Life As Performance Art 63

This morning feels like the calm after the storm. It seems that the rock star who likes to brag about his loud stereo has been located and warned by my building managers (it turns out that he lives in my building, and not in the building next door, after all. Who knew?) Though I am still waxing vigilant. Summer is drawing near, but these days of early June are refreshingly cool with a little bit of rain and some cloud. This is an incredibly lovely time of year. It is no longer exactly spring, but not yet summer. Everything is fresh, green, and a little bit cool. Even on a cloudy day there is a sensuous pleasure to these kinds of days, as one calmly roams and wanders the street, the sidewalk, and the soothing balm of green inundates our eyes and our senses. You instinctively slow your pace, and you want to take everything in. Even if you do not notice the birdsong and the flowers they pervade and invade your unconscious with their own music and loveliness. This is a soothing time. A healing time, if we allow ourselves this. And the light is everywhere, because now we have sixteen hours of sunlight. For many of us, it is still light when we shut our eyes to sleep, and already light when we open our eyes to the new day. June is the month I often wish would last forever, and in some parts of the world, June is forever. I am thinking of Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia. Oh, but many Colombians complain bitterly about how cold it is in Bogotá. That city has an elevation of more than eight thousand feet above sea level, which makes for a cool and springlike climate year round. Every month there is rain, and so it is always intensely and vividly green. The temperatures are like late May and early June in Vancouver. For us, soothing, for your average Colombian, chilly. But you can't please everyone. Here in Vancouver, there is no other time of year when everything is so fresh, new, and exuberantly green, vibrant and vital. This is my day off. I will soon be having breakfast, then getting my clothes out of the dryer, then I will enjoy a long leisurely walk, underneath tree boughs heavy and laden with fresh leaves and foliage, every bit as green as in the early days of Eden. I will arrive early in the French cafe to meet my friend with whom I share the same birthday. While I am working on yet another tropical hummingbird drawing, he will arrive and we will enjoy a visit over coffee and croissant, before I embark on my next walk, elsewhere in the city, underneath the incredibly green trees of June. Oh, I know this all sounds so very twee and escapist and cloyingly lovely, but can't we say that we deserve this, that we have earned this? After all the troubles we hear and witness and experience, in the world and in our own tangled and interconnected lives? Can we not, at times, switch narratives, just long enough to give ourselves a rest, and enjoy a pleasant escape from the ugly realities that our news media shoves down our throats day after day after day? I don't believe that it is fake news. I simply will not accept that all the anguish and doom and gloom that holds us all hostage, and has so many of us wringing our hands over the future of our planet has to be the only valid narrative. There is joy and there is beauty in our lives, in our world and in this universe and we cannot afford to let the ugliness of our times eclipse our vision from what is truly meaningful and beautiful.

Life As Performance Art 62

I promised one of my supervisors that I would blog about therapeutic lies, given that I mentioned the term yesterday during our meeting in a local coffee shop. It happened that the two big comfy chairs were both empty and available. I call those chairs the Thrones. So, as we were taking the Thrones, I joked that this way we can feel as if we rule this domain. A therapeutic lie. My supervisor expressed slight skepticism on the value of the concept of therapeutic lies, since of course, it does sound rather contradictory. Ask the writers of the DSM. It's full of them. I did do a quick consultation with Uncle Google, and it turns out there is almost a full search page about therapeutic lying to dementia sufferers. That kind of goes without saying, I suppose. And I have also had some very delusional clients, like the fellow who believes he is a brain surgeon. I did feel some annoyance, and even said something about this, to the Handydart driver who referred to my client as Doctor Birkenstock (not his real name). When I told my supervisor (a different supervisor) about it later on, he suggested that maybe we could cut a little slack in that kind of situation, given how utterly stuck our client is in his delusional state. I tend to think of therapeutic lying as something that is okay as long as we are only doing it to ourselves and so long as we stay aware that that is exactly what we are doing, we are lying to ourselves, and this is not just to make us feel better, but to activate our imaginations and actually have a little fun with reality as we know it. I'm sure that a lot of you who ride the buses as often as I do have sometimes seen these rather daft young women putting on their make up. Some people find this very annoying, and I also think it's kind of tacky, but really I want to say one of two things to the dumb girls: either that it isn't working, or you look fine already, why ruin it. The whole makeup and cosmetic industry is a splendid example of therapeutic lying for profit. And girls and women, being brainwashed about their physical appearance from early life and into full adulthood, are very effectively taught and conditioned into believing that they are ugly, or at least too flawed and imperfect, and so they have to put stupid expensive paint and powder on their faces, otherwise nobody is going to love them. This is not a seat on the bus, it is my private dressing room, and then I will appear on a catwalk, later a red carpet and we will all be sipping champagne from tall crystal flutes and the whole world is going to worship me as a goddess. And don't get me started about young male gym rats and their muscle fixations. I can appreciate the need to get through the day, and that if we are constantly focussed on the bitter and ugly truth of our lives, we could well be so stranded in our wallows of depression that we are not going to get anything done. So we tell each other, and ourselves, sweet little lies to help us get through the day and make it through the night. And sometimes our suspension of disbelief doesn't know where to end, and we end up believing our dear little lies. I think this is also true with any narrative. For example, the CBC is inflicting on the rest of Canadians its usual pet lies de jour. Right now we are all supposed to be adoring the raptors (a dumb basketball team), shedding sentimental tears for the soldiers who gave their lives for our freedom (not my narrative about the war) at Juneau Beach in France, 1944, while also fist-pumping for the Indigenous women and agreeing that they have been all victims of genocide (and in all likelihood this is true). But when someone seizes the narrative, and makes their truth the only all-encompassing reality, then in another sense we are collectively falling for the therapeutic lie. The same thing happened last year when our public broadcaster tried to get us all damp and barmy about Gord Downie and his band the Tragically Hip. Life is infinitely more complex and messy than the neat formulas that we try to squeeze our narratives into, but this we often end up having to do in order to cope and make sense of the information overload we are forever having to negotiate. By excluding other realities and perspectives, the official narratives take on the nature of propaganda and, by extension, lies. And these lies we wind up repeating to ourselves and to one another, because we have to make it through another day. We have to make it through the night. This is insidious, as it is also dangerous, every bit as it becomes dangerous to be one of those people who know the other narratives and try to to speak them, even if they might appear to contradict the officially sanctioned wisdom. We are forever telling lies. This is how we cope. This also protects us from having to pause and think and ask ourselves exactly what is it from which we are trying to protect ourselves, and why your average human appears to have such a chronic and lethal allergic reaction to the truth.

Life As Performance Art 61

A couple of moments ago, as I was sitting quietly in my little subsidized apartment, I was thinking and reflecting on how much the place where you live can help define you and form your character. Living in government subsidized housing, for example. In one of the scuzzier and very impersonal neighbourhoods of downtown. In a building run by a socially conservative Christian organization that doesn't accept same-sex marriage and where by extension I am going to always feel like a little bit of a pariah. Where forty percent of my neighbouring tenants are members of a support network for people living with a mental illness, and some of them are at times quite ill. Where management takes a charity approach, often treating their tenants like the Other. Where your apartment is just big enough to be able to accommodate you, but too small to facilitate hospitality. Where you are stranded with noisy neighbours in a building full of hard to house tenants. Where it often feels unsafe stepping out of your own front door. Where it is a waste of time communicating these concerns to management because their attitude seems to be of the old school conservative beggars can't be choosers and just be grateful that I don't have to sleep out on the sidewalk or under a bridge. This is the kind of low level stress I have been living with these past seventeen years that I have lived in Candela Place. I think my age also plays a factor. I was forty-six years old and unemployed when I moved in here. Well, I was self-employed, marketing my art and cleaning homes and offices, but I didn't really get a real job until after I had been living here for five months. And I have remained steadily and remuneratively employed ever since. I have been off of welfare now for going on seventeen years. The low rent that I pay has balanced off my ridiculously low wage, enabling me to save money and enjoy every year at least one month of international travel. I have become tougher, stronger and more self-reliant. Knowing that I will likely always be at loggerheads with management here, I have worked hard at cutting my own path while living here, and this has actually toughened me and made me more creative and resilient. Especially when dealing with noise from next door. I have come to make good use of earplugs and indoor ventilation from fans in order to simulate for myself a living environment that is relatively comfortable and liveable. This also comes at a cost, because I am never able to fully relax while living here, knowing that this environment is neither particularly safe or healthy, and that the support of management and staff is going to be at least somewhat indexed to compatibility of our belief systems. For them, it is not enough that I am a Christian, as they are. Given that I attend one of those liberal and progressive apostate Anglican churches must also stick in their craw. Particularly given that, to some of them anyway, I am a purported homeosexual who refuses to come out to any of them (since it's none of their goddamn business), but that also, while professing their religious faith, I will also come out (pardon the Freudian) in full support of marriage equality and adoption rights for gay, lesbian and transgendered persons. And all this while worshiping and loving God as the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So, this is how living here has helped shape me. I have become more wary and less trusting of others. I have become tougher, more creative and self-reliant. I am more resilient than ever before. Plus, I am a little bit wiser about people, and more astute at examining and discerning the impact of power on other people and of the power dynamics in relationships where there are clear imbalances of power. Such as the dynamics that circulate and ebb and flow between tenants and management right here in Candela Place. This is not an ideal living situation. But it is certainly better than nothing, and far better than some of the alternatives. Plus, living here has provided me with just that right balance of safety and stress to enable be to grow stronger without turning into a complete basket case. In the meantime, my housing providers are going to have to satisfy themselves with me as a tenant for paying my rent early or on time, keeping my place clean, not making noise and being a good neighbour. Any other expectations they would presume to make on me will be considered unfair, unreasonable and will be immediately discarded. Live with it!

Life As Performance Art 60

Gifted-shmifted. That's what I have to say these days about my various talents, and I suppose that I do have my few. But, the other day, when I couldn't even assemble a simple standing fan, but had to get help from the staff at the hardware store where I tried to return it...this is telling me something. I remember one of the many choice phrases my mother used to have for me. "He's so smart, he's stupid." Okay, maybe not the warmest or fuzziest thing your own dear momma might say about her darling boy, but my mom, nor my dad, were anything at all like warm and fuzzy. They were from working class and farm families, Scots and German, and pragmatic to the core. I was just the kid they deserved. And they were just the parents that I deserved. As a child I was diagnosed as gifted. I have never been able to live that one down. But give me a simple fan to assemble (well, okay, to cut myself some slack, I did not have the right screwdriver, but the point is, why did I not have the right screwdriver, nor other tools, besides a hammer, in my junk drawer?) even if I have some ability in art, writing and music, none of those same abilities are going to do squat for putting food on the table or paying my rent on time. Well, okay, my art did help for a while. Quite a bit actually, and had I been able to connect with a good gallery at that time in my life, I probably would have said goodbye to day job slavery and be living quite nicely while painting all the time, and likely for the rest of my life. And then I would have changed and morphed into a dreadful art and culture snob, like another famous Canadian artist that I knew years ago (so sue me, Gathie Falk!), and for decades, has not given me so much as the time of day. Having been poor all my life has made me incredibly resourceful. Having had to work for a living at less than glamorous employment has kept me grounded and ordinary, and I think, humble. Working in poorly remunerated health and community care professions has helped me develop and maintain a very strong core of empathy, care and compassion for others. Having to live in social housing for the rest of my productive and likely for all my retired life, while working in a profession as a mental health peer support worker have taught me to live with stigma, while rejecting it and learning that I don't have to own stigma. There is a lot I can do. Unlike some gifted geniuses, I am able to keep my home and my person clean and presentable, I am able to resource good nutritious food, cook and feed myself, and I am able to make and keep (most of them) friends. I don't own my home, can't even manage with a market rental (I live in vancouver, so we cut cut ourselves a little bit of slack here), neither do I own or drive a car. But from my teenage years, knowing what vehicle emissions contribute to atmospheric pollution and global warming, I opted, purely because of my ethical sense, to never own or drive a car. This has also likely placed limitations on my employment and earning opportunities and potential. A sacrifice, yes, but I have learned to live with it, and to still thrive. Even if I work for an ungenerous and stingy employer (make my day, my lovely little bosses!), I have rewarding and fulfilling work. Even if my neighbourhood downtown can be difficult and noisy, I have found creative and healthy ways of coping and adapting. But I still can't assemble anything that comes in a box, not even if my life depended on it. Or, if I had the right tools, maybe I could. I remember how back in the eighties, with no carpentry or building skills, I was able to make a dilapidated farm house in Richmond liveable and attractive, and this I managed with almost no help from others. Out of that house was born a dynamic and very effective ministering, and controversial, Christian community. It didn't last, but that doesn't matter. It did go on for eight years and a lot of people were helped, and I and the people I was living and working with truly grew as human beings. This morning, on less than adequate sleep, I have just wrecked breakfast. It turns out that one of the eggs I was boiling while writing this was cracked and the pot horribly boiled over. I am still going to eat the eggs, with toast, peanut butter and jam, and a slice of cheddar on the side. It is almost 3:30 am, and I am drinking decaf, of course, as I will be soon hunkering down for a nice long nap.

Life As Performance Art 59

I am dedicating this blogpost today, especially to my parish priest, and to all my Gentle Readers with a tender conscience. I am thinking today of a point that came up in yesterday's sermon, about the whole exercise of self-examination that we often do at the end of the day, of how we often feel that we have fallen short of our best and highest selves, and of how we have fallen short of God's highest hopes and expectations of ourselves. I am also writing about this because I also have a conscience that can at times easily turn ruthless and punishing tyrant, torturer and executioner on me, all in one, if I am not careful. It is wonderful that we have a conscience, to begin with. This helps us maintain our lives with a functioning moral compass and a living ethical sense. If we can get through the day this way, without succumbing to the self-hater, then we will have done okay. But the self-hater, that crown prosecutor that we carry in our heads, can at times turn vicious and vindictive and we have to watch for this. First of all, we never do get it right. We never have and we never will. We have to live with this. This doesn't let us off the hook for trying. We have to keep trying, to keep making the effort. This is how we learn, it is how we grow. I am thinking of the legend of Lucifer, of his great fall and how he became Satan, the enemy of our souls and the foe of all that is good and God. It is alleged that Lucifer began his career as the highest of God's angels, the bright morning star, the most beautiful and powerful of the angelic forces. But he wanted to be God himself, and his envy of the Most high resulted in a great revolt that led to the downfall of Lucifer and those angels that aligned themselves with him, and how they were all cast down by the hand of God. Lucifer could not be God, that was simply never going to happen. He could only be his creation. Lucifer could not be God, but only his reflection. All his beauty, glory and splendour was but reflected light, much as the moon owes its gentle and meeker glow to the light of the sun that it reflects. This is the way it is with all of us. It seems to me that we all are lacking in our natures that one essential characteristic that makes God uniquely God. That characteristic is called love. We can only get love from God and this is what maintains us in relation to God and to one another, this interdependency of love. Lucifer lost, or somehow lacked that perspective. He was unable to see or honour the love, the very love that made him and maintained him and was the source and fount of his beauty and divine splendour, and when we want to be completely self sufficient, as he did, we are essentially rejecting love. So, this is my counsel, to my priest, to myself, and to my other friends, for when our conscience torments us, for when we have fallen short, for when we weren't able or were simply unwilling to live up to the high standard of love. We are almost made to fail, first of all, and this sad fact of our imperfect humanity will be staring us in the face every single day of our existence on this sad and sorry earth. That we don't get it right is really for us a reassurance that we are incomplete in ourselves and frail and imperfect beings. But it is also our willingness to see this imperfection, to look it in the face, to smile and laugh at it, and by extension, laugh at ourselves, that helps us move forward. Keep our standards high, yes, because otherwise we are not going to grow. Then to learn to laugh at our failures and keep moving on, for this is also going to make us grow. Lucifer did not have a sense of humour. And Satan is not able to laugh at himself, nor forgive himself for what he is not, and never can be. But this is something, that we, as humans, can do, and so we can make our lives and our world at least a little bit more beautiful in trying.

Life As Performance Art 58

I tried to go out for a short walk yesterday after dinner. With the bright sunshine of the incredibly long days of early June it was tempting to want to be outside. In the past, I always went out after dinner, regardless the time of year, but especially in the spring and summer with the beautiful prolonged daylight. I can't do this any more. Not while living here in an unsafe neighbourhood downtown and this is frustrating. I still try to go out sometimes, but nearly half the time I come home regretting it. There is always something going on, the shadow of which I often end up taking to bed with me two hours later. Yesterday, it was an attempted dog attack. It was a golden retriever, so one would assume he would be friendly and gentle. No, I did not approach said doggy for a pat, Gentle Reader! I am not stupid! First the dog started barking and threatening a young woman just ahead of me, then it was my turn. Fortunately his young woman human had him on a leash and she was very quick to reprimand her darling pet. Too bad she wasn't equally quick with an apology, but she was probably coping the best she could at the moment. I simply said, "We have just as much right to this sidewalk as you do, doggy," and the woman who was also threatened smiled and thanked me. As if the dog would actually care. So, what should have been a quiet, enjoyable stroll in the early evening sunshine turned out to be yet another endurance ordeal, heightened by the hordes of other people out at the same time, a lot of them tourists. I don't know what my housing providers were thinking when they decided to build in this area. Downtown is not fit for human habitation. It is crowded, noisy, polluted, and often unsafe. And they expect people who are trauma survivors and worse to do well here! And for one unfortunate while, they were even campaigning for us to thank them for our lovely little government subsidized apartments! What nerve! But I am grateful to live here, but this is also my one available option if I don't want to sleep on the sidewalk or in a low-barrier shelter. So, why do they need us to thank them? We're already grateful. We're still alive. The mornings are much nicer. The idiots in the neighbourhood usually don't emerge from their coffins till around noon, so it is usually quiet and serene and I can hear the birds outside. This isn't a perfect arrangement. And it would be helpful if our housing providers would openly acknowledge the problems and challenges that often confront those of us who live here. But for some reason, they don't want to. Maybe they still have so much of their personal ego invested here that they have to hear regularly our paeans of gratitude and praise. So much for Christian humility. It really got a lot worse when the Spirit of Howe Money Laundromat, or, oops, I mean to say, Liquor Store, opened next door, and our housing providers did absolute nothing to oppose them opening here, neither did they pay me an ounce of attention when I raised the issue with them. But I was long problematic to our housing providers, and for the simple reason that I am both intelligent and articulate, as well as assertive. Okay, so humility is not one of my other virtues, but who's perfect, eh? But this can make for a very annoying tenant, especially when we are rather expected to be ill or half-ill, medicated, submissive, compliant and not very intelligent. Well, sorry to disappoint you guys, and yes I am going to keep on keeping on, as I like to say, because these issues need to be continually brought to your attention, if for no other reason than to help you form and establish better-informed future policies and practices for the general well-being of your tenants. By the way, Gentle Reader, management has improved, a lot, in my building anyway. But this building has been operated by some real doozies in the past.

Life As Performance Art 57

Outside I am hearing the courtship dance of a male Anna's hummingbird. I can tell by the periodic loud metallic peep which happens when the bird dives down from a height then rises up again. Apparently the peep noise comes from special notches in his tail feathers. I have never heard this in my neighbourhood, being so downtown, but this could be coming from or near the garden across the alley. This is also a comfort to me because for some reason the white-crowned sparrow is silent this morning, and on some mornings he doesn't sing. The Anna's hummingbird, as some will know, is now the official bird of Vancouver, which is a little bit ironic. This is a particularly striking hummingbird. The male sports a helmet, rather like an executioner's mask of brilliant iridescent magenta feathers that have highlights ranging from yellow to almost purple, with shades of orange, scarlet and crimson as well, but in many lights they still appear dark and drab. They have somewhat displaced our own native hummingbird, the Rufous, as the Anna's is a California import that only established itself up here in the last thirty years or so. I suppose you can also tell they're Californians by their sunglasses. Ray Bans, of course. It is still just before 6 am, and it is quiet outside and for this reason I can have the window open. Later, when the rockstar in the building next door climbs out of whatever he sleeps on for a bed, at around noon or so, we will likely be serenaded by his dreadful excuses for music. But now it is a bit safer for me to keep the window closed on a summer or near-summer day, and for one simple and lovely reason. I now have an extra electric fan. I bought it yesterday at the local Home Hardware store on Davie Street. It is a standing fan, and I had to assemble it myself. I wasn't able to. Even if I am considered gifted, there are still gifts that I do not have, and putting things together properly is one of them. Trade-offs, you know. I had to track down the new assistant manager in my apartment building in order to borrow a screwdriver, since mine wasn't adequate. Then there were other things I simply could not figure out, so, instead of further troubling building staff, whom I couldn't track down anyway, I took the fan back to the hardware store where I thought of exchanging it for a table fan. The lady at the front desk instead wanted to put it together for me, in between serving other customers. Then one of her coworkers pitched in, and before I knew it, I had a functioning standing fan. Of course I asked if we could first plug it in and turn it on, in case upon bringing it home, I might discover that it doesn't work. It works. Rockstar next door was likely playing air guitar to whatever audial shit he was churning out through his open window. I was able to close my window, turn on my small table fan and the new standing fan, and it's all good. I also have earplugs if Rockstar is still audible. Living downtown is not for the delicate, and if you don't do well with other people's noise it can be a recipe for serial breakdowns. It may be onerous to have to take extra measures to simply get through the day, but it's still a place to live. And it's affordable. Now that as of today, my bosses have become a minimum wage employer, I still try to be thankful that I have a job. Minimum wage in my province has gone up to $13.85 an hour, which means that other prices are also going to rise and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority still expects their peer support workers and other contracted staff to subsist on 14 bucks an hour. Yeah. Uh-huh. I have a job. Yowza! Small mercies. The Anna's hummingbird has recently stopped his courtship dance. Maybe he got lucky. Or maybe he gave up. It's a lovely day, despite some idiot outside banging stuff together. It might be time to close the window soon. I have just heard the Ana's hummingbird again. The show must go on........This just in. It is almost eight in the morning, and the white-crowned sparrow is singing again....