For those you unfamiliar with the phenomenon, a comb-forward is when a man, self-conscious of his balding pate, combs the hair on the back of his head up, forward and over his flesh-flashing dome in the mistaken belief onlookers will say, "Wow, look how thick and lustrous that man's hair is! " as opposed to: "Oh look – that man has a comb-forward. Jesus H. Christ." Donald Trump is the best known and most extreme example of phenomenon and his technique - which could be a comb-over or a candy floss machine that emits hair instead of delicious hair-like candy strands -  has taken on near skyscraper proportions. In fact, according to architectural insiders, it was the inspiration for Ai Weiwei's Bird's Nest.

Gentlemen, I'm calling time on these ridiculous attempts to disguise disappearing hairlines and encroaching scalp. I am going to go out on a limb and say the following: balding does not make a man look bad. Attempts to cover up balding, however, do. In fact, I would say that they are insulting to the average person's intelligence. Do you think the world is fooled by your masterful hair disguise? Any woman worth her salt would rather spend sexy times with a man who knows he doesn't have a lot of hair than one who foolishly believes that she doesn't notice that his own hair is wrapped around his head like a turban. 

Let me be even more plain: I would rather be squired around town by Ed Harris look-alike than the Donald any day of the week.

So chaps, consider this page a cease and desist order, that you cease fretting about this whole balding thing – and you may as well, it does come to many of you in the end – and that you desist trying to disguise it. And yes, this is legally binding.

Thank you for letting me get this off of my chest. And t-shirt-wearers-who-also-wear-scraves? Consider yourselves on notice!  

True New Year

September is almost here and it’s transition time again. The leaves are changing, the kids are headed back to school and Matthew Perry is making yet another weak attempt to return to primetime (When will he learn?).  In our home, we refer to September as "True New Year". There is a sense of excitement that a new school year brings, when we shift from the schedule devil we know, to the devil we don’t know. In many ways, adapting to September's new schedule is like a signing up for your first step aerobics class (Remember when?) -- first week, just get your kids to school on time, figure out how to get them picked up. Step back and forth. Second week, dance starts. Back and forth and grapevine. Third week, back to school nights and jiu-jitsu stars starts. Back and forth and grapevine and add the arms. Fourth week, swimming begins. All that and step up and down. Fifth week, guitar begins, whatever board meeting you're supposed to go to once a month is scheduled, projects are starting to come due, and kids have the audacity to make inquiries about Halloween costumes. Back and forth and grapevine and add the arms and step up and step down and TWIRL. 

Straight on til December.

Because besides being transition season, September is also cheque-writing season. Cheques for swimming lessons, cheques for guitar lessons, cheques for agendas, cheques for Pizza Day, Sub Day, AK47 Day, dance lessons, protection from the Mob. It never ends. Plus, guess who drives them? Every September, I schedule the inevitable existential breakdown I have each year in which I question whether my university education prepared me for my job as a full-time chauffeur. Answer: not so much.

This year, though, rather than deal with it by swigging wine after hours and bitching to people who do the same, I intend on taking a page from financial guru Suze Orman: I will  show the kids how to write the cheques themselves. Nice, huh? You want the money, you write out the cheque. This will be a great way to help them to understand how much cash we spend on their extra-curriculars and it will give my hand a rest, as well as the portion of my conscience that tells me that it is important that kids figure out how much the "extras" really cost. Harsh , maybe, but a good way to help them understand that my cheque book has its limits.

Get Down Off the Letdown

Post-Olympic Letdown, a photo by jjdorsey57 on Flickr.

It was a rite of passage for my sister and I growing up in Northern Ontario to make a pilgrimage each summer to the Canadian National Exhibition. The CNE was held a special place in our hearts because it meant we got to go to the big city (translate: my Nana's ground floor apartment in a high-rise in Scarborough), see people we never saw in our small town (translate: grubby ner-do-well carnies who could build and operate complicated attractions whilst smoking AND asking if "I WANTED TO GO FASTER?") and watch my sister projectile vomit onto a metal ramp of The Enterprise after eating too many Tiny Tom donuts. Priceless.

As we slipped into our teenage years, the Ex's allure gave way to another attraction: the Ontario Place Forum, an amphitheater which lay just across the lakeshore. Throughout the summer, this venue would play host to scores of bands, from the most obscure rock outfit to the most popular jazz ensemble. It was six dollars admission to get in and, at night, the park came alive with teens lining up to hear their favorite rock and roll, disco, new wave, or hip hop music. By now, my parents had split up and my sister and I were spending our summers in the city and we would take the streetcar down from my mother's downtown apartment and catch any number of bands: Kool and the Gang one night, Al Green another, Triumph (Why not!), Parachute Club,Wynton Marsalis. The musical genre was irrelevant. We couldn’t wait for nightfall.

I hadn’t thought of the amphitheatre in a long time, until a few nights ago when I was stretched out on the sofa watching the closing ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics in London. I had appreciated the opening ceremonies and the challenges faced by the host country of presenting such a complex and rich history to a world audience: the opening pastoral scene with a little Shakespeare thrown in, which transformed quickly into the industrial revolution, a parade of the proletariat. I even kinda enjoyed the uncomfortable and overly long celebration of the National Health Service, with some sort of morphine induced Mary Poppins versus Voldemort montage. All interesting.

But this closing stuff was a different business all together.

I guess having dispensed with the entirety of British history in 30 minutes, the only other direction to take the closing was a celebration of pop music from the last thirty years. Really? There was no other way to go then reuniting the Spice Girls and slap them atop some taxis? Okay. And then I realized where I had seen it all before … at the Ontario Place Forum! Except this thing came with bubbly dancers performing overly choreographed moves, singing the same songs I had sung in my youth. All I needed was a glow necklace, a giant pretzel, and a Slurpee to complete the memory. I still enjoyed the evening. I sang along with songs. It was just like being back at the EX and amphitheatre all those years ago. Only they were theme park for kids. London is one of the cultural hubs of Western Civilization. Or was. And so I slapped on my Whatever goggles and went along for the ride.

Fear and Parenting at the Movies

In the small town where I grew up, there was no movie theatre. The closest was a 45 minute drive away in Sudbury and screened films weeks after they'd opened in larger cities, months after they were released in the US. I remember my parents driving in to see the film, MASH. An hour before they were expected home, our babysitter received a phone call asking if she could stay another four hours. The reason: my father had laughed over most of the jokes in the 7 o'clock show. They were staying for the second screening so my mother could hear the ones she'd missed. Aside from too much laughing or terrible winter weather -which was frequent - there were very few things that would keep you from going into Sudbury to see a movie, if that's what you wanted to do. But one thing was certain: if slag was being poured on the way there, the movie was cancelled.

For those of you who didn't have the pleasure of growing up in a town whose fortunes were based on the rise and fall on the price of nickel, the pouring of slag was a hot, bright reminder of our town’s fortune. Ore was scraped from the earth in the mines a few miles below us, fed through screens and crushers until it is the size of a marble and then ground to powder to which water was added to make slurry. Nickel and copper were separated and the waste - or slag - was taken away in special slag pot cars on the railroad and taken about 3 miles to be dumped as waste. This operation took place about every 2 to 3 hours, 24 hours a day using 10 car trains requiring two electric locomotives and poured off of the side of a hill right beside the highway. If it was night and your car was driving by it on the way to a movie you didn't make that damn movie. It was hot, molten slag dropping off a hill, for the love of God! What can beat that? I remember praying to God on the way to my first screening of Star Wars to please, please, please not drop the slag as I didn't want to miss the greatest movie of all times. He took pity on  me and I got to see Luke Skywalker get his hand chopped off by his father. Good times.

In the winter months, however, someone in town came up with the brilliant idea of circumnavigating the mesmerizing allure of slag: they would screen movies in the high school gym. And so popcorn was popped and sold for a quarter, mats were spread over the gymnasium floor for the younger kids to sit on (and the older kids to lay down and make out on) and instead of being pushed out into the yard and told Not-to-come-back-inside-until-I-call-you-...I-mean-it!, an entire afternoon was spent watching films. Genius! And let me be clear: these were not first-run films. The afternoon always started out with at least an hour's worth of cartoons, and not the kind that kids watch today where lessons can be gleaned from a talking aardvark. These were the violent kind where overly dressed-up members of the animal kingdom chased each other off of cliffs with farming implements, their souls drifting dreamily out of heir bodies and into the ether only to return in the next cartoon, newly formed and oblivious. The cartoons were followed by a double feature whose only criteria seemed to be that it contain Judy Garland or Ma and Pa Kettle. I saw more grand-scale MGM musicals on that gym floor than it seems humanly possible and though we grumbled and wished for a Clint Eastwood revenge film, you could have heard a pin drop during most of those movies.

I shared this story with my 12 year old son on the way to screen the newest installment in the Batman franchise after he asked me what "summer" movies we went to see as kids. We didn't categorize films by season back then, I explained. Movies were what you watched when they showed up and you could get in to to see them, provided the slag didn't get in the way. Did you have to worry about being shot at the screening, he asked? His question took my breath away. 

The world my son he is growing up in is not very different than mine on the surface. Like me, he lives in a small-town, surrounded by family and friends and people who love and care for him. But in many ways it is very different from mine because unlike my childhood, his is influenced by the 24-hour news cycle. Despite my best wishes, it creeps into his wet-wear and makes him believe that going to the movies means not just seeing bad guys with hand guns in the screen but imagining them sitting in the seat beside him. I pride myself on not being a fear-based parent. I let my kids walk and drive their bikes to school and go to the store unsupervised.  I don't always trust the world around them but I know that giving in to that fear has a price, and the price, I think, is greater than any of us should be willing to pay. Fear robs us of the profound joy of living in the moment with our children, of experiencing, with guidance and nurturing, the vicissitudes of life that are found in the most ordinary of days and so I thought long and hard before I answered him on the way to that movie.

No, I told him. And I don't worry about it and neither should you. Okay? He nodded and we kept on driving. 

Fear is the only thing I know of that has the power to turn good parents away from the careful, reflective human beings they once were. It has the power to twist their thinking and undermine their behavior and, I believe, it is as fatal to the simple joys in life as it is detrimental to our children’s greater good. As overwhelming as it sometimes is, though,  I have chosen to let go of it. I poured  mine on a slag heap somewhere far, far way and instead of stopping by the side of the road and watching it smolder, I chose instead to move down the road go see a Batman movie with my son in a dark theatre where I didn't know a soul and instead chose to believe that, like me, people want the best for the world. Even at the movies.

Dockside Reading

I know it's been two weeks since school let out but it has taken me that long to get my "you-know-what" together. Sigh. I have no excuse, really. Isn't "The heat makes me sluggish" the middle-age equivalent to "The dog ate my homework?" Anyway, I have very few plans this summer beyond gorging on summer fruit and reading on the dock. Melding the two is the only thing I plan to do with enthusiasm.


To that end, I have already read two exceptional books: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - which was delightful and reminded me of the excellent novel The Prestige - and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn There's not a lot I can tell you about Gone Girl without ruining its dark surprises, but I can tell you that it's an ingenious and viperish thriller — and that no matter how smart or blase you think you are when it comes to reading thrillers, it's going to bite you. The novel concerns a missing wife named Amy and a husband named Nick who's either (best-case scenario) a big, fat phony or (worst) a full-on psychopath. I don't read a ton of thrillers but this book had me hooked from the first page. I read the entire thing on a rain soaked Tuesday and am the better for it, I tell you!


Told from alternating points of view, we get to know Amy, via chatty journals she kept before her disappearance. She narrates the arc of her relationship with Nick, which begins with lovestruck flirting in Manhattan and a giddy marriage in Brooklyn. It's when Nick gets downsized from his job as a magazine writer and insists they move to his hometown of St. Louis that things reaaally get interesting.
That said, the chapters of the novel that involve Nick, mostly unfold like a television procedural from the police investigation which unfold shortly after he rushes home one day looking for Amy and instead finds her blood on the floor, to the ultimate media frenzy that sweeps us up in its wake. What I loved was how Flynn doesn't paint Nick as the most sympathetic narrator: he lies, he whines and he ends up revealing himself as somewhat of an ass as he story unfolds. How refreshing! But what saves him are his moments of honesty. He does incredibly stupid stuff, given the circumstances and has - in his own words - a face you want to punch. It's the second half of the book, though, that is the real stunner. Just about halfway, Flynn pulls the rug out from under you and does it in such a way that you cannot believe that you've been reading the same book!


I really am going to shut up now before I spoil what is, seriously, the best book of the summer.


Better than this Fifty Shades of Grey which I tried to read - I really did! - but made me want to quit the earth about halfway through. I have decided that there is a reason that I am immune to this book and that's because I have engaged with a better, more entertaining version of it called Mad Men. Because isn't Christian Grey really just Don Draper in disguise? 

Replace the chain-smoking, bourbon-drinking and workaholic tendencies with helicopters, chilled white wine and effed-up e-mails and Tada! you've got Fifty shades of Grey. It's hard to engage with a handsome embodiment of the American Dream in book form when you can look at Don in re-reuns every Sunday night on AMC, non? Double crap! This is not a book for me.