Life As Performance Art 95

The show must go on. Those of you, Gentle Reader, who know me well, will also understand how much I live by those words. I will try to let nothing stop me, unless it happens to be death, or unavoidable hospitalization. Those of you who know me well will also understand that I am a trauma survivor. Two and a half years ago, when the shit was really hitting the fan for me, I ended up with snowballing crises in my apartment, my work, friendships. i was threatened by an off leash pit bull and that escalated into my not coping well with a lot of other situations. Then something happened. A friend, also suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, took way too personally my inability to communicate well to him or his friends at a social gathering in his home, and he was not about to consider that he wasn't the only person in the room who might be suffering from trauma. After he ended our friendship (in the long run, no great loss at all) I took stock of a few things, which is to say, I began to very carefully re-examine my life, my values and my way of reacting to stressful situations. I understood that I had to stop listening to a lot of the mental health propaganda about self-care, and for one simple reason. It reinforced a sense of victimhood. I knew then, that I must never again use my PTSD diagnosis as a get out of jail free card. I was determined to stop using it as an excuse for my own bad behaviour. I also decided to no longer let things escalate, or should they start, to do my due diligence to make it stop. At that time, on the pages of this blog, I was also exploring trauma as a theme and concept of our very human existence. Through my research and thought and exploration i have concluded that trauma is the one defining theme that unites us as humans. Trauma has always been a defining feature of our existence on this earth. The mental health industry has tried to persuade us that there are those who are traumatized, and those who are not. I disagree with this binary. I would rather be inclined to think that we are all traumatized, and that some react or respond to it in ways that are considered socially inappropriate. So I have opted to do better than that. For example, yesterday, when I was jumped by an individual outside my building who was going through a mental health episode. I was carrying home a jug of milk at around five in the afternoon from the local Shoppers Drug Mart, when suddenly the four litre plastic jug slipped out of my hand and some of it spilled on the pavement. I was able to rescue the jug before more than maybe two glasses worth had been lost, shared a joke with another tenant in my building about not crying over spilt milk, then this guy tried to grab the milk jug from my hand, saying he wanted to spill some too. I got a bit splattered with milk, told him to go away as I grabbed it back from him, and promptly escaped into my building. I did call police, because this was an assault, and they were kind to give me a follow up call to say he had been apprehended, is known to them, and to be sure I was alright. Truth be told, I wasn't quite shaken by the incident, but as I said to the woman on the phone, that I was in a gray zone between feeling pissed-off and shaken. I still continued with things as usual, cooked and ate dinner, cleaned the 'kitchen and had a Skype conversation with my friend in Colombia. (telling him about the incident in Spanish was excellent language practice, by the way, and it did give us something to talk about!). Am I feeling as if nothing happened? No, I am still feeling a bit odd. But I slept well last night, which is unusual, given what had just happened. I am also strongly aware of feeling compassion and concern for this individual who jumped at me, because I know that he is in a much worse place than I am, especially as a hostage to mental illness. I might even meet up with him again at work, since there would be a high possibility that he could become one of the clients that we work with and try to support. In the meantime, I am still carefully monitoring myself and my reactions, and the way I communicate to others, because I know that this kind of trauma can easily snowball if it isn't checked immediately. I am also reminding myself that life is never actually safe, and that this middle class assumption that life has to be safe and completely bullet proof is simply a lot of bourgeois nonsense. I am thinking here of the the words of Sara Maouie, the twenty year old activist in Sudan who has survived more than her share of trauma, incarceration, torture, and is now hiding and fleeing for her life. She said that she was born traumatized, and for this reason she is afraid of nothing. Words for us to live by, Gentle Reader.

Life As Performance Art 94

It is dawning to be a beautiful day today. And today, the Cuban dark roast coffee I am sipping on is almost decadent, it is so rich and potent. This morning is cloudy, cool. It could rain. And it is early July. In the elevator yesterday, a tenant mentioned that he doesn't like this kind of weather and longs for hot sunny days again. I told him to not wish too hard because the hot sunny days will return soon and with a vengeance. Well, we have already had plenty of hot and sunny days, through an uncharacteristically warm and dry May and June. We have already had lots of summer. It feels, to me, like we have truly already had our summer. And according to the long-range forecasts, the hot weather is likely to return anytime soon. So, why not enjoy the break? Yesterday, it drizzled a bit off and on. I walked around in shirtsleeves, no umbrella, cool but comfortable and refreshed. One lady of age paused to mention to me that not needing anything other than the shirt I'm wearing must make me hot-blooded. I suppose. I just find this kind of weather refreshing. I find it kind of ironic that Bogotá has one of the chilliest climates in Colombia, and Colombians complain bitterly about how cold it is, as well as how cold are many of the people who live there, but I love it. It is for me an ideal climate I could easily live in all year round. Even when it's sunny, the temperatures are seldom higher than twenty. Often it rains. It really rains. With thunder and lightning and such special effects as will leave you slack-jawed with awe, shock and wonder. I love thunder and lightning, and regret that here we seldom have these kinds of storms. Right now, the sky is grey, the air cool, and everything else is so green, so deliciously and exuberantly green. I just heard on the radio. It is fourteen degrees. There will likely be a little sunshine today, maybe this afternoon. Rain is also forecast for later this week, perhaps for two days. I just had a peek at the fourteen day forecast. It will be sunny with cloudy periods and a little bit of rain till the twenty-first, or for the next two weeks. It shouldn't get warmer than 22. For me, this couldn't be more perfect. I suppose the conditions are still less than ideal for the beach lizards. Those diehard pale-skinned melanoma hazards who insist on lying in the sun like el lomo a la parrilla or beef on a barbecue. I can't understand this toxic obsession with suntanning. Except that white folk, like me, don't really like our skin colour that much. We look pale, unhealthy, almost leprous. Northern caucasian people, it seems, are a human genetic anomaly, we are near-albinos, almost against nature with our incredibly pale skin. I believe that the normal human skin colour is brown, and that there is something in our collective unconscious that longs to have that colour, and so we still like to cook ourselves to death under the blistering July sun. By the same token, I often wonder if the racism that some of us are afflicted with has its origins in envy. That some of us, feeling inferior to brown and darker skinned people because of our own lack of pigment, try to make ourselves superior, and maybe that's where some of the racism comes from. Well, I know for a fact that I would rather be brown. But I am not going to cook myself in the summer sun and end up visiting the oncologist. I accept as a stigma of nature my pale skin. And I love wandering outside in the cool, cloudy and drizzly weather of Vancouver in early July and in Bogotá, Colombia, any time of the year. But still, there is something so dazzling and transfigured about the world when the sun is shining and the way its heat caresses and smacks us like a playful sadistic lover, and even now when it is cool, moist and refreshing, I still at times long for the dazzling hot days that intoxicate the senses and smite us with cancerous tumours. Bring out the sunscreen. Lots of it. And enjoy the hot days, enjoy the cool days, the sun and the shadow, because they are all equally beautiful and they too are part of this wonder of our existence here on this glorious earth.

Life As Performance Art 93

The most interesting thing that happened to me yesterday was buying a new shower curtain. The second most interesting thing? Buying new underwear (isn't it great that underwear is something that simply cannot be bought or sold, used or second hand!). I like my new shower curtain, likewise the new ginch. It's a white shower curtain, clean, fits perfectly and it makes my bathroom look, well, professional? At least I can enjoy the illusion that life is working out as it should. I seem to be over my meltdown about Canada, the true north bland and boring. As I just mentioned in a reply to a friend's email, after all the class analysis, we are still all in the same boat. But it's a pretty leaky one, and for those of us living closer to the cracks in the hull, it can be downright scary. I think so many people get all barmy and patriotic about this bland land of ours, not because they really love this place, but because it helps them cope with fear and uncertainty. I think a lot of us already know what a sad sellout this country has turned itself into, and especially now that they simply keep throwing the poorest Canadians under the bus so that the economy can keep rolling. Sad. And evil. But no one seems to notice, and when there are panhandlers choking the sidewalks, well, they all have addictions (said the executive who can't leave his single malt alone), or they all come from other provinces (said the headhunter from Toronto). The fact of the matter is, most of our homeless are from here. They have fallen on hard times. And now it is easier than ever before to fall, and it is also now harder than ever before to get back up again. Trust me when I say this. I also became homeless, and now some of the clients I work with are or have been recently homeless, and it was hard getting back into housing. It never used to be this bad. We never used to have homelessness. And no one seems to want to accept responsibility for how bad it is now. Just wave the red and white, belt out a lusty and totally tone-deaf O Canada, and suck back that craft beer. And while you're at it, keep blaming us for making bad choices (if only some of us had choices we could make!), and keep muttering between your handfuls of Doritos that most of them come from other parts of the country, that you're not to blame for other people's misfortune, not even if you did consecutively vote the BC Liberals into power for sixteen years in the provincial elections, ignoring, of course that within a year of their first government in 2001, after implementing some of the most draconian policies against people on social assistance in the history of this province, the homelessness stats spiralled upward by four hundred percent! Idiots! And now we are being faced with the disastrous consequences of climate change, thanks to our own bad choices, and the fact that we have in this country too many people who would rather have a job in the oil sector and a fat squealing pig of a premier egging them on (fat-shaming not intended, apologies to readers of size!) than a sustainable environment and a planet that is going to survive till the next generation. Well, I can only dole out so much energy for outrage. I like my new shower curtain. My life is better than what it was. I have no idea what is waiting around the corner. All I can do is keep doing what I can, reduce, reuse, recycle, walk and use public transit, and nag the hell out of you idiots till you start taking responsible and appropriate action. It might not make a shred of difference in the long run, but at least we can feel better about ourselves. Fat lot of good that's going to do, but if we're going to go down, then let's go down with a smile on our face.

Life As Performance Art 92

Recently in Stanley Park, by Lost Lagoon, an Asian man (Korean, I think) with his wife were photographing one of our many raccoons, and like an excited kid he said to me, "look! A raccoon!" I didn't want to rain on his parade, but I probably did anyway when I replied, "Oh, yeah. I see them all the time." I'm like that about squirrels. Coyotes and skunks too. We have them everywhere. And don't get me started about our iconic shit machines, the Canada geese! It isn't that I don't care about our urban wildlife, and I actually like that they have so cleverly adapted to our toxic human presence and dominance. There was also a time, before critters started to make themselves so at home among us, when the very novelty of seeing any one of those creatures of our God and King made us all gape and ooh and ah like enrapt little school kids still untainted by YouTube and computer games (do they exist anywhere?). How quickly and how easily the novel, strange and exotic become for us like ambient wallpaper in three tones of beige. We become totally used to it. Familiarity breeding contempt, and we simply continue losing ourselves in our little phones and other tech toys. Well, not me, anyway, since I don't carry a phone with me, and I like to focus on my surroundings. But maybe this also suggests that I still have what people used to refer to as a soul (a word still in my own common usage, Gentle Reader.) I am a Christian and all you born again atheists out there can wipe your butts with this for all I care! and I hope my blog gives you all hemorrhoids! Nice, fat, itchy, bloody ones! It really is amazing what we take for granted. And what we don't. Birds, for example. Outside of crows and seagulls, no one really seems to notice them. Starlings and English sparrows, maybe. And, of course, our own feral street pigeons, those beautiful iridescent birds that everyone loves to hate. I think it's because no one really goes out that much, except maybe to jog or bike ride. And when you're moving that fast, you are not going to notice very much. As much as I appreciate bikes for being environmentally friendly, I do take exception with some of the people who ride them. DOW's I like to call them, or, Dicks On Wheels. But very few people seem to appreciate what we really have for a rich diversity of bird life in this city. Have a look on Uncle Google, if you will, Gentle Reader, for such beauties as the Northern Flicker (red-shafted), or Steller's Jays. Now look up, if you will, the American (also Canadian!) Goldfinch. Try now, the House Finch. The Varied Thrush. The American (and Canadian) Robin. The Black-Capped Chickadee. We also have ravens, bald eagles, and different species of hawks and falcons, not to mention woodpeckers and ducks. This city is full of beautiful and awesome birdlife. If you are really serious about learning where they are and how abundant and beautiful they are, then please go out for some long contemplative walks in our quieter and leafier neighbourhoods. Walk, don't jog, don't ride a bike. Go slow. And most important, leave your goddamn phone at home and also your personal listening device, otherwise, you are not going to notice anything. If you can suffer through the withdrawal pains, then you are going to be simply amazed with what you are going to see out there. And don't forget to smell the roses. If you're heading out between mid-June and early July, you will notice the overpowering perfume of the two species of linden trees that are abundant in many neighbourhoods and in bloom this time of year. Try it. I dare you to try it. Learn how to live. For a change. You might even grow to enjoy it!

Life As Performance Art 91

I just looked up the word ishkabibble. I came across it once when I was a kid, I think it was in a comic strip, and I didn't have a clue what it meant. But somehow, this word has always haunted me, lurking in the recesses of my memory, as though just waiting for me to take it out, dust it off and display it like a fireplace mantel ornament. Well, thanks to Uncle Google and Urban Dictionary, this morning I took the plunge. I have looked up the word, and sure enough, ishkabibble is a real and legitimate word. Yiddish-Jewish, it means basically, no problem, I don't care, don't worry about it. Now I can sleep tonight, this mystery finally solved. Yiddish is a great language that has furnished us with a lot of cool words that have gone into everyday use. Words like schlep, shill, putz, schmuck, shlemiel, nebbish, and I could go on. It seems like a shame that it is now little spoken and considered a dying language. I love the words, and their tone is like salty matzoh in the mouth. It is a language with the tone that takes no prisoners, that pretends nothing. But English is the language that knows where all the bodies are buried, and in my mother tongue, subtlety and double-meaning have been honed to a science. What does this have to do with what I'm writing about on this blog? Well, nothing, really. But there is something about the theatricality of Yiddish that helps lend to the moving theatre sports that my life has often turned into. I don't use Yiddish words very often, though schlep and shil still often bleed into my vocabulary. And of course, too much Yiddish can be like too much white pepper in the hollandaise sauce, if you know what I mean. We want things to have a little bit of spice, but not such that it overwhelms the palate and makes eating a painful experience. Or speaking, for that matter. Words do matter, but so also does silence. Sometimes it is better to stay quiet, to listen, to learn and absorb. It can be a bit awkward at times if I'm talking to a quiet person, since I also tend to be on the quiet side. But then I become the loquacious one, asking the leading questions, and using everything in my toolkit, to get the other to open up and spill whatever they are hiding. But quiet people aren't always quiet because they are concealing. They are simply quiet people. I am often, but not always a quiet person. When I am quiet, it's usually because I want to hear what's being said, I want to learn, absorb. But really, what I turn into is more a facilitator. With people who like to talk a lot, I take the listener's seat, just as when the other is one of few words, I will talk more. I was once called, in one of my workplaces, the Great Balancer. This was a tribute to my talent for balancing simultaneously several difficult and demanding worksites and duties without breaking a sweat. But I also like balance everywhere, and in all things. The only problem with this is, when I am with someone who is talkative, I can give them too much airtime, and with quiet people, not enough. So then, it sometimes behooves me to direct, edit and even interrupt frequently those who do not know when to shut up, so I can get a word in edgewise, just as I often finding myself asking the silent ones over and over again to tell me what they think of something, what they really think, and to see if I can get them talking till they don't know when to shut up. For some reason I almost always seem to feel that it's my duty to coach others. Maybe because so many people need coaching. Ishkabibble!

Life As Performance Art 90

I have left a lengthy message on my housing providers' voicemail. This simply for one little reason: Pride Week, nor anything else that relates to LGBTQ matters is ever acknowledged in my apartment building. There is not even one tiny little rainbow sticker on the door, nothing. It is as though we do not even exist. This is no surprise to me, Gentle Reader. More Than A Roof is run by evangelical Christians, and everyone knows that evangelical Christians are not friendly towards queers. They tend to take the Bible very literally, swallowing everything that St. Paul wrote in the New Testament, including all his nonsense about slavery, women and homosexuals. Now that same gender marriage has been legal in this country for the last fourteen years, this does place my housing providers in rather an awkward position. They are no longer allowed to openly discriminate against us. But they still pretend that we don't exist. I remember around six years ago or so, when Xtra West, the local LGBTQ newspaper, was still widely available, and someone would leave a stack of papers at our building door. Now sometimes the cover would push even my boundaries, occasionally bordering almost (but not quite) on soft porn, so I can appreciate the squeamishness that might be induced in some. Still, it was a legitimate paper with lots of interesting news relative to the LGBTQ community and people with open minds. One of the fundamentalists in my building, a tenant (I think), got in the habit of removing those papers from the foyer and dumping them in the recycling bin. I decided to fight. I would rescue the papers, bring them back and stack them neatly and prominently by the mail boxes. If someone tried to hide them, I would remove whatever was covering them, or put the papers right side up again. I even got support from our building manager, himself an evangelical who does not approve of same gender marriage. He even put up a notice in the elevator, remonstrating with tenants that they please respect those who are different. I was also having an email dialogue around that time with the editor of Xtra West. She was very supportive and her cheerleading sometimes helped make my day. I know that one more time, I am sticking my neck out, and taking a chance. I have basically come out to my building managers, telling them on the voice message that I am a queer asexual and androgynous man. I also told them that as a Christian with a strong relationship with God, that I also support and approve of monogamous marriage, including same gender marriage, even though, also as a Christian with a strong relationship with God, I might happen to disapprove of promiscuity and sexual licentiousness. I left them this message for the simple reason that, one more time, they had plastered the elevator with ads about every single summer event in this city, including the Celebration of Light fireworks competition, except for one very prominent and well-attended occasion. That's right. The Pride Parade. That celebration of the love that dare not speak its name, and that in my building anyway, goes on being silenced. So, this year I am addressing this. My guess is that both the young, presumably straight, but who only knows, men who manage this building are going to feel too embarrassed and squeamish to want to respond to my voice message. I also suspect that otherwise they are going to do nothing, that under the mandate of the Christian organization that signs their paycheque, they re going to go on acting as though people like me just don't exist, at least not here in their beloved island of evangelical sanctity. Time alone will tell. On the other hand, I just might get pleasantly surprised. For now, I am contemplating picking up a small rainbow sticker, and putting it in prominent place in the foyer, on the door or in the elevator, just to see what happens. It is decidedly uncomfortable, and rather boring, feeling treated where I live as though I don't even exist. Time will tell.

Life As Performance Art 89

Despite my distaste for this country, I did have a pretty good Canada Day yesterday, and not because it was Canada Day, but because it was a beautiful sunny day off. I started with a Skype visit with my friend in Colombia. We have actually become friends through language exchange after almost a year of being in contact. It's often touch and go with the Conversation Exchange page and very few respondents ever really stick, or even get as far as one single Skype or coffee appointment. I suppose that life has a tendency of getting in the way for all of us. Later, I got on the bus as far as Kitsilano (Fourth and Alma, then proceeded to walk through the Jericho lands and towards the beaches. There was a pungent stench of raw sewage in the air, and a lot of people crowding the beach, given the holiday. I still don't quite get other people's need to spend their free time in noisy, crowded areas that smell bad but I think that a lot of people are really afraid of quiet and solitude. They also have very little imagination and simply go to places that are already popular. I must have walked for over an hour till I could get up into the forest nearby. I had to avoid an off-leash dog. I'm not sure if the dog was dangerous, but after previous encounters I am not taking chances. His owner was reasonable when I informed her (she was distracted on her smartphone, natch). She acknowledged my concern, caught up with her dog, and I still waited till they were well out of sight before proceeding. Noticing the odour of cigarette smoke, I commented to another hiker, and he and I stopped for a while and chatted about a whole range of issues, from smoking idiots, to Emily Carr and the Group of Seven, to the way some people are trying to turn the forest here into a gay cruising ground (I so far haven't noticed). Later I rested on a bench. A woman would not permit her friendly dog to come over for a pat, and strangely, apologized instead for his behaviour, but she was with a rather standoffish looking group of relatives and maybe that gene pool hasn't yet been chlorinated. Altogether, I spent at least three hours hiking. The coffee shop on the campus was just closing when I arrived there, so I resumed my hike, went to the bus stop and then returned home. The young man who sat next to me had pungent body odour, so I moved to the back. A woman with her daughter, a special needs kid of maybe six or seven came on. The girl appears to be somewhere on the spectrum. The girl and I interacted a bit as she was very friendly. She asked me my name, and I asked her her name and she wanted to know if I like hotdogs. (I don't). A bit later she tried to say hi to a small group of three Latinos speaking Spanish. I could tell by their accent and appearance that they were upper class, possibly from Peru, I don't think from Mexico (though I can't always tell). They steadfastly ignored the child. I thought up a strategy. As I was moving to get off the bus, I wished the mother and her child a great Canada Day (regardless of what I might think of the occasion), then to the snooty young Latinos (age around twenty-three, or so), Y a ustedes, los latinos engreídos, un adios amable. Ella es sola una niñita. Es cómo llevamos bien. (and to you snobby Latinos, a nice goodbye. She is only a little girl. This is how we all get along here.) When I mentioned to the mother that I had just chewed them out in Spanish she gave me a very warm smile, and from the Latinos, three rather shit-eating smiles!