same as it ever was

A 2010 Lego ad, still building on the '80's.

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Staff bbq + fun day yesterday so of course I took a personal day. C and I had lunch, went shopping. I mostly cruised the discount stuff, which can make you a little dizzy (all that failure + cheap plastic).

Seeing what the kids are wearing these days, it got us talking about a few of the things that were verboten when I was in university ...

+ riding a bike (reaction: are you retarded?)
+ shaggy beards (reaction: so, which is it -- are you a hippie, drug dealer or just homeless?)
+ headbands (reaction: seventies/hippie/loser)
+ toques (reaction: nice lid)
+ large dogs (reaction: I can barely feed myself; who the fuck can afford a dog?)
+ smokes (reaction: do you have any?)
+ sandals (reaction: I've obviously stumbled into some kind of hippie matrix here)
+ wire-rimmed sunglasses (reaction: ew, sleazy)
+ backpacks (reaction: seriously, are you retarded?)

C seems to think that people generally look worse these days but I'm not so sure. They seem heavier, certainly. But we were only thinner because we smoked too much and considered beer a meal.

* * * * *

This will be my last post for awhile as I take a break for vacation. Take care, kids.

on drowning

On Thursday, after work, I left an office made up mostly of cool, air-conditioned, half-informed darkness and stepped into the full, lobotomized effulgence of the hottest day of the year. It was not bad for the first half-mile or so. Then it was atrocious. Have you ever walked into a busy kitchen in the middle of a blazing summer afternoon? The cooks all have that red-busy-burning look, that punished, automatic-moving thing going on. It was like someone grabbed me by the hair and forced me to stare at what was in the oven. Look at the little lamb! Look at what you make me do! I thought I was smart to go hopscotching from one super-cooled premises to the next (Staples, Indigo, art supply store, grocery), my eyes buggy from relief each time, but I leaked whole bullets of DNA all the same. O god it was awful. I saw people in jeans and thought, You are going to die ... and you're *still* going to look fat. This wasn't summer. This was a message. It went: Insects! People scurried or wilted. I even heard a busker singing, Livin' on a Prayer. Jesus Christ!

* * * * *

Days later, C and I went to go see The Drowning Girls: three bathtubs, three showers, three buckets, three policeman's helmets, three bouquets, three soaking newspapers, three teacups, three wedding rings, three pairs of hosiery, three wedding dresses, three drowned girls. Or ladies, rather. All victims of a serial seducer, a serial killer. All three with the same murdered voice, yet each one with its own life. Very stark, and wet (in the front row, I got splashed) and sad, and often funny. All the actors were quite good, although C and I agreed that Taylor Trowbridge was a standout.

* * * * *

Amy Winehouse died this weekend, only twenty-seven. A fit from drinking. Sad.

* * * * *

In 1970, two percent of the population considered multiple telephones a necessity. In the year 2000, it was 78 percent -- and I doubt many people were still calling them "telephones".

Well, *I* still call it the telephone, and I *hate* talking on it. About the only calls I make are to my mom, the bank, the dentist and Oona's daycare.

I'm trying to write letters to people again, or at least send out cards (my accordion story cards are good for that, because the story does most of the work). I don't know -- it seems more serious, more polite, more thoughtful. This might come as a surprise to people on Facebook, where I exist like one of the heckling old men from the Muppet Show, but I do have other gears.

* * * * *

The other night, as she refused to eat dinner, sitting slumped in her highchair with her head in her hands, droning away like some grieving medieval peasant, I heard myself telling Oona: Listen, when you're drowning in misery like this, and you make it cartoonish, I can't help but laugh. If you want some real sympathy, try dialling it back a bit.

tangerine dreaming

cigar-tin story #120, now in my shop

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We watched The King's Speech the other night. It was terrifically well done. Yes, fine and fine. All very sweeping and noble. Helena Bonham Carter even managed to look rather sane. Unfortunately, I found it difficult to muster the required amount of giving-a-shit about a stuttering king who, in real life, managed to underline his irrelevance by championing the appeasement artists of the time (please stand up, Neville Chamberlain). How wonderfully inspiring, too, that the climactic 'speech' of the movie is about Great Britain's declaration of war against Germany -- for invading Poland. Because, you know, the Soviet Union *also* invaded Poland. Two weeks later. No speech on that one. No speech either when the Soviets came back at the end of the war. So I guess it really wasn't about Poland after all. What a crazy war!

Also: there was no Tangerine Dream on the soundtrack.

the rules for summer

Not exactly rules per se but we've fallen into a certain kind of weekend routine, one predicated on a simple idea:

avoid bursting into flame.

The sun isn't the enemy -- not exactly -- but C and I are both old enough to treat the dragging afternoon apocalypse with a certain amount of respect and distaste. The irradiated skin, the inside-out boiling, the wobbling and then collapse of one's central nervous system ... all of these things are better left to the kind of people who go shirtless for a (non)living, and can smoke while holding three babies.


So we do our business in the morning. On Saturday it's the park, where the theme for Oona is always the same: Run, please. And she does, mostly from slide to swing to climbing structure to bench to interesting stick to excitable dog to other children, all the time pointing at everything like a traffic cop or a tour guide. Then we go for a winding walk home, hit a yard sale or two, have some lunch, and then a long afternoon nap. On Sundays I go to the studio. I'm there by seven, with a list of things to do and the energy of someone with more plans than talent or time. Right now, at the height of summer, I can usually stay 'til noon-ish before things get too warm, my eyes get too bleary and I need some lunch. If Oona *doesn't* sleep on Sunday afternoon, we'll go swimming -- indoors, at the gym we belong to -- and I'll ask many pointed questions about where all that Oona-energy has gone to when she *doesn't* want to kick or float or even be in the kiddie end.

p.s. And then, finally, a big walloping thunderstorm this morning, even as I drank my coffee and typed this, which ended with me sitting in the dark (the computer has its own battery, mom).

it's here, I can feel it

That threshold, that point of tipping over -- every summer I say I won't, and then it happens anyway, whereupon I lose all thread of ambition, and any capacity for work. I try to keep some spare thought around, just in case I get inspired (I won't), but even that is heat-addled and lazy.


July has been too hot, too humid, too unrelenting so far. Every day with your face to the open furnace. When every list starts to include 'hat' and 'sunscreen', you know the program has turned oppressive. I go around following thinned alleys of shade. Is this what it's like, to live in Nevada?


For a pedestrian, there are only three kinds of drivers ...

• bad drivers
• bad drivers on cell phones (the attention-deficit equivalent of farting while reciting poetry)
• bad drivers on their way to the mental hospital, having just been told (by cell phone) that their test results came back 'Angry/Retarded'

Yesterday, while walking Oona home from daycare, an elderly couple (British, diminished) with a little girl in the back seat stopped their car at the corner to ask me directions to the new water park. Directly behind them were a pair of kids (anywhere between 13 to 25, I can't tell anymore) on a motorcycle.

GIRL: Holy fuck just go around them already they don't even use their fucking blinkers they're a million fucking years old.
BOY: Holy fuck just shut the fuck up already.

I apologized to the fearsomely stunned old folks and proceeded to give them the wrong directions.


Really, there are only three avenues of relief for the hottest afternoons

• the liquor store -- always super-cooled in there ... plus they have free samples!
• the library ... the air-conditioning is only mid-range but the soiled seats are extra comfy ... plus they have free books!
• reading lost-cat posters ... this is more a personal one.

Still, the last two days have seen some rain and breeze, the mornings fresh and lively and some people even showing up on time, and all play-acting at work-acting can be safely tucked in by eleven. But after lunch it's useless.

* * * * *

All these cigar-tin stories (there are ten, altogether) done as a custom order for a collector, bless her red heart.

G H O S T

Received my copy of GHOST from the Toronto artist Rebecca Cairns the other day -- a dark little exercise in movement and memory and blank-ceilinged spaces, and another wonderful example of creatives acting for themselves (it's a blurb book). I hope she has great luck with it.

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O God are the royals gone yet? Because I don't know if I can bear another pants-peeing sound bite like, Oh, they were SO NICE! And she's SO GORGEOUS! And she said she liked MY DRESS! Really, they were nice? As opposed to what -- spitting blood at people? Telling the crowd that they looked like ants? I mean, have we had other royal visits where they've flown over to scream obscenities and shake gloved fists down at us from the balcony? Have they gone around hitting people with champagne bottles? Because *that* is a tour I would be interested in.

nauseated

owly; acrylic inks on Cartiera Favini Letraset paper.

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(I would prefer to say 'nauseous' but then C would nearly pee herself trying to correct me fast enough. But 'nauseous' just sounds closer to how it feels, doesn't it?)

Anyway: slightly owly and nauseated today and *very* nauseated last night (was supposed to get groceries -- instead I couldn't get off the couch), bouts of nausea occurring over the last three days, usually in the late afternoon and then dissipating by early evening, except for last night which was awful. I could hear C in the next room, watching Coronation Street and getting drunk.

Actually, she had the same thing on the weekend. So what the hell?

Yesterday on the way home from work there was a certain point where I just had to stop walking and stand there, my mouth filling with spit and the urge to vomit all over the sidewalk.

It reminds of the headaches I had all in a cluster back at the end of May: about ten days of brain pins and nausea arriving in tides, here and there. And then disappearing for good.

My advice? Don't ever get old.

found this in my shirt pocket today ...

... I hate being taunted by the Chinese.

whatsits

Have you ever noticed how people will talk at length about happiness and dreams and goals but hardly anyone ever talks about reasonable goals, about life in realistic terms, because to do so is somehow seen as downbeat or pessimistic or defeatist? What's more, we never talk about how rewards often just fall from the sky, just happen to people, because they're pursuing a certain line of thought or activity and experience a certain amount of luck, as opposed to them actively chasing the recognition for that activity?

I just read a little interview with Michael Spence, who was asked if he had any advice on how to win a Nobel Prize ...

There’s no way to win it in the active sense; you sort of end up receiving it if you’re lucky. It’s not a reasonable goal in life.

... and I was struck by how odd this sounded. No "reach for the stars" or "dream big" or any of that bullshit.

He also talks about our ideas around happiness. This is a subject I often discuss with my wife. We discuss it because my wife is the kind of person who is never happy. She *thinks* she will be happy, when she gets that next whatsit (car, couch, computer, house, certificate, toy, sushi tray, etc), but it doesn't last. And then starts the race to the next whatsit.

She would be the first to admit that she just wants what she wants, and that she doesn't give a shit about the journey, about process. She would also be the first to tell me to shut my hole about reasonable goals.

And hey: she does get a *lot* done. But then, so do I. And I do my stuff so much more quietly.

meaningless

Speculative poster design by Chris Thornley.

* * * * *

We watched Mean Streets the other night. No: had never seen it. Do not be surprised. There are all sorts of omissions like this, when one grows up in the middle of a prairie nowhere, with three channels (one in French) and no idea.

Anyway: I enjoyed it, in that sense of seeing a kind of cultural artifact, the fountainhead of all that dirty glamour that was to come. Really, the weight of thing is no more than a short story, and went on a bit too long, but so what.

Unfortunately, we then misplaced our trust in the TVO feature and watched the 1997 romantic comedy In & Out. Kevin Kline, Tom Selleck (sans moustache), Matt Dillon, Debbie Reynolds, Wilford Brimley, Bob Newhart, Lauren Ambrose ... what a shallow, trivial mess. About as funny as wet wedding cake. And yet: a commercial success!

C says this kind of movie reflects a certain appetite, that there's a sizable population out there that just wants ephemeral fluff, and nothing deeper. Okay, fine. But there's also an audience for Leni Riefenstahl flicks, and that doesn't make them right either.

Are you going to stay up to watch Personal Best? C asked me.

No, I said. Those chicks are too skinny for me.