Monday, July 13, 2020

Yabbut, Serially

GalaxyBrain.ca

Go there to support the arts and read chapter one of "That Looks Good on You - You Should Buy It!"

You won't regret it.

Sunday, July 12, 2020

Photographic Memory

A Facebook friend just posted about not knowing what to do with a lot of old memorabilia left behind by the long ago owners of a house she purchased. I guess she'd ignored the stuff as long as she could and is now dealing with it. But in the thread someone mentioned rescuing photo albums from the trash of a seniors' residence and it put me in mind of my mother, who, not long after moving in threw all her old photo albums in the laundry room trash of her seniors' residence.

Fortunately, another resident saw them and took them out again and suggested to my mother that she might not want to throw them out.

So my mother, not wanting to interact any more than necessary with another resident, took them back and stuck them in the closet, where they remained until we cleaned out her apartment after she had to move into the nursing home.

But I remember on one visit, when she was in the hospital recovering from a fall, and I was staying in her apartment, I decided to look through her photo albums. They were of her travels, and I was shortly into my look-through when I came across a photo of her staring at the camera. And I stared back at that person staring at the camera because suddenly, I had no idea who she was.

Who. The. Fuck. Are. You.

It was a quite a discovery for me, that I really had no idea who my mother was outside the context of me, myself and I. She was absolutely a stranger, that woman in the photo, staring at the camera. So I looked at more photos and, sure enough, not a trace of my mother. Just some stranger in Hawaii. Or Australia. Or Greece.

And she'd thrown out the photo albums not because she was depressed, although she was, but because she couldn't see the photos anymore. She was losing her eyesight. Besides, I'd never once known her to look at a photo album even though she made many of them. I used to pour over them when I was a kid because I loved those old photos of her as a WREN or WAC or whichever it was. She always looked to be having fun.

Anyway, my point is, I have no idea where those photo albums are now. And although I'm really glad I saw that photo, and so can live on knowing that we never really know our mothers, I'm gladder still that I don't have responsibility for storing them - or not.

Because I'm pretty sure the resident who handed them back to my mother has passed on now and I can't just knock on her door and hand them back.


Saturday, July 11, 2020

Make Government Work Again

Since my late mother's public service pension went entirely to Chartwell, profiteering vampire-at-large benefiting former premier and lifelong thug, Mike Harris, and then partially to Extendicare, houses of horror in ongoing violation of even our most basic regulations, I say all residences for people who are no longer able to live independently, or just no longer want to, should be entirely public and paid for with the public and private pensions of residents.

So co-op-style.

Because here's the thing, nobody deserves more pension than anybody else anyway, but also, we don't need money when we're old and certainly wouldn't need money if we could count on our governments to - at least - look after us - properly and equally - in our old age.

This is just stupid how we're living. I'm still working because I don't have any pension, not because I want to be working. Meanwhile, my younger ex retired a couple of years ago on more money than my current partner and I make combined. A recent university graduate should be doing my job, like, say, one of my own offspring. Instead we have thousands of them (not mine, everybody's!) in student debt up to their ears who aren't working at all and so have no way of paying it off.

Why? No wonder anxiety and depression are rampaging through our population. And who wants to add the responsibility of babies to their stressed lives?

Oh and here's the real kicker - in spite of my fear of me or you, Dear Reader, getting COVID-19, my old lady still working life is actually better because at least I don't have to spend a couple of hours a day commuting on public transit to make money to increase my pension so that I don't have to live in a cardboard box in the middle of the road when I'm no longer able or wanting to live independently.

Seriously, stop the world, I want to get off.




Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Dear Canadian Political Media

Yes we have a ginormous deficit. There is a global pandemic. If you get it you will either die or have lifelong health consequences.

Or, get it and not even know you had it.

But odds are, if you're middle-aged to older, it'll be option #1 or option #2. So our governments, democratic and undemocratic, mandated a complete shutdown of communal activity. That's how important it is to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, children, or, Vectors of Disease, as I call them now, seem to get away with option #3.

So I say we leave the deficit to them to sort out.