low and mean and free; inks and acrylic on paper.
* * * * *
garbage
There is something about country music played at distorting volumes over a freezing supermarket's buzzy speaker system at 8:17 a.m that always brings me close to tears. What is that man braying about? He sounds badly congested. He sounds like he's trapped somewhere between singing and honking. Why must it be so loud? I thought country-music artists(!) were supposed to be all heartland and soulful. Not rock-y and blaring. The way my head hurts is a kind of pressure from both sides.
At the top of the pasta aisle is a middle-aged woman who has removed her glasses so she can cry in an unencumbered way. She's put her basket down and so has the middle-aged man she's with, who is looking especially bald and bespectacled and hopeless by the situation. It's not so bad, I want to say. I'm sure the artist isn't even getting royalties from this. Besides, you'll soon be out of here, and back home with the rest of your family.
That last part reminded me why my policy of saying less is almost always right. Besides, in my imaginary comforting, I'd forgotten to remind her that summer had finally arrived. So hurray for that! The day started off cool enough, but I knew everyone was impatient for that kind of temperance to go away and for the real stinking heat to come in. Which happened at around lunch, and is supposed to be with us for a good week or so. As will sweating, and violent rainstorms, and more sweating, and artificially cooling your environment! I can see why people look forward to this. Why would you want to be anything else but irradiated and slightly damp all the time? Fall with its leaves and multifarious colours and fluent crispness can go fuck itself.
Anyway, while it was still cool we did have a thorough go-around at the Skeleton Park Music Festival, where Oona enjoyed a giant cardboard castle and my wife bought me some buttons and I found a very nice handmade journal, and everyone was pleasant, and smiling, and happy to be there. I still haven't decided exactly where the tipping point is from hippie to hipster, but I certainly have more empirical evidence now.
What I do know is that these are the kind of people who would worry about moving out to the suburbs and turning weirdly right wing, but I can tell you that you don't need to incur the expense; living in the inner city will make you hate a lot of poor people just as quickly. It's the third or fourth time that someone dumps garbage in your alley way that does it. I mean, you kind of get used to all the middle-of-the-night fighting and swearing and threats to kill each other, and you hardly take notice after the twentieth or thirtieth time you encounter an adult male riding a children's bicycle down the sidewalk, and having things stolen by people just walking by is infrequent and random enough to mostly shrug off, but the *effort* involved in dumping garbage feels much, much more personal. SOMETIMES THEY EVEN USE SHOPPING CARTS. And then my wife phones the city, and the city does nothing, and then she writes her city counsellor, and he does nothing, and then you have to go back there with gloves and bag it up and store it and put it out with your own garbage and pay for the extra bag. And what I've decided about the kind of people who dump garbage in our alley is that they represent the tipping point where poverty becomes hopeless, and impossible to address, because these are the kind of people who are incapable of dealing with ordinary problems, the kind of people who deal with an ordinary problem like garbage disposal by illegally dumping it.
And so whenever I think about what we're trying to accomplish with raising Oona, I always come back to one point: I just want her to be capable. I just want her to be resilient and confident and able to deal with life's problems. I want her to be able to take care of her own garbage.
There is something about country music played at distorting volumes over a freezing supermarket's buzzy speaker system at 8:17 a.m that always brings me close to tears. What is that man braying about? He sounds badly congested. He sounds like he's trapped somewhere between singing and honking. Why must it be so loud? I thought country-music artists(!) were supposed to be all heartland and soulful. Not rock-y and blaring. The way my head hurts is a kind of pressure from both sides.
At the top of the pasta aisle is a middle-aged woman who has removed her glasses so she can cry in an unencumbered way. She's put her basket down and so has the middle-aged man she's with, who is looking especially bald and bespectacled and hopeless by the situation. It's not so bad, I want to say. I'm sure the artist isn't even getting royalties from this. Besides, you'll soon be out of here, and back home with the rest of your family.
That last part reminded me why my policy of saying less is almost always right. Besides, in my imaginary comforting, I'd forgotten to remind her that summer had finally arrived. So hurray for that! The day started off cool enough, but I knew everyone was impatient for that kind of temperance to go away and for the real stinking heat to come in. Which happened at around lunch, and is supposed to be with us for a good week or so. As will sweating, and violent rainstorms, and more sweating, and artificially cooling your environment! I can see why people look forward to this. Why would you want to be anything else but irradiated and slightly damp all the time? Fall with its leaves and multifarious colours and fluent crispness can go fuck itself.
Anyway, while it was still cool we did have a thorough go-around at the Skeleton Park Music Festival, where Oona enjoyed a giant cardboard castle and my wife bought me some buttons and I found a very nice handmade journal, and everyone was pleasant, and smiling, and happy to be there. I still haven't decided exactly where the tipping point is from hippie to hipster, but I certainly have more empirical evidence now.
What I do know is that these are the kind of people who would worry about moving out to the suburbs and turning weirdly right wing, but I can tell you that you don't need to incur the expense; living in the inner city will make you hate a lot of poor people just as quickly. It's the third or fourth time that someone dumps garbage in your alley way that does it. I mean, you kind of get used to all the middle-of-the-night fighting and swearing and threats to kill each other, and you hardly take notice after the twentieth or thirtieth time you encounter an adult male riding a children's bicycle down the sidewalk, and having things stolen by people just walking by is infrequent and random enough to mostly shrug off, but the *effort* involved in dumping garbage feels much, much more personal. SOMETIMES THEY EVEN USE SHOPPING CARTS. And then my wife phones the city, and the city does nothing, and then she writes her city counsellor, and he does nothing, and then you have to go back there with gloves and bag it up and store it and put it out with your own garbage and pay for the extra bag. And what I've decided about the kind of people who dump garbage in our alley is that they represent the tipping point where poverty becomes hopeless, and impossible to address, because these are the kind of people who are incapable of dealing with ordinary problems, the kind of people who deal with an ordinary problem like garbage disposal by illegally dumping it.
And so whenever I think about what we're trying to accomplish with raising Oona, I always come back to one point: I just want her to be capable. I just want her to be resilient and confident and able to deal with life's problems. I want her to be able to take care of her own garbage.
* * * * *