On Thursday, Rachelle and I took the train from Toronto to Montreal. Unbeknownst to us, there was a special that day in which children could travel for just $10 each. As a result, our train was a kind of anarchy, full of unattended children, indolent parents, senior citizens and others secondary characters that had their driver’s licenses revoked for one reason or another. It was kind of like being in a narrow, store-less version of the Dufferin Mall, only hurtling through Ontario.
At any rate, the train was packed, and as there was no reserved seating, everybody was struggling to find a place to sit. I had a little fight with one woman (who was sitting directly across the narrow aisle from me) who had been trying to reserve the seat next to her for her luggage and two dolls, in spite of the obvious fact that the train was sold out.
Before our dispute escalated, a young girl of about 10 squeezed in and shared the seat with this woman’s luggage, thus establishing a kind of compromise. But still, I was far from satisfied and kept shooting the woman dirty looks.
She was probably in her mid-thirties, and she actually looked like Penelope Cruz, but I hated her guts. She was an evil Nazi who skinned cats. She wrote fan letters to Mel Gibson. She turned off her lights at Halloween and pretended she wasn’t home.
Anyway, the two dolls that she was traveling with were not beautiful or interesting dolls. They were ratty, balding things that looked like they’d been purchased at Value Village or snatched out of the mouth of a dog. One of them, the yellow one with the pink bonnet, she held on her lap like a child, while the other blue one sat looking at her from its perch in her backpack.
After a spell, the girl and her fell into conversation about these stupid dolls, named Benny and Jet. The woman showed the girl pictures and movies of the dolls she kept on her iPhone, and spoke of all the different outfits she dressed them in according to the seasons. And in no time at all, she began to speak in her doll voice—in insensible, high-pitched babble-- as she waved them about. It was utterly creepy, like a mental illness, and I couldn’t stop looking over.
The little girl’s three brothers, all younger than she was and eating Harvey’s hamburgers bought back at Union station, came over and crowded around, too. They were yelling and shouting questions, and the woman with the dolls got more and more excitable, too, feeling validated that a bunch of six years old were interested in her mania. The dolls were shrieking, the kids were shrieking, the burgers were dripping, and I was staring, my face a mixture of rage and horror.
The woman, aware that I, her enemy, was staring over, began to speak to me through her doll, Benny.
In a screechy voice, “Hey, Mister Mean, you have to turn that frown upside down!”
I looked directly into the doll’s dead eyes, “I just have a stern resting face,” I said.
“You mean fart face!” Benny responded.
All the little boys howled with laughter.
“Fart face, fart face!!” They chanted.
“He smells like an old chicken full of onions!” Benny screeched.
At this point, full of a kind of beautiful rage, I reached across the aisle and grabbed Jet, and with one hand on her throat and the other on the top of her head, I said, “Benny, if you say just one more word, I am going to rip her head right off.”
Three other passengers began to applaud my action, while the doll woman burst into tears and began to scream like the Dustin Hoffman character in Rain Man, and the boys continued to shout, “Fart face,” only this time with some admiration in their voices.
At this point, we were still three and a half hours from Montreal.
Queen Street East, Monday, 6:00 PM
Ninja-black in Spandex, fit, unsmiling mothers with perfect blonde hair hurry their strollers down the sidewalk. From behind expensive and unfriendly sunglasses, they seem like Cyborgs from the future. With mathematical precision, they cut around clusters of elderly Asian women, all standing beneath colourful umbrellas, protecting themselves from the late afternoon sun.
Blonde waitresses from the Comrade start slowly. Sitting outside smoking, they pose and shift like advertisements for the bar, before heading off to get some ice for the evenings shift.
An immense couple, each one riding their own mobility scooter, inch down the street, pausing every ten yards or so to inspect the garbage that’s been placed out on the sidewalk.
“This fan looks good,” she says.
“It’s a piece of junk!” he shouts back.
“You haven’t even looked at it, Harold! Jesus H. Christ! If I say black, you say white!”
And then, with some authority she slams the fan into the basket on her scooter, shooting Harold a vicious and hateful scowl from over her shoulder.
Bonjour Brioche, which closes after lunch, has a semi-enclosed patio bordering Queen Street. It’s here where ironic hipsters wearing Run DMC t-shirts and Adidas sneaks take up residence. In the dark, they might smoke a joint, but during the early evening they sip traveling beers brought from their patio-less apartments, enjoying a middle-class alternative to the more sincere street culture that does the same thing in Jimmy Simpson Park just a block away.
In the park, black kids with some hop in their game, play basketball at one hoop, while surrounding them at the other baskets are the Asian boys. Always passing, the Asians keep their eyes on the other, more stylish and accomplished game-- the one they hope to play in one day.
On a bench sits a man wearing a sleeveless, black t-shirt. His bicycle lies flopped on the ground beside him, and behind his sunglasses and greased hair he has a glazy, drug smile on his face. Leaning back, he has his arms outstretched, as if he imagined them encircling two hot babes.
On a bench perpendicular to him, are two old men wearing hats that are as old as their grown children. Everyday at this time, they meet. Speaking together in their native tongue they never smile, seemingly unhappy with the world they find themselves in.
At Rowe Farms a woman stands at the cash speaking into her Bluetooth. It’s business, and she’s making a point of being efficient and crisp in her dialogue, but still, although she’s playing to the audience of customers in the store, she never once stoops to make eye contact.
A man in a vivid, gingham shirt and skinny jeans holds hands with a pretty woman in a sun dress. With her free arm, which displays a sleeve of colourful tattoos, she reaches over and holds out her ice cream cone for him to taste.
As some of you may know, I volunteered with an organization that facilitated correspondence with a prison inmate. I was paired with an inmate who went by the handle of “MotherTrucker,” and although it was sometimes a rewarding experience, things got weird pretty quick. It turned out that this guy was really and into role-playing, and that whenever I wrote him a letter he wanted me to pretend to be “ a ghetto whore named Marcus.”
I wasn’t’ very good at this, so I contacted the supervisor of the program and asked if she could maybe give me a different inmate, which she did. This is the first letter that I’ve received from my new pen pal:
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Friend:
As I spend a lot of time alone, I am very happy for your correspondence! I want you to know that I am a thinker, and that I am often wondering about Jesus, who is my friend and co-pilot in all that I do.
For instance, I wonder what Jesus’ favourite sport would be? I like Roller Derby, as I was on a team called the Death Track Dolls until the trouble started. I was pretty good at mashing people, and didn’t mind the blood at all, but I don’t think that Jesus would really like Roller Derby. Perhaps he would be more of a fan of swimming? What do you think?
I have been saved by Jesus, so I think that he’s pretty cool. If I liked guys, I think I would like somebody that looked like Jesus, but I don’t like guys. I like girls. Does that weird you out, thinking about girls with other girls? I’m not sure if God likes it when girls love other girls, but in prison here there are only girls. Perhaps God would feel differently if the devil had put him prison with nothing but other God-Men?
I have been told that I look like Charlize Theron from the movie monster.
Who do you look like?
Jesus saves and the Devil spends!
Roller Debbie
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Roller Debbie:
Let me first tell you that I am open-minded and not at all grossed-out by the idea of girl on girl action, I mean, relations. You see a lot of that sort of thing in, oddly enough, prison movies, and on TV shows about vampires. Did you ever see the movie The Hunger? Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve made-out and I would be shocked, utterly completely shocked, if God had a problem with that. In fact, I’ve long suspected that God might have been behind that.
I also think that Jesus would like Roller Derby fine. There’s a fair amount of handholding in Roller Derby, and a lot of camaraderie so I think it would make Jesus happy. I don’t think that he’d like paint ball very much, or Short-Track Speed Skating, which is just stupid. (If you committed a crime against Short-Track Speed Skating or Short-Track Speed Skaters, then I think you’re a hero and I support you entirely!)
I think that Jesus’ favourite sport would be tennis, as I believe that white is his colour.
I look like a Spanish soccer player.
It’s been excellent to meet you and I look forward to our correspondence!
Stay well, Roller Derby Debbie!
MM
I’ve recently embarked on a project in which I’ve been compiling a collection of various people describing their favourite coffee mug and the story behind that mug.
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Brandon Marshall Age 37
My favourite coffee mug has a picture of Farrah Fawcett on it.
I was never a big fan of Charlie’s Angels as a kid as I thought it was a girl’s show, and anyway, Farrah Fawcett wasn’t really my type—too skinny. I thought that Cheryl Ladd was way hotter. Anyway, I’m just telling you this so you know that this isn’t my favourite mug because of her. Anybody or anything could be on it and it would be my favourite mug.
About ten years ago my friend Paul was hosting a poker game. There was a guy there named Allan-- a friend of a friend of a friend-- and he was a real asshole. He had a grating, yippy manner, and he was just out of synch with the rest of the guys. Our games were always relaxed, you know. We’d have a few beers, maybe smoke a joint and just allow the poker game to serve as the event around which we talked, but this Allan guy needed to dominate. He bet more money than was appropriate, got drunk, told shitty, racist jokes and to make matters worse, kept winning.
Well, he was drinking out of this Farrah Fawcett mug that night. I remember he pulled it out of his knapsack-- with a bottle of rye and two cans of diet coke—which he drank from all night. Like everything about Allan, it was irritating.
To make a long story short, I busted him in one hand. I took everything he had, including this coffee mug. Allan was certain he was going to win the hand, and he kept betting extravagantly and taunting me, and when I won, all of the other guys at the table began to applaud really slowly, and Paul, who was hosting the game, said, “Allan, I think you should probably just go now.” And then Tom began to sing that Habs chant:
Nah, nah, nah,
Hey, hey, hey,
Goodbye!
And everybody joined in laughing.
I'd never felt closer to my friends.
It might sound ridiculous, but I swear to God, it might have been the best moment of my life, and that’s why this is my favourite coffee mug.
Demonstrations almost always make me uncomfortable. It seems that regardless of how worthy I might find the cause, there’s always somebody “on my side” who just makes me want to slither away in shame.
Canada, where I grew up and live, is an entirely decent place. It’s a relatively progressive country that’s infused with humanitarian values, and the honest truth is that it’s pretty easy to live as the person you want to be without too much difficulty. The protests here generally have less to do with how we think we should be treated, and more to do with how we think that other people should be treated. Rarely urgent and spontaneous expressions of rage, demonstrations are essentially political marketing displays, theatrical events designed to sway people come election time.
In the wake of G20 Summit in Toronto, YouTube has been flooded with videos designed to support the claims that the police behaved in a brutal, authoritarian manner. Surely, they did, but just as surely, they did not, and the tribal insistence of many activists that the police were “evil” and the demonstrators “good,” is a self-serving and deceptive reduction that lacks generosity, I think. Quite frankly, it’s the kind of thing that keeps me an observer rather than a participant when it comes to activism.
A primary example of this is the Officer Bubbles video, which has now received over 200, 000 hits. In it, a pretty 20-year-old woman dressed in camouflage fatigues is blowing bubbles into the face of a police officer. The officer doesn’t seem overly put out by this, and smiles thinly back at the woman (who later claimed to be a volunteer street medic rather than a protestor). However, another officer-- a man, a big, black man-- gets pissed off , strides over and barks at the woman that if she doesn’t stop she will be arrested. Feigning wide-eyed innocence, the girl, acted brutalized and stunned by the request. “For blowing bubbles? But I am light, love and purity! I’m just expressing myself!” the seductive pout on her face seemed to suggest.
(Imagine standing in line at Price Choppers and watching some guy with a pair of sunglasses perched on the top of his head blowing bubbles in the face of the cashier. How would you respond if somebody was doing that to you, or if your child was doing that to somebody else?)
At this point of confrontation between the officer and the bubble girl, there is an edit in the video, and a graphic that says “several minutes later.” We then see the girl who had been blowing bubbles getting arrested, and are led to believe through the construction of the video that she’s being arrested for blowing bubbles, but this isn’t the case. The arrest took place in a different part of town, under a different pretext, by entirely different officers who knew nothing of the bubble imbroglio.
No matter, a martyr was born, and legions of people rallied behind this disingenuous piece of propaganda, citing it as dramatic evidence of the brutal police state in which those of us in Canada live.
The G20 Summit provided those who were so inclined with a three-day bubble in which to attend a kind of fantasy activist camp. Downtown Toronto became a theme park in which people stepped outside of the obvious comfort of their daily lives, and acted out romantic fantasies of revolution, all the while knowing that in a day or two, they’d be able to return to the lives of privilege and ease they’d grown accustomed to. They camped it up and ran around with cameras, snapping pictures of the cops like they were tourists at the zoo.
The need of some in the protest movement to feel good about themselves, even holy, completely obliterated any sense of empathy or balance they might have for those external to their tribe. In the case of some, believing is seeing, and even though nobody was arrested for blowing bubbles, the “arrest” still became the central narrative and truth of the G20 Summit, and so I watched in dismay as this video metastasized and people used it to determinedly shape the truth they needed with the zeal and certitude of religious extremists.
About a year ago I lined up a personal trainer for myself. Her name was Anastasiya, and she was a 22 year-old that had recently emigrated to Canada from Russia. Amongst her hobbies were beach volleyball, mature gentlemen and running. Her rates were very reasonable, and she agreed to come to our apartment three times a week while Rachelle was at work, so that she could conduct my workout sessions. Unfortunately, before we could begin I discovered that I had a torn diaphragm and couldn’t participate in any strenuous activity and so I had to cancel our plans. Anastasiya seemed disappointed when I broke the news to her, “Am very sad, was looking forward to bringing you the comfort,” she said.
Well, it’s taken forever, but it finally looks like I’m going to have surgery for my tear, and so Rachelle has taken the initiative to find a trainer to help me with my rehabilitation, picking some 41 year-old Jamaican dude named Treshaun. Apparently, he lives on a diet of nuts, seeds and mangos.
As Rachelle was showing me his web page, which had a kind of creepy photograph of him, shirtless, crouched in the snow like a tiger, Rachelle commented, “Oh, Michael, look how his smooth, black skin contrasts so sharply with the snow!”
Seemed like a weird thing to say.
“I guess," I said, "but what about Anastasiya? She seemed nice.”
“Her phone line was disconnected because she was a dirty whore. Michael, didn’t you think it was odd that there wasn’t a photograph of her on her website, but just an avatar?”
“You just hate Russians.”
“ Treshaun is a CERTIFIED personal trainer. He’ll create a meal plan for you and work with you three times a week. It will be good for you.”
“Does he know I don’t like fruit? I’m not eating a fruit diet, and if he wants me to get some warrior tattoo, well, he can just fuck off!”
“You’re not going to have to get a warrior tattoo. Oh, and Trey…”
“Who?”
“I mean Treshaun, he’ll be swinging by my work before your sessions. I thought it might be a good opportunity for me to get in shape, too. A few of the girls thought it would be a fun thing to do as a group, so we’re all going to do it!”
And then Rachelle’s phone rang-- some new reggae inflected ring tone I had never heard before-- and she ran off to the next room, giggling, to take the call.
On Saturday, Rachelle and I went to an estate sale out in Woodbridge. About 30 minutes outside of Toronto, it’s a suburban community with a large Italian immigrant population. Through leafy streets we passed mansion after mansion. The homes were all brand new and most had the idiosyncratic flair of the owners prominently displayed somewhere in the front yard—a statue of a Roman god, a pair of lions or a saint.
The home where the estate sale was taking place was a 15, 000 square foot palace, one surrounded by a gate that had the family name on it. I’d never been to an estate sale before and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but for some reason I imagined people somberly walking about, quietly looking at furniture and then making a hushed bid to a representative of the estate.
Well, this estate sale was nothing like that.
The place was packed, a frenzy of elbowing, inarticulate greed. Women, as if in a state of competitive panic, tried designer shoes on in the middle of the staircase. A man in a Vince Carter jersey, indifferent, dropped his Tim Horton’s coffee cup in the bathtub before walking out with a scale pressed to his chest. People, focused on whatever treasure they imagined lay just behind the next door, pushed past one another, never pausing to make eye contact or exchange a kind word. It was remorseless, unceasing scavenging.
In the kitchen, all the cupboards had been thrown open, revealing the terrible intimacy of all the medications the couple had been taking before their deaths, but people didn’t seen to care. They plowed indifferent through the home in packs, dropping what they didn’t want without a second thought.
In one of the living rooms, a huge space that looked like it had rarely been lived in, a music box, abandoned, played heartbreakingly from the sofa. A woman with a stack of towels (the one or two she didn’t want she had dropped into the bidet) marched out of the bathroom, looked at a painting of a Flamenco dancer, turned her nose up and then pushed it away.
I wanted to rescue something of the people that had lived there. I wanted to preserve some part of the story of the young man that had emigrated from Italy to Canada, and with his own hands built a successful business from the ground up, and then erected a castle from this success. Maybe his World Cup Italy 94 baseball hat, an item from the room in the basement where the wife had pickled vegetables and hung pasta, or a souvenir ashtray from a favourite vacation resort, but that seemed a little presumptuous.
Everything that was there was being consumed, quickly and without sentiment. It was like one of those wildlife shows in which you see time-lapse photography of nature washing over and devouring a carcass.
And the next day we drove past one of those junky antique stores that line Queen East. Sitting out front were a couple of old guys with bushy, gray beards that kind of looked like civil war soldiers. They were hopefully selling their wares to people passing by, and within their offerings we recognized that two of the displayed items were paintings taken from the foyer of the Woodbridge estate just a few hours earlier.
Lindsay Lohan is beautiful.
I don’t mean that she’s exceptional within the hierarchies of Hollywood, or that she has some sort of idiosyncratic quirk that renders her astonishingly unique-- it’s just obvious that through any sort of rational analysis, she’s a beauty. I mean, if she existed in the circle of our friends, she’d be the stunning one everybody gravitated to.
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be beautiful, how that would shape the person you were to become. I’ve seen people walk into bars and restaurants and immediately had all of the eyes in the establishment trained upon them because of their utterly compelling physical charisma. What must that do to you? Everyday, wherever you go, you’re the focus of everybody’s attention.
It could certainly give rise to all sorts of horrible insecurities, but I think it would also instill in you a natural sense of entitlement. How would you feel if one day, people stopped looking, and what would you do to get them looking again?
This, I guess, is celebrity in a microcosm.
Our current cycle of celebrity immolation has been focusing on the public self-destruction of Lindsay Lohan. As you will have heard, she’s just been sentenced to 90 days in prison for failure to comply with her terms of probation. Opinions differ on whether this was an appropriate sentence or not, but what’s striking is how we, like we did with Britney Spears before her, having been following the spectacle of her demise as if it was entertainment.
Spears seemed to be a princess that floated up from the septic of a trailer park. A teasing schoolgirl, she was the taboo sex bomb that every man in the world wanted to screw, but once she realized that sexual potential and became a wife and mother instead of the forbidden fruit we dreamed about, she was brutally cast out of celebrity-Eden. And then, with a truly creepy glee, we watched as she went insane.
Lohan is following in a similar arc, although perhaps not in quite so sympathetic way. It was impossible not to see Spears’ vulnerability. She simply did not have the tools to deal with the brutal and confusing chaos her life revealed itself to be. However in Lohan you got a sense that she had the ability to control her own fate. Could you imagine Spears citing Article 5 of The Declaration of Human Rights or handing her lawyer a page of neatly printed out notes concerning her case as Lohan recently did?
Lohan, the product of an ambitious, upper, middle-class New York family was an ace student who left high school in grade 11 to maker her fame in tweener-friendly movies like Freaky Friday and Mean Girls. When she got old enough and started to realize her precocious sexuality at nightclubs and parties, things began to fall apart (as they often do for young women in Hollywood), and she became a skanky train wreck.
And last week, while listening to the judge deliver her sentence, Lohan had written out in the perfect script of Tracy Flick-- Fuck U on the nail of her middle finger, which she subtly flashed at the judge.
It’s almost inconceivably childish, of course, but even more penetrating is just how much it illustrates how powerless and disconnected from the “real” world she must feel. I mean, can you think of a more impotent and pointless gesture? But still, it’s very much worth noting that the poor, little rich girl whom everybody is persecuting, never would have had this bizarre, little indulgence discovered if not for the intrusive and ever present eye of the media. They, and we, are watching every single thing she does.
But as I watched her sobbing, distraught at the unfairness of the world, all I could think about were her lips. A naturally beautiful woman, now just 24, she obviously felt the need to have plastic surgery done on them, and now they look weird, and kind of cruel. Her mouth looks like it’s in a permanent sneer, and it struck me how Hollywood has this Dorian Gray effect, compelling beautiful looking people to alter their appearance, in the hope that will change their identity and how they’re perceived, but inevitably they just create grotesqueries that reflect the arrested and terribly compromised interior of a flailing narcissist.
Today, I have given the Blog over to Heidi, our three year-old Miniature Dachshund.
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Heidi very, very hot.
Not good hot like King-the-Doberman-killing-a-squirrel-hot, but Bad hot, very Bad hot!!
Heidi covered in fur, you know.
My fur black, too. It concentrate sunlight so it hit Heidi like laser beam. Make me feel all puky. Rather fight an Owl than live with this humidity! Hardly have any appetite. Good for four bowls, and then no more!
Heidi try to be team player, but when four-eyed two-legged treat giver take me out it feel like being thrown into stupid hot bath with cats! Quickly, I seek the wet dirt, but he yell, "No, Heidi, No!" like I trying to smuggle bomb into airport. But no smuggle bomb! Just trying to throw heat from back by rolling in mud puddle!
Master stupid in the head!
Real buzz kill.
And take him forever to climb stairs back to apartment. He moan and makes sigh sounds, whimper like scared of thunder. After 30 minutes, when he finally drag himself up stairs he go to bathroom to make sick noises for rest of day, completely forgetting about Heidi!
No water in bowl make Heidi dehydrated, feel woozy and start to see mice everywhere! Chase mice, bark at mice, jump at mice!! Get real mad! Hate stupid mice!!
And then realize not mice at all, Heidi just chasing her tail!
Very embarrassing.
Stupid heat!
“Everybody's children are so special. It makes you wonder where all the ordinary grown-ups come from.”
--Maria, from the movie Code 46
I recently heard a story about an acquaintance that tried to make dinner reservations for some adults and a baby at a restaurant in Toronto. She was told that they didn’t allow babies in their establishment, and this infuriated her to the point where-- believing it was a human rights violation-- sought to take legal measures against the place. It’s worth noting that this was the same woman that didn’t allow children to attend her wedding just one year earlier, thus illustrating that an individual’s politicization is often born from feelings of personal exclusion rather than empathy for others.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether children have a place in adult spaces such as restaurants, movie theaters and concert halls. I’m certainly sympathetic to the isolation a new mother, perhaps feeling excluded from the pulse of civil society because she’s taken on the responsibility to attentively raising a child must feel, but on the other hand, I absolutely hate having my evening hijacked by the enforced spectacle of somebody’s child rearing.
We’ve all been there, and it’s difficult to know what to do. Becoming increasingly preoccupied by the offending parties, I tend to quietly seethe, which is probably what most people do. It’s awkward as hell, and there’s a political subtext to the battleground that’s entirely frustrating.
At any rate, this entire debate is pretty much the exclusive precinct of the upper middle class. Typically, the people impassioned by these sorts of annoyances are those that have become acclimated to privilege and entitlement. Many of my peers waited until careers were firmly established and finances in place before having children, and have become habituated to having some authority and power over their environment. These are people with disposable income, living lives plotted by the freedoms money grants access to, and when they find that their leisure time and social liberties are now impeded by the presence of a baby, well, they find religion, so to speak.
Of course, getting babies into to an upper end restaurant in Yorkville is likely not going to be very helpful to the vast majority of weary parents just scuffling along. No matter, for most of these well-heeled new parents, there is nothing that takes precedence over the development of their child. Bach for babies, organic meat, exclusive schools, summer camp for the gifted and an appropriately limited exposure to third world poverty, are all typical of the upper middle class narrative.
The child becomes a vessel of concentrated light, one that contains the brightest qualities of both parents, and this potential is guided lovingly into the world with such radiant pride that it can’t help but burn bystanders standing outside of the immediate family unit. For these proud parents, imposing on the comfort of 50 other people in a restaurant on a Friday night so that they might spend time with their child seems perfectly natural.
I guess what I find frustrating about such scenarios is that these parents typically ask the rest of the world to become participants in the narrative of their lives, rather than using their imagination to become a part of the narrative of the rest of the world.