Michael & Me

Prepare yourselves, I have very sad news today.

Michael Murray, the founder of GalaxyBrain.ca and publisher of my book "That Looks Good on You - You Should Buy It!" -That Looks Good on You - passed away early this morning.

I know, I know, but Michael would want me to plug my book. It was my turn for him to do it himself, and he was as proud of it as I am.

He'd also want me to plug his, though, so go buy "A Van Full of Girls" if you haven't already. You'll laugh, you'll cry, your emotions will run the gamut.

Michael was just one of the many inspiring characters I've had the good luck to connect with over the internet, but the better luck to connect with in real life, when I attended a reading for his book, A Van Full of Girls, at the Manx here in his hometown of Ottawa, as well as a 50-something birthday party, with he and his beautiful wife, Rachelle.

I bought his book at the launch, fending off his dad who wanted me to buy a dozen more, and baked him a raspberry pie for his birthday.

We had a rollercoaster relationship, Michael and I, pretty much all of it taking place online, whether we were dishing dirt in private messages - he was an epic dirt-disher - or yukking it up in public threads on Facebook.

Michael could keep a thread going forever, and had a particular rapport with our mutual friend, Jane Michelle Wilson, whom we both knew to be the most excellent person on the planet, while Michael would make out like she was really Leona Helmsley or Cruella de Vil (for you youngsters).

He did the same thing with Margaret Atwood, in his many tales of their ongoing feud she knew nothing about, probably the funniest shit I've read on the internet.

His politics, his nostalgia, drove me up the wall, and I would have to remind myself several times a day during our many back and forths that this slip of a man lived with a fucking oxygen tank strapped to his back and never complained about his health.

I was mad enough about it for both of us, I guess, the unfairness of it all, and please don't ever think I don't appreciate the primo hand I was dealt, in spite of all my whining.

Michael Murray I am not.

So yes, we squabbled, a lot, but always made up. He knew of life, did Michael. His short story posts of hospital visits and stays was the most poignant writing I've ever read, and although he promised me the brutal truth in private messages, he never delivered. He didn't want to dwell there any longer than he had to, I guess.

Or maybe he just wanted to spare me.

He was a fan of my writing, a fan of me, and it really was everything. After reading the first two chapters of my book, not easy for Michael, who admitted to having the attention span of a newt, thanks to his social media addiction, "You have a voice!" It was exactly what I needed to hear to keep going, the perfect pitch. When he conceived GalaxyBrain.ca with a view to serializing my book, he gave me the gift of readers, readers who took the time to express their appreciation, and I'll be forever grateful to him and to them, his many, many, many friends.

He was so loved.

It settled me down, GalaxyBrain.ca. Michael had given me what I needed. I wrote more pieces. He edited. I argued. Whole pieces got scrapped, better ones written, both of us so proud of ourselves.

It was fun. We had fun. Calling each other brilliant and geniuses, no superlative too much for us.

We were gods.

Back as mortals, we squabbled over politics. I found him endlessly, frustratingly stubborn, as he would no doubt say of me. Did he? He probably did. Omigawd, he did, didn't he. Dirt-disher. But we wanted the same world, too, a world full of good things for everybody, magic, joy, creativity.

We shared the sentiment that work was drudgery, a waste of our glorious lives, and he urged me over and over and over again to quit whatever government assignment I was on, which was exactly what I wanted to hear, over and over and over again, while I slogged my way through the latest waste of my glorious life.

Oh how I loved complaining to Michael about work. "You should quit! Work is stupid!" he'd write back, and I'd live to work another day. As the legend goes, when Michael got cancer as a young man, he decided he wanted to be a writer, and that was that, no more wasting time watching the hands of a clock go 'round.

In my last message to him I conceded we were fellow travellers and I would miss him. A lot.

And as promised, I do.

The world's light has dimmed a little so let's all who knew Michael light a candle for it this evening.

I'd like to leave off here with my condolences to Michael's beautiful wife, Rachelle (the real Galaxy brain as Michael reveals in his bio, before hilariously snatching all credit back for himself, because he was very, very funny) and their pride and joy, Jones, the snappiest dresser any of us will ever know, his sense of style so clearly handed directly down to him by his loving, dapper, father.

Goodbye, Michael. It was a gas knowing you. And rest assured, my friend, you will forever live on in our hearts.

#ParentFail101

"Kathryn, you don't know how to be married."

I've thought about those words a lot. They came from my former mother-in-law, deceased now, and I miss her. But those words stuck to me like dog shit in a boot tread.

Fair enough, I guess. Hard to learn how to be married growing up with a widowed mother.

But to be fair to me, I think it was more a case of not liking being married. More specifically, not liking being married to her son, not once we had kids, anyway. And while kids are never to blame for their parents' divorce, they're very often why.

But imagine if instead of trying to make a marriage between two incompatible people work (and be honest, husbands, that work is tasked to your wife) we spoke up as soon as we realized we'd married each other's "unfinished business".

Marrying Your Unfinished Business

Of course, a lot of kids wouldn't be born if we did, having kids often being the prime motivating factor for a woman to rope one off from the herd, as it were, that man tending to be the one we happen to be with when the mood strikes.

No worries - we can change him later!

Alas, also thanks to Lewis Howe's podcast, which I only watch in Facebook clips that pop up in my feed, I must cop to sucking at parenting, too.

Shitty wife, incompetent mother, may as well admit it, I was never in any danger of being Employee of the Month, either.

All along I thought trying to make my children happy was where it's at, tricky when you're responsible for separating the family, the saddest development in their young lives, kids just wanting their parents to stay together - whether we want to or not.

So to be fair to parents, it's not like kids give a rat's ass about our happiness.

But it turns out, no, resilience is where it's at, and resilience can only be learned through adversity.

Oh. Okay. Well I guess mine must have learned some then through divorce, even if I did try to jolly them along into believing nothing had changed, when, of course, everything had.

Ugh. Why must everything be so hard?

Anyway, back to resilience, which, duh, can't be learned by mom jumping in whenever her kids are feeling sad/mad/bad, to distract/avoid/deny, and so on and so forth and more of the same "don't worry, be happy" disguising "I'm not comfortable with my own feelings, never mind yours!" and, oh my goodness - breakthrough!

Stop Trying to Make Your Kids Happy

Really, who knew? Well, professional parents, I guess. Social workers and teachers. Unfortunately, a lot of us amateurs are trying to raise kids at the same time we're trying to make marriage with an increasingly incompatible spouse work, while the village that used to be there to support us when we all lived in little hunter/gatherer tribes, is either behind its own closed doors or at work.

Anyway, it's all a crock, the notion we've come a long way, baby, which we only realize once we've been thrown clear in one way or another - usually by aging out.

It's the bloody system. We're still stuck trying to live our best lives within a Patriarchal system that actively works against our own and our children's happiness.

But instead of Smashing the State, parents are now tasked with ensuring our kids develop resilience.

Wtf, man?

Soap Opera Lives

As I've blogged many times, we just get CBC and TVO chez nous. With Netflix, it's more than enough.

I could even live without Netflix. I just don't care that much about any of it anymore. I'll never watch the last season of Breaking Bad, for instance. And I can't even remember now how The Wire ended because I got tired of it, too, and didn't really pay attention.

I stopped watching The Sopranos at some point. Mobsters repulse me. I don't see the humour in their casual violence. It doesn't make me laugh, it makes me sick.

The ongoing pretence they have some kind of moral code is what's laughable.

Whoa, off topic much, Kathryn?

So yeah, don't get me started on mobsters, I despise them.

I watch Coronation Street on CBC unless a storyline is too aggravating for me. If it is, I switch to TVO, and the other night I was about to do that when I decided, no, stay the course.

Stop being such a wuss about dramatic storylines.

An unpopular and somewhat feared character I enjoy was having an affair, not of the heart or mind, really, although she did enjoy their banter, as well as the challenge of seduction, but because she wasn't living the life she wanted.

As she would eventually admit, she really just no longer wanted to be married, not to the man she was, anyway, not anymore.

I was ready to turn away because I knew she was going to get caught, try to deny it all, too late, marriage over, nothing left but a life of regret.

Also vilification for being an ungrateful jezebel by the worst hypocrites who ever walked the face of the Earth, given the sixty year history of Coronation Street, although I'm only acquainted with the last ten.

Well, I'm glad I stayed to see the storyline play out because that's not what happened at all. She got caught, yes, in flagrante delicto no less, by her husband's best friend, too, who ratted her out to her husband when she didn't fess up to him herself.

She meant to, but he intercepted her fessing up with a request to renew their vows, and in true soap opera style she changed the grim expression on her face to one of false sheer delight, saying, "Yes!"

It reminds of the time I said to my boss at the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, where I was on assignment as an administrative assistant to an executive assistant, the worst job in the government, when asked if I was enjoying it, "I love it here!"

In fact, I felt sick every time I entered Place Bell, I hated it so much. When I got my next job, a policy analyst at Environment Canada, I was so happy it didn't even matter that it was deep into Gatineau, a commute involving two bus systems.

Oh he was so righteous with indignation for his pub buddy, the deceived husband's friend, another popular Corrie fellow punching so well above his weight in the romance department, it is to laugh.

Really the only evenly matched pairs on Corrie are gay. Otherwise it's princesses and toads who never turn into princes, not that there's much kissing, thankfully.

But when her outraged husband confronted her, and he's a popular character, a jokey daft fellow in good standing at the pub, beer with his mates solving all manner of ups and downs, she didn't deny it. Instead she copped to it all, adding, if not the former soccer star, it would've been somebody else, lest her husband deflect away from the why of it all, which was their marriage no longer working for her, if indeed it ever really had, and so she didn't want to be in it anymore.

She wasn't mean about it, but she didn't pussyfoot around why, either, refusing to accept all the guilt and blame for their marriage not working out, just because she'd had "a thing" as she called it.

I liked that. A thing. Not an affair, not a fling. A thing. An action to bring about change in circumstance and feeling, not intended as a replacement for a marriage with one man that wasn't working out with marriage to another who mightn't work out, either.

It was hard to watch though, too, because her husband didn't want the marriage to end, in spite of the thing. He didn't feel the way she did about their marriage, although she did point out that he wasn't really happy, either, an opinion with which he disagreed, but you could see the old wheels cranking around, too.

It was enough for him because she made it enough, I guess is how I'd put it, but they were nonetheless undeserving of each other, and you can take that every which way, but only one of them was admitting it.

Out loud, anyway.

No, he wanted to put the thing behind them and carry on. He'd even been trying to up his game of late, show his appreciation more, bring a little romance back to the marriage. But, of course, he was doing too little, too late, and in that same lazy way that had been the problem all along, while she was determinedly having a thing to bring it all to an end.

I don't think I've ever seen a storyline resolve quite like it. Certainly not on a soap opera. And at first I thought there might be a reconciliation and resumption of the status quo, was hoping for it, and tensed up when she not only copped to the thing but followed it up with the real why of it, which was that she didn't want to be in a marriage with him anymore, wishing him the best but we're done here, honey.

It was very cathartic, the scene, and I'm glad I didn't switch to TVO to avoid it. Interestingly, I'd had the same urge with regard to an earlier episode involving teen bullying, but stuck around to see a phenomenal bit of acting by a character not particularly noted for it, when he exploded in anguish at his son for being part of a gang bullying another teen.

Anyway, it did my heart good, the endless dramatic possibilities in vilifying an ungrateful jezebel who decides marriage to a perfectly decent bloke isn't enough for her, foregone in favour of said jezebel very undramatically stating straight up that, yup, marriage to a perfectly decent bloke isn't enough for her.

The myth persists about women, that we exist, really, ultimately, for men and children. Others. A woman's a wife and mother. Sister, daughter, friend. She isn't supposed to want to be the star of our own show once she's married, certainly not after she has kids.

She's supposed to be happy playing a supporting character in her husband's show or her child's show.

The thing is, it's a myth. We do want to be the star of own show. We always did. It just wasn't until recently we could admit it out loud, in this part of the world, anyway, and then go out into the big bad world and do it.

Czech Mate

I'm so sorry Donald Trump is still in all our lives, but I think, in a way, it's our own fault. Maybe not yours, but mine, for sure. Like, right now. Here I am, mentioning him again.

It's awful, though, isn't it. We survived a pandemic. But we're back where we started with Donald Trump.

Or are we?

I thought Donald Trump hadn't been in my life until there he was in 2015 running for the Republican Party nomination. But I was a monthly buyer of Vanity Fair magazine back in the day and at some point Ivana Trump started showing up in it.

It was odd, this tacky throwback from eastern Europe hawking diamonds and furs and showcasing her frat boy husband's gold-plated pile in Manhattan, in an otherwise stylish magazine.

She looked more like his mother than wife to me.

But as Graydon Carter explained to readers in one of his more memorable editorials, an issue thick with fashion ads meant an issue strong in relevant and insightful articles about our world from real journalists and erudite writers.

And just as I wrote the above paragraph it dawned on me what a pile of malarkey it was, this dowdy woman whose son Eric would grow up to be her spitting image, being sold to Vanity Fair readers as the latest super model/urban sophisticate/educated mind gracing its pages.

Anyway I went down a bit of an Ivana Trump rabbit hole after that and lo and behold turns out she lived in Montreal in the 70s with a defector (she herself had permission to come and go from Czechoslovakia, unlike anybody else at the time?) before meeting and marrying Donald Trump in 1977.

Her back story and explanation for the ease with which she could come and go was that she was an Olympic skiing star, likely completely manufactured as no actual record of such could be found in a 1989 search to corroborate her 1972 Olympics claims.

In 1990, after her marriage to Donald Trump was over and at an acrimonious stage, Ivana's 63-year-old father, an informer for Czech intelligence who apparently relayed information from his daughter (uh, say what? about... skiing? modelling? decor?) died suddenly of a heart attack.

Sure. Okay. And there's nothing odd about her falling down stairs to her death during an investigation into Donald Trump, who once raped and ripped out clumps of her hair in a jealous rage at his hair plugs not taking, and about whose treason and corruption she would have known everything, being intricately involved in his businesses, then being buried on his golf course.

It's the Russian way, though, isn't it. Or is it the American way? I mean, why is Donald Trump, blatantly obvious traitor, proven fraud artist, conman, well-documented rapist and best bud of convicted and found dead in his jail cell pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, and leader of a violent insurrection in early 2021 against the US government, the Republican Party's nominee for President, hosting white supremacist rallies all across America, instead of in prison?

But let's go North of the world's longest undefended border.

As I've pointed out many times, what was so terrifying about the Freedom Convoy was the support it had from leaders, past, present and future of our Official Opposition, the Conservative Party of Canada, while it attacked us, you and me, local councillors, MPs and their staff of the New Democrat and Liberal parties, so many Canadians either oblivious it was happening at all or chiming in to support our attackers.

Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, was the blatantly obvious political sponsor of this attack on us, an unlawful occupation and attempted insurrection, after which the Conservatives elected him their party leader.

There were other contenders, too. They didn't have to elect Poilievre leader. They chose him. In a landslide victory complete with eliminating his main rival in case he ended up winning and MP supporters carting boxes of ballots around in public like is never done in legitimate elections, but, oh well.

Since when has an election involving Stephen Harper's Conservative Party not had its irregularities, eh?

Meanwhile, in the world of us ordinary citizens, the Freedom Convoy caused real and lasting harm. People who live and work in downtown Ottawa lost their trust in police, social cohesion already frayed from the pandemic was stressed to the max, our health suffered, some of us requiring medication and therapy due to panic attacks, people lost rent money unable to get to their minimum wage jobs as the city centre was shutdown, and disinformation from social media went from a trickle to a flood out into civil society, a steady stream of chaos inducing propaganda.

The Freedom Convoy and its fallout cost Canadians millions and millions and millions of dollars.

There are many people living in government town Ottawa who believe all the same Qanon nonsense their American cousins do. Pierre Poilievre is their man for Prime Minister. Why?

Why are so many Canadians behind this well-known, well-documented, thoroughly odious creep who has no respect for us, our laws, our democracy?

What's going on? His wife, Anaida, of "Pretty & Smart Co", a supposed online magazine she co-founded in 2019 (I googled, nothing happening on it), first shows up in a Senator's office, then moves into Poilievre MP tenant and best buddy, Michael Cooper's office, and next thing she's married to the woman-repeller (Poilievre, not his best buddy the other woman-repeller, Cooper), they have two spawn, and he has in-laws about whom nobody can get the straight skinny. Oh and surely it's just a coincidence he's also suddenly, blatantly, and obviously, unable to get a security clearance, even though he had one when he was a Cabinet minister in Stephen Harper's government, pushing the blatant and obvious lie that it's because he doesn't want one.

And just like Trump he's getting away with it.

What's with this Soviet-era type shit going on here?

And why is nobody who's anybody pointing at walking talking contradiction, former Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, self-proclaimed Putin-hater but blatant and obvious Orban-lover, Orban being, like Trump, blatantly and obviously pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine?

He, like Trump's Republican Party, is actively preventing Ukraine defending itself from Russia's invasion, which is no different from Germany's invasion of Poland, an invasion that led to our eventual involvement in World War II.

On that note, anybody who thinks we aren't in World War III isn't paying attention. We are and we have nowhere near the political and social cohesion we had in World War II. I know what I witnessed in February 2022. Stephen Harper's Conservative Party on the side of the Freedom Convoy and its attack on civil society, Western liberal democracy, sponsored by Russia and Trump's Republican Party.

It was treason, an insurrection, no different from January 2021 in the US except instead of attacking the harder target of Congress, the insurrectionists attacked the softer target of ordinary citizens and civilians.

And speaking of Stephen Harper, if the International Democracy Union, created in 1983 by Vice-President and former CIA director George H.W. Bush, isn't a blatant and obvious laundromat for global fascism, supporting blatant and obvious fascists like Trump and Orban, then what the hell is it? What does it do?

Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

Anyway, I'm sorry to go on about it, even sorrier to have gone down a couple of rabbit holes writing this entry, sorrier still it doesn't seem to matter to so many of my co-citizens that they're rallying behind fascism Soviet-style and the politicians who pretending to be against it - even while being blatantly and obviously in lockstep with Vladimir Putin, its greatest proponent, and our greatest enemy.

Crazy-making, but that's the point, isn't it? 

The Secrets We Keep

My mother had a friend, Mary, a slight, quiet woman, very reserved, who visited our house on occasion. I was curious about her because she was always alone, never spoke of a husband or kids, and lived in an apartment.

I was fascinated by people who lived in apartments, as my mother's young teacher friends did, but this woman was my mother's age.

Not being a shy kid I peppered this poor woman with questions, trying to figure out her life. She wasn't offended, and often laughed at my intrusiveness, but never gave up any information.

Pretty soon into the visit my mother would put the run on me. I wonder now why she allowed any of it but maybe she was seeing if I could crack the vault.

One day Mary showed up, very upset. I was getting older, though, so left the scene right after answering the door. Later, I asked my mother what was wrong, and I guess she decided I was old enough to know.

Years before, Mary's son had tried to kill her, stabbing her with a butcher's knife. Her husband was long gone by then. Left. He'd been a brute. Her son had been in prison, but Mary had just been informed he was being released, and she was afraid.

That's all I remember, and maybe all there is to the story.

I think Mary moved after that.

It stayed with me, the back story to this slip of a woman, always in black, or that's how I remember her. I've always pictured her son, who I never met, as a gigantic, oversized monster with unknowing wild eyes, attacking his own mother with a butcher's knife. But I have no idea. Perhaps he wasn't much bigger than his mother. I've been out-muscled by the scrawniest looking of men and I'm athletic.

I grew up knowing about the bad things happening to kids, their moms, behind closed doors. I was friends with a girl up the street whose father beat her mother and older sister, which I only found out about later, after my friend had been killed in a car crash on the notorious Hwy 17 where another friend of my youth was killed.

Her father used to argue politics with me. There was something off about him and no amount of coaxing could get Nancy to veer off course. If she wasn't allowed to do a thing, that was it. If she had to be home or couldn't go out, that was it. She was a cynical kid who found me naive and under-read, who suffered from terrible eczema. Her older sister was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen, and my brother had a crush on her. Her mother, according to Nancy, had a skin condition that made it dark, but I think she was probably of mixed race, although both Nancy and her older sister were fair, like their father.

Her mother worked but I never saw her outside their house. Ever. I think I remember Nancy saying she couldn't go outside. Even then I knew "couldn't" meant wasn't allowed, even though Nancy's father worked shifts at the plant and often wasn't around during the day.

I never liked All in the Family. Archie reminded me of Nancy's father.

I despised him.

The expression "working class" doesn't translate to me like the politicians who use it intend. I'm from the Sault. Lunch pails, hard hats and shift work don't bring to mind good times for families any more than pin striped suits and briefcases do.

It brings to mind angry and bitter men who believed they deserved better than wartime housing and unionized jobs at Algoma Steel, and who took their grievances out on my friends and their mothers.

Kids know this stuff, the violence that happens behind the closed doors of their friends' houses. It's why nightmares. Trapped with a monster, no one coming to the rescue because we're not allowed to tell and even if we did, the monster is king of his castle, and trespass is the sin, not beating up your wife and kids.

No Trespassing! Remember the signs? We lived across from a field owned by the president of Algoma Steel, an awful man, a Mr. Burns of his day. He kept vicious guard dogs. I could've been killed by two of them, if I hadn't had the little kid instinct to trap myself between the storm and inside door, but that's a story for another time.

Being kids we played baseball in the field, anyway, appointing scouts to keep an eye out for the dogs.

It was a field, ffs, in a neighbourhood full of kids, and that asshole had guard dogs he set loose.

His wife was kind and liked little kids. It was her I had gone to visit.

I'm not sure how much has changed for all our public discourse about family violence. It's still kept behind closed doors, a private affair, left to its individual members to live their lives around, protect the perpetrator, themselves, the family name, from the shame and scrutiny of public exposure.

In Russia, Putin, admired by so many men here, took care of that by decreeing family violence to be no longer even a crime.

I lived the good old days male politicians, mostly younger than myself, look back on with nostalgia. I experienced life - as a fatherless girl paying close attention to the fathers of my friends - in working class Northern Ontario in the 60s and 70s, in residence at Victoria College U of T, in various office temp jobs in Toronto, including the ONDP of the 80s, as a married homemaker and mother in suburban Ottawa in the 90s, as a divorced partner of My Blond Companion in the 2000s.

No time is better than now, here, in this part of the world, for women and children, that much I know to be true.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They may not know they're lying but I do. You do, too.

It would be a sin to let them win.

Living with Rex Chapman

I'm reading a book supposedly by the Dalai Lama, "An Open Heart - Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life".👸

It's not very well written, but no matter. I'm not reading it for its literary merit, but inspiration. I want to strengthen my connection to the divine. I was raised in the here and now by my secular mother, but my father was a religious man, and I share his genes, too.🙏

Years ago, I started to wish an enemy well. I forget now where I got the idea but I decided to try it. And it worked. His behaviour didn't change, it just didn't affect me anymore. Wishing him well, sincerely wishing him well, freed me up from the bad feelings I'd not realized were the real problem.💃

Anyway, I'll need ongoing refreshers in letting go if I'm to get through this life in one piece.💪

Sunday morning on CBC radio I heard an interview with Piya Chattopadhyay and Rex Chapman. I only know Rex Chapman as a Twitter wit, I didn't realize he's a famous basketball player, but the interview was about his book, "It's Hard for Me to Live with Me: A Memoir".😎

He stole my title.🙇

My Blond Companion's would be: It's Hard for Me to Live with Her".😃

Anyway, I didn't know much about Rex Chapman except he's hilarious and biting and just an excellent all-round Twitter personality. But he also had an opioid addiction AND a gambling addiction and spoke of both during the interview. He's so eloquent I finally understood just how terrifying the opioid addiction crisis really is.😱

He describes how he felt when he took the first pill, prescribed for an injury in the later stages of his basketball career, all his anxiety melting away, feeling like he was a better person, even, kinder, more sociable, able to connect with strangers in a way he couldn't before. And I could imagine what that must have felt like for him. Not for me, not now, anyway, but for him, then, the way he'd described himself as a young man.😬

I have never felt so lucky to feel good naturally, in spite of issues I've blogged about many times, because I do, I feel good naturally. I wrote my regrets in one column, my values in another, and how to live now in a third. It all added up to more than just sober but sober is certainly the magic decoder ring. Like I said, I'm lucky, and for that, I'm grateful. 💖

Eventually Rex Chapman was up to 40 pills a day, bankrupt, charged with shoplifting, because, of course, to keep feeling good required increased amounts of opioid. He says he's just lucky he got out of it before he got into injecting heroin.😷

It's a stunning story, and yes, he had a long hard fall from grace, but it sounds to me like everybody who gets addicted to opioids ends up at the same bottom.💩

Gabor Mate describes addiction as a coping mechanism for trauma. And while Rex Chapman doesn't talk about trauma, he does talk about privilege, and how he was let off the hook so often, knew why and felt guilty about it. He also talks about having a black girlfriend at one time, and the relationship not being approved of, particularly in the American south. He wishes he could go back and tell that young man to stand up for himself, for others, use his platform, his privilege, for better, instead of wasting it as he did.😇

Don't we all, or most of us, fail ourselves, others, in one way or another, but as someone once said, "The best time to plant a tree was forty years ago, the next best time is now". Hence why I'm brushing up with some reading on how to do better.💁

Old Style - Updated

Update: I weighed in on gender, after all. I'm tired of the same old same old double-standard and Feminists being blamed for the problem of Patriarchal violence against the rest of us.

Look, I really want to be able to quote Bette Davis, "Gettin' old ain't for sissies", because I think given our progress on recognizing gender as a patriarchal construct, we should be able to agree that "sissy" just means "lily-livered", and therefore can be applied to anyone with a liver who shrinks from the tough stuff.

Otherwise, I almost never weigh in on the politics of gender because I'm waiting until transmen demand to compete in men's sports.

Or demand anything, now that I've weighed in to make what I think is a fairly salient yet consistently overlooked point about who presents the real danger to transwomen in our society.

Hint: It's not lesbians. And it's certainly not Feminists - of any wave. So sod off with your firings and cancelings, trans activists, and repeat after me: The problem is the Patriarchy and its perpetration of male violence against women. Period. End of.

This morning I read about death cafes and then watched an inspiring video about "Fabulous Fashionistas", a handful of octogenarians - all women, so sorry, fellas - who are keeping fit and current, rockin' cool threads - including thrift shop finds - and just generally making older age seem less daunting to the rest of us.

Not a sissy in the lot, they're pretty much made of the tough stuff, so no shrinking from it for them.

I want to emulate their good example but I've a ways to go I'm afraid. Still, one foot in front of the other. I don't want my adult children dreading getting old - or any younger person dreading getting old - so my goal is to make my own aging look like the adventure it actually is, sucking up the daunting bits, revelling in the bonuses.

I plan to blog a lot, including a book, "Memories of Me", in which I'll jot down this and that along the way. It's a reinvention I'm after, a sloughing off of roles I've outgrown, opinions I want to let go of, an opening up to let the universe in - a third act. I'd like to do it without taking on paid work, which I've never much cared for, but I do want to be a "helper" as Mister Rogers would say.

I guess I can pass a police check?

So we'll see you around these parts. Stay hydrated and take the stairs.

Today in Late Breaking News

So contrary to ongoing complaints from some Canadians that the Liberal government has been supporting Israel in its ongoing war crime against Palestinians, it turns out it's actually been "slow walking" - so not delivering on - requests from Israel for armoured vehicles, night vision goggles, and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc.

A class action suit for gross negligence as a result of deaths during the pandemic against six Ontario long term care nursing homes is going ahead. In a ruling last week, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice certified class action suits against Sienna, Revera, Schlegel, Responsive, Extendicare and Chartwell.

Peterborough has housed 50 of its estimated 250 unhoused citizens in individual tiny shipping containers with locks. They come with heating and air conditioning, a small fridge, but no cooking facilities, and no washrooms. On site care is available 24/7, violence isn't tolerated, and residents pay a portion of their income for rent, $500 or so, which should net a citizen a studio at least, but it's better than a tent. 

Pay Now or Pay Later

So I've been thinking about the recurrence of nausea the other day, after my sojourn downtown, which is depressing as hell and not at all normal or how it always was and while the poor may always be with us they needn't be drug poisoned zombies, and how I've tied it all in with the Freedom Convoy's attack on civil society two years in to the pandemic, when I did the math and realized I'd broken my wrist a few months prior.

I remember the 14 hours overnight surprisingly well, too, sitting in a chair, cracked patella and badly broken wrist, masked, commiserating with the other broken people in need of healthcare, witnessing the abject failure of our social safety net, all while reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt (author of The Goldfinch). My Blond Companion, who could not be with me due to the pandemic, had smuggled in an umbrella to use as a cane, an apple, some nuts, cheese, a bottle of water. I wasn't hungry but I drank the water.

He was upset, which helped me be braver about it all, but it also made me more conscious than ever of our age difference, and how falling and breaking a bone was pretty stereotypical old lady of me.

And there's nothing like being in hospital in your 60s to have that "and so it begins" feeling you never expected to have even though I guess it happens to most everybody who lives long enough.

But then there's nothing like finally getting the care you need and being sent home with a knee brace and temporary cast, surgery scheduled for a week later, to have that "this is the first day of the rest of your life" feeling, too. Oh and that sick leave covered month off work, devoted to rest and recovery, in spite of the pain, is a cosy memory I make a point of visiting every now and again.

When I first fell the pain was so bad I wanted to crawl out into traffic and let a car run over my head. Just end it. Done.

A Facebook friend recently said of the followers of Queen Romana Didulo, who I'm pretty sure is in drag, but so what if she is, I guess, they've been "failed by society" to think they don't have to pay their bills and follow the rules like the rest of us.

But aren't they just taking the political ideology that preaches taxes are bad to its logical conclusion?

I remember paying healthcare premiums when I was an office temp in Toronto. It was annoying, $60 a year (I think?) because I didn't have any benefits, wasn't in a union, so no coverage otherwise. Premiums were phased out not long after but they seem to be making a comeback with these nurse practitioner clinics popping up.

Middle-class parents will sign up in droves, I think, willing to pay an annual fee of a few hundred dollars to belong to a clinic they can access whenever the need arises, while emergency rooms remain for the rest of us. And maybe it'll alleviate some of the pressure on the system as it is now, and maybe it won't, but whether it's through taxes or fees, healthcare was never free, and if taxes aren't going to be raised then fees will have to be paid.

What's important is to keep insurance companies out of it, those money grubbing merchants of fear who never pay out as promised. Ever. We know - we know - from our American cousins where insurance companies in healthcare lead - to unconscionable suffering and death. No, whatever we do, we have to say no to insurance companies being involved in our healthcare system any more than they already are, scamming old people and just generally scavenging around the edges.

So sure, let middle-class parents be shareholders of nurse practitioner clinics. They can afford it or they wouldn't be voting Conservative. And if they can't afford it, well they can just cancel hockey for one of the kids, or the family vacation to Disneyland, or give up one of the two cars and take public transit. 

Setback

I'm just putting this out there in case it helps somebody else, although it helps me, too, to recap.

I had a setback yesterday, after having lunch downtown with a friend. After being home for a bit I experienced nausea and was eventually sick to my stomach. It lasted a couple of hours, mostly because I wanted to allow it to happen, not force it, but was fighting it, too. So from about 5 until 7:00 p.m. Then I took Gravol with a glass of cold water and went to bed.

I'm still tired but otherwise fine.

Lunch was at a vegetarian restaurant on Rideau, and I only mention that because I had a sandwich made with tempeh bacon, something I don't normally eat. But I knew even before I ordered I wasn't comfortable and should just get on a bus and go home. But I didn't want to make it awkward, either, so I forged ahead.

Rideau Street is in a very sad state. I have a hard time squaring lunch out with homelessness and addiction. The drugs people are taking are so powerful and dangerous. It's Russian Roulette. It felt all wrong to me, windows looking out on the human misery and despair, eating a $35 lunch.

My friend had been advised to sit away from the front, too, but she told me about the server asking a fellow to move along who'd positioned himself in the window where a couple of women were having lunch. He kept miming a request for money at them.

In Florida he'd be sent to one of its private prisons. I don't know what she said to get him to move along but the servers all seem decent enough and used to their surroundings so I imagine it was done politely. When I worked at the store in the Rideau Centre I had occasion after an evening shift to witness the goings on at the McDonald's, now closed, and wondered if the staff had MAs in Social Work.

I told my friend a story at lunch about something I'd seen on a CBC nature show Sunday evening. I don't usually watch nature shows but TVO had something involved on and I was working on curtains for our bedroom so just had the tv on for a bit of company. Anyway, at one point I turned to see a herd of wildebeest getting set to cross a fast flowing river filled with hungry alligators. Almost to the other side a baby wildebeest got caught in the current. Its mother tried her damnedest to save it but eventually she had to let it go to save herself. The baby drowned and was eaten by an alligator. The mother, safe on the other side, looked back at the river, but her baby was gone. Then she turned away to rejoin with the herd.

It broke my heart seeing it, broke my heart telling the story at lunch, is breaking my heart typing it out now. So I remind myself, mother alligators have to eat too. Perhaps the mother wildebeest will go on to have another baby, that one older and stronger when it comes time to cross the river again.

My mother always thought I was upsetting myself on purpose by caring about the world. She didn't concern herself with it and so didn't understand why I did. I get her point of view, sometimes I wish I had it myself, but she honestly, I think, didn't get mine. It wouldn't have made any sense to her, empathizing with a mother wildebeest.

Maybe a therapist would say it's not really about the wildebeest.

I don't think I'm being unfair to my mother here. I wonder if there aren't a lot of people who grew up as she did who don't concern themselves with the world outside their chosen parameters. Certainly I grew up in very different circumstances than she did, part of a post-war baby boom of relative affluence, challenging authority, breaking down barriers to create a more egalitarian society.

Maybe we just have more caring to spare.

For years I could run on empty, trust my body to tough it out. Now my body says no, the title of a now famous book by Gabor Mate, "When the Body Says No", which is really an indictment of our society and how we're being made to live in it, as is, "The Myth of Normal".

Anyway, this all started after the Freedom Convoy took over our downtown, the nausea and vomiting, and I think it's connected but I don't know. I'm certainly feeling the effects of Russia's destruction of Ukraine and Israel's destruction of Gaza, where civil order has broken down. I almost want the Freedom Convoy to come back and try again so I can show up to physically fight back, see if that slays this dragon.

Thanks for reading.

Spring Forward

It's been an unsettling winter here in Ottawa. Half as much snow as last year. Mild. Grey skies.

Yesterday, Saturday, we had cold rain.

The winter haters love it, but I've missed the cold and the snow. It's really messed with my identity as a Canadian. Thrown me off my timeline, too. I feel like I only just stopped riding my bike to the pond for a swim. And I'm already stressed about the coming forest fire season out West. And East. And Central. And North. Last summer there were a couple of days I didn't even ride my bike to the pond, the air quality was so bad here in Ottawa. Other days I did, anyway.

I was in Las Vegas in August once and I couldn't believe people actually live there. I could feel the moisture being sucked out of my body every time I stepped outside, like walking around a 400 degree oven. Inside was worse. Dank and moldy. I got dysentery in Las Vegas, like I got dysentery in Mexico, like I got dysentery in Venezuela.

Americans terrify me. So in love with the afterlife they ignore the real one.

But I'm working on live and let live, putting aside ego when I catch it getting in my way, reminding myself over and over and over again: It's not all up to me. And if Poilievre is elected Prime Minister and tries to steal the Canada Pension Plan I'll take it to the mat then.

She's a complete fucking loon but we should thank Danielle Smith for giving us all a heads up because the only reason Pierre Poilievre is pretending not to support Alberta taking its cut now is because his fascist sugar daddies expect him to deliver the whole enchilada to them later.

Not your gramps' Conservatives.

Girdin' Me Loins

I was feeling too responsible again yesterday, the fate of the country resting on my shoulders because there was a federal by-election in the 905, and I'd seen on CBC who was getting out the vote.

The Conservatives won it in a landslide, 57% of 27% of eligible voters.

Taxes and tradition in the year of our Lord 2024.

Even accounting for the vote split between New Democrats, Liberals and Greens the Conservatives won.

I decided to not let it get me down, even though that odious little creep, Pierre Poilievre, will likely be elected Prime Minister in 2025.

He doesn't care about anybody or anything, so we'll all pay the price when he is, but that's democracy. He also wants to exact revenge on women, as lots of men do these days it seems, so it'll be a war on us, but there's always protesting in the streets.

I wonder if he'll just have us gunned down by his private police force?

Public police force?

The police have been dying to take the Freedom Convoy's public humiliation of them out on us and no doubt look back fondly on Stephen Harper's G20 when they could kettle and jail liberals like me for being in our public streets.

Journalists will be at risk unless they work for Post Media. Of course, CBC will be destroyed so I guess we'll have to depend on journalists from outside Canada to report on our government.

It's like a friend has always said, we're ten years behind the states in our politics, so welcome to our 2015 in 2025, sister and brother Canadians.

Of course, if Donald Trump is elected President again, we'll be right up to date with Poilievre in power here, won't we.

Americans could vote Donald Trump into the Presidency again even if he had to do his bloviating from a jail cell.

Andrew Scheer will vote for him, regardless. He loves Donald Trump.

Is it better or worse that Poilievre and not Scheer will be Prime Minister? What a hard choice that would be, eh?

Satan's Choice.

Anyway, I've given up on strategic voting advice. Who am I to advise someone else on how to vote, even whether to vote. The NDP doesn't want to win, and so won't, but it's hard to tell these days if the Liberals do or not, either. I don't really blame them, to tell you the truth. Politics is tiring. People are selfish and stupid.

Listening to their reasons for voting Conservative in yesterday's by-election they sounded exactly like Trump supporters.

Oh well, I expect the country's big enough to survive another round of Conservative hatred of liberal democracy, but I guess we'll see.

Today in Facing the Facts

So basically, US support for Ukraine in its defence of democracy against Russia's imperialist terrorism has stalled, but its support for Israel, while it slaughters Palestinians trapped under its occupation in Gaza, continues unabated.

Money Over Matter

My young middle-aged neighbours who have jobs in the federal public service didn't want to go on strike last year or whenever the most recent PSAC strike was. They did, of course, but they were embarrassed by it. My suspicion as well is, even the employees who did want to strike were doing it not over pay but for the right to work from home.

And I doubt the union made much of a push for that because it isn't in its interests to have members working from home.

My last job was a term, so I was paid the going rate of a CR-04.

Let me put it this way, I was pleasantly surprised by the pay, and it's the lowest level job I've ever had in the government.

I just read a defence of a current teachers' strike in Saskatchewan and it lines up with my thinking, because it's not about money, it's about working conditions.

Amen, brother.

Sister?

Burnout isn't about pay, ffs, it's about working conditions.

I talked to the teachers at my kids' elementary school during Rae Days. Every one of their female teachers confided in me they had no quarrel with the Social Contract. Every. Single. One.

Time over money worked out for them just fine, thanks, Premier Rae. Ask a man his opinion of the Social Contract, though, and watch his face turn purple with rage.

I've always thought it stupid, the public service union focus on ever more money instead of a four day work week, shorter day, more employees to divvy up work in an increasingly complex world. Here in Ottawa we have bus drivers and police officers regularly making the Sunshine list.

Meanwhile, where's a bus or a cop when you need one?