A.B.A. (for D.J.T.)

Between contractions, I sucked on ice chips and stared up at the ceiling tiles and thought about the child in my belly, working up the courage to leave the safety and protection of my body and face the world, such as it is.

Did she know going in how bad it would be, this world and all its horrors? Did her spark of consciousness see something in my spark of consciousness and decide that it was worth the risk? Does she dream, tucked away in the sensory deprivation tank of my womb? What does she dream of? Does she remember things that we forget when the cord is cut and we are suddenly alone and the world erupts into a chaos of violence and love?

Another contraction hit, different from the rest, those other ones were just practice, I could tell now.

Every muscle in my body clenched in effort. Yes, darling, yes, I want to meet you. And it was exactly as Patti Smith sang, it was dawn and the storm settled in my belly and the sky split and the planets hit, balls of jade dropped, and existence stopped, mine and hers together, for the briefest of moments before she burst through in a rush of blood. 

Chaos then as medical professionals swabbed and swaddled and placed her in my arms. I wondered if the third time would be the charm or if we would have to start all over again. 

She looked up at me as I held her tenderly and looked down into her eyes, deep brown, almost black. Again. I wanted blue. 

The obstetrician registered my dissatisfaction. Would you like an After Birth Abortion? he asked, and I nodded, regretfully. He took the baby from my arms, expertly broke her tiny neck, and tossed her into the bin.  

 

  

On Bad Nights

On some nights, the good nights, his snoring is a soft, regular rhythm, almost (almost) comforting. A slightly nasal intake of breath followed by a gentle puffing exhale. But those are the good nights, and good nights are rare. 

On bad nights, she wants to smother him in his sleep with his own pillow. (She is certain that she would be able to avoid jail time with an insanity plea.) On bad nights, the relaxed tissues of his tongue, soft palate, and airway vibrate like a goddamn subway train in the dark. Chugging, choking, snorting, snuffling, pitch rising rising rising until she can't take it anymore. 

Sometimes she stares through the darkness and thinks at him really hard shutupshutupshutupshutup, and sometimes, miraculously, he inhales one last wheezing breath that peters out into the regulated breathing of snoreless slumber. (Either they share some sort of psychic connection or he subconsciously senses her body tense in the dark, preparing for violence, and his body reacts to protect itself.)

Sometimes she reaches across the pillows and plugs his nose until he gasps and mumbles something unintelligible at her and changes position. Sometimes she puts a hand on his face. Sometimes she shoves him. Sometimes, as a last resort, after lying in the dark for what seems like (and sometimes are) hours, she resigns herself to the guest room in the basement, where she can still distantly hear him rattling through the floorboards. 

He takes great pleasure in waking her on those rare occasions (too much wine, a cold) when she becomes the snorer. You're snoring, he says happily, nudging her awake. Oh, pardon me. My sincerest apologies for the briefest of interruptions to your otherwise restful nights, she replies, completely insincerely.

Nasal strips were ineffective. They spent forty bucks on a snore guard that he refuses to wear because it's uncomfortable. (You won't be uncomfortable in death, she thinks.) She googles how to stop snoring and comes across medieval torture devices, snake oil, surgery. The only reliable cure appears to be murder. (They have investments. The house is paid for. She can live frugally. She'd be okay.)

She loves him, but, lying sleepless for the umpteenth night in a row as he rasps and rattles wetly beside her, she understands the darkness of the human heart. The snorer! The snorer!  

  

The Final Girl Updated for 2022

The weeks leading up to Halloween are, of course, spooky movie watching season. Truly terrifying horror movies are hard to come by (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre still tops my list because things just get totally fucking bananas for no reason), but I have been pleasantly surprised by a number of films lately. The last three movies I watched share a common theme: that we need to listen to women. We know when something's wrong (maybe a constant state of vigilance is part of our evolutionary DNA), so believe us.  

Chronologically, the first movie that got me thinking about this idea was Watcher. More psychological thriller than horror (unless you are a woman), the story follows a woman named Julia who becomes isolated socially and culturally when she and her husband move to Bucharest for his job. Julia becomes aware of someone watching her from an apartment across the street, and the rest of the movie is us wondering if this guy really is a serial killer or just an awkward creep. Despite a number of alarming signs, her husband doesn't believe her, the police don't believe her, and Julia is only vindicated at the end of the movie when the awkward creep (who is, of course, also a murderer) almost kills her. The final brilliant scene is the I-fucking-TOLD-you look she exchanges with her husband after she shoots the guy. The movie ends there, but I'm pretty sure a sequel would involve a divorce.

The next one I watched was Alex Garland's Men. I knew nothing about this movie going in, which is my favourite way of watching movies and probably the only way to watch this one. (I read a review of it afterwards that used the term "metaphorror," which I loved and am stealing.) In this film, Harper, like Julia, also finds herself in an unfamiliar setting, this time at an old house in the idyllic British countryside, which is apparently only populated by creepy dudes who all share an alarming physical resemblance. (As an aside, she should have turned around and driven home immediately after seeing the blood-red walls of the country house, because blood-red walls are never a good sign, but she didn't.) Harper has experienced some trauma and wants to escape for a while, but the men in this town (who become a metaphor for all shitty men throughout our patriarchal history, including religious figures and the police, of course, who don't do anything to help her) won't let that happen. There is a pretty bonkers scene near the end where the the pagan Green Man figure/exhibitionist pervert who has been stalking Harper gives a monstrously twisted version of birth to one of the other male characters, who in turn gives an even more monstrously twisted version of birth to another one, and another one, and another one, until Harper's dead husband is sitting next to her on the couch, blaming her for the abusive behaviour that ultimately resulted in his demise, accidental or not. We don't actually see Harper refusing to accept this blame and using the axe she holds in her lap on this fucker, but she is alive the next morning when her pregnant friend arrives, so chalk another one up for the ladies. We are nothing if not resilient. 

While the aforementioned last scene was pretty horrific and gruesome (and fun, if you're into that sort of thing, which I am), an earlier scene is the one that really haunts me. In this scene, Harper walks into town to grab a drink at the pub, which her landlord has assured her is pretty good. She is the only woman there, and, while nothing really happens besides the landlord trying to buy her a drink, which she refuses, there is a familiar sense of unease and tension that will likely resonate with most women, which is the understanding that something really, really bad could happen here because she is a woman, and alone. 

As an aside, I am, in general, a confident person. I am pretty good at handling being hit on, and I am comfortable with my sexuality. I like hanging out with guys, and I don't think they are all inherently misogynistic jerks. However, there were two occasions in my life when I felt distinctly uncomfortable and aware of my female powerlessness. The pub scene in Men reminded me of these occasions. 

On occasion the first, I was with a male friend (not my boyfriend) at another guy's apartment, a friend of my friend. (I think we were going to a rock show later, although I can't remember exactly.) So anyway, the vibe at this guy's apartment was heavily bro, and there were a lot of other guys there, drinking beer and playing cards. And the thing that made me uncomfortable, such a small thing, really, was the deck of cards they were playing with, which was a nudie deck. I don't have a problem with nudity or sexuality, but the fact that I was the only woman in an apartment full of strange men was unsettling when combined with the images of the 52 naked women being shuffled, commented on, and dealt across the table. Nothing bad happened, but it could have, and there would have been little I could have done about it. That sense of unease has stayed with me.

On occasion the second, I was shooting a promo video for some friends. My role in these videos was to provide cleavage and a sense of silly sexual raunch. I had done it before, and I trusted the guys. I let them objectify me, but I was in control, and I never felt pressured to do more than I was comfortable with. On this day, I met the gang at the Motorcourt Motel. The room had a red heart-shaped jacuzzi and porn was playing on the TV in the corner. I knew a few of the guys but not all (there were maybe seven or eight), and, again, as the only woman there, that sense of unease returned, heightened by the moaning and grunting coming from the TV screen. This particular group of boys was known for being sleazy (that was the whole point of my being there), so I felt uncomfortable asking them to maybe at least turn the sound off. Porn in the comfort of your own home is one thing, but walking in on a bunch of guys all watching together, in a room whose primary furnishings were a bed and a hot tub, was rather unnerving. (Plus, there was the video camera.) Again, the only bad thing that happened was my discomfort.

In neither of those instances did I feel entirely safe. I was on guard, even while I stood around in a bikini, aware that I had put myself in that position. And maybe, as a woman, that is the most terrifying feeling of all: the potential helplessness, the needing to be on guard. Because you just never know, do you?  

The final movie of the Believe Her trilogy is Barbarian. In this one, the most direct of the bunch but no less enjoyable or relevant for its bluntness, another young woman, Tess, finds herself in a strange part of town (Detroit this time) at an airbnb that has been double-booked. Tess is understandably wary of spending the night in a house with a man she doesn't know, but they eventually hit it off, even though things are already pretty fucking weird. Unpredictably, this guy is not a creepy murderer, although a creepy murderer does indeed exist in the subterranean tunnels beneath the house. Horror tropes abound (don't go into the basement!), but the way this film depicts the way the female character reacts to the discovery of a blood-stained mattress, a rusty bucket, and a video camera versus the way the male character does is both amusing and scary as hell. Of course the police disregard Tess when she escapes and tries to warn them, of course she goes back in to save a stranger who will later try to sacrifice her to save himself, and of course she will survive, but, sweet Jesus, the nightmare she goes through to do it. 

So I was thinking about the similarities between these movies and how they are different from the typical horror movie of yore. The final girl has always been victimized and abused and terrorized, but she is stronger and smarter than the men. Of course she is; she has had to be from the beginning of time in order to survive. But this latest crop of final girl films have added the message we have learned over these past few years with the Me Too movement, which is that when a woman tells you something is wrong, something is dangerous, something terrible is going on, she is right. So fucking listen to her.    

         

Death fucking sucks.

When somebody important to somebody close to you dies, you hope they can see the empathy in your eyes and feel the love in your hug despite the useless things you say. Because there is nothing to say besides death fucking sucks. 

Whether death comes suddenly or takes its time, we are left with the same surreal void: someone is, and then, inexplicably, impossibly, they are not. 

So we participate in the rituals, and we say the useless things, and we take that surreal void and we fill it up with stories, and with memories, and with love. 

And I don't know if it ever really works, but it's all we can do. 

Selfie

You mostly like your own face. You like looking at it in the mirror and wish that somehow you could capture the self you see in a photograph. You can't, of course, because to get that exact angle, the angle of eyes and nose and chin that you so admire when you accidentally (or deliberately) see it reflected, would mean the camera would be covering your face. You tilt your phone, hold it up awkwardly out of the frame, use the timer, to no avail.

Yours is not the most photogenic of faces. The points of the bow of your upper lip are uneven; from a certain angle, this gives you an unintentional pout or sneer. The placement of your eyes is not symmetrical. When you were younger, you wished your nose was smaller, thinner, although with age you have grown to rather like it. You are fond of your cheekbones, and your teeth. 

You believe (perhaps erroneously) that your face is more pleasing in person than in pictures. You do not know what you look like when you laugh or smile (an honest laugh or smile, in the moment, free of pose and guile), but you hope that it is as beautiful as the faces of people you know (or strangers, even) when they laugh or smile for you and not the camera.

You like your face best with a thin strip of black eyeliner, winged up slightly at the outside corners, and a coat of mascara. (Your eyelashes are naturally straight and pale, and somewhat sparse.) You are not an expert at make up, have never learned to contour cheekbones or blend multiple eye shadow shades (the most you do is two), but you are rather proud that it does not take much to make you feel pretty: the aforementioned eyeliner and mascara, a dab of concealer here and there, a swipe of blush, a hint of eyebrow pencil. (You have always admired the dramatically dark, perfectly penciled arcs of the eyebrows of other girls but feel they would look somehow out of place on your own face.) You own many lipsticks and glosses, but you like the natural colour of your own lips best. 

You are no longer young, a fact that is often hard to accept. But you see it sometimes when trying to take a selfie: the hollows and shadows, the creases and lines. You mostly like your own face, but sometimes you feel old and ugly. 

Never take a selfie from below. Or from too far above. Or straight on. Or with overhead lighting. Or when you have just woken up. Or when you have not gotten enough sleep. (Or before you have applied mascara, obviously.) 

There is a selfie sweet spot, taken from slightly above, your face turned slightly to the side, not full frontal, not in perfect profile. You realize that all of your latest selfies are the same (and if you have noticed, so have the people you want to impress with images of your face), so you try some new angles, chin tilted now slightly down, now slightly up. You feel silly, a vain, aging fool trying to capture the ideal vision of yourself that lives some magical where between your memory and the mirror. You delete them all and realize the only one you like is the same old selfie. Still, you mostly like your own face, so you post it. Ah well.    

Misanthropy: Part One

Misanthropy: Part One

It came easily, she found, the descent into misanthropy. Like slipping into an old denim jacket, frayed around the cuffs and collar, but familiar, comforting. Hello, darkness, my old friend. 

A slight prickle of irritation at the person in front of her in line at the grocery store who took too long packing her bags. An exasperated sigh at the driver who slowed to a crawl before making an unimpeded blinker-less right-hand turn.  

Why, it seemed to take no time at all for the minor ranklings to turn to full-blown rancor. 

People and inanimate objects alike became sources of violent rage. Jesus fucking Christ, just GO already!, she growled at the car in front of her as the advanced green turned to yellow. Suck it!, she snapped, as the left half of the top dishwasher rack collapsed for the umpteenth time. She pounded her fists, she swore, she rent her hair and gnashed her teeth.    

She found her empathy for the suffering of others draining away, slowly at first, but ever more swiftly, a dirty whirlpool in her breast swapping milk for gall. 

Her usual forgiveness of others’ foibles and weaknesses, understood and therefore pardoned, flickered and blinked out like a pilot light in a forty-eight-year-old furnace. People, with their ignorance and excuses, their whining and wallowing and incessant complaints. Misspelled comments on online news articles. Social media “stories,” which, to her dismay, weren’t stories at all, just an insidious feature designed to keep followers logging on for fear of missing something crucial. Facebook. Fucking Facebook.

I hate you all, she thought murderously.

She watched a lone moth cling desperately to the patio door, absorbing residual heat through the glass. You’ll be dead tomorrow, she thought at it. 

She wondered if everyone thought this way. Was everyone secretly seething with anger? Or were there people in the world for whom life really was all kitten memes and gluten-free vegan cupcakes and binging the latest Netflix series, their daily experience tarnished only by the occasional use of a cartoon representation of anger? Rage, but innocuous, inoffensive. Cute.   

What would such an existence be like? The classic conundrum of ignorant bliss versus knowledge and suffering. Look what happened to Adam and Eve, poor bastards. 

The Dr. Seuss Dilemma

Ah, the internet, where things that don't really matter seem to take on an enormous significance for a few days before fading away into the ether... In yesterday's news, the Dr. Seuss dilemma...

We are living in an interesting time: a time of re-examining the past and attempting to change things for the better. I think this is an undeniably good thing for the future. It is critical for people to examine their beliefs and attitudes and adjust them as necessary to make the experience of living together on this planet as not-terrible as possible for everyone. 

I don't know if the world is any less racist/sexist/classist/homophobic/etc. today than in days of yore (probably not), but people are certainly more aware of the damage their ignorance can cause and are (sometimes) being held accountable for their words and actions. This is a positive step forward.  

Conflicts arise when people forget that the world was a different place 100 or 50 or even 10 years ago, and apply the same rules or expectations to people and their attitudes and behaviour that we apply today. And by people, I mean artists. In this specific case, writers. In this even more specific case, writers of children's books.

Now, if an author of children's literature wrote a book today that depicted horrible racist caricatures of African monkey-men (If I Ran the Zoo), I would hope that particular book would not find a publisher. But in 1950, it did. Schools were still segregated in the U.S. until 1954. 

And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, the book with the illustration of a "Chinaman who eats with sticks" (later edited to "Chinese man") and the suggestion that "Say, even Jane could think of that," was first published in 1937. Imagine the world of 1937! Women in Quebec weren't even allowed to vote until 1940. And five years after the publication of Dr. Seuss's book, midway through the second World War, the Canadian government rounded up Japanese-Canadians and threw them into internment camps.

Reading Oh, The Places You'll Go!, that perennial graduation gift favourite, today, I find myself uncomfortably aware of Seuss's use of "he" to refer to people in general, but that was published in 1990, in the early days of the implementation of gender-neutral language. As an aside, I was born in the 1970s, a time of policemen and mailmen and stewardesses. The patriarchal use of the masculine pronoun to refer to all human beings, and especially those human beings in positions of power, was a given. Even today, I find myself automatically thinking of animals as boys, a habit I am consciously trying to break, given that the likelihood of the creature having female genitalia is roughly 50/50. Sometimes I think that young people today don't understand how hard it often is to even identify, let alone break, lifelong belief systems. But then, they are products of their time, too. 

So anyway, my point is that Dr. Seuss was living in a different time, and while we should not condone his racist and sexist remarks, we should at least understand why he might not have seen anything wrong with them at the time. There seems to be a tendency these days to assume that every artist who created something that does not conform to our current expectations is somehow evil, or at least immoral, and therefore has nothing of value to offer.  

Literature provides two functions: entertainment and education. It can of course do both things simultaneously, and great, lasting literature always does, but it certainly doesn't have to. However, I do believe that the authors of children's books have a greater responsibility towards education than any other artist. By reading to our children (especially the young ones who enjoy a silly rhyme or two), we are shaping their minds and attitudes, and we should make a conscious effort to make these lessons as valuable as possible. Learning the importance of imagination and sharing and unconditional love and protecting the environment and treating people equally and that everybody poops are things all children should be taught. If a children's story does not have an important life lesson to impart, and if the words and/or pictures reinforce, either consciously or subconsciously, something that can actually harm that child's sense of self-worth, then I heartily support no longer publishing that story. There are other stories out there. 

The current uproar seems to be conflating no longer publishing said offensive works with censoring them (or cancelling them, in newspeak). As a previous bookstore employee, let me assure you that the offensive aspect of the books in question is likely a far less significant consideration than the fact that those books are no longer being purchased. The book business is a business. I spent many work hours locating and sending back books that had lingered for months on the shelf. If people ain't buying, the company ain't reprinting... So don't worry, nobody is "cancelling" Dr. Seuss. Nobody is coming for the beloved childhood copy of McElligot's Pool tucked away in your basement bookshelf. His books aren't being gathered and thrown into a pile in the town square and set ablaze.  

However, and this is where I find my hackles rising, I recently read someone describe Dr. Seuss books as "really brainless rhymes for children." While there are certainly some troubling aspects of some of his books, dismissing his entire catalogue as "brainless" is a pretty limited perspective, the kind of limited perspective we are trying so hard to eliminate from society. 

I can only believe that the author of that observation never read Green Eggs and Ham and learned that trying new things is good for you, or The Sneetches and learned the dangers of capitalism and realized that, despite the number of stars on our bellies, we are all the same. And, sure, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish IS pretty brainless, I'll admit, but the silly rhymes and goofy pictures teach kids numbers and colours and that reading is fucking fun. By the way, Oh, The Places You'll Go, while encouraging young people to have hopes and dreams and goals, also reminds them that shitty stuff happens in life, so you better be prepared for that, too. 

I have been helping children and young adults with their English homework for over a decade now. Whenever I get a new student, one of the first questions I ask them is if they like to read. And I can state with authority that the children who like to read are more sensitive to the nuances and grey areas of characters and their actions than those who don't. They are more critical thinkers, quicker to pick up on symbolism and bias, more able to make big-world connections between the literature and their lives.

We can only engage with the world based on our own personal experiences. Reading broadens those experiences so that we are better able as individuals to consider other perspectives. That is what we do when we open a book: we live the life of someone else. What a miraculous thing to be able to do.

I will leave you with perhaps the good doctor's most famous lesson, ostensibly about Christmas, but perhaps also about what happens when you look beyond your own limited point of view:

"And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!

...

And what happened then? Well...in Whoville they say, 

That the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day!"   

So if those "brainless rhymes" awaken in a child a lifelong love of reading, of thinking and questioning and engaging with the world, are they really so brainless?