Anne

We lost a giant of a woman.

My mother-in-law, Anne Hopf, passed away last Wednesday.

The word I'd use to describe Anne is "awe", and I mean that word in its original sense, of inspiring wonder, reverence and a little dread. She had a sharp tongue and strong opinions, had Anne, and she did not suffer fools at all, let alone gladly. If you didn't know her, and sometimes even if you did, she was beyond intimidating. 

But my God was she loved. And for good reason. Many good reasons. 

Anne was a highly successful tax accountant. (Her late husband, John -- another man who elicited widespread awe just by existing -- was a longtime caretaker of a cemetery: together, they were known as "Death and Taxes".) She was exceptionally good at her job because she took care of not just her clients' accountancy needs, but whatever else she could possibly help with. There are a lot of distraught people surrounding Campbellford, Ontario right now. 

That was one facet of the woman. There were many others. She lived in an overgrown doublewide trailer  on a farm with all manner of traditional "redneck" accoutrements scattered over the property -- and for many years she was an absolutely insatiable, omnivorous reader. She watched things like Pawn Stars on repeat, but could don elegance with ease. And holy hell don't you dare underestimate this woman. She cultivated that in both her kids, too. What a trait to have, and to pass on. 

At home, Anne threw herself into hobbies with a will, discarding them once she'd mastered them and picking up new ones. Her motto may as well have been "go big or go home".  At one point she had over 250 ducks, geese, swans, and chickens to go along with her five beloved wiener dogs. 

She was Mom to Eva and Jim, who were raised on resilience and drive. She was Gramma to Alexa and Lily, whom she loved deeply. She was "G.G." to little Emily, the granddaughter of her best friend Danielle. She was "Miss Anne" to Danielle's daughters Julia and Sarah, who are family.

And to her, I was "the invisible son-in-law". I never got to see her enough, which I regret mightily. 

From the first, I felt tested. I was not Eva's usual run of boyfriend and her folks didn't know what to make of me until they made out enough of me to see I loved their daughter very much. But even so, I felt under scrutiny there, and probably overtried not to offend.

The woman was blunt, memorably so. I recall being at the funeral of her mother, who was not religious and who did not want religion in her service. There was entirely too much religion in that service. Anne strode out of it at the end and with the finality of a coffin lid closing tinged with bitter graveyard dirt, she told us that if we predeceased her, "You won't get none of this crap. Crispy critters, then you're done." 

That she herself is now a crispy critter -- though not done, at least not in my belief system -- I feel quite sure would make her laugh. Anne's laughter was the sweetness behind her sternness. And while I never perceived the woman as anything close to touchy-feely....according to the many people mourning her in messages public and private, she gave the best hugs.

What comes out again and again in testimony about Anne Hopf is her utter dedication and devotion to the client -- or granddaughters -- in front of her. "Above and beyond" was the baseline in so many of her pursuits personal or professional. 

Eva can tell you stories, not all of them pretty. There was a time when "hate" might not have been too strong a word to apply to that relationship. But as everyone matured and mellowed, Eva and her mom grew into the best of friends. It's been a delight to watch that evolve. 

I feel like it's almost a cliche at this point, obligatory in eulogies, to mention the strength of the woman, but damnit, Anne was a rock. She endured physical pain I can't even comprehend and made it so as you'd never notice if you weren't attuned to it. She was fiercely independent, freethinking, and the most utterly unsentimental pragmatist I've ever met. I've come to appreciate that ruthless logic, which lives on in my wife, Anne's daughter. It's the polar opposite of my own run of thinking, but it has its uses and its place. 

There will be some form of memorial service at a future date. 

Rest in peace you've truly earned, Anne. 

Religion As It's Supposed To Be

 Anyone who has or can make the time, PLEASE go watch this.

I especially mean that for people who reject Christianity and religion in general. I don't think even the most devout atheist would find overmuch to quibble with in here, aside from certain choices of words. The man uses "God" because he is a Christian, but he makes abundantly clear and even says outright something I believe with my whole heart and have been preaching since high school: there are many paths to the sacred.

Put into my own words, which I have spoken and written many times: mine is not a better way, mine is only another way.

_____________

My relationship with religion has been...complicated. I was baptized Roman Catholic at a year old and again at fourteen -- something that is not supposed to happen under any circumstance. I never grasped the theological complexities as to why the first baptism was found to be invalid; I had about as much interest in religion at fourteen that I did at a year old. It was something forced on me by my mother, and mother-forcings were not to be questioned in any way lest it summon the dragon. 

Church was a sometimes thing for me throughout my childhood. My babysitter, Martha, lived next door to me and her family -- which included a daughter named "Faith" -- took me to Sunday school tolerably often, until I moved to London at nine. I bounced back and forth between the Catholic and public school boards. Other than extra added ritual, there isn't much to differentiate the two educational options: I actually got a damned good grounding in world religions that weren't Christianity at Sir Arthur Carty Catholic School in grade six. 

But religion meant little to me at that age. I barely touched my Bible; my mom had obtained a book of Bible stories (from the Watchtower Society,  which means post divorce when money was nonexistent, likely the only reason she accepted that book, as you'll soon see). They were considerably easier to read. At six years old, fables are fabulous, not fabulistic. And as I grew up, I found church had more questions than answers. I was particularly unhappy whenever I was told "it's a mystery". A mystery? You seem to care very much about Jesus and God but you've had two thousand years to solve the "mystery" and you haven't even TRIED? You're all frauds. 

Or I'd routinely hear "it's God's will" as a thoughtstopper. Who are you to question the will of God? Especially when it just so happens to align with the will of a Christian taught never to question the will of God? There's a simple, direct way around that prohibition: turn "what would Jesus do?" into "what would I do if I were Jesus?" The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven, no pun intended. 

In grade thirteen I had two unlikely friends. One, the Kieron I have mentioned at intervals, was a very strong atheist, which suited my temperament at the time. The other was Johnathan, who was raised strict Jehovah's Witness. The three of us made an odd trio: I often found myself mediating theological and philosophical arguments between two wickedly intelligent and diametrically opposed minds. (Johnathan graduated high school with a near perfect average, including all the science course he memorized but did not believe.) 

Jehovah's Witnesses do not permit higher education. The waste of Johnathan's febrile mind fundamentally offended my best friend and sincerely puzzled me. I asked to borrow one of Johnathan's Watchtower Bibles, wondering what could possibly be in there to so enslave and stunt a person of such smarts. 

My mom hit the roof. I may as well have brought home a copy of the Necronomicon to summon demons with, as far as she was concerned. She threatened to burn the book, and I got the distinct feeling she wouldn't have cared if the flames jumped to me and consumed me along with it. I took it out of the house, leaving it in the shed until I could bring it to school, and then I read it over the next few months, surreptitiously, while listening to teachers drone on about stuff I mostly already knew. 

Their Bible is, um, fundamentally different from the one I had a glancing acquaintance with. JWs explicitly deny the divinity of Jesus, instead stating Jesus is the archangel Michael incarnate. They also don't believe that the "Holy Spirit" is anything other than the will of God. These seemed like trivial differences to me at the time. I was more interested in the JW belief that only 144,000 people would enter the higher levels of heaven. 

As of 2023, there were a shade under nine million JWs in the world. Somethin's gotta give. Expressing the 1990 equivalent to Johnathan yielded little more than a shrug. "We all  do our best to qualify," is all he'd say. 

At the same time, in grade thirteen, my Classical Civilizations teacher was making religion and spirituality accessible and relatable to teenagers, no easy feat. I've praised Reverend Roger "Uncle Rog" McCombe to the high heavens, because quite frankly that's where he is right now. He was there throughout his life, too. He was a man who saw the holy in everyone everywhere all the time...the closest thing to a saint I've actually met. He was especially interested in the Greek gods and their stories, and he would relate them using terms from Christianity and other religions interchangeably. Uncle Rog opened my mind, my heart, and my spirit.

In second year university, my girlfriend at the time lived in the Lutheran Student House at Wilfrid Laurier. I was living there rent-free for almost the entire school year, in blatant but unpunished defiance of their beliefs. Sex was had. Often. By more than just Cathy and I in that house. I can tell stories.

Because Cathy was Lutheran, and because she didn't seem at all God-besotted, I tried attending church with her. This time was a little better: I could at least see the truths behind all the dross. I undertook to read the Bible thoroughly, with commentary, and mostly succeeded at that (never mind all the genealogical tables, a man can only read the word "begat" so many times). 

Buried under centuries and centuries of ground axes and (often purposeful) mistranslations, if you dig hard enough and refrain from taking everything so gods-damned literally, there is a message there.  A very powerful message. In the video linked above, the Texas Representative and seminary student James Talarico distills that message to an essence and presents it in direct opposition to what Christianity has largely become in the U.S: Christian Nationalism. 

Talarico's vision of Christianity is both expansive and much more historically grounded than what often (not always, by any means)  passes for the faith in the political arenas Americans and many Canadians call churches. He insists that Christianity is blatantly political, but not in the way many of its adherents think. Jesus was, after all, an activist who pissed off the people in power with a message that sidelined them. 

He died for that. Powerful people don't like being bypassed. That doesn't change with the historical era. 

Neither does love. 

As Talarico notes, Jesus himself was not Christian. He called his faith "The Way" -- and it represents nothing less than a complete repudiation of the values driving society, then and now. It actually aligns very closely with my own values -- which really ought not to be a shock since, again, there are many paths to the sacred. 

Jesus' faith was highly communal. His followers shared land and possessions. They greeted one another "with a holy kiss". It wasn't top-down; it was bottom-up. Many of His followers were the literal bottom, the  dregs of society, which would have alarmed the Pharisees. The most dangerous thing in the world for an artificial overclass (and all overclasses are artificial) is for the rabble to realize they are collectively more powerful than even the most brutal tyrant. 

Jesus never elevated himself above his followers. He explicitly told them "these things and more will you also do". You can see him patiently explaining that the value system his disciples had learned was upside down. They continually ask him who will be the greatest, the most powerful, among them and Jesus continually redefines their notion of power in response. 

Talarico is like this. He doesn't seek to import his religion into politics: he seeks to import a certain kind of politics into his religion. A radical kind of politics that says, among other things, "by their fruits you shall know them" (not their power, not their status, not their bank accounts). 

This to me is the essence of Christianity -- and it's not much different from the essence of any other religion, or the basis of secular humanism, for that matter. I no longer get hung up on God talk even though I don't believe in the Christian God. There are many paths to the sacred. Taoism even calls itself "the way" and there is nothing in Taoism to negate Christianity.

I still do, sadly, get hung up on individual Christians. To my mind, more of them ought to be doing what Talarico does, calling out the hypocrisy. But then I remember I'm an idealist and frightfully naive, often. For instance, I question anyone's belonging to a church that fully endorses, defends and even encourages child sexual abuse. The Catholic Church has more blood on its hands than any other organization in the world and I question how much good can come out of something so rotten.

In the secular realm, I'm just as disgusted with any person or entity still using Twitter. So I guess I'm consistent in my naivete. 

I'm glad to see someone who truly understand what religion is supposed to be for. I'm doubly glad to see he's bringing his faith to bear on real world issues in a similar way to how Jesus would. And I'm in awe the guy is only, as of that video, in seminary. He has a bright future...sharing his Light. 

52 Pickup, Part 2

 As promised, the other half: random facts about me

27) Chores I don’t mind doing: 

--Dishes. I've had dishwashers for maybe two years of my life: three of them in total and they all broke within months. That's okay. There's something therapeutic about dish-doing. Meditative. The water feels good on my touch-starved skin. 

--Laundry. I've done about 99.5% of the laundry in this house for 25 years. It's a lot easier than it may be for most since none of us here wear business attire, ever and folding? Waddat? You put the shirt on, stretch it over your capacious gut, and presto: Wrinkles removed. Almost like an iron.

--Lawnmowing. Now that I have a decent cordless electric mower, anyway. Before, with a cord, it was low-grade torture. The safety features on our old mower -- and you want those, if you're me -- meant wrangling the cord with one hand while clutching the handle of the mower unnaturally tightly and steering with the other.

--Winter driveway maintenance (most of the time). I have a small electric snowblower to handle mild to moderate snowfall. It's the winter version of the lawnmower: it makes my life much easier. But unless I've been seriously dumped on, I truly didn't mind manual mode. I can take a small measure of pride in that when I'm done, not only is the driveway and sidewalk clear, so is a chunk of the street. It thwarts the evil trickster plow god Snoki. 

28) Chores I hate: Most of the rest of them, with special emphasis on litter, bathrooms, and anything on a handier man's honey-do list. Chore that goes BEYOND hatred: putting anything together. Eva does the heavy lifting on this, for which I em eternally grateful, but she'll ask me to hold something and...okay...how tight? If I feel it moving, am I supposed to let it move or not? Where EXACTLY do you need me to hold this? Guaranteed to put both of us in bad moods pretty much instantly. 

29) Song currently in my head: Johnny Cash covering "Hurt".

30) Collections: Outside of my books, the only real collection I ever had consisted of between 200-250 dinky cars. All different makes: Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Corgi Jrs, Majorette....I miss them, honestly. The thing I'd WANT a collection of: strange and unusual clocks. My dad had a couple:  a genuine Black Forest cuckoo clock, a Mexican souvenir clock where the 'pendulum' was a guy swinging a whip.

31) What humbles me: I'm no more special than anyone else. For every supposed quality I'm told I have, I can name you two qualities I should have but don't. My shitty vision and the disconnect between my eyes and my hands KEEP me humble. So does the sobering realization I've only ever been "good enough" in this house, nowhere else. 

32) Memory from childhood: Camping in our 1970 Trailmaster tent trailer, first at Oastler Lake, then later at Grundy Lake. As a kid, it was a near weekly thing through the summer months. We'd go into Parry Sound first thing, see my Gramma Breadner and Aunt Dawna and Uncle Ted, among others, and stock up at Dominion, a grocery store that's long gone. Their slogan, painted on the back wall of the store, was "Mainly because of the meat". But for us the shopping list always included two things that scream childhood to me: that ten-pack of Kellogg's cereals in little box-bowls...and butter tarts.

33) Memory from my teenage years: Grade thirteen orchestra practice. My friend Jason spotting a spider on someone's violin and calling "Helen! There's a spider on your G string! .... Now it's crawling into your F hole!" I couldn't breathe for thirty seconds, I was laughing so hard. 

34) Next big trip, at this rate, it's going to be Eva's and my 25th wedding anniversary trip next year. It was SUPPOSED to be to the Just for Laughs festival in Montréal, which I just found out has gone belly-up and won't be back. Son of a BEEYOTCH. EVERY time we plan something, it gets kiboshed. Either something expensive breaks and steals our trip money or festival organizers get wind we're coming and say "absolutely not". 

We thought about taking the train -- or flying -- to Halifax, doing the Cabot trail, and training/flying home, but that is (a) crazy expensive and (b) very hard to plan. We are brainstorming alternatives. Agawa Canyon is high on the list. We'll see.

35) How I’d like to die: Instantly. 

36) favourite pun: I gotta million of em. This one's courtesy Spider. For this, you need only know there's a book called SHARDIK,  by the same man who gifted the world with WATERSHIP DOWN, and SHARDIK is about an empire ruled by the titular enormous, semi-mythical bear.

Now, the only way to become a knight in Shardik's empire was to apply for a personal interview with the bear. This had its drawbacks. If he liked your audition, you were knighted on the spot--but if you failed, Lord Shardik was likely to club your head off your shoulders with one mighty paw.

Even so, there were many applicants--for the peasantry were poor, and if a candidate failed for knighthood, his family received, by way of booby-prize, a valuable sheepdog from the Royal Kennels. 

This consoled them, for truly it is written:

"For the mourning after a terrible knight, nothing beats the dog of the bear that hit you."

36.3333) I think I'll just let that sit up there a minute.,

36.6666) Isn't that awful? Isn't it GLORIOUS?

37) My favourite comedian deserves a HELL of lot more fame than he has. His name is Derek Edwards. His delivery is SO good. We've seen him once and we'll see him any time he gets within a four hour drive of here.

38) Lesson I learned that stuck with me: in grade five, I turned in an assignment four days late. My teacher gave me a 96% on it...and then subtracted 15% for every day tardy. I can still remember the huge 36%, circled in red. I don't think he let that affect my final grade...but I didn't know that at the time, and since then, I have never turned a single thing in late. Nor have I ever been late myself, barring circumstances utterly beyond my control. 

39) Something I am always losing: I hate to admit it, but my glasses. They're $1300 or so and they SHOULD be in a case every night and I know that but it doesn't happen as often as it should. And when it doesn't, it's hell, because without them on there is almost no way to find them except by lucky touch. Seriously, folks: without these things on,  this screen is completely unreadable more than eight inches from my eyeballs. I CAN'T SEE.

40) Something I wish I'd never lost: OMFG they're making these again! Mine was plastic. I just had an attack of YEARN. My ball clock was destroyed  in a move and (pants like a lizard) want want want want want...

41) My most left wing belief: For some reason this is dismissed as hopeless idealism, beyond communism, but here you go: If something is necessary for life, it should be a crime to sell it at a profit.

I believe that with all my heart and CRINGE every time I hear somebody refer to "earning a living". What a fucked up statement people just ignore. If you're not making money for somebody else, why are you even alive? is what that says to me.

42) My most right wing belief: immigrants should (a) fill a need here; (b) obey all the laws and norms of our society and (c) shouldn't be here at all until there is infrastructure to support them.  Note: I don't give a pig in a poke where they come from, what colour or gender or sexuality they are. I don't feel like this is too much to ask, but my left wing friends lambaste me as some kind of Trump supporter if I let that out.

43) My biggest flaw...now which of ten million should I choose here? Thank dog for the very few people in my world for whom I am good enough. But I think my biggest flaw is probably my aversion to turning play into work. Most people invert that and turn work into play. My mind refuses to think like that.

I have two things -- and only two -- I could ostensibly make a decent amount of money doing: writing or composing. Writing's easier--the putting words on the page part of it anyway. The rest of it? The full time job (UGH) MARKETING myself? The constant rejection? The need to write umpty-dozen hours every day just to keep money coming in (hopefully)? The knowledge that less than a hundredth of a percent of people actually live off their words?

I'm going back to bed.

44) Hottest temperature I've experienced: 39 with a 47 humidex. That's 102, feels like 117. Coldest: -48 (-54) with a windchill of -72 (-97). 

45) Favourite stores:

Groceries: Costco, Sobeys

Clothing: Mark's Work Wearhouse, Pure Muskoka

Books: Bearly Used, Indigo

46) Products I would shill for:

Mr. Clean Magic Erasers

Dawn dishsoap

Hawkins Cheezies

Kawartha Lakes Dairy (Chapman's, too)

Mac computers

47) An expensive thing I bought that was worth every penny: The Sleep Number bed. No longer available in Canada, which really bites because we need a new bed. Our Sleep Number gave wonderful sleeps for many years.

48) Favourite game shows: The Price Is Right, Joker's Wild, Pitfall, Just Like Mom

49) Favourite card game: Cribbage (and reverse cribbage, where the goal is to amass as FEW points as possible...takes three times as long to play a game, but it's an absolute hoot. Knowing me I'll see the only 29 hand of my life in a game of reverse crib.)

50) Favourite hour of the day is in the middle of the night. Silence is golden and dark is dark. 

51) The best sleep I ever had: that tent trailer I alluded to earlier. Rain outside pattering on the roof of the trailer. Blacker than midnight in an asshole. I think I may have spent that night dead. 

52) Funniest things I have ever done: Judging from the reaction, and I've told this story before, but the time I was in a donut shop with my dad. I was maybe four, and I was trying to read every word I could see. The place was packed, as Canadian donut shops ALWAYS are, and thirty conversations magically fell silent at the same time  that my piping four year old voice triumphantly announced: "OPEN! 24! WHORES!"

I can still hear the shocked laugher.

Thanks for reading. 

52 Pickup, Part 1

 I'm 52. This blog is 20 years old. Not sure which is more amazing to me. It's not that I didn't think I would live this long, it's that I had no idea what sort of life I'd be living at 52 until...after I turned 52. Damnit, things keep changing on me.

And I never imagined in 2004, just before moving into this house, that I'd still be writing 20 years later: much less frequently, but it's still happening. At least until Google decides to extinct Blogger the way they did Google Spaces. 

Without further ado-do, 52 random things I've either never told you before or never explained.

1) My proudest accomplishment: convincing someone I was valuable enough to marry. I still don't know how that worked, exactly.

2) My biggest fear (that I haven't explicitly stated) is that I will lose the love and respect I have now. How would that happen? No idea. It just could. When you're not sure why people do love and respect you, it's easy to imagine it's conditional. And no, I'm really not sure: I've of course asked the question, but the responses I get are like, well, sorry, baseline human attributes. "You make me feel seen". I'd bloody well hope I do, what, do others throw an Invisibility Cloak over you? Yikes. 

3) My high school superlative: I was an Ontario Scholar who graduated grade 13 with an average in the nineties. Whoopty do. Most of what you learn in high school needs to be swapped out.

4) Something I was embarrassingly late to realize: that the KFC logo depicts a bowtie, not a stick figure with an astonishingly large head.

5) Number of sexual partners: seven or eight, depending on how you define "sex". (Number I regret: four.)

6) The trip I most want to take and haven't yet: I'm keeping this to at least ostensibly plausible destinations, because otherwise there are far too many to count or rank. But I DEARLY want to do this. Sault Sainte Marie is less than seven hours through the Excited States and only seven and a half through Canada (unless you take the Chi-Cheemaun, which I'd love to do again).

7) If I could be reincarnated as a different animal, I'd want to be either an octopus or a cat.

8) The first concert I attended as a teenager was an open air Glass Tiger concert at Fanshawe Park in London. We are almost certain Eva was in that crowd with me. I think I remember seeing her.

9) A contest I once won. A sales contest for Danone yogurt that netted me a genuine Luke Schenn Toronto Maple Leafs jersey. Of course I didn't win that alone: my dairy/frozen team at Price Chopper contributed. 

10)  A movie I have memorized: the easy (and already given) answer would be Groundhog Day, which I once watched five times in succession for the United Way. But I consciously discarded most of that movie so that one day I could enjoy it again. I have, since. No, the movie I have memorized is Silence of the Lambs.

11) The name I'd want to go by if it wasn't my own: I have never given this any thought. I like my name, but if I had to choose another it'd probably be Kieron. Still has a K, honours one of the closest friends I ever had, and I just find the name lovely.

12) Best phone I've ever owned: My current Pixel 8 and it's not close. I mean, it's the first time I've had a current-gen near flagship phone. I love it for several reasons. One, it ISN'T a Samsung, which means it doesn't come with fifty duplicate apps you'll never use hogging half its memory. Two, the speech to text is great. Three, the call screening feature exclusive to Pixels is worth the price of the phone all by itself. Don't want to talk to the guy inquiring about your ducts or your car insurance or the virus in your computer? Hit Call Screen and your caller will be asked their name and the reason for their call, which is supplied to you via text. You can then choose to get more information, accept, or decline the call. Brilliant. (The phone will also wait on hold for you.)

13) The mythical creature I kinda sorta believe in even if I know it's not "real": Nessie. I mean, I WANT to believe.

14) The eeriest prediction I ever made that came true: 1993 Stanley Cup playoffs. The day before the Leafs won game one against St. Lous in double overtime on a Doug Gilmour goal from behind the net, I announced to the rec.sports.hockey Usenet community that the Leafs would win the game in double overtime on a Doug Gilmour goal from behind the net. People were asking me for lottery numbers. 

15) The first song I can ever remember truly loving: Knock Three Times, Tony Orlando and Dawn. But there are probably a dozen before that I can't recall. 

16) Number of plants in my house: zero. (Because number of cats in my house: two...)

17) Favourite "bad" smell: gasoline or campfire. (If you think the second is a "good" smell, think again: campfires are HIGHLY carcinogenic, akin to inhaling a pack of smokes all at once.)

18) Best nonsexual fantasy: it starts with a recurring dream that I win eighty million dollars. Initially, it was a lottery win. That's the only way I've ever dreamt it. But I've changed and vastly (and totally unrealistically) elaborated on it in a wakeful state, and now it goes something like this:

--I save at least two people's lives, usually by taking bullets intended for them

--The bullets put me in a coma

--From which I am extricated by the kisses and spoken promises of two people I love

So there's this whole program I've made up in my head called the Kiss of Life: it's something you register for with organ donation and it goes like this: anyone saving two lives and going into a coma in so doing is eligible. To win the prize, the third condition must be met (within five minutes of the kisses/promises). Seventy nine people have qualified for this fictitious prize; none have met that third condition, and so now the prize is eighty million. Plus rejuvenations for the two who kiss me and  ten people I care about, curing anything that ails them and granting them many more years of life. Yes, I have a list.

Isn't that the stupidest thing you've ever heard of? Completely impossible seventeen ways and ludicrous in the bargain. Other than this one, every fantasy I have ever had as an adult, including all the boom-chik-a-wow-wow ones,  stood at least a chance, however faint, of happening. This one is pure wish fulfillment and nothing more, and I berate myself every time it comes into my head...but can't help imagining gifting people with functional bodies and a lack of financial worry for the rest of their days.

I have this fantasy OFTEN as I am falling asleep.

Sometimes it goes further: the same alien wizards who rejuvenate my loved ones inform me that the earth is going to be destroyed next week, and offer to take us all to a galaxy far, far away. It's like something out of Contact. Is this how everyone's fantasies are? Usually my brain shuts it down before it even forms if it's impossible. Spider Robinson says a fantasy is not a wish, much less an act, but I don't know if that's true for me. If I'm fantasizing about something, by definition I'm wishing for it. How else does it work? Do people fantasize about ugly terrible things they have no wish to happen/do? How does that even work?

19) My favourite childhood book series: I really enjoyed the Choose Your Own Adventure books (and the knockoff WhichWay? books) at a certain young age. But I find myself thinking of the Alfred Hitchcock Three Investigators series. I read them all. The two I most enjoyed were the first, about Terror Castle, and especially the fourth, The Mystery of the Green Ghost. My aunt Dawna infuses my memories of both books because I read them at her house and she gave me that fourth one. They are flatly IMPOSSIBLE to find nowadays.

20) Things I can't do that most people can: blow a bubble; drive a car; perform that piercing shriek-whistle people do to get the attention of other people halfway across the country; use a whippersnipper (ungodly bad depth perception); Jesus. the list is endless.

21) Most recent dream: someone I care about -- who does not care about me -- living in my house. I'm not there anymore except as a ghost over her shoulder. I just had that dream two nights ago. Freaky.

22) Number of books I own: it's under a thousand, now. 

23) Weird sensory thing about me: I am sensitive to both light and sound. Bright sunlight ranges from annoying to intolerable. Sound is much more detailed. There are many sounds I detest. Squacking through mud (which I also hate to touch). Forks scraping on plates. Fran Drescher's voice. Noises that just kind of peter out weakly without a defined end.

GEE I WONDER IF I MIGHT BE NEURODIVERGENT.

24) Provinces visited: two. U.S. states visited: fifteen.

25) Did I have an imaginary friend? Many of them. I named them after characters from the books I read, and once talked to a dial tone for half an hour in an effort to convince my parents I had a friend. Best acting performance of my life: they bought it. It helped that somebody became my friend shortly afterwards and coincidentally had the same name. (Note: I didn't "make friends" with Tim. I still have no idea how to do that. I've never "made" a friend in my life. I just be who I am and some people befriend me.

A quote that resonates (that I haven't given you): 

“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.”

― Stuart Chase

26: Weddings I can remember attending: eight. Weddings I have participated in: three (once as ring bearer, once as musician, once as best man. Funerals I can remember attending: three.

Second half up tomorrow. 

Coming Clean...

 

My closest friends know some of the struggle I went through this spring.

Only Eva and Mark have any sense of how bad it was. You can't hide things as well from people you live with. 

Why did I hide my distress and despair from most everyone else? That's not like me. 

I grew up with a bipolar mom. I'm not blaming her for this...actually I think I'm crediting her....but the truth at any given moment was often hard to decipher. It was hard not to believe deliberately so, at times.

As a teen, I had a Trumpian idea of truth. I cast myself in the best possible light, not realizing people could easily see through my mask. The truth of anything was how I felt about it at the time. That lasted longer than it should have...almost, not quite, until I met Eva when I was 26.

By that point I'd realized I'd alienated everyone who ever cared for me. On a very deep level I didn't believe myself worthy of care at all, and the Newtonian reactions to my own actions only reinforced the notion. I began digging myself out of that hole. How? The same way I dig myself out of any hole. I make a ladder out of words and climb it. 

The writing was damn near compulsive in 1998. Much of it was done in a quiet room at Kitchener Public Library...I had nowhere to write in either of the two pretty awful  places I last lived before moving in with my now-wife on our third date. In the year before that happened, I filled a thick journal with a pink/purple cover I christened "Past, Present, Fuschia". 

Some of my best writing is in there. Nobody will ever read it. Yes, there are some things too personal for even me to share. I basically rebuilt myself into the baseline of the person I wanted to become, then charted out possible future paths. Even back then, every potential path had obstacles in it I had no idea how to overcome. Even back then I felt like it was far too late to try. So I decided to lean hard into that baseline person -- the being at my center, my core -- and see what kind of much needed  growth might result.

The first step was putting authenticity into everything I did, and to do that I began to consciously model my stepfather, John. Although he was and presumably still is a deeply private man, you could be sure his public and private faces rarely diverged. Compare and contrast my mom, whose feelings about anything could pivot instantly and often did. 

I didn't want to live like that. If at any time I can't determine how I feel about something, I'm apt to drop everything until I do. Sharing my feelings? Has always, always been like breathing to me. How else does a guy who grew up deeply sheltered, without friends, learn which feelings are natural and which aren't? I have a lot of supposedly unnatural feelings I am both lionized and demonized for.

______

But in this case I just had a lot of feelings, period. Guilt. Shame. Defiance. Grief. At first, quite a lot of anger -- which is always fear in drag. I apologize for not being willing, or able, to share that with you. I feel like I have been living a lie these past few months, and there are few things on this earth I hate more. 

Now that I am emerging from the storm, I need to shake myself dry, and so here comes a flood of words. This is carefully written not to disclose anything covered under multiple NDAs.

The campaign I was in for the better part of seven years poofed on me in February and they generously allowed me to test out for, and get into, a completely different outfit. It was a curveball for me. Part of it was the switch to a Windows machine. I have less experience with Windows than just about anyone I know, and I LOATHE it as an operating system. Since I got my first Mac in 2009, I've barely touched anything else. Not the first time I've backed myself into a corner. The job itself was radically different too: constant, EXTREMELY HIGH STRESS customer contact. Not life-and-death, but any potential interaction could easily involve (a) thousands of dollars; (b) an inconvenience that would be intolerable to anyone, especially my new clientele; and (c),  I thought I was cut out for this.

As I went through the training, my misgivings grew. One day just before work, I had what felt like what I imagine a heart attack feels like, fell and gave myself a concussion. I was forbidden to look at screens for five days...right in the meat of the training.

They tried to condense five days into one, but that only increased my anxiety. I was vomiting with every call. I kept trying to ask them to lay me off so I could go on EI. They kept telling me my only option other than perseverance (and no offer of further training or even shadowing) was quitting...which wouldn't allow me to access employment insurance. 

I went to my doctor as frightened as I have ever been in my life. My voice cracked like I was going through second puberty. I was shaking. I mean, I try my hardest to provide in other ways, but those ways don't pay the mortgage or put food in our mouths, you know? I'm so glad medical EI exists.

Getting a new job: I wanted to start looking immediately. I had a six month deadline. Eva nixed that as harshly as she ever nixes anything and commanded me to take at least a month off and heal. She, too, has been through career wrecks.

That added more fear, honestly. Every day threads from various places would find their way into my line of sight (I swear I didn't go looking for them)  all of them saying the same thing: jobs do not exist. Help, I'm homeless and have applied for almost a thousand jobs and nothing. Over and over again. Demoralizing (and terrifying). 

One more thing to add to the trigger-list. I'm getting more and more adept at simply zeroing my attention to anything I don't want to look at. By that, I do not mean I'm ignorant, any more than a person with their eyes closed is unaware they're watching a horror movie. It was a conscious decision that very quickly became unconscious: don't fixate on the Bad Thing. Let it pass over and through you. Strip your feeling from it, make it a bland fact. There are no jobs available. If it starts drumming in your head anyway -- a real problem for us anxious depressives -- reframe it. It doesn't actually say "There are no jobs available FOR YOU, does it? Have you even tried yet?

I felt a twinge with the first job I applied for. This could well be a lie on their part, but the rejection letter I got from them was worded in such a way as to encourage, not discourage me. They said they'd had over two thousand applicants and that my resume made it further than most; although they weren't interviewing me this time, I got a real feeling the "no" was more of a "not now". 

Eva's been through that. The first time she applied for her current position, she was rejected. The second time, same deal. Third time was the charm, and it was only after she had gained some call center experience. Both the first two times I DISTINCTLY recall telling her that the "no" was a "not yet" and she'd be working there someday, don't give up hope. Those gut twinges are starting to come more often as I become more open to them.

The second job I applied for, the twinge wasn't just a twinge but a psychic yank. Sure enough, after a month of waiting -- enough time for me to question whether it was a yank, a twinge, or just gas -- I got an interview. Unlike any interview I have ever had, this one was NOT in person or on camera. I was hired on my voice alone; I was well into training before anybody had the slightest idea what I looked like...and so far I've been on camera for maybe five minutes total. 

Please don't ask who I'm working for or what I do: while I can legally disclose the company I work for, I am strictly forbidden to disclose its client's names. Instant termination would be the least of my concerns. I can say I have one more week of training before nesting, that I regrettably will not have weekends off any time soon, and that other than the lack of weekends so far I'm very happy with how things are going. Nervous about taking calls, yes, and that's to be expected: I'm one of those people who doesn't feel like he knows anything until he knows everything. They have done everything in their power to stress to the whole class that mistakes are not just expected but in a sense encouraged. I'm optimistic that this company doesn't seem to put any credence into visual apperance: that aligns with my own value.

I'm glad the clouds have begun to lift. The panic around I gotta get money so we can live is pervasive and hard to combat. The guilt and shame around I just had a nervous breakdown doing stuff  easier than my wife does every day has dissipated with pharmaceutical aid. The defiance, heavily inflected with idealism as so much of mine is, had to do with needing a job at all. I'm pining for some sort of UBI so that I can learn how to stand on my own two feet, without a boss or company behind me propping me up until they're ready to pull another rug out from beneath me. We are a species that has existed for 350,000 generations...how many of those had to deal with offices (even work at home offices) and credit scores? NOT MANY.

Mostly, I'm grateful to my new employer, and to Eva and Mark, who once again kept me from spiralling completely out of control.

Now back to your irregularly scheduled Ken. 

"Give Yourself Permission Not To Have Sex"

 Source material for this entry. Some of it. The rest of it is INTENSELY personal. 

My Hollywood Squares response to this headline was I'm 24 years married, I get permission not to have sex every night.

My real answer demanded a blog.

"Celibacy is having a moment", we're told, and yes, it is. A long moment. It started a few years ago with "incels", or involuntary celibates, a group of men who blame their lack of sexual activity on women. The reality, of course, is that there is nothing involuntary about the celibacy of incels: their attitudes make them sexless by popular demand.

Incels believe that women are nothing but receptacles. This mindset differs only in degree, not in kind, from that of most other men when it comes to women. Does that sound harsh? My usual question along these lines: after how many dates do you expect sex? If you answer with a number (and only three men I've asked didn't, out of well over a hundred), then you believe women are objects you put kindness into and sex spills out.

Oh, men don't like to hear that. I'm mocked, insulted (the usual "cuck", "beta",  and "white knight") and, as if I'm a child, told that the purpose of a date IS a relationship. Yeah, okay, fine, but why does sex have to be part of a relationship? I have non-sexual relationships I cherish from the many people I call friends. At this point I'm usually insulted some more and the conversation ends abruptly. 

Those insults, by the way? They're meant to wound, and they don't even touch me. That's relatively new in my life, the ability to laugh off casual hate directed at me from a distance. I couldn't always do that. 

"Cuck" is of course short for "cuckold", a man who inverts several social norms at once by "letting" his wife have sex with other men; originally the other men were Black, but that requirement has dropped. In fact these days the word "cuck" is used identically to all those 80s gay slurs I also heard pretty much every day. It no longer means pimping your wife out, but something closer to "I wouldn't be surprised if that pitiful excuse for a man can't satisfy a woman".

I'll only repeat and repeat and repeat what Heinlein said: sexual intercourse vests no property rights. There are many perfectly valid reasons for options beyond monogamy and so long as everyone agrees to the deal -- and periodically revisits the deal to see what has changed -- quite frankly I don't know why people care so damn much. Doesn't affect you.

Isn't it interesting how to about half the population, "masculinity" is both something immutable and forever fixed AND something you're hated for if you don't perform it the "right" way? It's a mystery kinda like how sex is an unstoppable biological urge (whatever) for men and women are supposed to "keep their legs together" (whatever times a million).

We all know "beta", the unfinished, buggy, unfit-for-consumption model of a man who treats women as equals (the horror). Not only is the whole "alpha/beta" idea scientifically vacuous and toxic as fuck in men, it doesn't even apply to the wolves men stole the framework from. I hear "beta" as a compliment. Every time.

"White knight" is just as ludicrous as the other two. It has a long and noble literary history and originally meant a hero; in today's world, outside business, it's a man who engages in various behaviours to try and help or impress women without their consent. The concept ties in with "virtue signalling", the implication being it's all an act.

So much to unpack here because this is all wrong.

I do call out misogyny whenever I see it. Not to impress women: in fact I don't address the victim(s) of the misogyny unless she/they address me first. Not exactly to "help" women either...more like to help MEN. The immediate object of my scorn is probably beyond saving, but I do want men to see there is another way to treat women besides the way they've been taught to. 

I don't do "acts". 

There are certain reflexive responses to what they call "white knighting". The most common is for the sexist pig to ask me if my behaviour/words have "ever gotten me laid". To which I cheerily respond "nope, that's not what they're for". The script diverges here pretty much right down the middle: half call me a liar and flatly refuse to consider that a man would do anything without a sexual motive. The other half lapse into a spicy verbal stew heavily flavoured with "cuck" and "beta" and some swipes at my sexuality because clearly a guy who doesn't think a woman is a bedpost notch MUST be flaming.

Not flaming. Not even smoldering. I am at most "heteroflexible" -- and about as flexible there as I am physically, which is to say...not very. 

Does defending women against sexism need their consent? I've yet to hear a woman say I should have asked for it. I usually get thanked, politely, and sometimes with a species of desperate relief that breaks my heart: just how many assholes ARE there out there, anyway?  Is it an act? If it ever was, I long ago forgot how to play out of character. Like, in my teens. My response to a woman thanking me: this is baseline behaviour, please don't thank me for doing the least that needed doing. 

________

The linked article above is written by a devout Catholic. I was baptized into that faith twice and have rejected pretty much all of it. But there is wisdom here. Plenty of it.

Once you get past the through-the-looking-glass definitions the church uses, anyway. In the Catholic church, "celibacy" isn't abstinence, it's being single (since no singles are supposed to ever have sex). Actual celibacy is called "continence", as if sex is piss that leaks out of you if your muscles are weak. That really does seem like how every religion (as opposed to spirituality) treats physical love. Like piss.

But then, that's for good reason. Or at least I think it is, and I think that because among the people that regard sex askance are the ancient Greeks. They had nothing against it in and of itself, but they recognized it as incomplete. And so it is, again to me.

Sex without love is...nothing. I'd rather take a VOW of celibacy than ever have sex without love in it. Interestingly, the author says "Perhaps the greatest gift celibacy can foster is the ability to love people without wanting anything from them" and goes on to suggest sexual love wants "everything".

Mick Jagger said "you can't always get what you want...but if you try sometime you'll find you get what you need". I'm going to get to this in just a moment. 

I've had sex without love in it. I've had sex I didn't think love was in, only to find out later it really, really was.  Both kinds of sex did nothing but hurt myself and my partners in the end. There are in fact people who pour love into their sex on short notice. Just because I can't do that doesn't mean it can't be done. 

I feel like a lot of women have had sex without love in it and regret it just as much or more than I do. "Why have sex if the sex is usually bad?" The author praises this but laments it's for the wrong reason: disgust at digital dating culture" rather than "physical discipline". But the thing is? Regardless of why you're celibate -- if you place sex in its proper place in your life -- the LONGER you're celibate, the more discipline you'll build.

Discipline does not, in any way, displace desire. Whenever my desire spikes, I hike my discipline unless I have permission to share the desire. 

I have been celibate at various points in my life. Once for five years. Can I confess something? All things being equal, I'd rather not be. But whether I am celibate or not at any given point, one of those thorny things I have to explain to people once they get close enough (and it can take years for them to fully grasp): the difference between desires and expectations.

I have more desire than I know what to do with. Not to jump people, never to jump people. To get to know them, as deeply as they'll allow. To know their dreams and their demons, their hearts and minds and souls -- in that order -- and then, if we're on the same page, PERHAPS their bodies. 

Celibacy, after all, is not asexuality. A celibate person may well want sex. But she can, ideally, recognize that desire, comprehend it and send it on its way. There is much one can learn by feeling a desire without rushing to satisfy it.

Indeed there is. You can examine your desire from all angles, play with it (privately), really feel it, and then...let it go. Yeah, some of them are a bit harder to let go than others. I can't be called disciplined in much of my life -- I'm far too easily distracted by new information and new emotion -- but here I am a drill sergeant.  

Sex is just one form of intimacy. It is, admittedly, a doozy: where other kinds could be called "into me see", a physical expression of love is literally "into me be". It's a gift I don't deserve unless a woman says I do. (NOTE AND NOTE WELL:  UNLESS, not UNTIL: the latter definitely implies I'm waiting for those panties to come down, which I am most emphatically not).

Pull it back way before sex and call it a kiss, now.

There are an even dozen people I would just love to kiss, and the only way ANYBODY on that list will find out a single name is to ask me if theirs is there.  Anybody off list will never know even that much. (And then, having been told that yes, dear friend, your kiss is on my list, they won't notice any difference in treatment from me. I mirror what's freely given me, nothing more, nothing less.  Further to that: none of these kisses are even remotely likely to happen, and will never happen without explicit and enthusiastic consent on the other end. It wouldn't come up at all unless I felt very clearly that it could be returned. It's...kind of an requirement to even activate the switch that lights the light at the top of the streetpole between my legs.

(It's a model world down there.) 

People have wildly speculated on every relationship I've ever had in my life. They've all been wrong in multiple ways, by design.  The same man who said sexual intercourse doesn't vest property rights also said the thing to do with a nosey question is to fail to hear it. 

 I don't get much of this anymore since people have made up their minds about me. Thankfully most have recognized, at least partly, that I really do have an oversized heart and devote myself as much as possible to growing the hearts of others...and that this does no harm because I seek out the same sort of person.

I have had three women promise me the next life. They'll each get it: once we leave this realm of relativity, all times will be one and we can be everywhere all at once. I know this ain't scientific: put down the damn slide rule, okay? This is soul talk science will never touch. I don't think it can: anything that can't be sensed or measured, as far as our hyperrationalist world is concerned, doesn't exist. And if it's heard mewling away in the dark just beyond physical perception, it must be stepped on and squashed before it breeds.

One other thing caught me in that article:

Celibacy transforms other people from potential lovers to potential friends — friendship being the form of love that asks for nothing except that its beloved exist. 

But every lover I have ever had was a friend first and always. No idea why she would treat these as mutually exclusive. Then again, only opposites are mutually exclusive in my world.

Love to all of you. Whether it's physical or not.

Chicago!

Administrivia:

So Substack is a dud: I'm getting a fifth to a third the number of views of a typical Breadbin/Proofing Drawer post. And life has thrown me some curveballs of late that have forced my attention elsewhere for the foreseeable future. I won't bother you with excuses. As part of my ongoing social media calibration, I'm done with announcing plans before they've come to fruition.

____

I do want to commemorate the weekend I just had with my pal. My apologies for the lack of pictures: I left my phone turned off once I got over the border, not wanting to incur ugly roaming charges. 

Back in November, Craig invited me to come see Mahler's 2nd Symphony performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And right away I have to stop and explain to non-classical music fans why this is a big deal.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)'s musical philosophy might be summarized as "go big or go home". His symphonies, of which there are nine complete, are massive, emotive sound worlds. Symphony #2, "the Resurrection", is widely considered to be the absolute zenith of Romantic era music; in fact, many say the last five minutes is the most glorious music ever composed. It's scored for a very large orchestra and chorus -- so large, in fact, that only three orchestras in Canada have the forces at their disposal to program the work. 

Craig has seen this several times. Being a professional trumpeter, it kind of goes with the territory. For me it was a bucket list piece I honestly never thought I'd get the chance to hear live.

He had a gig at Theatre Woodstock on Friday and comped me a ticket: Something Rotten! This was an absolute hoot of a play, capably acted and sung, and some of its tunes will be stuck in my head for a while -- especially the opening number, "Welcome To The Renaissance" and "A Musical" (the latter directly references twenty other musicals in the space of eight minutes and celebrates the genre while mercilessly mocking it).  So much fun.

We lit out for Chi-town at nine in the morning on Saturday in a monsoon that let up shortly out of London. Not much to be said about most of the trip there as far as scenery goes. The 403 from London to Sarnia is quite possibly the most boring stretch of road in Ontario ("oh, wow, a curve!" I remarked just outside Sarnia). It was about a half hour wait at the border, otherwise painless, and then we stopped -- as is required -- at Cracker Barrel in Port Huron. 

Craig is a fan of the chain, and I mean that as short for "fanatic".  I'd been to three locations with Eva and my love for the place isn't too far behind his. Good down-home comfort food. Even with our dollar sitting around 73 cents, eating out in America is quite a bit cheaper than it is here.

 

I had never been west of I-75 in Michigan. The little differences jump out at you to let you know you're not in Canada anymore:

REST AREAS. It's odd, you know: you'd expect hypercapitalist America to have "service centres" like we have in Ontario (ours are called En Route) but instead you have actual rest areas, with picnic tables and nowhere to spend money besides a couple of vending machines. America does these right, in my opinion.

SPEED LIMITS! Rural Michigan has long sections of interstate signed at 75 mph (120 km/hr). You'll only find that on one highway in Canada...and in Michigan, in many places,  the flow of traffic is 90 mph or faster. I'm not kidding. 

WHERE ARE THE HIGH RISES? Apartment buildings seem to be almost non-existent outside the downtowns in the U.S. You really notice the lack.

Craig had booked us in to the Holiday Inn Express in Portage, Indiana. This little city is an hour east of downtown Chicago. Any closer and we'd be staying in Gary....which is not advised. I only saw the city from the highway, and I saw enough to know I don't want to see any more. There might be nice areas of Gary, but all I saw was blight and neglect. 

After checking in and refreshing ourselves, we completed the trip into the Windy City, and this is when things got interesting fast. 

I've always felt Toronto is extremely intimidating to drive in. There's only one through east-west route and it is clogged to high heaven most of the day and night, not to mention absolutely infested with tractor-trailers. 

Chicago is intimidating for different reasons. The first is the signage. Coming over the Chicago Skyway, you're confronted with a profusion of signs with a hell of a lot of information on them. Toronto has its share of spaghetti interchanges but Chicago is on a whole different level. 

 Like Toronto, Chicago has express and collector lanes (here called "local"): unlike Toronto, the signs for the collector lanes do NOT inform you which exits each segment serves. Let's say you want to exit on Park Ave. In Toronto, you'll transfer from express to local when you see the sign saying "COLLECTOR LANES and a list of exits, wth distances:

Field Ave 2km

Meadow Rd 3 km

Park Ave 4km

Dale Ave 5 km

In Chicago, you better know where Park Ave is because the signs won't tell you. The split will say EXPRESS on one side and LOCAL ALL EXITS FIELD AVE TO DALE AVE. Craig tells me he had some adventures his first couple of times here.

Then you get downtown and I never really thought I'd call Toronto a baby city but...wow. Depending how you measure population, the cities are comparable, but Chicago feels all grown up. I know Toronto currently has more ongoing building construction than any other city in North America but it has a ways to go to catch up with the colossus that is Chicago. 

The waterfront here is a vast improvement on Toronto's: instead of endless condos, you've got as nearly endless park. And of course the public transit here puts Toronto's to utter shame (not hard to do)...although the L train is old, rickety and loud as hell. 

We park and are warned to validate our ticket at Symphony Center, otherwise it'll cost us fifty bucks.

Dinner: Miller's Pub, established 1935. This sprawling and cavernous bar is a local icon. I had a prime rib sandwich and Craig had a heaping platter of fish and chips and I'd come back here in a heartbeat. 

Then, the main event. We climbed and climbed (and climbed and climbed) until we could almost touch the roof (click here for something like our view). No vertigo until the standing ovation.

Which was well earned. Mahler's 2nd symphony is about 90 minutes long. Our performance was to be conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is quite renowned in the orchestral world, but he withdrew for personal reasons and so we got Neeme Järvi instead, and he's legendary.

The piece itself -- well, I can't expect any of you to go listen to it. Just in case: Neeme Järvi doesn't have a YouTube recording, so I have gone with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. There is a whole universe in here, complete with some awfully big bangs.  It requires serious stamina to play this, no matter your instrument. The brass and strings in particular have very demanding parts.

The choral fifth movement is simply heavenly. Here's a link to the final 8 minutes or so, and if you can spare the time, you'll never hear anything else quite like it.

Craig being Craig, he had spotted the assistant principal trumpeter. Mark Ridenour, just before Mark had to go prepare for the concert;  we met up with him in the rotunda after the performance. Given congratulations on a fine performance, Mark said that it felt like a struggle for the entire brass section. If that's them struggling, I can't begin to imagine what they sound like when they're not. 

Then we meandered up Wabash St. to a bar where friends of Craig's from Sarnia were. A burly Black bouncer started to pat us down and demand a $25 cover charge to enter, and so instead his friends came out one at a time, so as not to lose their table.

We forgot to validate the parking, but Craig simply asked the parking attendant if she could do so, and she did. One of his philosophies is "it never hurts to ask". What feels bold as, well, brass to me is just confidence and kindness (for Craig is one of the kindest men you'll ever meet). I truly believe he produces his own luck.

Getting out of downtown was...frightening. In fact I've never been that scared in a car in my life. It had nothing to do with Craig: the man is an exceptional driver roughly on par with my wife (and that is a supreme compliment). It had more to do with how Craig had to drive.

In Chicago gridlock -- and that grid was locked tighter than Tilly, such that the traffic lights were meaningless--you drive aggressively or you never move at all. A spot opens up ahead of you: you'd best take it before somebody else does. And so we made our way, ever so slowly, out of the downtown core and back to our hotel in Portage.

We had pizza from this place delivered to our room. I know I was supposed to get a Chicago deep dish pizza, but I really prefer a thin crust. I didn't realize how hungry I was. Damn, was that tasty.

The next day, we came  back home, stopping once again at the Port Huron Cracker Barrel, this time for lunch. We ordered, and Craig excused himself to go to the restroom; before he got back, our dinners were on the table. I have NEVER had service that fast. And why can't Cracker Barrel come to Canada?

Craig tried his best to get me into opera on the way. It's still a bridge too far for me, mostly because of what feels to me like overwrought sopranos. But on the way back I heard a couple of Bruckner symphonies, which were excellent, and later that night at his place I introduced him to this, not expecting him to like it.

People don't like the music I share with them; I've basically had to shutter that side of myself. Craig loved this...sent it to his father, who loved it too...and there is nothing that feels quite like people falling in love with music you love yourself.

I was supposed to train home yesterday, but the train was replaced by a bus due to "operational issues". I got back home around 1pm, tired but exhilarated.

Some thank yous are in order, as alwayu.

To Mark and Kathy, who together got me to Woodstock; 

To my father, whose generosity supplied my spending money;

To Eva, for the train ticket (too bad it turned into a bus ticket, but oh well);

and lastly, of course, to Craig, for the music, the food, the laughs, and the company. I love you, pal.