Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads out there.

My Dad isn’t on social media, or the internet, really — something I often envy. I’ll no doubt see him on FaceTime later today.

He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a few years back and has bravely and pragmatically been doing what he can to mitigate and adjust to it. It’s really tough to see a family member endure a medical condition and not be able to help beyond encouraging words and internet research. But nowhere near as tough as it is for him.

But on Father’s Day, I’d rather focus on other things.

- His love for music of many genres and his extensive record collection sparked a lifelong passion for it in me. His eclectic tastes meant I knew all the words to “Raise a Little Hell,” by Trooper, “Legalize It,” by Peter Tosh, “Like a Rolling Stone,” by Bob Dylan, “Hell’s Bells,” by AC/DC, and “If Drinking Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will),” by George Jones — all before the age of puberty.

- Him giving me his old acoustic guitar when I was 15, which led to me playing in bands and some of the most meaningful experiences and relationships of my life.

- And, after many years of butting heads in my youth, as fathers and sons often do, restarting and rebuilding our relationship into one of a quiet, understated love (he’s still British, after all) and support.

Although we had our differences in my younger years, I’m very much like my Dad in many ways. My hermit tendencies. My love of politics. My need for order and love of lists (recently I discovered this was a coping response to ADHD, which I have and strongly suspect inherited from the Old Man). And when I look in the mirror these days, sometimes I swear it’s him staring back at me.

I’m also fortunate to be a Dad myself. I always think of Father’s Day as a day to celebrate and reflect on how lucky I am to have my daughter Emma in my life.

Although there were many tough years, struggling as a young Dad on my own, her appearance in my life changed everything for the better. I didn’t know I was capable of that much love for another person until she came along.

Because I’ve strived to be someone she can be proud of, someone who “walked the walk,” it made me a better man.

She’s turned out to be a really wonderful person. Kind, intelligent, creative, and incredibly funny. I’ve seen her overcome challenges in her life, filling me with respect and admiration for her fortitude and resilience.

In personality and sense of humour, Emma is the person I’m probably most like. We are father and daughter and of course share that bond, but I sometimes wonder if we knew each other in another life, as we are so alike that we can almost communicate telepathically — though neither of us ever stops talking. I often don’t need to ask her what she thinks about this or that because I already instinctively know, but I still do ask, because she has such a great way of communicating and telling a story.

As one gets older, these relationships mean more.

When we are younger, we take it for granted that these people are around. Now, in middle age, I realize the relationships with these people — my family, my close friends, the romantic partners: the people I’ve shared my life’s experience with — aren’t just part of my life story. They are the story.

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I shot some people in Central Park yesterday.

I should clarify.

I sometimes like to walk out my front door for long, aimless walks around New York City, armed with my camera, and take photographs.

This activity serves many purposes. It forces me to get out of my apartment and results in easily getting my 10,000 steps (often more) without thinking too much about it.

I like that doing this also makes me look at the world differently. Rather than just going from point A to point B, I am instead wandering around hunting for “moments,” which makes me more observant and appreciative of the hidden little stories unfolding every minute in the never-ending swirl of humanity that is NYC.

It also forces me out of my comfort zone a little bit. When photographing human subjects, I often ask permission before I click, and this requires me to speak to strangers. The only person I’ve had turn me down so far was the owner of a hot dog cart in Central Park, who I suspect was undocumented. A sad reality in the time of Trump. I respected his wishes, of course. Otherwise, I’ve always been granted permission and had short but pleasant interactions with my subjects.

I also often don’t ask permission. If the person is too far away, for example, or it will ruin the moment to do so. Sometimes, bringing awareness to the camera would stop the person doing what they were doing, and the moment I was seeking to capture would vanish. These situations are usually uneventful, though I was once followed down the street and shouted at, called a “stupid bitch” by a pedicab driver who I’d photographed taking a nap. Unfortunately for me, he awoke just as I was taking the shot. Fortunately for me, he couldn’t leave his pedicab unattended, so he gave up the chase. I was also twice his size, so I think he was more bluster than an actual threat. Still - an adventure.

I was also once threatened by a drug dealer in Washington Square and had to delete the photos in front of his henchmen to satisfy him that I was not walking away with any evidence. I wasn’t actually trying to photograph him — he just happened to be in the background of someone else I was trying to capture. I felt like saying to him, “Don’t worry, you aren’t that interesting,” but I didn’t because I’m fond of being alive.

There are all sorts of debates about where the line is with street photography. Legally speaking, in most places (there are exceptions in Europe), there is no expectation of privacy in a public place and shooting videos and photographs of anyone is well within the law. There are some, like Bruce Gilden, who push this to its limits and are seemingly intentionally confrontational, which is not something I’d ever want to do as I don’t see the fun in that, though his work is famous and renowned — he’s received the European Publishers Award for Photography and is a Guggenheim Fellow — whereas I most certainly do not have either of those distinctions.

Likewise, I never seek to mock anyone or exploit anyone with my photographs. I will never photograph homeless people, for example, though I know others do with the good intention of bringing their plight to the fore. In my case, I know I would probably not want my lowest moments to be forever captured, so I don’t do this to others. It’s always my intention to celebrate people and human moments.

I also rarely photograph children. Despite loving kids and their being such incredible subjects due to their utter lack of self-consciousness, we now live in a world where the intentions behind photographing a child can be considered suspect. This makes me terribly sad, but I don’t want anyone to worry I’m up to no good, so, with rare exceptions, I generally let these wonderful moments pass.

Even with all this time and thought I’ve put into this, I’m not a professional photographer. Even to call myself an amateur photographer feels like I’m lying. The end result of my urban shooting safaris might perhaps more aptly be described as snapshots rather than photographs.

I did watch some videos on all the various technical details one is supposed to know about photography and others on the thousands of options and settings on my camera, but I’ve forgotten most of them. It’s not that I don’t want to know this stuff; it’s just that when I have a free moment, I’d much rather go out and just take photos than watch two hours of instructional YouTube videos. So I basically point and shoot.

I also know damn near nothing about the post-shoot manipulation of images, other than adjusting the lighting a bit or a simple crop. This area, too, lands squarely in my “one day when I have time” list.

Although I strive for something approaching art with my photos, I’m not sure anyone who actually knows about the subject would see me as anything other than a hack. A try-hard. A faker. A poseur.

This is not unlike how I felt for about half of the many years I wrote songs, played guitar, and sang, both solo and in bands — calling myself a musician felt like a falsehood. I thought of myself as someone who liked to play music, not a musician.

I distinctly remember having a conversation with the guys in my band, after about three years of rehearsing for three or four hours twice a week, playing live once a month, and about five years of me banging away on my guitar on my own before that, where I said: “I’m starting to feel like I might be ready to think about calling myself a musician.” I never really did, though. I’d say “I’m in a band,” or “I’m a songwriter and play guitar,” things like that. I always felt the title of “musician” was something someone else bestowed, rather than something one proclaimed for themselves.

“So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
How the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test”

- “Changes”, by David Bowie

Likewise, I consider myself a person who likes to take photographs, not a photographer; who is entrepreneurial, rather than an entrepreneur. And until very recently, I was a person who liked to write rather than a writer. Even in the last case, I half expect someone to digitally stand up and shout “J’accuse!”, to which I would likely respond with a crumbling admission and a scraping plea for forgiveness.

Is this “imposter syndrome”? Perhaps. But is it still a “syndrome” when the person in question (me) is, in fact, an imposter?

This isn’t some false humility. Like Marlon Brando in “On The Waterfront,” I arguably “…could’ve been a contender,” and more quickly arrived at legitimately calling myself a musician, a photographer, a writer, an entrepreneur, and so forth — had I been more deliberate and disciplined in any of these pursuits. Alas, I was neither of those things.

This is the result of three of my hundreds of fatal personality traits:

• I am incredibly lazy.

• I like to get to the fun part immediately.

• Though I’ve now been sober for coming up on 19 years, I spent 20+ years frequently under the influence of one substance or another, which does tend to cut into the time available for mastering skills.

And one recent discovery:

• I have mild ADHD.

The latter of these did help explain a lifetime of behaviours that, until that point, I’d both beaten myself up about and devised elaborate processes to work around, which took the sting out slightly, but doesn’t change the outcome.

I never learned music theory. I still can’t really read or write music, though I skirted around learning a few times. It was more fun to learn some chords from songs I liked and just play. Besides, I would tell myself, the Beatles didn’t read or write music or know music theory either. And the punk rock spirit I loved and admired was more about “just pick up a guitar and start making noise” than toiling endlessly over charts until you become a virtuoso. I aspired to be Howlin’ Wolf or Joe Strummer, not Yngwie Malmsteen or Eddie Van Halen. This logic sounds solid, and I do subscribe to it, but it could also very well be what Jeff Goldblum’s character in the film The Big Chill called a “juicy rationalization”.

“A rationalization is better than sex. Have you ever gone more than one week without one good juicy rationalization?” - Jeff Goldblum, as Michael Gold in the film The Big Chill.

One of my other main problems is that, like Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes. I am interested in and enjoy doing so many different creative things that I’ve ended up a “master of none”. Acting, improv, film, music, writing, publishing, entrepreneurship, digital publishing, and photography are all things I’ve seriously explored, enjoyed, and even been paid to do — and would do again. Of course, the reality is that one can be anything, but one can‘t be everything.

There’s a scene in The Matrix where one of the characters suddenly needs to know how to fly a helicopter. In the film’s futuristic world, learning this skill is simply a matter of instantly downloading the information to her brain. Until that’s possible, I’ll probably keep doing what I’ve always done and follow 10 different muses at once. But maybe that’s OK. I don’t want to be just one thing, and I don’t mind being considered a student, an amateur, or even a poseur. At my current age, my mid-50s, I’m not doing any of this stuff to please or impress anyone. I’m more interested in enjoying the process and the creative act. I’m still learning and improving, just very, very slowly.

Maybe the end result of my wandering around with my camera is just snapshots and not photographs, but I’d push back on the idea that this distinction devalues them. Duchamp signed his name to a urinal, and now it’s on display at MoMA. Bob Dylan can’t sing for shit, but is one of the most important and influential musical artists of all time. Art and its level of distinction are whatever we assign them to be.

I think finding a way to continue being creative in a world that seems to do everything it can to suppress that human instinct is, in itself, an achievement, especially as we get older and the potential for being perceived as ridiculous ever-increases. To be creative in public is a dedication and bravery unto itself. Even for, and maybe especially for, the amateurs.

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🕰 ICYMI

In case you missed it, here’s last month’s Journal of everything I was 👀, 🎧, 📖, including: Spring things, Feeling DTF, Billy and Courtney Sitting In a Tree, The Purchases of Peaches, When the Party's Over, It's Not That Big, Creative Reading, and More...

And here’s my last essay, about the power and importance of NYC dogs:

Thanks for reading.

XO

C.

One of the many great things about NYC is the ability to remain anonymous. It’s the polar opposite of the cliche small town where everyone knows everyone — and all their dirty laundry.

In most of the places I’ve lived over my collective near-twelve years in Manhattan, the extent of my relationship with my neighbours has been a polite hello in the hallway. This isn’t out of mean-spiritedness or callousness, but more as part of the unspoken first rule of living in NYC: “Mind yo bizzness.”

There have been a few breakthroughs over the years, where we might stop to talk and catch up in greater detail, but most of the time, a nod and a “hello” is about what you can expect.

When I moved into my current building, I was immediately acquainted with Drake, the golden retriever owned by Donna1, who lived at the very end of the hall on my floor.

Donna, an old-school lifelong New Yorker, has a thick Queens accent that is quickly becoming a thing of the past as the internet slowly but surely makes us all the same. Imagine Bernie Sanders’ voice, but female. I’d guess she’s in her mid-60s. Except for Drake, she lives alone and works as a wardrobe supervisor for Broadway productions. She’s somewhat eccentric and fond of large floppy hats.

Although I’ve never been inside her place, Donna told me she’s been living there for nearly 30 years, which led me to wonder if it’s rent-controlled — the holy grail of NYC apartments. Without getting into all the details, suffice it to say that rent-controlled means a lot less expensive. They are extremely rare and highly coveted.

I also suspect it’s a studio apartment (a single room, but for the bathroom), which means it’s very small.

Donna generally left her door wide open when she was home, so Drake, a big galoot, could wander the hallway, stretch his legs, and do some extracurricular sniffing. It also allowed him to befriend everyone who lives here, all of whom reciprocated his friendliness, but for the moody Siamese cat who lives at the other end of the hall, and was decidedly not a fan, despite Drake’s unrelenting attempts to befriend her. You can’t please everyone.

When Donna first introduced me to Drake, she told me, “He’s famous, you know,” explaining that he had performed on Broadway (in the role of a dog, I suspect).

Because Donna has lived in the building for such a long time, and Drake for over half that period, Drake is known not only on our floor but throughout the building, confirming his celebrity status. But it is on our floor, in particular, that he served as our mascot.

Like everyone on our floor, the first thing I’d do anytime I was taking out the garbage, or getting off the elevator after a long day, was to turn my head and see if he was in his spot at the end of the hallway, lounging with his ball or one of his stuffed toys nearby (he had a particular fondness for a squeaky stuffed duck).

If there, you’d be unfailingly greeted with a wagging tail. As a senior citizen, he would take some time getting up and lumbering over to say hello, but it was worth the wait. Most of us made it over to him by the time he got all four legs under him.

Unlike the people who live here, Drake has been inside every apartment on our floor. If he felt an inspection was in order, he would stand between the resident and their door so he could enter as soon as they opened it. It wasn’t a request, it was a demand. He’d slowly wander from room to room, taking his sweet time, tail wagging, and sniffing constantly. Once he felt everything was in order, he’d show himself out.

For the residents on my floor, seeing Drake was a welcome stress-reliever from the never-ending pressure and noise one has to tolerate in exchange for living in NYC.

For Donna, Drake built a community around her — everyone on the floor knew Donna and stopped to talk to her, because of him.

Drake even contributed to the local micro-economy. One of the porters (NY-speak for a building janitor) took him to Central Park every day when Donna was at the theatre, for a small fee.

About three weeks ago, I was waiting for the elevator when Donna popped her head out of her apartment. She would often do this if anyone was out there, pretending to need to tend to Drake, but really just looking for someone to talk to.

Amid our neighbourly small talk, Donna informed me that Drake had cancer. I said I’d noticed he was getting skinny and seemed less energetic than usual, and tears welled up in her eyes when she told me he didn’t have much longer. I gave him extra pats every time I saw him after that.

Last week, I emerged from the elevator to find Donna and the porter both crying.

“Oh no…” I said.

“He’s gone,” Donna said through tears streaming down her face.

“I’m so sorry, Donna. We all loved him.” I said.

“I know, I know, and he loved all of you,” she said, her face wet.

Since then, Donna’s door has been closed, and I don’t see her very often. I no longer hear my neighbours in the hall saying “who’s a good boy,” or the squeak of Drake’s duck.

He was more than just a dog. He was a connector. A community-builder. A reliable friend. He was a very good boy. And he will be missed.

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ICYMI

In case you missed it, here are a few recent posts:

“A few weeks ago, the 4th toe on my right foot was the victim of a vicious, unprovoked attack by my heavy bed-frame. I was making my bed at the time, early in the morning, before coffee and half-asleep.

It seems to me that the universe should reward activities that confirm one’s role as a “responsible adult” rather than punish them, but, as we all know, the universe can be an irrational, unmedicated bi-polar bitch…”

Journal: Mar 2026

Featuring: Memories of Writing Class Drama, Bill’s Records, The Sailor, Cleo Sol, the Talented Ms. Highsmith.

March 2026 | New York City

A few weeks ago, the 4th toe on my right foot was the victim of a vicious, unprovoked attack by my heavy bed-frame. I was making my bed at the time, early in the morning, before coffee and half-asleep.

It seems to me that the universe should reward activities that confirm one’s role as a “responsible adult” rather than punish them, but, as we all know, the universe can be an irrational, unmedicated bi-polar bitch.

I’ve always been clumsy. Despite having been the front man in rock n roll bands, and having done a few other arguably cool things, I’ve never been able to escape the reality that, if scripted in a movie, I’d be the funny, chubby, non-athletic, bespectacled, over-read and sexually amorphous best friend who trips over his own feet rather than the chiseled hero — more Richard Kind than Brad Pitt. I’ve made the best of it.

I frequently cut or bang up my hands, for example, doing things as simple as opening an Amazon box or taking down a Christmas tree. I’ll find bruises on my legs from bumping into furniture and whatnot. When I was still drinking, it was considerably worse, but even in sobriety, I find myself regularly tending to one self-inflicted injury or another.

As someone on the tall side, I’m often smacking my head into things, such as the overhead bins on a plane or the metal bars on the subway. “Ohhhhh!” strangers will collectively gasp in response to the sound of my melon being bashed, to which I will sigh, resigned, and respond in an Eeyore-ish voice, “I’m OK,” while rubbing what will become yet another permanent lump on my head. It’s a lucky thing I’m not bald, because I imagine my head resembles a large misshapen potato with its many post-trauma bulges.

I must have been moving with purpose while making my bed that morning, because I didn’t merely stub my toe — an occurrence so commonplace that it would not even earn a casual mention. Rather, somehow, at full speed, I managed to stride with velocity such that the corner of this chunky Mid-century Modern wooden bed-frame jammed itself directly between my third and fourth toes, causing the fourth to bend sharply in a direction it strongly prefers not to go.

This was the kind of pain where everything seems to stop for a few seconds as the brain tries to comprehend what has just happened.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t even curse. I just stood, motionless, holding my breath and clenching my fists as a wave of excruciating pain emanated from my foot. The pillow I was holding dropped to the floor, seemingly in slow motion.

After a moment, I involuntarily inhaled deeply, gasping. As the swelling and the throbbing began, I made a guttural sound one might expect from a bear caught in a trap. (Do bears ever stub their toes, I wonder?) The neighbours on the other side of my paper-thin walls likely assumed I was either dying or having the greatest orgasm of my life. It was definitely more the former.

As a result of my ongoing victimhood in my abusive relationship with inanimate objects, I’ve become rather stiff-upper-lip about these incidents and tend to try and shake them off and carry on, as one would imagine Her late Royal Majesty might do after smashing her toe into something. “Put the kettle on,” she’d say, briskly and unbothered, to a nearby servant, no doubt impressed with such royal fortitude. But even within the first few gingerly attempted steps, it was clear that putting any weight on that foot was going to be a nonstarter.

I hobbled to the kitchen for coffee and Tylenol, lying to myself that it would be back to normal the next day. As my Keurig sputtered, I dashed off a Slack message to my colleagues that I’d be working from home, climbing subway stairs now an impossibility.

Three days later, with no perceptible improvement and my foot now in a spectacular bloom of purple bruises, I decided a visit to urgent care1 was necessary, wondering if it might be broken.

New York City had experienced the largest snowstorm in recent memory a few days earlier, and the streets were a mess. Fortunately, the clinic was only a block away. As I made my way to the front door of my building, my doorman said, “Gooda luck out der!”

I staggered through swirling snow, feeling like an urban version of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant,” finally arriving at my destination. The clinic was empty but for the desk attendant and two others waiting to see a doctor.

After providing my essential details and, of course, paying first (America!) I was instructed to sit and wait. As I surveyed the waiting area, I heard a horrible sound.

A burly, bearded man, also waiting to see a doctor, sounded like he might keel over and die. His coughing, relentless and phlegmy, bounced off the walls, his face red from struggling to breathe.

I made a strategic decision to sit as far away from him as possible, hoping to emerge with only the medical conditions I’d walked in with and, ideally, no others.

His coughing took a brief intermission.“Ohhhhh God…” he said, breathlessly aloud to no one in particular. Quite dramatic, I thought.

He rose and walked to the water dispenser. For reasons I don’t understand, rather than return to his original seat on the opposite side of the room, he sat a mere four chairs away from me, sipping from his plastic cup, as though this decision was perfectly rational.

I began to panic internally while maintaining an external veneer of nonchalance. With every passing second, I was breathing in more of his diseased second-hand air. I needed to act, and quickly, but, being Canadian, dared not risk offending him.

After a moment sufficient to seem entirely relaxed, I stood and casually sauntered to the front desk to ask a clarifying question about insurance, to which I already knew the answer, providing innocent plausibility to be moving away from him.

In that moment, he was called to see the doctor and left the area. I was out of harm’s way. Or so I thought.

The only other person remaining in the waiting room was a young, slim, handsome man who sat, coat and hat still on, looking at his phone, his knee bouncing up and down. Despite the weather, he wore Nike high-tops rather than winter boots, a sign of his youth. He had no noticeable affliction.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then an equally attractive young woman emerged, prescription in hand. More sensibly dressed, she wore big furry boots and carried a collection of winter gear. He’d been waiting for her. The young man’s face lit up, and his eyes filled with warmth, almost seemingly becoming another person in her presence. He stood and went to her immediately.

He towered over her. He, tall, athletic, and Caucasian. She, Latina, petite, but curvy.

“OK?” He asked.

“I’m OK, babe.” She smiled, if a little tiredly.

Her large brown eyes flickered up at him intermittently. He helped her with her coat, even zipping it up for her, which seemed to amuse and please her in equal measure. He loves her, I thought, and she knows.

He opened the door for her, and they headed out into the swirling winter scene outside the glass frontage of the clinic. She held onto him as they walked away. I briefly wondered what would become of them before my thoughts were interrupted by my name being called.

I was greeted by a nurse with no perceptible personality who took my blood pressure, stuck a thermometer under my tongue, and clamped a device on my index finger.

“Is that also for temperature?” I asked, making small talk.

“No, that measures oxygen,” the nurse replied.

“Am I sufficiently oxygenated?” I asked, half-joking.

“Well, you’re talking a lot…” she replied. “Take off your shoe and sock,” she ordered.

As I did so, she fired various questions at me. Was on the same medications? Was I allergic to any medications? And that’s when she got to the question I am always asked in these situations.

Somewhere along the line, the fact that I am sober — and perhaps more to the point, once very much wasn’t — was recorded in my medical files. I guess this makes sense; it’s part of my medical history, but any time I find myself at urgent care ( fortunately, not all that often), there’s an innocuous-sounding question about pain.

“How have you been managing the pain?” the nurse asked innocently, not making eye contact. It took me a while before I realized this was their way of fishing to see if I was faking an injury to procure opioids.

I always want to say “You don’t need to worry, I was primarily a wino who ‘went skiing,’ I was never Oxy man,” but I never do. It’s annoying to be suspected of script-seeking after 18 years of sobriety, but ultimately, I know they are just trying to look out for me.

“Just Tylenol,” I smiled.

It was then that the doctor entered the room. Roughly 5 feet tall, asian, slight, and seemingly delighted to be working in this clinic. He beamed. An enormous smile never left his face throughout our interaction. It was very disconcerting.

He wiggled the toe. Any pain there? Yes. How about there? Yes. It seemed self-evident to me that these would be my answers. Why else would I be there?

“Well,” he chuckled, “It’s likely either fractured or broken. I don’t think it’s broken.”

He turned his attention to the nurse, “Where’s the closest available imaging?

“Ninety-six west,” she said without even looking up from her screen.

Turning back to me, he said, “We could send you for imaging to confirm, but you’d probably do more damage getting there. And it doesn’t really matter either way — there’s not much we can do for toes. Best bet is to walk on it as little as possible, especially avoiding stairs.” He again let out a little laugh, for no apparent reason.

“For how long?” I asked. New York City is not the kind of place where not walking is an option for any length of time.

“At least two weeks!” He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder, like we were old chums. “If it’s better in two weeks, you’ll know it was a fracture. If it takes six weeks, it means it was broken,” he laughed like this was an old inside joke between us.

“Six weeks!” I exclaimed.

“Yeah, but I don’t think that’s the case here. And toes are amazing! They’re really resilient,” he said, seeming genuinely pumped about toes.

He then taught me how to “buddy tape” one toe to another to help it heal straight, warning, “It might still end up looking wonky, but you’ll recover.”

“There goes my OnlyFans foot channel,” I joked. A short, uncomfortable pause filled the room. Neither of them seemed to get this reference.

A lifetime supply of medical tape in hand, I emerged back into Planet Hoth, trudging through the snow with a Ratso Rizzo limp — “I’m staggerin’ here!”

I awoke the next morning, limped across my living room and slumped into a chair, elevating my foot as instructed.

I’ve been in a period of endless bad luck for nearly two years now. One thing after another. I thought to myself, “Well, at least it can’t get much worse…”

And that’s when the coughing started.

“Ohhhh God….” I said aloud to no one. Quite dramatically.

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IKYMI

In case you missed it, here’s my last journal entry: Memories of Writing Class Drama, Bill’s Records, The Sailor, Cleo Sol, the Talented Ms. Highsmith.

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I’m 54 years old and coming up on 18 years of sobriety (and being tobacco-free).

One of the few advantages of having spent the bulk of my teens, 20s, and 30s consuming copious amounts of drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes is that my 50s largely don’t seem so bad in many ways.

Oh, sure, I’m falling apart, as we all do, starting at around 50. I liken turning 50 to owning a household appliance, such as a washing machine or dishwasher. It works fine until the day the warranty expires, and then immediately starts making clanking sounds and self-destructing, which is what I’m also doing.

I take daily supplements and medications now for this and that. I have several mysterious ailments that various doctors keep trying—and failing—to figure out.

Doctors, one learns as time goes on, are just throwing darts.

I’m told I’ll likely need a knee replacement at some point and to expect cataracts and skin cancer as inevitable parts of my future. As a result of the latter of these forthcoming conditions, I have to get buck naked in front of a dermatologist once a year so suspect moles can be zapped off (I’m pretty sure this is the correct medical term for the procedure).

Due to the insane, Kafkaesque health system in the United States, I’ve had four different dermatologists in the past five years. Before my current one, an elderly man who resembles Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street, I had a young, terribly handsome, gym-buff gay doctor. Not only was it traumatic to have to reveal my pale, nude Dadbod to this GQ-esque gentleman, but he also had a penchant for “rolling deep”, bringing a collection of nurses, medical students, and assistants with him to witness my striptease, all of whom, for some reason, were also exceptionally physically fit and good-looking. I will also mention that his offices were kept at a sub-zero temperature. Just sayin’.

“For the record,” I’d announce mid-strip, “It’s very chilly in here!” — met with no laughs. Tough room. I suppose they hear the same joke all day long.

For self-esteem reasons, despite him being a confirmed sadist (see below for proof), I much prefer the elderly, bald, and lumpy Mr. Hooper, who brings with him only a single no-nonsense chubby nurse who looks on with an expression of sympathy and resigned exhaustion, likely the result of dealing with Mr. Hooper and looking at middle-aged, pale, chubby naked Caucasian men all day long.

@chris.stevensonMy elderly #Dermatologist has issues. #pale #doctor #funny #dermatology

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I sometimes see internet posts geared to Gen-X men lamenting the loss of their younger athletic prowess and slim, muscular bodies, to which I don’t relate at all. As someone who never had these attributes in my youth (or otherwise), I have no such version of myself to mourn. In fact, I have very foggy memories of these years in general, since much of it was spent blind drunk or under the influence of one drug or another.

I certainly don’t recommend my younger lifestyle to anyone. While some of it was a lot of fun, the back quarter of it wasn’t fun at all. Once I hit the wall, where the drugs and alcohol were taking me rather than me taking them, I had to essentially deconstruct myself to the cellular level and rebuild my entire persona and worldview to escape its clutches. I had to install an entirely different operating system.

While doing this has many benefits, the process is absolute torture. In my case, it involved bouncing around between the self-help section of bookstores, briefly attending meetings in a secret society to which no one wants to belong, lots of therapy, and getting deep with my homeboy, Siddhartha Gautama (better known by his MC handle, Buddha).

Ultimately, when one lives the sort of life where one does not expect to see 30, and somehow, mercifully, finds a way to escape the mindset, beliefs, and habits that bring one to that conclusion, everything that follows feels like a bonus.

When I was a kid, back in the 80s, we would spend our paper-route and babysitting earnings on video games at the local arcade. If you got good at a game (I was an exceptionally good Galaga player), you would occasionally earn an “extra life,” as we used to call it.

You’d start with three attempts to play the game for the cost of a quarter. If you messed up and “died” three times, that was it; you’d need to spend another quarter and start over again. But if you were good at the game, you’d learn how to earn another attempt, at no extra cost.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m happy to be here. But at my age, I’m happy to be anywhere.” - George Burns

For me, everything past my late 30s, when I finally got my shit together, has been an “extra life.” I wasn’t really expecting it, so I didn’t have many preconceived expectations of what it would be. I’m just happy to be here.

Viewing the remainder of one’s life as a bonus round definitely has its advantages. Whatever happens, I’m grateful for it. It wasn’t promised and came damn close to not happening. So, like pizza and sex, even a bad version is pretty damn good.

The good news is that you don’t need to abuse drugs and alcohol for two decades to come to view what’s left of your existence on this mortal coil, as Shakespeare aptly described it, as an “extra life.” You only need to adjust your perspective.

I’d like to say the bonus round has been a perpetual delight, filled with croissants, sunsets, and meaningful spiritual revelations, but, alas, this is not the reality. Much of it is waiting for a subway that never comes and attending meetings about meetings, and sometimes much worse.

The past year or so has been a particularly tough slog. I’ve been in a long, tedious, stressful winter in the seasons of my extra life.

Despite my best efforts as a metaphorical gardener, nothing will grow. I find only barren fields covered in snow, no matter how I try. At my age, I’m no longer naive enough to ask “why me?” Indeed, why not me? I can also look around and recognize that many are far worse off than I, though their misery brings me no comfort.

Like most people, much of my life has been a Sisyphean grind that required tenacity, grit, endurance, and, perhaps most essentially, a sense of humour and an appreciation for the absurd.

It remains so now as I battle under-employment, which has wiped me out financially, and rampant ageism in the job market. “This, too, shall pass,” the Sufi poets assure us. I hope so, Sufi poets. I really do.

One of my favourite programs as a child (and as an adult if I’m being honest) was the colourful and highly campy Batman television series.

Some of my earliest bisexual signals arose from this program as both Julie Newmar (Catwoman) and Burt Ward (Robin, the proto-twink) gave me funny feelings I didn’t yet understand. Did you know that Burt Ward’s penis was so big that the network ordered him to take pills to shrink it so it would protrude less from his costume? He ignored them and “just covered it with his cape” (as one does). I’ll wait while you Google photos of Burt Ward.

But I digress.

At the end of each episode of Batman, a cliffhanger would be set up for the next one, in which Batman and Robin would find themselves in peril. “Is this the end of the Dynamic Duo?” the narrator would ask aloud. “Tune in tomorrow to find out. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.”

It’s my hope I’m merely in a similar conundrum, which will be magically resolved at the start of the next episode. I only wish the next episode would bloody well get started, as this one has really dragged on. It’s felt more like the seemingly 16-hour-long “The Irishman” than a 30‑minute episode of Batman.

In the end, I believe we are all just stories, and I hope this is just the part of the story where the hero meets with unforeseen difficulties. It seems hopeless to the protagonist and likely to the audience as well. But there are still pages left in the book, minutes left in the program. We all end in tragedy, but there’s a hell of a lot that can happen before we get there.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy” - Albert Camus

I don’t know what the universe wants from me or has in store for me. I keep turning up and doing my best. I try this and I try that. Thus far, to little avail.

I’m Sisyphus behind the boulder. I’m not happy there, as accomplished philosopher and chain-smoker Albert Camus would suggest I should be, but I’m also not done yet.

I’m the past-warranty clanking washing machine, but one with a heart of gold and, I think and hope, many good years in it yet.

My quarter has dropped; I’m on my third attempt in the video game, relentlessly working the joystick, trying to earn just one more “extra life.” I’ll persist every damn day until I’m either successful or die trying. I will try again tomorrow. And again the day after that.

Same bat-time, same bat-channel.

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“To all appearances, Nora was a standard high school girl. She didn’t dress strangely like I did. Preppy skirts, loafers, sweaters, and, importantly, knee-socks, for which I had a distinct fondness. Beneath that conservative exterior, however, beat the heart of a bohemian artist. She was a skinny girl with long brown hair that she parted in the middle, sixties-style, a distinct nose, thin lips, and intelligent mischievous eyes. Even if she didn’t care for the Dead Kennedys or Minor Threat, as I did, she knew who the Smiths and Billy Bragg were. She passed the cool test. She had a sharp sense of humor, and the functionally illiterate but handsome and built football hero in our class was often the butt of her jokes. I was smitten.”

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New York City

W/O Aug 20, 2023

Greetings Earthlings,

I’ve been totally obsessed with music since I was a child.

Music is a portal to another world. Each song is like a different drug that can make you feel something new or different. Maybe you’re sad and take comfort in listening to sad music. Or maybe you’re sad and want some music to cheer you up. It can provide motivation, encouragement, and act as an outlet for anger. It can amplify feelings of love, make you think differently about the world, or make you feel less alone.

In fact, for some of us, as far as our brains are concerned, music is a drug. Music directly increases dopamine in the brain, with a similar effect to cocaine. As someone with addictive tendencies, it’s no surprise that I got hooked early on. Music, I think, is one of the few good drugs with no harmful side effects, except maybe to your bank account.

Throughout my childhood and into my tweens I became more interested and obsessed with music, with a particular interest in the rebellion, truth-telling, and mythology of rock n roll.

While many kids have fantasies about being a famous rock n roll star, of the many who have daydreamed about rocking out on stage, there is a small subset that actually went ahead and did something about it. These are a special breed of people. Sensitive dreamers, outcasts, and creative kids, largely. When they find each other, it’s not unlike the moment the gay dentist elf finds his fellow weirdos on the Island of Misfit Toys in the vintage Christmas special, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” a Gen-X favorite.

I joined my first band, 21st Inheritance, when I was 16 or 17 and still living in my parent’s safe suburban home.

My involvement came about after a random meeting with a supercool older kid named Greg at Calgary’s Warehouse bar (RIP.) At the time, the Warehouse was one of two places gays, goths, punks, skaters, and other assorted fringe groups could safely get wasted without fear of being stomped by some monosyllabic cowboy-hat-wearing yahoo.

Underage and drunk as usual, I struck up a conversation with Greg, cigarette perpetually in hand, with his long jet-black hair and fondness for Mexican ponchos, about maybe wanting to be in a band “one day.”

At the time this felt about as likely as me “one day” being an astronaut or Nobel Prize winner. It was self-evident that I was nowhere near cool enough to be in a band.

Surprisingly, Greg told me he was getting together and playing music with a few guys and invited me to come and jam with them. I was drunk so agreed to this, thinking this would all fade into the ether - just more drunken bullshit talk. But then he set a time to pick me up and take me to the rehearsal place. “Oh, I guess this is real,” I thought.

It wasn’t until the next hazy morning, awake at the crack of afternoon, completely hungover, that the terror set in. I came close to calling Greg and canceling several times. I was a fraud, after all. But something in me told me to go and see what happened, which I did. It changed the trajectory of my life forever.

Joining a band when you are young takes courage. Especially if you are planning not to be a cover band, but to do original material. It means putting yourself out there, risking ridicule, and that you might suck. This action, of “feeling the fear and doing it anyway” (with apologies to Susan Jeffers, Ph.D.) is a monumental moment for a young person. Whether they know it or not, taking this risk flips a switch in their young brains that allows them to take risks again in the future, which can pay dividends in life.

The reality is not that you might suck, but that you absolutely, 100% will suck. It’s only through the dual blessings of delusion and ignorance that one can start doing something new, thinking they will actually be able to pull it off. Whether riding a bike, making love, playing in a band, or starting a blog or podcast with no real plan or understanding of why you are doing it (ahem), you have to be terrible when you start at almost everything.

The kid that joins a band learns to think “so what" and does it anyway. I think, for me, punk rock had a lot to do with my ability to say “so what.” Punk rock wasn’t about being a virtuoso, it was about raw energy. “Three chords and the truth” and all that. When I saw bands like SNFU as a teenager I thought “Maybe I could do that.” Its lack of gatekeeping is part of what made punk rock great.

I couldn’t yet play the guitar when I joined 21st Inheritance, Greg took that duty, so I just sang. David played bass and John played drums. To me, they seemed like real musicians, whereas I was totally faking it. The lyrics were written by Greg, with some eventually written by me. Looking back, I am largely embarrassed by my contribution to what otherwise would have been a solid group of musicians, but I am grateful to have had the experience.

I played my first gig with the band at Cowtown’s Westward Club (my fake ID again coming in handy.) There was no one there but the bands and their friends, but I was scared shitless. I remember talking to some girl before we went on, maybe a girlfriend of someone in one of the bands. She was talking away like this was totally normal and I played along, but all I could hear coming out of her mouth was the “Wahhwaah wahhh” sounds adults made in the Charlie Brown cartoons.

But in the end, I had a few beers—which meant four or five beers for me—to get my courage up and then went for it. I’m sure I was absolutely awful, but it seemed to go OK at the time. I’d never had the experience of playing with the band outside of our little rehearsal space and everything sounded different. Knowing people were watching certainly added a layer of anxiety. But I did it. I played a real gig in a band. No one threw a tomato. I didn’t die. Cool.

Through the magic of the internet, the Calgary Cassette Preservation Society tells me that 21st Inheritance played two shows, but I only remember one. My time in the band was short-lived, as it was mere months later that I left Calgary for New York to go to theater school, and never lived there again.

The spark from that experience in Calgary led me to start trying to teach myself to play the guitar and although I never played in a band during my time in New York, I did continue writing songs, to which I would subject my roommate and friends on a regular basis. I think back now on how kind and patient they were to allow me to share these amateurish, angst-filled songs with them.

Without telling a living soul, I played at a handful of open-mic nights in Greenwich Village and took comfort in the fact that almost everyone, like me, was absolutely terrible.

For most of my time in New York City in the early 90’s, my focus was on dance music of one kind or another. I went to the big megaclubs like Limelight and Tunnel, was into the rave scene, and threw dress-the-part disco parties with my roommate in our apartment. But by the time the city had chewed me up and spat me out in 1995, I missed guitars and found myself migrating back to rock n roll as I started anew in Toronto.

Through drunken happenstance, I met a weirdo artist who told me he played the bass and I started playing with him. I was bad, but he was truly terrible. We needed a drummer and he said he had a friend who played drums so we booked a time at a cheap rehearsal room in Kensington Market. As we walked over to the rehearsal space, this guy who was supposed to be playing the drums, named Bruce, turned to me and said “You understand that I don’t play the drums at all, right? I’m a bass player.”

Partway through our jamming, I suggested that the weirdo artist and Bruce switch instruments. Although the weirdo artist was no better on the drums, something magical happened with Bruce on the bass. I played C. He played C. I played E. He played E. Compared to the other guy, this was Entwistle-level. I knew then that I had a bass player, but was going to have to find a new drummer.

I hadn’t been in Toronto long when, through a girl I was sleeping with at the time, I found myself invited to the birthday party of a Polish stripper who made hats on the side. This party took place at a bar called Sneaky Dees. I didn’t know it at the time, but Sneaky Dees would become my home away from home for a significant portion of my time in Toronto.

By the time we got to the party, it was already in full swing and there were hardly any seats left, so I was inserted next to a skinny kid with a mop of hair who looked like he slept under a park bench. This kid, Tappy, became my best friend. We started talking and I, drunk as usual, told him I was starting a band.

Call it fabrication or manifestation as you will. One could hardly call what I had going a band, but I related this to Tappy as though this was something that was really happening and a going concern. He told me he played the drums and I told him he was in luck because we were auditioning drummers. In reality, there were no other drummers on the radar of course. He asked what we sounded like and I said like a mixture of the Police and Nirvana, which was a complete lie.

Tappy showed up for the audition and, in the same miraculous way Bruce could play the same note I did, he could keep time. When we finished the “audition” and he offered to buy us beer, that cinched it—he was part of the band.

This was the beginning of an incredible adventure. This band, Gumption (later known as GMFG), would never sell any records, never win any awards, and but for a small number of people - certainly less than 1000, would never even be heard of.

The one thing it did do was save my life.

I’d arrived in Toronto pretty raw after my time in NYC. Tappy and Bruce came along exactly when I needed friends—real friends—the most. They were both artists, open and bohemian, but ultimately I think all of us thought of ourselves as dorks cos-playing rock n rollers. Which is exactly what we were. I could really and truly be myself with these guys. They loved the same things I did. They were just as happy to stay up until 5 am listening to records as I was.

We didn’t know what we were doing, but we started playing and rehearsing. I started writing songs. We played out-of-the-way bars on Wednesday nights. Then slightly better bars on Wednesday nights. Then we got opening spots at cooler bars on the weekend. And then we headlined shows at the El Mocombo, Lee’s Palace, the Opera House, and Clinton’s, among others on Friday and Saturday nights. They definitely weren’t Maple Leaf Gardens, but we played them as though they were. The same kid who was so nervous about singing in a band that he nearly didn’t show up for the first rehearsal was now walking across the tables in the El Mocombo while playing guitar in platform shoes.

As or more important to all that, though, was the inordinate amount of time we all spent together. We rehearsed a lot, partied together, went to see other bands together, and, in the case of Tappy and me—we sporadically lived together as roommates. It was not uncommon in those days that if someone saw me on the street or in a bar they would ask “Where’s Tappy?” and more often than not the answer was “Right over there,” usually getting drinks, hitting on some girl, or bumming a cigarette.

I felt I’d found my people. I felt accepted and, yes, loved. With age, I now know these kinds of friendships are rare and valuable and to be treasured. Music was the glue that brought us together and the oyster inside which the pearl of our friendship grew.

Time, distance, and adult responsibilities mean we see each other an awful lot less these days, but the impact of these friendships will be with me forever.

On the one hand, I think it’s great that it’s so easy to record music now. Anyone can have access to a full music production studio on their laptop. You hear a lot about people like Tame Impala, Bon Iver, M83, and Blood Orange starting up musical projects on their own, in their bedrooms, which is great. But I also know that in Toronto and New York, the availability of rehearsal spaces has gone to near zero, with even properties on the edges of town or in industrial areas snapped up and repurposed for condos. This means a lot less kids are getting together in cinderblock rooms, cranking it to 11, and rocking their little hearts out. Even if none of those kids would have ended up at the top of the charts or selling out arenas, it means they are missing out on what I got—friendship, a way to express myself, socialization, and a reason to get out of bed even when things were darkest.

Until next time…

XO

🍪

Hidden Tracks

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New York City

W/O Aug 6, 2023

Greetings Earthlings,

When I was in Kindergarten, so I am told, I was a participant in a school play in which each of us played a different food. One by one, each of the children was to emerge from the curtain on the school auditorium stage in a cardboard and construction paper costume and reveal to the audience what food they were. “I’m a hamburger,” or “I’m an egg.”

When my turn came to take the stage, my costume became tangled in the curtain, and I couldn’t seem to escape. Finally, after much effort, like salmon swimming upstream, I was spat out onto the stage in front of the audience of parents and siblings, no doubt riveted by my incompetent display. Confused and exasperated, I forgot what I was supposed to be and exclaimed, “What am I anyway?”

For the record, I was a pear—adding insult to injury in light of my lifelong status as a chubby person. Typecasting.

This story came to mind last week as I attempted, yet again, to update my “headline” on Linkedin.

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Linkedin, the social media site dedicated to work. It’s owned by Microsoft, which should tell you everything you need to know about why it is hateworthy.

For those blissfully unfamiliar, imagine countless corporate drones posting business jargon every day to make themselves seem relevant and then blowing smoke up each other’s asses to confirm the circular, cliched, meaningless banter one used to be subjected to in offices, back when people were forced to work in offices.

“I’m honored to be joining XYZ Accounting Firm as their new VP of Boredom. I am excited to bring my passion for all things boring to this exciting corporate global behemoth.” That sounds great, Helen. “Chris Stevenson celebrates this.” Click.

Love it or hate it, Linkedin has become a necessary evil for those of us doomed to work for a living (I still maintain that I was switched at birth and should have been a “lady who lunches” but have yet to find the necessary DNA evidence to prove this. But I digress.)

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After losing my job in early 2022, I returned to my natural entrepreneurial tendencies and started working for myself again, which I have done for nearly half my “career,” if one can call it that.

I’ve hopscotched around in my work life, always seeking to get as close as possible to doing something creative. This is how I ended up writing, publishing, producing videos, leading social media strategy, and the like. In the 90s, I really had no idea that content creation, understanding the internet and social media, and the ability to effectively string a sentence together would end up being valuable skills in the world of marketing and advertising. But they did, and so that is the path I found myself on. I built a couple of businesses around it, and have had a couple of so-called “cool jobs” (in reality there is no such thing.)

Secretly though, I’m still the creative kid who went to theater school, played in rock n roll bands, and liked writing stories and making people laugh.

At 52, I find myself again at a crossroads. I‘ve reinvented myself many times, and it feels like the need for that is upon me again now. In the same way, I couldn’t foresee how my areas of interest in the ’90s would end up being useful skills on a resume in the 2000s, I find myself feeling around in the dark trying to make my interests and gifts (if I may be so bold) combine into something that can keep me gainfully fed and watered.

My Linkedin headline has been through no less than four iterations since losing my job and becoming a consultant. Some glib, some over-descriptive, all of them too long.

At the moment I describe myself as a “Multi-hyphenated creative consultant, producer, and strategist. Serial entrepreneur, perpetual writer, occasional musician, and multimedia dabbler. Digital enthusiast. Multitude container. Dad joke expert.” Clearly, I am trying to keep my options open. I can only imagine how this reads to Gertrude in HR. Not that I am actively looking to go back to a 9-5 gig anyway. So there, Gertrude.

So, to return to the accidentally philosophical question I posed at age 5: what am I anyway?

I’m still pear-shaped, but no longer a pear. I’m a creative person. An idea person. An entrepreneurial person. I’m in that fuzzy place between knowing what I can get paid for now and navigating to the next version of me.

I’ve been here several times before and these fuzzy moments are often filled with stress and dissatisfaction. But it has been my experience that it is often during these times that something new is born if I am brave enough to follow the path into the unknown.

It’s scary to venture into the future unknown at any age, but maybe more so as one gets older. But if the other option is to stagnate - doing more of what I have already done without variation or an interesting left turn, then I guess I will jump out of the airplane and build the parachute on the way down.

Until next time…

XO

🍪

For other creative people who might be in a similar time in their lives, here are some resources that I’ve found helpful:

1. The Creative Act: A Way of Being, by Rick Rubin

2. Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going, by Austin Kleon.

3. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull

4. The Struthless Youtube channel.

Are you a Gen-X-er who is a creative person? I’d love to hear from you. I am interested in sharing stories from those who create for a living or make a living in order to be able to create.

Hit me up in the comments below or drop me a DM on my IG if you’d be willing to chat about your experience and any advice you might have for others.

W/O Oct 9/2022

Greetings Earthlings,

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Despite my citizenship in the United Kingdom, bestowed at birth by way of being the first generation of my family to be born anywhere else, I had never set foot in the United Kingdom - or anywhere in Europe for that matter.

I lived in near abject poverty for the greater part of my youth and then became a Dad at age 27, which, despite being one of the best things that ever happened to me, also did not result in an excess of cash for things like trips to Europe.

As someone in my early 50s, time very much seems to be clipping by at a speed that is highly concerning. I have not even begun to do all the things I hope to do during my time as Chris Stevenson, and I decided to throw caution to the wind and cross this “bucket list” destination off my list (with more to come, I hope.)

Little did I know that the Queen would decide to kick the bucket shortly before my trip and, further, that her elaborate funeral would be held on my first full day in London.

Arriving at Heathrow at 8 pm London time, I climbed into a black cab only to have the driver turn around, ten minutes into the drive, and say, “Dunno how close I can get you to your ‘otel, mate. They’ve shut down most of London - never seen anyfing loike this!” This is how I ended up walking 30 minutes through the late-night streets of London, carry-on wheels clacking on cobblestones, iPhone in hand to direct me, after 10 hours of travel.

With my hotel a mere 5-minute walk from Westminster Abbey, my first day in London was a bit of a write-off as I was trapped by police lines and metal barriers no matter which way I turned. I also went the wrong way several times, thus causing me to miss the convoy with HRH’s coffin inside flying by.

I was struck by how profound and universal the outpouring was for the death of Elizabeth II. Harrod’s blacked out every single window out of respect. But even in tiny corner shops, one would see an image of the Queen in remembrance. Outside a pub, near my hotel, the chalkboard had written on it “Thank you, Ma’am, for everything.”

Once the procession was over, I decided to head back to the hotel to let the crowds clear, but was met with a new police line that had sprung up in the few hours I’d been out and about. I explained to the Bobby that I was trying to get back to my hotel, hoping he would notice my little Canadian flag pin on my knapsack and give me some kind of special treatment as part of the Empire, but no. “Dunno how long before you’ll be able to get to your ‘otel, mate. They’ve shut down most of London - never seen anyfing loike this! Maybe grabba cuppa tea until this lot are out of the way,” he said (or something to that effect), gesturing broadly to the throngs behind him making their way to the Tube with their Union Jack flags, photos of the Queen, and other royal paraphernalia clutched in hand.

I made my way to a little shop selling sandwiches and snacks and grabbed a pickle and cheese and a Diet Coke, but realized after paying that there was nowhere to sit. I was kindly gestured to sit in an empty seat at a table with two old ladies, with whom I struck up a conversation.

Fierce loyalists, they spoke with indignation about those who had shot the procession with their phones or who had dared to bring screaming children to the event. They also had no time for dissent where the Windsors were concerned. “I recognize that not everyone loves the royals, but we do, and we simply don’t want to hear that nonsense. Of course, you understand, being Canadian” one said, in between sips of tea and nibbles on a Cadbury chocolate bar. I didn’t want to further raise their ire by telling them that I was not a huge fan of monarchy in general, so I just Mmm-hmm’d while scarfing back my sarnie.

Fortunately, I made up for lost time after that first day, and while I did not see everything I’d hoped, I did see quite a lot.

Buckingham Palace was closed to the public in light of recent events, but I did stand outside. I made what I thought was a hilarious post on social media about Lindsay Buckingham, but the lacklustre response confirmed that others did not agree with my assessment where hilarity was concerned.

I was able to tour Kensington Palace, which was very interesting. Everywhere I went, I kept hearing about people being beheaded, which helped keep my interest. There was a tour group in the palace, and as they passed by me, one of the stragglers was sternly admonished by the tour leader in a clipped English accent: “I must again ask you to please stay with the group, Ernie.” I found this funny, chuckled aloud, and was shot a look that indicated to me that, had she the option, the tour guide would have had me beheaded.

The Tower of London was very interesting (lots more beheadings and murders) and, in addition to seeing the various buildings and the Queen’s - er, King’s Guard I also had the opportunity to see the Crown Jewels (insert your own joke here) which was pretty special in light of the fact that the orb, crown, and scepter had been atop Her Majesty’s casket a mere 24 hours previous. No photos permitted, though. It occurred to me that I don’t think I know anyone who owns a sceptre. Maybe I will get one.

I took in more history at the Museum of London. The part about the Black Plague stood out in light of our own recent plague, and there were more murders and beheadings to hear about. It was sometimes hard to fathom how old some of what I was seeing was. Roman stuff from AD 200, for example. What is considered old in Toronto is considered recent in New York City, and what is considered old in New York City is regarded as 15 minutes ago in London. They also had Paul Simonon’s bass guitar featured on the cover of London Calling (being smashed) and a cool exhibit on the Grime genre of electronic music.

I managed to tour Westminster Abbey, which was incredible and filled with history and amazing statues and memorials (and still more stories of murders and beheadings).

Of particular note was the fact that they placed Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I right beside each other for all eternity, despite the fact that Liz had Mary beheaded after Mary plotted to have Liz assassinated! Drama! Oliver Cromwell was also briefly buried there, but upon reinstituting the monarchy, they dug him up, hanged his already dead body, and then also put his head on a spike at the Tower of London (a bit of overkill, in my opinion. I think the spike would have sufficed. But then, I’ve always been a minimalist.)

The Museum of London had a big section on WW2, of course, and this was just one of many times that I thought about my late Grandma and how cool it would’ve been for her to be on this trip with me, having served in the Women’s Air Force and lived through the Blitz, etc. She came to mind in Trafalgar Square, which is where she told me she and her friends celebrated VE Day at the end of the war, and when I took in the Churchill War Rooms, which have been preserved exactly as they were at the end of the war. In one of the desks belonging to a senior general, they found three sugar cubes stashed away (sugar was highly rationed), which are now displayed as part of the exhibit. As a kid, my Grandma told me that during her time in the WAF, one of her jobs was to track the positions of RAF planes, turning them sideways if MIA or upside down when struck down. For some reason, that detail stuck with me. There was a memorial to the women of WW2 outside the offices of Parliament, where she came to mind again. I hope that wherever she may be now, she was looking down with approval at my devouring of British history.

I saw lots of art and fascinating objects at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Gallery - there was so much to see that I pushed myself to the point of dropping to see as much as possible.

I made time for breaks, though, including the food hall at Harrods, which I can only describe as incredible. I had sushi followed by a freshly made warm chocolate chip cookie from their in-house bakery. It was so incredible that I went back and bought a second one. As I wandered the food hall, I stumbled upon The Chocolate Room, which is a place I should never, ever, be allowed into.

In addition to the gorging described above, I also had a free full English breakfast buffet provided at my hotel every morning, and I had proper fish and chips at a pub while catching up with my friends Tom and Simon.

I also made my way to the very hip and cool Brick Lane neighbourhood, which features something like 50 different curry houses, including Aladin, where I had dinner. An older man (the Dad, I soon discovered) stands outside, welcoming passers-by in a smooth, slow, British voice; “Table for you and the lady, Sir? This voice quickly changed to a stern, no-nonsense, fast-paced one when bossing around his sons, who managed the inside of the restaurant, and snapped to attention when he spoke. Aladin is apparently a favourite of Prince, er, King Charles, and I can see why - it was delicious.

The streets of Brick Lane are covered in graffiti art, and there are many cool little shops, like a Communist bookstore and a tiny but amazing boutique chocolate shop (again, highly problematic for yours truly). It will come as no surprise that I put on six pounds (roughly half a stone) during my one week!

I managed to navigate London pretty well, despite it not being on a simple grid like Manhattan (above 14th street, anyway). I figured out the Tube very quickly and found it clean and efficient (of course, I have a low bar as a frequenter of New York’s rapidly decaying subway system).

One feels a bit stupid at having to make use of the “LOOK LEFT” and “LOOK RIGHT” notices painted on the streets to help tourists, but I was also grateful for them, as they likely saved my life a few times. I also soon learned that the “opposite side of the street” thing applied to stairs in the Tube as well, after a few days of being bewildered as to why I was like a salmon swimming upstream.

I would have kicked myself had I not taken in some theatre while on my visit. I was fortunate to be able to snag very affordable (considerably more so than Broadway) tickets to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the National Theatre - a play that is especially relevant in the United States in the current political climate - with Erin Doherty (The Crown), as Abigail. The play was exciting to watch, if in a by-the-book workmanlike fashion. The staging and set, featuring a pouring rain feature between scenes, was innovative and memorable.

I absolutely loved London and started thinking about whether I’d like to live there one day. I don’t plan on leaving New York anytime soon, but it’s fun to daydream. As I get older, my ability to pick up and start a new life in a new country seems less likely than before, however. Still, one can always hope for the day one will employ an odd transatlantic/fake British accent like Madonna had at one point.

I keep promising myself (and you!) that I will make these articles shorter and keep failing miserably. For those who made it this far, congrats!

Until next time…

XO,

🍪

I’m a pretty healthy person. Sure I could stand to lose a few (OK many) pounds. But I don’t drink, smoke, or use drugs. I exercise intermittently. I eat vegetables. I try to meditate. I floss. You get the picture.

But these past three or four years, I’ve been hit by a series of unrelated illnesses, including one I am working through right now that is most unpleasant and has knocked me on my ass for about a week (I found out I was prescribed the wrong meds after three days of taking them. So that was fun.)

It’s ironic that back when I was in my wilder years I rarely got sick except for hangovers. I guess all that alcohol in my system killed everything else, which might explain the mystery of how Keith Richards is still alive — but even ol’ Keef has quit smoking at this point.

While I’m no Keef, I also had 21 years of living the “rock n’ roll lifestyle” (only without all the pesky money and success), and as of now (2022) have accumulated nearly 15 consecutive years of sobriety and ciggie free! Well done, me! But to this day, when I feel sick — when I had Covid, for example — I have a built-in mechanism in my brain that also adds guilt and sadness into the mix. I have the sense that I did something wrong. I have to remind myself that I am now pure as the driven snow and am not to blame when nature strikes.

If you’ve been lucky and haven’t had much illness to manage, it can be easy to overlook how intensely it impacts everything else for those who aren’t as fortunate. My eyes have certainly been opened.

Being sick can be incredibly exhausting, leaving little gas in the tank for other things in a society obsessed with productivity. When you are in pain or immobilized, your energy and ability to focus are compromised.

My illnesses have thus far either been temporary or manageable with medication for the long haul. For those who deal with persistent, debilitating health issues, my hat is off to you because that must be incredibly difficult. You are truly superhuman. That you might be operating at a disadvantage, negatively impacting your quality of life through no fault of your own, can go unfairly unnoticed and unrecognized.

Likewise, I’ve developed an even greater respect for seniors, for whom health is often a constant source of struggle. I have to admit, I didn’t really consider this much when I was younger. It wasn’t that I was without empathy. I understood older people often had health issues, but how they impacted their lives was largely abstract to me.

Things younger people take for granted can be very challenging for older folks, and to make things worse, they are sometimes made to feel embarrassed or ashamed of these struggles. The way we trest older people in the western world is what is really shameful in my opinion.

When I was younger, I didn’t really understand what a delicate and sensitive machine my body is. As you get older, that is made clear. Even if you do your best to keep it running properly, it can turn on you. We all walk around with the illusion that we are in control of everything until life cracks us over the head and reminds us that we aren’t. We might think of illness as something that happens to other people. But as time goes by, every one of us will likely be walloped by illness at some point, and let’s face it, as Jim Morrison reminded us (and proved): ‘No one here gets out alive.”

Getting sick a bunch of times over the past few years has helped me reconsider what is important. I’m realizing that I might really be looking for a much simpler life. I don’t really know what that means yet, but I know I don’t ever want to go back to the 24-7 toxic stress-fest I was living in earlier this year if I can avoid it. I don’t want to be important; I want to be happy.

I’ve also realized that I need to take advantage of the time available to enjoy life and do the things I want to do. Tomorrow is not promised. The capitalistic carrot of a delightful retirement after years of slaving away will not be a reality for most of us who are not Boomers (they just lucked out in being born at the right time - no shade on them for making the most of it!) This myth is presented to young people who don’t consider that by the time they retire, they might not have the energy or wherewithal to do the things they want to do. We have to “make hay while the sun shines”, as they say in Calgary.

It’s a cliche, but in the moments I am happy and healthy, I now try to savour the hell out of them and take a mental snapshot so I can remember it when the chips are down. During my current illness, I tried transporting myself back to my recent trip to Mexico, standing on the beach at sunset, waves gently rolling in front of me, palms swaying in the breeze. This was made even more real thanks to the fever I was battling, replicating the sun’s warm rays (hey - I was making the best of a bad situation!)

I now have considerably less faith in modern medicine. It’s become clear to me over the years that, while I know they are doing their absolute best, science still hasn’t figured out a lot of stuff. You can find yourself in situations where it’s clear that doctors are throwing darts or trying to figure things out through a lengthy (and, in the country in which I currently reside, sometimes expensive) process of elimination. Not to mention that humans are known mistake-makers — like being given the wrong meds, for example.

Even with all their failings, doctors, nurses, and EMTs are doing the lord’s work, in my opinion. I go out of my way to be kind and polite to them. I can’t imagine doing their jobs — especially nurses and paramedics, who are generally the lesser paid and the ones who actually have to get their hands dirty.

Once I get through the expected periods of self-pity and anger after a tough or unpleasant experience (and god knows I’ve had my share), I try to remember to ask the question, “What can I learn from this? How can I benefit from this experience?” Even if the answer is simply that it will make me a more compassionate person, that is something valuable I can take away.

That said, I will obviously continue to do my best to avoid illness as much as humanly possible. It’s no fun and, bluntly, I’d rather be a little less enlightened and healthy than the opposite.

This latest bout has kept me sequestered in my apartment for nearly a week, creepily watching and envying those enjoying beautiful summer weather through my curtains.

Once this passes1, rather than immediately jumping back to 100mph, I hope to take a moment or two to just sit outside in the sunshine, feeling better, and thinking about how great that feels.

ICYMI

Last week’s dispatch: 51 thoughts on turning 51

As it is Stampede time in Cowtown2 (yahhhhhoooo!), here’s an essay about the time I spent under the tutelage of a methhead ex-con, hustling lemonade and sausages on the rodeo midway (no wonder I needed therapy in adulthood.)

W/O June 20/2022

Greetings Earthlings,

I didn’t bat an eye when I turned 40, but when I turned 50, I must admit I had a moment of pause. 50. Wow. There is no way around it at 50 - I’m old! All those things I’d heard older people say throughout my life, at which I’d rolled my eyes, now rang worryingly true. It really did go fast. You really do feel 35 inside. And so on.

Without further ado, here are 51 random thoughts on the occasion of my turning 51 this week, many of them clichés that will no doubt make the eyes in the heads of younger folks roll around as mine did years ago:

1. Your hair will always look best when no one is around to see it.

2. By the time you hit 50, you likely already have a few physical issues that you are dealing with. Rather than comparing notes on where to find the best street drugs, as I did in my 20s, I now found myself comparing notes on medications for an enlarged prostate. My knee flares up. And so on. I know this is only the beginning because my parents say things like “Oh-ho! Just you wait!” when I mention these things and keep me up to speed on their various ailments. I am always reminded of the quote by the great New York fashionista and eccentric Iris Apfel, now 100 years old - “By my age, anything you have two of, one of them hurts.” I can only hope that Elon Musk has something up his sleeve to prevent this seemingly inevitable decline that we all must face.

   

3. If presented with the choice between buying a thing or having an experience, I’ll take the experience every time.

4. By 50, you’ve probably realized that you can’t carry on like you used to as a wild party animal anymore, and more than likely don’t want to. In my case, I gave up drinking, smoking, and illicit substances nearly 15 years ago (best thing I ever did.) At 25, you may convince yourself that you are still a bon vivant, cigarette in one hand and drink in the other. By 50, you aren’t fooling yourself or anyone else - you are now just a middle-aged person with bad habits.

5. No matter where you are sitting, a pen will never be within easy reach when you need it.

6. Sex is not the end-all, be-all that it was in my 20s. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it as much as the next person, but it is not a 24/7 obsession like it was when I was a younger man. I’ve also come to accept, enjoy, and celebrate different kinds of relationships. While I am happy for those who are in long-term marriages and think there are likely a lot of wonderful benefits that come with that, I am glad to have experienced everything from committed long-term relationships, to “friends with benefits”, to of-the-moment rolls in the hay. All of it has been great. As long as everyone is on the same page and no one is getting hurt, I say do your thing. As Mel Brooks said, “Sex is like pizza. Even when it’s bad, it's still pretty good."

7. Roughly 30% of your adult life is spent filling in forms.

8. There are a lot of really broken, unpleasant, and unkind people in the world. Rather than get into battles with these people, I have found that the best possible course of action is to simply avoid their presence.

9. Yacht rock1 and Steely Dan are no longer enjoyed ironically, but sincerely.

10. I am slowly coming to realize that I am likely going to be pear-shaped forever. My tendency toward the Winnie the Pooh body type was a source of much self-criticism and angst in my younger years. As time went on, though, I came to realize that there were plenty of people who still were willing to get it on with me despite this (and some, incredibly, saw it as a plus!) Rock-hard abs are great and all, but I’ve found that if you can make someone laugh or feel special, you can often successfully get into their pants (and more importantly, their hearts) without giving up cookies. Best of all worlds.

    

11. Nothing and no one is ever going to be more important in my life than my daughter, Emma. Raising a kid (half the time) on my own wasn’t easy, especially when I was young and poor and had no family to help me in the city I lived in. I remember vividly all the times I had to carry Emma, her stroller, and all her kid gear up endless steps in the Toronto subway system (escalators always shut off, elevators rare) and out into the harsh Canadian winter to push the damn thing through the snow. But I also remember all the wonderful summer days at the amusement park on Toronto’s Centre Island, in the swimming in the pool in my building (where I had to play the role of Dolphiny, a friendly dolphin who loved to carry little girls around on his back), and smuggling candy from Sugar Mountain into the movie theaters. For better or worse, Emma and I are a lot alike, and the relationship we have now, as a young adult, is the most precious thing in my life. Our constant ongoing banter in texts, which includes everything from serious conversations about life to sharing hilarious moments in our day to music and film recommendations, means the world to me. This was the most recent recommendation that was shared with me (liked it!):

12. Politeness will open doors, options, and opportunities that were seemingly not there before.

13. Money is a cyclical problem and solution. My guess is that people who say “money isn’t everything” have never been really poor. They say that money doesn’t bring happiness, but I remember the real joy and pride I felt when I got a new, higher-paying job and was able to rent a two-bedroom apartment where Emma would have her own room, and I would no longer have to sleep on a sofa bed in the living room. Money may not buy happiness, but its absence sure as hell can bring misery.

14. That said, being really rich doesn’t make people any smarter or happier than anyone else. In my exposure to the super-rich, I’ve found there is often a general air of annoyance and irritation about them, sometimes matched with an insatiable need for validation and ego-building.

15. There is almost always some way around rules. It usually involves paying someone to make the rule go away or filling out a form (see item 7, above).

16. When I was young, I would often make decisions based on “what will be the best story later on.” While this did result in some great stories, this was not the best decision-making matrix. Instead, when presented with a decision to do or not do something now, the question I ask myself is based on something I read that the Dalai Lama said: “Will the action I am about to take result in my long-term happiness?” The key phrase is “long term” - instant gratification feels good, but generally comes at a long-term cost. This is one of the hardest things for human beings to do, and I imagine I will struggle with it forever. I do keep getting better at it, though!

    

17. In the 9-5 world, the people who tell you that job titles and offices don’t really matter are always people with fancy titles and nice offices. Don’t be fooled. Job titles do matter - because when your current job becomes unbearable, and you need to bounce, your next job will be predicated on your current title.

18. By the time you hit 50, everything you see, hear, or read reminds you of something else. I’m not a religious person, but this line from Ecclesiastes rings truer with each passing day: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Everything - art, fashion, music, books, ideas - is a reaction to or riff on something that came before.

19. If you didn’t enjoy high school, the 9-5 world might not be for you. One only needs to read the posts on LinkedIn to see that most people never evolve beyond wanting to be accepted, conform, and be one of the “cool kids.”

20. The ability to communicate well can overcome almost any other perceived weakness people might have of you.

21. Everything is a racket or a scam. Higher education? Racket. Politics? Racket. Religion? Racket. It’s better for your mental health to shrug and accept this with humour than to spend your life raging about it.

22. It’s hard to connect the dots of your life when you are younger. Everything is new and chaotic, and things can seem random. Sometimes they are random, but by the time you hit 50, you can look back and see how your choices led you to where you are now.

23. If “Lost in Music” by Sister Sledge comes on and you are not immediately compelled to turn it up and start dancing, there is something deeply wrong with you.

24. Humour is a gift and a tool. It can be a weapon, an equalizer, a kindness, an antidepressant, a flirtation, a commiseration, an aspiration, or a bitterness. If you are funny, use your gift for good and not evil.

25. If you don’t have a plan for your day, month, year, or life, someone else will. Refuse to be a supporting character in someone else’s story.

26. There are many things, maybe even most things, that are beyond our control. Accepting that is important. But understanding that the meaning we place on the things we experience, the stories we tell ourselves, and the eyes through which we choose to see the world are the things that determine our experience in life.

27. Nobody really knows what they are doing, and everyone is making it up as they go along. When I was young, even though I was (and remain) distrustful of authority, I did generally think that someone out there knew what they were doing and was keeping things on a steady track. As you get older -especially if you start getting into the orbit of people in charge and with power - you realize everyone is pretending they know what they are doing. Some are better at this than others, but there are a lot of really dumb people in positions of power.

28. Learning to let go of resentment towards others is essential to personal growth and happiness. It can be difficult, but it is essential. Even more difficult and important is accepting and loving yourself. This work is never done.

29. Getting into my 50s means mortality is harder to avoid thinking about. As unpleasant as it is, acknowledging in my mind that my time is limited and running out is also a great gift. I need to do and see the things I want to do and see without delay. As is within my means and power, I intend to do so. Memento Mori.

    

30. It’s always been modern times.2

31. Without self-awareness and checks and balances in place, the internet is like alcohol or drugs - it amplifies who you already are and what you already believe.

32. I gave up giving a shit what anyone thinks of me a long, long time ago. As I’ve aged, though, this has moved from a place of rebellion and anger to one of courage and placidity amid the noise and haste3. The latter is better.

33. The ability to choose how to respond to thoughts and feelings rather than to be controlled by them is key to a better life. I can’t remember who came up with the concept, but the idea that thoughts and feelings are like passing weather really resonated with me.

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34. There is a question on one of the dating apps that says something like “Would you rather be weird or normal?” 99% of the people who answer this say they would rather be weird, but almost none of them are. If you’ve truly been an outsider, you always wonder what it would have been like to be “normal.” It certainly seems like an easier path. Being “weird” does have its perks, though (after nearly crushing you in your youth, that is.)

35. I often think fondly of past lovers and sometimes have the impulse to send them a note and tell them how much they meant to me, but I never do because it would be weird to say things like “Your affection for me helped me to learn to care about myself”; “The sex I had with you was some of the best in my life”; “I’m sorry I hurt you, but I needed to be alone for awhile and fix some things - I still have affection and admiration for you” out of the blue so many years later. But I sometimes wonder if other people are also thinking past thoughts, negative or positive, about me and not saying them.

36. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” - George Carlin.

37. The impact of the music of your youth can never be superseded by the music you learn to love later on. When we are young, especially in our teens and 20’s, everything is new and emotionally overwhelming (for good and for bad). When that song from your teen years comes on in shuffle mode, it triggers a deeply emotional part of your brain. While new music can be enjoyable and meaningful, it will never have the same impact as the soundtrack to growing up.

38. For much of my life, there seemed to be an endless parade of people telling me that I could not do what I wanted to do, or that it was impossible. It has been my experience that it is highly beneficial to ignore these people and go ahead with your plans.

39. It’s not the overt stories that entertainment and media tell us that are dangerous; it’s the unsaid ones. The repeated presentations of “the way it is” as a given. The absence of those in one minority or another being represented. The false depiction of love and romance. The way the experience of childhood is presented. Taken at face value and without a healthy dose of skepticism and resistance, these false realities can be toxic. Buyer beware.

40. The most dangerous and radical thing you can do is to tell the truth.

41. Even with all its pain, misery, violence, and stupidity, the world is really an incredible and marvellous place. It is easy to forget what a miracle it is that we are here at all. They say there is a 1 in 400 trillion chance of being born a human being. We all already won the lottery. Every sunset, kiss, great song, meal, and laugh is a great gift. I am trying to remember to savour these things.

42. “Where your focus goes, your energy flows.”

43. Dress codes of any kind, for any reason, are stupid.

44. It is important to read a bunch of banned books when you are growing up (or later, if you haven’t gotten around to it.) You don’t have to agree with them, but it is good to hear and understand the voices of dissent and subversion.4

    

45. Sometimes a long walk in the park is the cure for what ails you. Listen to birds chirp. Watch kids play. Feed a duck. Breathe deeply. It will be OK.

46. If the way things are decided at your workplace is by the loudest voice in the room, I suggest seeking another workplace.

47. If someone on a dating site has any version of “If you can’t accept me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” in their profile, run, don’t walk, the other direction. The expectation that one should be able to behave at their worst without consequence is narcissistic and psychopathic. Get outta here with that bullshit.

48. Don’t give up. Don’t make long-term decisions based on short-term data. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

49. True friends are rare. You might know a lot of people, and they might be nice people, but when you are down and out, there are only so many people who will step up. Most people come and go in your life, and that’s OK. Sometimes we are meant to meet and be in each other’s lives for a while and then continue onward. When you find those people who are true-blue friends, though, you have to work to make sure they know they are appreciated. I am sometimes not good at this and keep trying to get better at it.

50. Every day is a new chance to move an inch closer to becoming your idealized version of yourself, as you define it. All day, every day, you will be presented with choices that will either nudge you slightly closer or further away from the life you want. Choose wisely. Course correct as necessary. Be kind to yourself when you fuck up, which you will - often.

51. Pizza is the perfect food. This is not a debate; it is a fact.

Recommended:

I can’t remember where I Shazammed (that’s a verb now, right?) this from, but I like it a lot. I was surprised to discover that it was released in 1999! I’d never heard it before and thought it was new. It’s a slow build from a seemingly sparse song to a full-on disco vibe. And the theme of time seemed fitting for this particular blog. Enjoy!

Of course, being queer1 means one is perpetually coming out. Every job, every new friend who doesn’t already know, etc., requires another coming out. But I’m talking about the ubiquitous “big moment” when one pronounces their sexual identity to the world at large — something straight people never have to do.

I think for most people, there are essentially three times one comes out: family, friends, and the rest of the world. In my case (counting on my hands here), I think I have come out at least seven or eight times, not including coming out to myself, which was its own whole ball of wax.

The first time I remember taking an interest in a girl in “that way” was in sixth grade, when a newly bosomy, brace-faced, red-headed Mormon girl became my first kiss in the field outside my elementary school.

This was a momentous and confusing experience in itself (obviously, I had no idea what I was doing kissing-wise or what to do with a girl that way in general), but there was also something troubling me. Why was it that sometimes I had that same funny feeling about certain boys in my class? Although I recognized this was happening, the sheer panic at realizing it sent me into so much anxiety that I pushed that deep into the back of my mind, doing my ongoing best to pretend that it wasn’t happening. You think he’s cool, is all. You just wish you could be like him. That’s all it is (narrator: but that was not all it was.)

There were certainly signs that I might not be the straightest person in the world.

Throughout elementary school, I had always hung out with girls. They were smarter, more sophisticated, and less brutish than the boys, and, as a person who cared little for sports or beating people up, I really didn’t have much in common with the boys. I would often be the only boy amongst a gaggle of girls. As a child in elementary school, I wasn’t really interested in any of these girls beyond being friends, but I would sometimes have a little crush on one or the other. Of course, I was simultaneously experiencing crushes on some of the boys. Like I said — confusing.

I also had a penchant for unusual clothing choices, and my musical tastes in grade six were largely made up of pop music, with a focus on the likes of Culture Club, Eurythmics, Duran Duran, and the like — “girl music”, in other words.

I had wall-to-wall posters of Culture Club in my room, T-shirts, etc. I thought Boy George was really cool, but it was the blonde, tall drink of water guitarist Roy Hay that caught my attention for other reasons.

Openly liking a band like Culture Club was actually a little dangerous in a city like Calgary. I was once punched in the head on the C-train at the age of 12 by a jean-jacketed hoodlum who made it clear that he did not appreciate my Culture Club T-shirt.

As a young person, one tries hard to absorb the social codes surrounding them. In Calgary, in the mid-’80s, it was clear to me that being gay was not ok.

There were older boys in my neighbourhood who would openly laugh and brag about going “gay-bashing.” One of them would sit on a bench as “bait” in a park that was a known place where gay men cruised for sex, which was common in those days. When a man would approach, the rest of them would descend on him, beating him up and stealing his money. There were never any repercussions for this activity because the incidents were never reported to the police. Many of these men were closeted and feared this information ever getting out, and the police were as likely to laugh at them as help them in that day and age, especially in a place like Alberta, where people were openly racist and homophobic — to the point that it felt normal to me at the time. I didn’t agree with it or think it was nice, but I just accepted that that’s how the world must be.

The outer world confirmed in me that I must never acknowledge or act upon these feelings about other boys - to myself or anyone else. The world was hostile to people like that, and I needed to protect myself.

I was fortunate. I could “pass.” I’ve never been swishy or effeminate2, and I genuinely had an interest in girls, so I could just take that easy path. Everyone assumed I was straight, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell them otherwise. Throughout my junior high and high school years, I would see what gay men who could not “pass” went through at school (and at home), and I felt lucky not to endure that myself.

In junior high, I developed a friendship with a young man I will call Terry. Terry’s family was wealthy. They lived in a fancier part of our suburb, had a bigger, newer house, and even had a trampoline and speakers built into the outside of the house (this was fancy), so we could jump on the trampoline while listening to his favourite music (synth-pop like Blancmange and early Depeche Mode, for example).

Terry was effeminate. He was slender (unlike my pear-shaped self), tidy, and had a swish in his walk and a lilt in his voice that gave him away (“A little light in the loafers,” I heard an adult say about him, when he thought no kids were listening).

In addition to being in the hostile world that was 1980’s Alberta, his family’s strict religious beliefs were a whole other layer he had to contend with.

But Terry just kept everything on lockdown. He and I never spoke about it. It was a version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” that he operated with his family, the world, and himself.

All of this subtext might explain why we found friendship. Terry knew he was safe with me, and he could show me the dance routines he’d worked out to his favourite songs on the trampoline, confident that I would think they were great, not shameful. Terry was the first of many closeted gay friends I would have over the years.

At home, there was a more tolerant point of view. I paid close attention to every infrequent word ever spoken on the subject.

My Dad once mentioned in passing having a gay work colleague in the 60s. The friend was shunned by some of the people my Dad worked with, he told me, but he didn’t mind being friendly with him. “It’s not like anything was going to happen,” he said. To my Dad, this was just a passing story at the dinner table (I can’t remember how it came up), but to me, it meant that while largely unacceptable, some people could be tolerant of queerness.

But it was my Grandmother who seemed to have some sixth sense about me. I think she may have known that I wasn’t straight3 before I did. When the two of us would be on our own, driving around in her silver K-car, she would often seemingly intentionally bring up the subject, talking about the gay men she’d been in plays with while serving in WW2, for example.

Her position was made clear to me whenever she spoke on the subject — they can’t help the way they are, there is nothing wrong with it, and people should just let them live in peace.

I decided this is how I felt about “them” as well. My Grandma taking the time to say these things to me had a really helpful and positive impact on me, and I never got to thank her for it. Many, many years later, I learned that my Grandmother had a particular gay man in her life who played a very important role, but that is another story for another time.

By eighth grade, I had left pop music behind and was channelling all my anger and frustration at the world that surrounded me into a newfound passion for punk rock.

I also started secretly having anxiety attacks around this time. I don’t think I have ever told anyone about them until recently, when I mentioned this period of my life to my daughter. This is also when my depression kicked in, likely inherited from the same Grandmother I mentioned earlier and something that would affect the rest of my life.

I had no words to explain how I was feeling and didn’t really try. I was tired and sad and angry a lot of the time, but so were most of my friends. We were teenagers, after all. But I was creative and funny, and I used humour to win friends, make people like me, and, in a way, to keep myself afloat. You either laugh or you cry, as the saying goes.

I started binge eating at this time and discovered alcohol and drugs, resulting in a weight gain of about 50 pounds in a year.

In ninth grade, I took to wearing black most of the time, in a uniform of black jeans, black Vans or Doc Martins, and a punk rock T-shirt with a plaid flannel shirt over top. This would later become known as the Grunge look, but to the 300-or-so kids that went to punk shows in Calgary in the ’80s, this was just how we dressed.

The general feeling I had about the world at this time was that it was trying to destroy me. I had a strange instinct to cocoon my inner self until it was safe to reemerge. Even now, it’s hard to put this into words. But numbing out with food, drugs, and alcohol seemed to help me detach from a reality I didn’t want to be in.

While punk rock gave me an outlet for my anger, it was also not a world that was friendly to queer people. In fact, there was an almost macho undercurrent that ran through it that manifested in misogyny and homophobia in some quarters.

Many years later, I would discover that several of the members of some of my favourite punk bands were queer, but they were closeted at the time. I think if I had known that SNFU’s Chi Pig or Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould were queer, it might have helped me to accept myself sooner. I don’t blame them for not coming out at the time — it would have been extremely hard to do that and simultaneously be in that punk rock world — but it’s for this reason that I make a point of mentioning my sexuality, sobriety, etc., openly, honestly, and frequently on social media. I may not be famous like they were, but if some bi kid sees that I’m bi on Instagram and that I seem to be having an OK life, then it’s worth it.

By the time I was in high school, everything changed again. I started going to bars (illegally and underage) with new friends where queer people were living in an alternate universe where they could dance, dress up, and be themselves (at least late at night while the bar was open).

To this point, though, but for some nudity based on “dares” with a neighbourhood boy (we did quite a lot of “daring”), I had kept in the straight lane. And while I did some smooching with girls (generally while three sheets to the wind at parties), I would graduate high school a virgin — the first of several “late bloomer” moments in that department.

By the time I graduated high school, within the limits of what was then possible in Calgary, I was being exposed to new people, ideas, and ways of living at the nightclubs I was frequenting (underage) and the people I met through college in the theatre program.

While I was nowhere near ready to start acknowledging my bisexuality to myself or anyone else, it was helpful for me to be exposed to people who were queer and living happy-ish lives (as much as that was possible for queer people in Alberta in the late 80s).

Around this time, a few of my male friends came out and a few others openly “experimented”, which seemed a mixture of brave and foolhardy to me at the time.

I was in no way homophobic or judgmental about queer people, yet I couldn’t allow myself to relax and accept myself. I held some deep, unspoken and confused beliefs that being open about this would somehow hinder my future possibilities, or result in a black mark against me one day. The world seemed a very hostile place for LGBTQ+ people at the time – because it was.

There was a massive homophobic backlash against queer people at the time, resulting from fear driven by the AIDS crisis. The general attitude in the media in the late 80s was that being gay was bad, but being bi was worse. Bi men were blamed for causing the “gay plague” (as the media frequently called AIDS at the time) to “transfer” from the world of IV drug users and homosexuals (implicitly dispensable) to the straight world (implicitly of value).

In all the television programs and films of the time, bi men, in particular, were always evil, drug addicts, murderers, liars, etc. They were generally dead by the end of the program, much to everyone’s approval and satisfaction.

The general attitude amongst both gay and straight people at the time was that all bi people were dirty perverts who would sleep with anything that moved and were incapable of monogamous relationships, which is, of course, ridiculous. And now, through the new lens of understanding “slut shaming”, one might also respond with: so what? As long as everyone is a consenting adult and no one is being misled or hurt, what business is it of anyone else?

During my last few years in Calgary, I had a few flings with girls, finally losing my virginity at the age of 18 — something I’d been trying to do since 15 (it wasn’t easy back then for those of us who shopped in the Husky section.)

I had one semi-serious girlfriend during this time. A curvy girl with fire-engine red hair and her own apartment, she taught me some essential information about the female anatomy (for which I remain grateful to this day). From my naive point of view at the time, she was eyebrow-raisingly sexually adventurous. In later years, I would come to realize she was really garden-variety in her sexual tastes.

Once I found out I’d been accepted to theater school in New York, I broke it off with her in a very clumsy teenage kind of way that, looking back, I wish I had done differently. But we were both kids. I was 19, she was 22 — an “older woman,” I joked.

Although I was very overweight and a bit of a mess style-wise at the time, I did have a few opportunities to experiment with men during my time in Calgary, but either I wasn’t attracted to those who were interested in me, or I was so deep in denial that I felt I dared not act upon it.

When I arrived in New York in 1990, my young, inexperienced mind was about to be blown (along with other parts of me).

Getting away from Mom’s home cooking, along with all the walking one does in NYC and being perpetually impoverished (and, truthfully, favouring the purchase of alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes over food) meant I rapidly lost 35 pounds. I was still not slim by any stretch — I still drank a lot of beer and really liked ice cream — but I moved into a seemingly acceptable category that gave me a lot more opportunities with girls and, occasionally, boys.

The fact that I was in a school filled with young, horny, frequently intoxicated people in their early 20s certainly helped. Much drinking and drug experimentation was going on, leading to some questionable activities among friends.

On the first day of school orientation, we were introduced to the older kid assigned to give us a tour of the school. He stood at the end of the hall in the main entrance to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and announced, “Hi, I’m Gary. I’ll be showing you around the school today, and yes, I’m gay.” The crowd of students applauded enthusiastically at this last bit of information. I was clearly not in Kansas anymore. This would never have happened at any school I attended at home. I thought it was incredibly cool that he was so open about it and, more importantly, that everyone else was so supportive.

Where the fairer sex was concerned, I definitely made up for lost time in the early 90s, tomcatting around and leaping into proverbial rolls in the hay with this girl and that, all of them equally enthusiastic, as one is at 20 years old.

I had one steady girlfriend from Boston for a while, with a strong Bostonian accent, natural Irish red hair (red hair seemed to be a thing for me back then), big hoop earrings, usually chewing gum, and a whole lot of attitude. “Don’t staaaht wit me Boo-boo,” she’d say, waving her finger, when I would try to get on top of her at an inopportune moment (like at school, for example), which I was perpetually trying to do.

In my first year in school in New York, I went to see a movie by myself for the first time. I felt quite self-conscious as I sat in the then-new Angelika Film Center, waiting for the film to begin. I asked a few friends if they wanted to see the film with me, but no one was interested in this weird arthouse film about gay street hustlers, Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho”, starring Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix.

On a family vacation some years earlier, I had somehow managed to see the film “Dog Fight”, also starring River Phoenix, and this was one of the moments I knew there was no denying my potential for attraction to both women and men. When I heard that River was starring in “…Idaho” and played a gay character, I knew I had to see it.

“My Own Private Idaho” was an early signifier of change in the portrayal of queer characters in film and TV, featuring not only an honest and, for the time, shocking representation of gay sex but also in the representation of gay life and love, including the unrequited variety.

The now-famous campfire scene in which Mike tries to awkwardly profess his love for Scott, which was reportedly improvised by the two leads, was so visceral that it felt as though the audience held its breath. Many Gen-Xers had experienced conversations like this, but we’d never seen it on film.

I walked out of the theater a changed person. Despite the film being about people outside my experience — street hustlers — there was a deep truth it held for me. Maybe even more importantly, it felt like I might not need to hide part of myself forever.

Yet I would still not be fully open about my sexuality for years to come. The stigma around bi men remained in place (and still does today). Straight women would generally not date a bi man, and some gay men also took issue with bi men.

In the past, I’ve been told matter-of-factly that bisexuality “doesn’t exist” by several gay men, the idea being that gay men who cannot accept their sexuality claim to be bi instead. This is confounding logic to me. My whole crisis was the fact that I felt the world demanded that I choose between men or women when I had the potential to be attracted to either. I would have 100% preferred to be either straight or gay rather than being bi — no one seemed to be cool with bi people.

As the ’90s progressed and Gen-X took center stage in pop culture, things began to change. Bi-sexuality started popping up here and there, and, for a change, it wasn’t all negative. In 1993, in an interview with the LGBTQ+ magazine The Advocate, Kurt Cobain stated he “probably could be bisexual.” This sentence, vague and noncommital as it was, jumped off the page for me. Bisexuality was briefly even a little bit hip in some quarters.

During periods of singledom in New York, I would start experimenting a bit more with men I would meet on surreptitious trips to nightclubs on my own, always well under the influence, for courage.

I experienced New York’s early 90’s gay culture and learned more about gay history and the gay world, which was then separate and distinct from mainstream culture. The idea that RuPaul, then a New York “club kid”, would one day be a household name, or that drag queens would go mainstream, would have seemed insane at the time.

I now finally accepted the truth about myself, but didn’t share this with anyone. I continued to have crushes on both men and women. I was intimate with both, but only had open relationships with women. Unlike the negative stereotype about bisexual men, I never cheated on any of my serious partners.

The first time I remember telling anyone I was bisexual was to the other guys in my rock n roll band in Toronto, to which I’d moved from NYC in 1995. I felt entirely safe with them; I knew they were not judgmental people, both artists, and I guessed they wouldn’t really care. I was right. A handful of friends knew this about me at the time. It became an open secret with some and remained a real secret with others, who I worried might be less accepting.

When I became a dad, I did my best to try to be what I thought a dad should be. I got married (lasted eight months - long story), went back into the closet about my bisexuality, and tried my best to be something I wasn’t.

When the marriage fell apart, I again accepted my bisexuality and told a few more people. I dated women and sometimes men, keeping the latter quiet except for a few very close, trusted friends.

About 10 years later, after some on-the-down-low flings with dudes and several relationships with some amazing women, I found myself single and newly sober.

One of the tried and true clichés of sobriety is the phrase “our secrets keep us sick.” At 37, I at last allowed myself to start openly dating women and men with the intention of finding the right person for me, no matter their gender.

I met a guy and fell in love. I didn’t want to keep secrets from my family and friends anymore.

My daughter was twelve years old, and I didn’t want her to think I was keeping anything from her or that I thought being queer was wrong. I wanted to exemplify that it was OK to really be yourself. I wanted her to know the real me.

One afternoon, before we went swimming, I sat her down and said I needed to tell her something. Even with all this dedication to truth, I still couldn’t bring myself to come out as bi, and thought that might confuse things further, so I told her I was gay.

This was one of the scariest moments of my life. I was worried she would be angry or upset or not want to be around me anymore. She sat quietly for a second and said, “Huh, cool. OK. Can we go swimming now?” Which is the best possible thing she could have said. In reality, I think she was still processing this information. It’s a lot to take in. But it was clear to me that she was ready to accept me as I was, and wouldn’t love me any less, which is all I’d hoped for.

I then came out (as gay) to my parents and brother, who, fortunately for me, were totally cool about it. I’m very, very lucky to have a kind, progressive, liberal, non-religious family. I’ve seen firsthand the damage done to queer men rejected by their families.

Then I came out on Facebook (as gay) to an entirely positive reaction — because I have great friends.

Finally, shortly after my first serious, known-to-the-world relationship with a man ended, in my 40s, I came out to the world (again on Facebook) as what I have been all along — bisexual. There was considerably less fanfare than the first time around, but I felt enormous relief that at long last, I’d said what needed to be said.

I can’t help it any more than the colour of my eyes and, now, after all I’ve been through, wouldn’t change it.

Since then, I’ve mostly dated guys, in part because the stigma around bisexual men with straight women remains unchanged, whereas gay men seem to have come to realize that bisexuals do, in fact, exist, and that, no, we aren’t going to run off with the first skirt that passes by while we are in a relationship with them.

For many years after coming out, I generally referred to myself as “queer”, a reclaimed slur that now (for some) acts as an umbrella term for everyone who isn’t straight. It seemed easier and avoided some of the hassles that come with being bi and male.

Over the last handful of years, I have embraced referring to myself as bisexual, including on dating apps, where I am often the lone out bi male in my age group.

Over the course of my 50+ years, I’ve migrated from a two to a four, and then to a solid 3 on the Kinsey Scale. I remain open to the possibility that it could migrate again.

Based on my personal experience and interactions with others, I think we all land somewhere on this spectrum, and that there are a heckuva lot of people who land somewhere between two and four but keep it to themselves. The large number of “DL” (on the down low) bi men on dating apps, many likely with girlfriends and wives at home, bears this out.

I still don’t know, in person, any other openly bisexual men of my age. I am fortunate to know some really great gay men. I am now a member of some groups on Facebook for bi people, which has helped me to feel less like I am the only openly bi Gen-X man on earth.

I am encouraged and impressed with younger people and how much more accepting and understanding they are about sexuality on a spectrum. Unlike my generation and the ones before me, those who are bi, pan, or fluid in younger generations seem to be represented in large numbers.

While there will always be those who hate or degrade those who are not like them, it feels to me that the next generation has already accepted that sexuality is individual and on a spectrum. It’s just not a big deal to most Gen Zs. For this reason, coupled with the changes we have seen in LGBTQ+ media representation, I don’t think the vast majority of young bi men will have to endure years of conflict and worry as I did. They can simply be who they are, in full. Which is exactly how it should be, whether it takes 40 years or 14.

W/O May 23/2022

Greetings Earthlings,

About four (five?) days ago, I started feeling a little under the weather. Tired turned to exhausted. Then a headache appeared. Then very painful stomach cramps, followed by excessive sweating and lightheadedness.

As loyal readers will know, I quit drinking, smoking, and other bad habits over 15 years ago, but essentially, I felt like I had a brutal hangover.

I am in the midst of getting a new venture off the ground after having lost my job some time ago, and I had meetings to power through and emails that absolutely had to go out. Once I got through those, though, I collapsed into a useless heap.

I started living like a house cat. I would slumber for 10 hours at night, wake up, and by the time I had showered and dressed, that activity would have me so drained that I would need a nap. I would end up sleeping two or three hours of the day, then do the full 10 hours again at night.

After the first day, I did a Covid test just to be sure - negative. Unfortunately, despite being triple vaxxed, I’ve had Covid once, so I know what it feels like. This didn’t feel like it at all, but I checked again at the three-day mark, as I know from my own experience that Covid can let itself in and hang out for a while before it announces itself. Negative again.

These were a pretty miserable three days. I had so little energy that doing something as simple as loading the dishwasher felt like it took a Herculean effort. I lost my appetite (very rare and foreign to me!) I had a headache all the time, so music was not desirable, and I was so out of it that the best I could hope for in terms of entertainment was tripe like “The World’s Worst Roommate” or Youtube videos because I had neither the strength nor will to pay attention to anything more challenging.

I started to subsist on a selection of “as plain as possible” foods to try and appease my angry stomach, with varying degrees of success. Reading made the headache worse, but even I could not escape the news from Texas.

I didn’t leave my apartment for four days, and my communications with the outside world dwindled to shares on FB and texts from my daughter and mum each checking in sporadically to confirm I was still alive (I was.)

About midday yesterday, I started to feel better. I tried some scrambled eggs and toast, got really daring, and used vegan margarine on the toast and threw a spoonful of Parmesan into the eggs. Seemed to go OK. I was able to watch an arthouse film (minimal subtitles - brain still not there yet.)

This morning, I woke up with some light stomach pains and a very mild headache, but considerably better than I have been since the start of this saga. Emotionally and intellectually, like many, I feel heavy from everything going on.

I risked an orange and coffee for breakfast. The orange was incredible, juicy and bursting with citrusy flavour. The smell of the coffee was almost a religious experience after not having any for so long.

Then I really decided to get crazy and leave my apartment. Not just leave, but go for a walk in Central Park - like, exercise.

Leaving my apartment, I was reminded of films where you see a character emerge from prison or gulag, dazed and squinting in the sunlight, unsure of what to do with themselves.

New York City was alive. The tourists are back in full force, and I didn’t even mind them. It was wonderful sunny weather, and the park was filled with people making the most of the holiday today. Kids running around with ice cream smeared on their faces; old people sitting on benches; people playing baseball being cheered on by their friends and family in the stands. The horses and carriages clip-clopping around the park; the 20-somethings listening to hip-hop, smoking weed and flirting and giggling with each other. The cyclists zooming around, the joggers plodding, and the tourists snapping photos every which way. All of them having a wonderful time.

In light of my illness and the events in this country over the past week, this simple experience was like a life-affirming tonic. Music was back in my ears, and the sun was on my face. Lovers still entwined, kids still kids, the park’s squirrels still busy and serious in their pursuit of nuts.

There are unspeakable horrors in the world, it’s true. And there are times when life doesn’t seem like it has much to offer in the way of joy, like when one is feeling sick.

Yet, the world is out there, turning. If you look for it, you notice there is considerably more good than bad. Most people are kind and good. They just might not be interesting to the media - social or otherwise. You aren’t going to hear 100 times a day about a man who chased after a young woman after she left her sunglasses on a park bench, which I saw first-hand.

I’m not suggesting we pretend that horrible, devastating things aren’t happening. They obviously are, and those of us who care must stand up and be counted. But I think it is important, especially now, that we also remember what we are standing for as much as against.

The absence of many of life’s simple joys during my short illness and then being able to revisit those pleasures thereafter makes me think that the act of joy, of knowing in our hearts what goodness looks and feels like, is essential to us all if we are to avoid losing ourselves entirely.

W/O May 15/2022

I am a gardener.

I don’t own the garden, I only tend to it. I do get to keep whatever grows - or share it with others as I see fit.

Others may have bigger, more beautiful, or more bountiful gardens. Those are not my gardens, however.

Each of us inherits a certain patch of ground, and we must do our best to work with it. Some might be handed a small patch filled with giant boulders and in an environment of blistering heat, while others may be more fortunate and get a larger plot in ideal conditions for growth, or inherit a tree grown by a relative many years ago that supplies apples every year.

Spending too much time worrying about the gardens of others is counterproductive, though. It steals time I could be working on my own garden, and there is nothing good that comes from endlessly looking at other gardens (on Gardengram, for example), which makes me feel less enthusiastic or proud of my own. I learned this the hard way in my 13th-30th years of gardening.

For this reason, I choose carefully the other gardeners with whom I spend time. The gardeners I have chosen to have in my life are a small group. We celebrate each other’s gardening achievements and empathize and help where possible when things go wrong. We know it is silly to judge someone by the state of their garden, since they are always in a state of flux (the person, the garden, and everything else, for that matter)

Ultimately, though, while empathy and help from others are nice when available, I know the reality is that minding my garden is my responsibility.

One thing about gardening that is hard to accept when you are new at it (and even later on) is that gardening, in the long run, often amounts to suffering and generally ends in death. I know this might sound pretty bleak, but I also have good news.

We don’t have to suffer through our gardening experience if we choose not to. This isn’t easy. Sometimes things can seem pointless when everything you grow either dies or is eaten. Nothing in the garden is permanent!

The trick, though, is to try and fall in love with the process of gardening, rather than the outcome, and to be grateful that we are getting the opportunity to garden at all. I know, I know - easy to say and hard to do.

There are some gardeners who grow their patches to incredible sizes. They work every waking hour on them, always rushing from one type of plant to the next in a hurry to keep up with everything involved in managing such a big patch of land and so many plants. They proudly boast of their latest addition to their garden on GardenIn to boost their self-worth. At the end of their lives, they might realize they were so busy chasing “bigger” and “more” and trying so hard to impress a bunch of people they don’t really know that they missed the joy of tending the garden - the sweet smell of the flowers; watching bees do their part; the cherry blossoms arriving to signal the start of a new cycle, or the sweet taste of a snap pea in mid-summer.

Of course, we have to take our part in the success of the garden seriously and put in the effort - maybe even a little ingenuity in terms of where we place the sprinkler or what plants we place next to each other. Even more importantly, we need to be on the lookout for weeds or pests that might threaten the garden’s success, and stay committed to the ongoing attention the plants require - making sure we don’t get distracted and forget to look after them. Sometimes we can be our own worst pests.

We also have to manage our expectations. We might have a great crop one year, but that doesn’t mean the next year will be the same. We may have a fond memory of a particular part of the garden that was lost and never regained its glory, and want to chase that past experience endlessly. If we can’t accept that impermanence and loss are part of the experience of gardening, we can become bitter or resentful, which in turn can lead to us neglecting the plants we have in front of us. Pretty silly when you think about it - letting some nonexistent plants of the past ruin the experience of the plants of the now, which are real and do exist.

If we know there is a problem in the garden, and things are not going well, we have to face the reality of this problem and address it. Trying to pretend the issue isn’t there or only looking at the nice part of the garden so as not to feel the feelings of sadness or failure that may arise from acknowledging the troubled part of the garden will only allow the problem to spread and grow. By the same token, spending lots of time worrying about a potential future negative outcome in the garden also distracts us from the garden of the here and now.

This is all not easy to manage because we want to be responsible about our gardens and prevent problems before they arise (put up a scarecrow, for example). But if we become fixated on the idea that the garden will fail, the lack of attention to what is happening right in front of us can lead to a negative self-fulfilled prophesy, where we imagine, and then accidentally create, our most dreaded result. A tricky business, gardening.

Sometimes, we are fortunate to have a bumper crop. We don’t necessarily get to choose if we will be up to our eyes in grapes or swimming in corn - we are just happy to have such a great bounty. It generally isn’t our choice which fruit, vegetable, or flower will be in abundance.

Other times, though, despite doing everything to the best of our ability, a particularly bad storm may totally wipe us out, or raccoons wreak havoc on all our work overnight, and we are left with nothing, starting all over again. This might happen numerous times over 50 years of dedicated and exhausting gardening in two different countries (just an example). We have to remind ourselves that this is all part of the experience of gardening. The good and the bad.

Understanding and accepting the difference between what we control (minimal, really) and what is beyond our control can help us to stay sane when we are confronted with fire, flood, or an extremely unpleasant boss, er, I mean, pestilence.

Thinking back to the garden as it was in the past is generally not advisable, but sometimes, on a warm summer’s eve, when the stars are out and our bellies are full of the fruits of our labour, it can be a pleasant experience to think back on the history of the garden and all we learned along the way - the good years when things went to plan - or even better, and the tough years when it seemed like nothing would ever grow again.

In the good times, we need to ensure we acknowledge our good fortune with gratitude, savouring the moment because we know, like everything, it will pass. In the bad times, we can take comfort in the same concept — things may be bad, but they won’t stay this way forever, so making drastic long-term decisions about the garden based on a short-term bad moment doesn’t make sense.

No matter what happens, I get up every day, put on my giant Katherine Hepburn hat, and go to work. Doing my very best. One crop at a time.1

Hidden Track:

W/O April 25/2022

When I was in junior high (that’s middle school to American readers), I didn’t really like science class. I was frequently banished to the back workbench or hallway for my frequent comedic interjections, which I found irresistible, specifically because the science teacher had no sense of humour whatsoever. But there was one class where, unusually, I was paying attention and learned something that blew my young mind.

The class was about the workings of the human eye. It was explained to us that the eye had rods and cones that controlled vision in low light and the perception of colour, respectively1. The cones, in particular, as I remember it, are responsible for sending colour-related information to the brain, where “seeing” and assigning the specific colour takes place.

Because we are all slightly genetically different, the rods and cones vary in size and chemical composition from person to person, which means (and this is the part that astounded 14-year-old me) that we are all seeing the world in slightly different shades of colour.

I raised my hand.

“Yes, Chris?” Mrs. Walker said wearily, likely expecting some smart-alec remark.

“So, wait…” I said, still wrapping my brain around this idea, “Are you, like, saying, like, that we all see that banana on your desk in, like, a slightly different shade of yellow?”

“Yes, that’s right.” She seemed pleased that I was actually listening.

“So, like, everyone is seeing everything, like, slightly differently all the time?” I was shocked.

“Yes, either slightly differently, or, in some cases, very differently, if the person is colour blind, for example.”

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She moved on, and I was already drifting away into my own thoughts. To this point in my life, I had thought that red was red and blue was blue - for everyone. I thought we all saw the same exact palette of colours in the world. This new knowledge, to me, indicated that each of us was living in our own unique version of the world.

Sure, I had understood that people interpreted things differently; sometimes in ways that made no sense to me (more on that later.) But the idea that the actual, physical world was also just an interpretation led me to my next thought. My hand went up again.

Mrs. Walker audibly sighed. “Yes, Chris.”

“Wait a second. If we are all, like, genetically different, and those differences mean the way we interpret colour are, like, also slightly different for each of us, wouldn’t that mean that because our brains are all, like, slightly different that everything we think, feel, touch, and experience is also, like, slightly different for each of us?”

“Yes, obviously. But we are talking about eyes today.” She continued with the class, switching out transparencies on the overhead projector.2

This was a changing moment for me. By the time I was 14, I already had long known I was a weirdo. In fact, I don’t remember ever not feeling like I was different from everyone around me, even in first grade. I now realized that my suspicion that I experienced the world differently from everyone else was, in fact, backed up by science.

Little did I know just how differently I was experiencing the world.

I had a knack for seeing how things might play out 5-10 steps ahead that others did not, and I seemed to see angles or opportunities where others didn’t. I had a rich, if tumultuous, inner emotional life, but beyond a handful of people I knew extremely well, people might not suspect this and might even accuse me of being “emotionless.”

I was highly creative and religiously wrote in a journal (not a diary, which is for girls) every night, including lists and secret plans.

I would become obsessed with specific subjects and explore them until I hit a dead end, yet I could not bring myself to participate in assignments if I had no natural interest in the topic.

I always dressed differently from others around me (in retrospect, these were often highly misguided fashion choices.)

I always had some kind of non-school odd project or venture going on, and my relationship with art, words, film, and music also seemed at odds with the vast majority of people around me, who seemed to view these things as mere frivolities. To me, they were as essential as oxygen.

Teachers and family members would carefully describe me as “walking to the beat of his own drum”, “slightly eccentric”, or “a real character”, but I knew what that meant. The reality was that none of this seemed normal compared to others around me.

There was also the matter of my attraction to both genders, which, at 14, I was still actively working to deny to myself and everyone else. But the horrible truth was that I took keen (if surreptitious) notice of both the girl in English class who did not wear a bra and the handsome, athletic guy in his briefs before gym class. As much as I did not want it to be so, I was among the 1-2%3 of bisexual males in the world. I would be decades before I could accept this, however.

I’m not really sure I believe in personality tests, but as is the case with astrology, the results I get are sometimes so on-the-nose that I do give them some consideration, if with a large grain of salt.

I hadn’t done one of these in a long while, but recently, while bored in front of the TV one night, I took one and was quite surprised at the result. Turns out I am an INTJ (the “turbulent” variety for those who know about such things), also known as the "Architect" or the "Strategist.” I genuinely expected to get something a lot less intense-sounding, but when I shared the description with some family members, they both said: “Oh yeah, that’s you all right!” It is estimated that fewer than 2% of the population are this personality type,4 and feeling different from everyone around them is an obvious side effect.

Anyone of this personality type will tell you that much of what is presented as “facts” about being human is often lost on us. The idea that we are all starved for contact with other people and would die without it is high among them. Natural introverts, we INTJ’s consider time alone, and often even more so - living alone, a precious gift. It’s not that we dislike people (although…sometimes…) but that we love the ability to learn, work on our projects, and think in blissful solitude. Our ranks include Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber). I’m sure some of us must be OK, though.

In addition to mild colour blindness, some time ago, my daughter was diagnosed with ADHD. Being the good dad that I try to be, I went out and bought a respected book on the topic, written by experts, so I could better understand how her brain works. I found out that a lot of assumptions I made about ADHD were totally incorrect and that there are various types of ADHD/ADD.

The book featured a test with about 100 questions, which I took just for fun. If you answered “yes” to more than 75%, you probably were on the spectrum, it said. Over 85%, and you almost certainly have it.

Did you know that ADHD and ADD are genetic? Guess who found out he has ADD that day…yep, this guy. About 5.5%5 of American male adults have ADHD/ADD. This explained a lot of things that I had always thought of as personality quirks. My bad memory, my inability to grocery shop without a list, my ability to laser-focus on something I am interested in, my terrible record at remembering people’s names, and my need to line up all the belongings I need to take with me (wallet, mask, keys, phone, sunglasses) with me every day before leaving my apartment among them.

For those of you keeping track, thus far I am among the 1-2% of bisexual men in the world, the >2% of INTJ personality types in the world, and the 5.5% of adult men with ADHD. But wait, there’s more!

I am also among the 10% of the population in recovery from addiction (14+ years, yay me!) I am pretty proud of being in this particular minority, and the good news is that 75% of people who report having a substance abuse problem also report being in recovery.6 And, like many who have battled addiction, I have been diagnosed with both depression and anxiety (both now well managed through medication).

All of this was pretty overwhelming growing up. I sometimes felt like there were so many things that were different (or even broken) in me that I would never be able to be happy.

But I overcame addiction. I accepted (and now even celebrate) my sexuality. I went to therapy and got the right medication for my mental health issues. And I taught myself to manage my ADD. Despite the challenges and sometimes heartache some of this caused me, I wouldn’t change any of it - I learned so much about myself through these challenges, and I have become someone I feel good about as a result of facing them head-on. And, in some ways, they sometimes feel like superpowers - special glasses that help me see parts of the world that others can’t see.

Some years ago, I met a woman who has Synesthesia7. Synesthetes, as they are called (what a great word!), are people who have a neurological condition in which information meant to stimulate one of their senses instead stimulates several. These people might experience a colour whenever they hear a certain sound, or get a particular taste in their mouth when they see a certain pattern. In this woman’s case, she saw colours related to numbers among other symptoms. I asked her how she discovered her condition, and she surprised me by saying that she didn’t know she was any different from anyone else until high school, when she casually and matter-of-factly said to a friend, while doing math homework, “Well, you know how 14 is purple…” The friend had no idea what she was talking about, and this is how she discovered she is among the 2-4%8 of the population with this condition.

When you dig a little deeper with people, I find there is almost always at least one unusual trait they experience. Something that makes them experience the world a little differently. It is ironic, then, that people seem to spend so much time trying to fit in and to be perceived as “normal” or “acceptable.” Everyone is running around with their own individual movie, playing on their own individual screen.

When you have more than one of these traits, as I do, you learn to approach all people as though they are from another planet (or maybe, better put, as though you are!) In this way, you go into conversations with people knowing ahead of time that they may not understand that men and women are both sexually attractive, that a casual glass of wine is impossible, that a trip to the grocery store without a list is futile, or that 14 is purple.

Ultimately, I have found that these are where the most interesting parts of people’s stories live. It is in the moments when we feel we are apart from others that we find ourselves and, hopefully, over the course of a lifetime, learn to accept, and maybe even love, ourselves.

Hidden Track:

W/O April 3/2022

Being Canadian in the United States is a bit like being undercover. Most of the time, no one has any idea that strange cultural concepts like Trooper, Mr. Dressup, and Ketchup chips lurk under our mild-mannered exteriors.

We are known around the world for our politeness, which isn’t too bad, eh? Better than a frozen boot to the head, right buddy? I suppose there are considerably worse things to have spring to mind when someone thinks about you (looking at you, Germany.)

Some months ago, I was hurrying some place or other (as one is obligated to do by law in New York City) and turned a corner, walking directly into a young woman going the other direction. “Sarry!” we both exclaimed. A beat. Then I asked, “Are you Canadian?” She was. We laughed and nodded knowingly - our secret language of constant apologies had revealed us to one another. On the other hand, I once saw a man dressed head to toe in Maple Leafs gear, and when I asked him if he was from Toronto, he seemed to think that was an insane deduction. “No! Just a fan!” he said emphatically. Sarry.

As Canadians, we have what might be considered an advantage in navigating the United States and in our interactions with Americans. We know the culture inside out. We all watched their movies and TV shows, we know all their slang, and we speak the same language (well, other than those in Quebec and Newfoundland, who both speak in foreign tongues1). Most of us know the words to their national anthem, for crying out loud.

Americans, on the other hand, seem to sometimes grasp at straws where Canada is concerned.

When an American travels anywhere in Canada, no matter which province, city, or town, they are “visiting Canada” and will refer to someone as living or visiting “up in Canada.” The exception is if they are talking about Montreal, in which case they are visiting Montreal, which to Americans seems to carry a certain Europe-lite™ cachet. When I would return to Toronto to visit friends and family, my American colleagues would always refer to it as “going to Canada” rather than going to Toronto. This all leads me to suspect that Americans consider Canada one large polite blob on top of the US, which, let’s face it, isn’t entirely wrong.

My American friends have pointed out that I say some words strangely and sometimes use phrases they don’t understand. In my specific case, this is further complicated by the fact that I am the firstborn Canadian in my family and grew up surrounded by Brits, who liberally used phrases with which neither Canadians nor Americans are familiar. I used “Bob’s your uncle2” (British) in a meeting and got blank looks, so I tried to explain the meaning by saying it was like “voilà3” (French), which helped about half the room, but only further confused the others. Mon dieu.

I also taught my former teammates what a kerfuffle and a toque are (they refer to the latter as a beanie or winter hat, neither of which has much panache in my opinion) and let them know that the abomination they call Smarties here are not Smarties at all - let it never be said that I have not done my bit for international relations.

My experience growing up helps me to empathize with Americans and their struggles with some of my vocabulary, particularly in the case of my late beloved Grandmother on my mother’s side, who, but for HRH herself, might have been the most British person of all time (although her temper gave away her Cork roots). She even looked like the Queen, right down to the hairdo and omnipresent handbag.

My Grandmother was fond of using British phrases dating back to the Second World War. As a result, my brother and I came to understand that “don’t stand there like cheese at fourpence4” meant “Get your ass in gear,” and “Buggeration” was a very bad word that Grandma would yell when driving at 30K on an 85 K road. She would shout a stream of these indecipherable expletives at the giant truck that seemed to be inevitably looming behind her as she navigated her K-car, head barely over the steering wheel. We’d have no idea what she was saying, but knew it was bad. “Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!” she might exclaim, or “Sod it all!”, followed by a sheepish “Sorry, lads, don’t say those words.” Likewise, my Grandfather on my Father’s side would warn us not to “give him the ab-dabs” when we were getting on his nerves.

As if that weren’t all confusing enough, my Father has long had a bad habit of mixing metaphors, putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, saying phrases backwards, or saying the opposite of what he means. In a heated moment when I was a surly teen5, he banged on the kitchen table and shouted, “I will NOT have you showing respect for your mother in this house!” which resulted in both my Mother and me bursting out laughing, to his confusion. Likewise, his own British shorthand and lexicon would get thrown into the mix. “Give that to me” became “Give it me,” and unlike most in my generation, the word “daft” was commonplace in my life well before Daft Punk came on the scene, generally in reference to something I had done. I imagine it was also odd for Albertan parents to hear my brother and me, with no trace of any English accent whatsoever, casually drop “bloody” this or that into conversation.

Here in the USA, beyond the obvious struggle to drop all the “U’s” from words and to spell Centre with an “er”, I had to train myself to stop using the word “washroom” (restroom) or asking for a “serviette” (napkin) if I didn’t want blank looks in response. I imagine my old stage name, Cookie Von Chesterfield, doesn’t seem as funny to Americans, as they likely have no idea that a Chesterfield is a couch.

For my first 6 months in New York, I was perplexed and confused by the word store clerks (“clarks” according to my Grandmother) would yell at me when it was my turn to come to the register. I soon realized they were saying “following!”, which still didn’t make any sense until one of them said the full phrase - “Following guest!” One rather nice turn of phrase I have only heard in the USA is “I appreciate you”, which a waiter might say when you leave him a tip.

It seems I am picking up some other Americanisms as well - my daughter inferred that I was going native on her last trip to New York when I asked her if she wanted a soda rather than a pop.

I sometimes worry that I might end up such a hodgepodge (is that a word Americans know?) of vocabulary that I will end up with some version of the Madonna transatlantic accent6 (aka the Madonna Fake British Accent), and nobody wants that.

I find these idiosyncrasies in language delightful and fascinating. I’d be interested to hear from any readers who have similar experiences. Please share them in the comments below. These “lost in translation” stories can often be hilarious.

W/O March 27/2022

A friend of mine has been living in the same apartment in Brooklyn for over 25 years. This is unfathomable to me, based on my own experience. In my younger years, I would have deemed this a terrible fate, but now, getting older, I feel a slight twinge of envy.

The apartment from which I am writing this missive is my 22nd or 23rd apartment (I can’t keep track anymore) since I left home at 19 to head for the Big Apple (the first time…I moved here again in 2019. A sucker for punishment, some might say.)

Each apartment has its distinct memories, the places, people, and incidents that made up that chapter of my life during my time there.

The tiny apartment in a “student housing” building that went bankrupt, and from which we were all bounced. The seven-story walk-up on 14th street that caused arguments about who would run out for booze and cigarettes, but also featured rooftop access and a view of the twin towers. The place in the East 30s where hoodlums set fire to a mattress in the basement after being denied access to a party I was throwing. The tiny apartment on MacDougal Street, where a couple of heroin addicts argued loudly and incessantly on the other side of paper-thin walls, with a loaded rifle in the apartment. And so on.

As someone who has moved this many times, I have become an expert at being ready for the next move. I don’t collect anything (except, one might argue, bits of technology - but those are sold or recycled as soon as a newer model is purchased) because less stuff is better. I don’t keep a lot of books around - I read them, then trade them in for new ones.

I’ve had apartments where I never got around to putting up any art on the walls because by the time I was able to do it, it was time to move again. In my current apartment, I have sections where artwork has been hung and others with huge white spaces, waiting to be filled. I am in a lease here for another year and a half, but I also just lost my job, so things feel tenuous, to say the least. How long will I be here? I have no idea.

It’s generally my intention that I will never move again (“…as God is my witness!”) when I unpack into a new apartment. Roommates moving on, breakups, a change in finances/loss of a job, intolerable living conditions - there has always been some situation that has necessitated it.

Moving so much also means that the idea of “home” can become an existential problem to be worked out.

When Facebook asked me to identify my hometown, I wasn’t sure what to write, so I just left it blank. My family moved to Calgary, Alberta, when I was about 7 years old (from Montreal). I definitely spent my formative years there - I was there until I was 19. I’m still connected (via Facebook) with many of the people I knew there, though most of them I haven’t seen in decades. But is Calgary my hometown? I haven’t had any family there for ages, as they, too, have long moved on. I’m a first-generation Canadian, and everyone before me was born in England or Ireland, so the lineage doesn’t go too far back anywhere in the Great White North. I lived in Calgary for 12 years and hated most of it (nothing against those who love Calgary, to each their own - I know many people who would consider living in NYC a fate worse than death!) It’s highly likely that I will never set foot there again.

Comparably, I lived in Toronto for over 25 years, met some of the most important people in my life there, and raised my daughter there. I wasn’t born there, but it feels a lot more like my hometown to me, even though I am often told that my hitting the second “T” in “Toronto” is a dead giveaway that I didn’t grow up there (it’s “Tarrana”, I am told, for those who are wondering.) I am not sure I can make a legitimate claim to Toronto as my hometown, though - I was 25 years old when I arrived.

Including me, my immediate family are located in four different cities in two different countries. Home, where they are concerned, is based on when we happen to be in the same place at the same time, which was never as often as any of us liked and even less so during the pandemic. Their presence, regardless of where we are (even if it’s on the internet), is home to me.

Despite the obvious hassles and costs, there are some advantages to moving around a lot. When you are young, finances dictate having roommates. I’ve had a bunch of roommates over the years, and I am so glad I did - these people all remain very special to me, even if we don’t see each other very often. In the absence of blood family, these people became my little family wherever I happened to be.

On one hand, this lifestyle can make one feel without roots, but on the other, I know I am adaptive and can create a life wherever I am, which is empowering.

As I have gotten older, I find myself longing more and more for a “forever home”, though. Failing a lottery win, as a single guy with a kid in university, the chances of my ever buying a home are slim to none, especially in markets like New York or Toronto where prices are beyond the beyond. But I still dream sometimes of signing a paper, turning a key, and knowing I can paint the walls, put up shelves, and hang the art - because finally, I would be there to stay.

In the meantime, I live by the mantra of “The Littlest Hobo”, the four-legged star of one of Canada’s many terrible television programs:

“Maybe tomorrow, I'll want to settle down. Until tomorrow, I'll just keep moving on.”

For a teenager in Cowtown, it’s a rite of passage to work for a summer or two on the Stampede midway, where impressionable young teens are given the opportunity to spend quality mentoring time with grizzled, life-beaten carnies.

Carnies, those who travel from town to town with midways and run the rides and concessions as a full-time gig, are an interesting subculture. While I don’t want to paint that entire subculture with one brush, I feel pretty confident in saying that roughly 98% of them are rough-around-the-edges heavy drinkers and drug users who have recently been incarcerated. They have what can only be called a unique worldview.

I spent two summers (aged 15 and 16) working on the Stampede midway, some years after having been a child performer in the Stampede Grandstand Show several years in a row (which is another story entirely).

I don’t recall how I was actually hired as a sausage-and-lemonade stand attendant during my first year of employment at the Stampede. Maybe I’ve blocked it out. I just remember immediately knowing that I would be hearing endless jokes from my teenage friends about sausages. Which I did. Ad nauseam.

I also remember being sticky for 10 days straight because I was covered in sickly-sweet lemonade the entire time. The smell of sugary lemon stuck with me for months after.

I was partnered with a carny named Dwayne (pronounced Duh-whayne). Dwayne had the word “HATE” tattooed not on one set of knuckles, but on both — no kidding. He told me he got them “inside,” but that he didn’t want to talk about that. As someone from Woodlands, a Calgarian suburb where almost nothing ever happened, this was a terrifying exposure to the harsh underbelly of life.

Dwayne used the word “fuck” in conversation the way some people use “um”. Or as an afterthought to bring a sentence to a conclusion. For example, “Fuck, it’s fuckin’ hotter than fuck today. Fuckin’ sweatin’ my balls off here, fuck.”

Dwayne and I stood in a food booth in the middle of summer with heat from both the sausage rotisserie thing and a generator that kept the ice and lemonade cold blasting on us. I’m pretty sure the lemonade was about 10% made up of the combined dripping sweat of Dwayne and me. Delicious.

I learned a few things about marketing from Dwayne:

• You can never have fewer than 11 sausages on display, or no one will buy them. People like to see large numbers of things from which they choose one. If they see three sausages, they assume they have been sitting around a long time and are probably not very fresh. They’d be right, of course, but if they saw 25 sausages, they would also be right, as the sausages were endlessly recycled until sold..

• For some reason, people are more likely to buy something when displayed in an odd number. If you display four sausages, people are less likely to buy one than if you display five.

Dwayne had many opinions on other matters as well. He was not fond of people of colour, for example, or French Canadians, or gays, or women with “too much attitude,” as he described it. He also enjoyed in-depth discussions on the subject of human sexuality a great deal.

One afternoon, out of the blue, Dwayne asked me a question:

“Hey, kid, got yer dick wet yet?”

“Pardon me, Dwayne?” I replied politely.

“You get yer dick wet yet? Ya ever fuck a girl?” he asked.

“Uh, no, not yet…” said I, getting more and more uncomfortable with each passing second.

Dwayne found this INCREDIBLY funny and laughed heartily.

“Why the fuck not?” he asked.

I shrugged and stirred some lemonade half-heartedly. Maybe because I was a chubby, sexually confused kid with braces working in a sausage stand, Dwanye?

“Here’s what you do,” He said, knowingly, taking on the affect of a wise sage. “You see a girl you want to fuck, right?” He was waiting for me to nod as though I understood, so I nodded, despite wanting this conversation to end as quickly as possible. “You walk up to her, and you say, ‘Hey, wanna fuck?” He paused for dramatic effect. “Now, one of two things is gonna happen, kid. Either you are gonna get slapped across the fuckin’ face, or you are gonna get laid. Pretty good fuckin’ odds if you ask me, fuck”. He emphasized this last “fuck” with a rap of his “HATE”-emblazoned knuckles on the top of the counter, then waited for my response.

“I’ll try that, Dwayne,” I said.

“Worked with my old lady!” he said, again laughing and referring to the drug-addled fellow carny with whom he was travelling. Imagine a teeth-challenged mixture of Divine, 90’s Courtney Love, and Nancy Spungen, but without any of the talent or spunk of the first two and all of the pathetic nastiness of the last, and you have a fairly good idea of what Dwayne’s Old Lady was like.

When not enjoying these generator-side chats with Dwayne, we were treated to the sounds of the booth across from us — an all-hits-all-the-time radio station. I heard the same 10 songs all day, every day. These included “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston; “Heart and Soul” by T’pau, and “I Can’t Wait” by Nu Shooz.

By this time, I was very into alternative and punk music, and I didn’t spend much time listening to commercial radio. I hated all the songs in the playlist with the exception of “I Can’t Wait”, which, for whatever reason, appealed to me, despite it being an “old song” by that point. It also seemed to generally follow “Heart and Soul”, which I despised with all my heart and soul (still do), and so was an aural salve to the Chinese water torture that was T’pau.

Years later, while doing a once-a-month DJ residency with my friend Scott at Toronto’s Cameron House, I would resurrect the extended mix of “I Can’t Wait” and was surprised to find it was always a sure-fire hit with crowds (although not the sure-fire hit, which we discovered, for reasons unknown, was “I’m So Excited” by The Pointer Sisters).

After that first summer, I was sure that the following year things couldn’t possibly get worse. And things were looking up. In my second year of employment at the Stampede, I managed to figure out how to get a job selling tickets to the rides. This meant I was not selling food, which was a HUGE step in the right direction.

This upward mobility (such as it was, in the world of the rodeo midway) also meant I would work with another kid my own age rather than with someone like Dwayne — also a positive development from my point of view. Or so it seemed…

Unfortunately, things did not go as swimmingly as I had hoped. It turned out that the first kid I was paired with was skimming money off the top and stealing and reselling tickets. I had no idea this was going on. I wasn’t good enough at math to ever try such a scheme myself.

When the delinquent kid was questioned, he tried to implicate me as the one who had been stealing. This resulted in us being called into a back office (one had to walk through a bar full of farm animals to get there, as I recall), questioned by the police, and our parents being called.

Fortunately, justice was done, and I was exonerated. Driving home in my mother’s station wagon, I considered how close I had come to becoming another Dwayne, with “HATE” tattooed across both sets of knuckles, and not wanting to talk about it.

Because of the whole “skimming” incident, I was relocated to a different booth on my third day on the job. This booth was directly outside a quasi-freak-show exhibit called “Zoma The Gorilla Girl”.

The idea was that you handed over a few tickets, and you would watch a “beautiful woman” — likely the girlfriend of someone like Dwayne (in a bikini, of course) transform into a wild, angry gorilla (a guy in a gorilla suit).

To attract attendees, they had smartly set up a loudspeaker cranked to 11 and pointed directly at my ticket booth. As a result of having heard the looped recording eight hours a day for days on end, I am still able to recite the entire spiel from memory:

“Have you seen her? Have you seen Zoma, The Gorilla Girl? She’s ALIVE! If you have a heart condition…if you are pregnant…if you are easily frightened…DON’T COME IN. Zoma, The Gorilla Girl. She’s ALIVE!”

Between Zoma and T’pau, I don’t know which was worse.

During this period of my life, I was not a big fan of high school and had been toying with romantic ideas that I might drop out and become a “working man,” living a simple life free from the constraints of The Man and his high school bullshit rules, and perhaps writing about my roughshod existence in a Hemingwayesque fashion.

My time on the Stampede midway confirmed that I would definitely be finishing high school because it was clear that these types of jobs were not for me. I was far too lazy and too much of a delicate hothouse flower to withstand them. That’s one life lesson Dwayne did share, even if accidentally.

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ICYMI

In case you missed it, here’s an essay I wrote about eyeballs, bisexuals, and purple 14:

But nature had other plans.

A mother pigeon decided the underside of the table would be a perfect spot to unleash the miracle of life, and it was there that she deposited two eggs when I wasn’t looking.

I didn’t notice anything unusual until I started hearing quite a lot of commotion by way of coo-ing and wing flapping out there. That’s when I discovered two wide-eyed, rather forlorn-looking baby pigeons.

Responsible citizen that I am, I contacted the Toronto Humane Society and was told to leave them alone, that they would eventually learn to fly and see themselves away. So I ignored them.

After a few weeks of activity and noise, I hadn’t seen either of the parents around for a while. I assumed everyone had successfully learned to fly, and my balcony was again mine alone.

I popped out to confirm they’d shuffled off to Buffalo (or wherever pigeons go when they leave home), thinking I would clear out the empty nest, as instructed, to avoid another family (of pigeons, not distant family members or anything) moving in.

It was then that I made the unfortunate discovery that one of the baby pigeons had shuffled off, not to Buffalo, but from this mortal coil — that is, had ceased to exist; had become deceased.

The remaining sibling looked understandably anxious about the circumstances. I became concerned that the parents had abandoned the nest when I realized I’d not heard their extremely irritating coo-ing for a few days.

Being the devoted, compassionate Buddhist that I am (by which I mean I have read a Pema Chodron book and watched a few PBS specials), I gave the remaining living sibling a slice of whole-wheat heart-smart 12-grain bread and a small dish of water.

I decided I would name him Bert, after Bert of “Ernie and Bert” fame, who had considerable affection for pigeons. Unlike me.

I again called the Humane Society to explain that I was in the company of an orphaned baby pigeon, and what did they intend to do about it? I was told they couldn’t pick it up, but if I would kindly wrap it in a warm blanket and put it inside a cardboard box, I could bring it over, and they would take care of him—“rehabilitate” was the word she used. This gave me visions of him strapped down in a miniature bed, begging for a fix.

I explained that I was without a vehicle and tending to my own child, so I could not spend the afternoon looking after a delinquent pigeon’s baby. Wasn’t there someone who could swing by and collect him? I gave the example of “What if it were an alligator?” She said she had been with the Toronto Humane Society for many years and had never had a call about an alligator — obviously missing my point. I was referred to the City of Toronto.

Determined to avoid this responsibility, I planned to mention the potential presence of West Nile Virus, the pandemic of the moment in 2008, as my ace-in-the-hole with the City and to ask them to retrieve the potentially disease-ridden cadaver and take the live one with them while they were at it.

I was told by the City that “it’s not even mosquito season” and that I was on my own with the carcass. As for the live one, that was not their problem either, but if I would kindly wrap it in a warm blanket and put it inside a cardboard box, I could bring it over, and they would euthanize him.

Even if I could get him over there, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. His stupidly cute bird face made that impossible.

To get me off the phone, this contact provided me with the Ontario Wildlife Preservation Society number.

If you enjoy my writing and would like to help me keep writing, sharing, and creating, you can buy me a virtual cup of coffee (as little as a one-time contribution of $5), with genuine thanks.

Christine1 at the Ontario Wildlife Preservation Society, with whom I would become well acquainted before this saga came to its dénouement, told me that I would need to do several things:

1) Remove the dead sibling from the nest, as it was likely traumatizing the living bird (“He’s not the only one,” I said—no laugh.)

2) “Tidy up the nest” — I kid you not.

3) Place newspapers under the remaining live specimen.

4) After about an hour, return to the bird and look closely at the newspaper.

5) Call Christine and, using my best adjectives, thoroughly describe any evidence of bowel activity my little friend may have left.

These five simple steps were apparently crucial for Christine to determine the correct course of action.

My daughter, Emma, and I went to the little shop in my building to buy rubber gloves so I could begin my grim task.

I returned to find that the body had gruesomely woven itself into the nest, and I immediately abandoned any plan of wrenching him from his final resting place.

The newspaper's business section contained an article about one of the big banks' record profits, which I thought would be suitable for Bert to defecate on. I simply placed the newspaper over the nest, dead body and all.

After Emma and I returned for dinner after our day out, as instructed, I went out to the balcony to make mental notes about the shape, color, and consistency of Bert’s poop.

It dawned on me as I was on my knees on the balcony, straining my neck to get a good look at Bert’s excrement, that other than Emma, there is no human being for whom I would do this. Even for my best friend, I can think of no circumstance where I would be willing to analyze his poop. Yet here I was doing just that for a total stranger of another species. It didn’t seem right.

I called Christine and left a message detailing the required information.

The following day at precisely 9 am, Christine called and said she thought that based on my description of his poop, they better have a look at Bert (as I now had her calling him as well). It was emphatically made clear that they DO NOT normally pick up animals but would make an exception in my case. I didn’t bother with my alligator analogy.

I was told that a volunteer for the Society happened to live in my neighborhood, and would be over shortly. I was asked to place Bert in a cardboard box in preparation for Gilles, the volunteer. I explained that I did not have a cardboard box in which to place Bert and to please have Gilles bring one with him.

Twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Standing in the hallway were Gilles and Pierre, both French Canadians, and a pensive-looking woman whose name I never got. Gilles wore coke-bottle glasses that gave the impression that his eyes were larger than his head — very disconcerting but appropriately owl-like.

Pierre was in a panic because he had illegally parked. Gilles was trying to speak to me about Bert, but Pierre kept interrupting about the parking situation. Gilles said something very curt in French, and Pierre left in a bit of a huff, never to be seen again.

At first, I thought The Unnamed Woman was annoyed with me, but I soon concluded that she was just annoyed in general. Her sweater featured a multitude of buttons with things like “save the whorey marmot” and “whales are people too!” on them.

Gilles stuffed Bert into a cardboard box, finally making its debut in the story, and was on his way out the door when he turned to me and said, “I will take da bird over to Christine, and we will call you to let you know da outcome.”

I assured Gilles that I was confident Bert was in good hands and that there was no need to call me with the results of his forthcoming physical exam.

“No, but you see, if dey finds dat ‘ee iz OK, ‘ee may ‘ave to come back,” says Gilles.

“Back where?” Says I.

“On your balcony – I mean, dats ‘is ‘ome.”

“It’s also my balcony,” I say flatly, tempting the ire of The Unnamed Woman.

“Well, we see, OK?” he says, hastily moving to the door with Bert and The Unnamed Woman in tow.

No less than five minutes after they all left, I spotted two adult pigeons frantically looking around the nest and coo-ing up a storm. I told myself they’d get over it and that Bert was probably better off anyway. Let’s face it: they weren’t great parents. Boomers, probably, based on their wings-off parenting.

An hour later, Christine calls. They’ve run an analysis on Bert, and he is in fine form. They found seeds and grain in his poop, she says enthusiastically. I try to deflect by mentioning the twelve-grain bread I provided him, but she says he is responsive and in good shape and should not be removed from his parents or his nest. She uses the word “kidnapping,” which I think is a bit strong, and I say so.

I tell her I’m sure Bert will do just fine; he’s a survivor, after all. Christine then launches into a spiel about all the disadvantages Bert will suffer if removed from his nest and his parents, and I have visions of Bert panhandling and selling himself to creepy older pigeons for their pleasure as a means of feeding the renewed drug habit he fought so hard to kick. Of course, I eventually back down — I can’t bring myself to leave Bert to a disadvantaged life.

Christine asks if I removed the sibling’s carcass (who, by this time, I am thinking of as “Ernie”). I tell the truth—that I left him where he dropped. She asks if I tidied up the nest, and again, I must report that I had not done the requested nest maintenance. I am told to do both things in short order because Bert will soon be returning by way of Gilles, and we all want to give Bert a fighting chance, don’t we?

Once again, I don my rubber gloves, remove the corpse, and tidy up a bit. Gilles arrives and gives me the thumbs-up, eyes bulging, after inserting Bert back into his nest.

Now back in residence, Gilles explains that Bert is about three weeks old and will not learn to fly for another three weeks. During this time, I can expect a resumption of the constant cooing from Bert and his wildly irresponsible parents. He assures me the pigeons will abandon the nest once Bert can fly. To Gilles’ credit, all of these things came to pass.

Once Bert departed, I was instructed to clear the nest and advised to visit a hardware store to purchase some wire and a fake owl to keep my balcony pigeon-free, which I did, allowing me to live a pigeon-free existence thereafter.

I’m just grateful it wasn’t an alligator.

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I’m not a strong believer in the idea of The Secret, but I do believe in Jung’s idea of synchronicity.1

Per the Oxford Dictionary, synchronicity is “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.” You might have just discovered the name of something you’ve experienced before - all humans seem to experience it to one degree or another.

For example, I was recently walking through Central Park and eavesdropping on snippets of the conversations of passers-by (as one does). One passing person said, “I think it was an eagle…” to their friend, and that’s all I heard of their chat.

Being a musical sort, words, people, and even smells can all trigger music in my head. In this case, hearing “I think it was an eagle…” as a snippet of conversation by passers-by fired some neuron that cranked up the jukebox in my melon to start playing “Fly Like an Eagle” by the Steve Miller Band.

I continued my walk for twenty or thirty minutes, then circled the Bethesda Fountain and headed back south, towards home, with the song ear-worming the whole time. As I saw Central Park South come into sight, I heard some musicians playing in the park wind down a blues song, pause, and then start playing the familiar opening riff of, you guessed it, “Fly Like an Eagle.”

Central Park South at dusk. Photo: Chris Stevenson (AKA: Snaps By Cookie)

You might think that I would be shocked or surprised at this incredible coincidence, but I just carried on as usual - because this sort of thing happens to me all the time. Like, weekly.

This leads me, in a roundabout way, to this newsletter (hang on, it’ll make sense in a second!)

Over the past few months (OK, many months), I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity - more than usual, anyway. As someone who has always played in bands, written for fun, taken photos, acted, and otherwise expressed myself as Madonna long ago instructed me to do, I realized much of this had faded away.

I’ve been fortunate to have jobs in the arts and to work in marketing, which have offered opportunities to think creatively and participate in creative work. This used to be what I thought of as my “day job,” while I always had other personal, creative passion projects that I considered my real creative work. But as time went on, the “real creative projects” became starved for time and attention, and all that remained was the day job. I didn’t feel I had the right to complain about this. After all, at least I had some creativity in my day-to-day life. My day job could be screwing the tops on tubes of toothpaste or something. I’ve done those kinds of mind-numbing jobs — unloading trucks, for example — so I counted myself lucky.

That said, there was a creative part of my brain and spirit that was like a dying plant, desperate to live. If only I’d watered it.

For as long as I can remember, I have always had notebooks around. I wrote songs in them. I made life plans and figured out my goals in them. I calculated my debt in them. I wrote diaries and stories in them. And so on. So it was my natural inclination to start scribbling in a notebook when I realized I wanted to get back to being a creative person, not just in my job, but in my life.

I came up with a bunch of ideas: musical stuff, a blog maybe? Could I do a podcast? What sorts of stuff would I create online if I could? Paint? I was feeling pretty fired up and optimistic about getting some of this stuff going and trying it out.

Then something happened. Or, rather, nothing happened.

I had the urge to create, but felt paralyzed. I told myself I didn’t know how to start. I told myself that I had too many ideas and I needed to narrow them down. I told myself I didn’t have time. While there was truth in all of these statements, it wasn’t really what was going on. But what was going on?

This was when synchronicity again reared its head and offered illumination. As I was scrolling through Instagram, this image grabbed my attention:

I instinctively “liked” and shared it. It was hitting me in a more profound way than the average meme somehow - and asking me an uncomfortable question: yeah, but are you really being brave enough to suck at something new? The answer was no.

When I got really honest with myself, the reason I had not started a newsletter, or actually posted some of the music I’d been working on for ages, or shared some of the creative writing I’d done, or a million other creative ideas I had not acted upon was because I didn’t know how to start, and how could I start creating anything if what I was putting out wouldn’t be perfect? I might look silly. People might not like it. People might make fun of me - or attack me! It might just lie there, and no one would care at all.

The El Mocambo Tavern, circa late 90’s. Photo: Chris Stevenson

So now, not only did I feel kinda pathetic about not creating anything for so long, I felt really pathetic when I realized the true reasons behind it. Where was the kid that happily bashed away at a guitar cranked to 11 while walking across the tabletops at Toronto’s El Mocambo, not giving a damn that he didn’t know what he was doing, and having a blast anyway? The young man who truly didn’t give a damn what you thought about him?

He got middle-aged. He started playing it safe. He started worrying about other people and what they might think. He became afraid to fail.

Well, fuck that.

Today, I’m starting to write on Substack (you’re reading my first post right now!) I’m going to experiment with it. I’m going to write. I might record podcasts. I might interview people. I might write in series. Maybe even make videos. I might just share stuff I think is cool. I really and truly don’t know. I will probably do it wrong. I might look like an idiot in the process.

Everything I have mentioned above might totally suck. It might fail. And that’s OK with me. I’m going to learn to embrace it! I will be learning stuff. I will get to exercise the creative part of my brain and water the dying plant. Maybe it will allow me to connect with others who love and care about some of the same things I do. Even if the output itself is bloody awful, I will consider it a success if it manages to do any of those things. Even if people hate it. Even if they make fun of it. Even if it just lies there.

Now it’s time to get out there and fly (like an eagle)! I’m very sorry for this last sentence. I warned you this might suck.

PS: If you are trying to figure out the “How do I even get started” question like I was (am), I recommend “Show Your Work”, a short and fun-to-read book by Austin Kleon, which helped kick me into gear. Austin is also the author of “Steal Like An Artist”, which is equally great.

PPS: Spot a typo? Have I shared something wildly inaccurate? Have I made myself look even more foolish than I have accepted will be the result of what I’ve described above? I beg you - please tell me. I will be most grateful. This is intended to be a learning experience, and learning requires graceful humility. I’m ready.