The Suicide Shop

NOTE TO READERS: I wrote this six months ago, when I was at an absolute nadir. It was never intended for public consumption: you'll see why when you consume it. This is me pulling myself up by my wordstraps, and should I ever sink that low again--I hope to all the gods that ever were that I don't--this life preserver ought to be preserved.

THE SUICIDE SHOP   By Ken Breadner

“It won’t work, you know.”  

“What…?”  

“Killing yourself. It won’t solve any of your problems.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. It took most of her energy to come down to the Suicide Shop today, and the last thing she expected when she got here was somebody telling her that the only way out wasn’t a way out at all.  

  

“But…look, I came down here to buy some pills. Just…just give them to me, okay?”  

“Sure, I can do that. But they won’t work.”

She took out her wallet and upended it over the counter. Wadded-up bills and change spilled out in a flood.  “That should be enough.”

The man took his time unfolding bills and organizing the coins. “Yes, there’s enough here for a lethal dose. That’s what you wanted, right? Enough to kill your body. So that’s the first step taken care of.”

“First step? What else could there be? I take these pills, I’m dead. Then what?”

“Have you written your suicide note? That’s just one of many things we can do for you.”

She was incredulous. “Are you trying to upsell me? On killing myself?  You’re kidding, right?”  

“Not at all. Most people like to leave notes, though, for the people they care about.”

“Not me. I care about people, the problem is they don’t care about me. A note won’t change that.”

“Why not?”

She stared at the man asking all these stupid questions. He looked like a man who had graduated from Nerd School with high honours: short. kind of fat, with thick glasses. Bald head. Nondescript clothes.  Not ugly, exactly, but not…anything else, either. Except the eyes. His eyes were hazel, and they weren’t just looking at her, they were seeing her. Nobody had actually seen her for about a year. She’d flitted through the world like one already dead. Like a ghost.

“Why won’t a note change that?”

How to answer that question? How to explain to him that no matter what she wrote, she couldn’t possibly make them understand?  

“Do I have to answer all these questions? I just want to kill myself.”

“Well, yeah, actually. I’m sorry, but you kind of do. We need to make sure that our clients are of sound mind, that they know what they’re doing. That’s why you had to go through that web interview last week, and why you’re being recorded now. We don’t want to get sued by your estate or anything like that.”

She glared at him “My…estate. I’m pretty much flat broke.”

“Humour me. Why won’t a note work? Most of our clients write something. Some of them write pages and pages and pages, different notes for different people, accusing or absolving—“

“Those are cries for help. I’m beyond help.”

He peered at her again. It should have been creepy, the way he seemed to look right through her, but somehow it wasn’t. They locked eyes. After an unknowable time—

“Nobody’s beyond help.”

He stated that with a flat finality. It came out like a command. 

“I don’t have the energy to argue with you.” 

“So don’t. Just tell me what you’re thinking.”

“You…you know, don’t you?”

“I think I do, yes. But I can’t plant any suggestions in your head. Your estate, remember?”

The noise that came out of her throat felt alien, like a foreign word she hadn’t spoken or heard in years. It took her a second to realize it was a laugh. She drew energy from it, a lot more energy when it turned bitter.

“You don’t have time for this.”

The man moved with uncanny speed. He shot out from around the counter, went to the door that gave on the seedy street outside and locked it, flipping the sign around to say “closed”. He shuttered the windows and turned a dimmer switch. The lights brightened. All of this seemed to be in one fluid motion. He sat down in a leather recliner she hadn’t even noticed and motioned her to a love seat against the side wall.

“All I’ve got is time.” Again, like an order.

She walked over to the love seat and sat down, feeling like she was dreaming. Am I dead already?

She looked around, as if seeing the Suicide Shop for the first time. It didn’t look like a shop at all. It looked more like a doctor’s office: drop ceiling with fluorescent lights that buzzed faintly, a bunch of waiting room chairs, potted plants that looked fake, boring prints on the walls. A reception counter against the back wall. There were a couple of weird anomalies: the love seat and recliner, tucked off in a corner alcove. A huge fireplace that dominated the right wall. And him, the nerdy, bespectacled man who actually saw her.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“I’m Joe. You’re Tara. And you tell me you’re beyond help.”

“Okay, Joe—if I tell you all this, will you promise to give me the pills I came here for?”

He looked at her again. It was unnerving and empowering in equal measure how he seemed to actually look into her head rather than at it. 

“If you still want them after you’re done, sure.” 

His words hung in the air. She searched their tone for a hint of a challenge or a dare and found none, so she invented both.

“You think you’re going to stop me, don’t you? If I had a knife on me, I’d cut my throat right here.”

“But you don’t. I do—a really sharp one, locked up in the back room there, but I’m not giving it to you. We agreed on pills. And not until you tell me your story.”

She sighed. “Okay, Joe, story time. Sit back and listen.”

The mere act of gathering her thoughts exhausted her. She’d been living with just one thought in her head for the last month — I’VE GOT TO KILL MYSELF — and digging up the ground under that thought was hard work. Whole minutes went by and he sat there. calmly, waiting, not saying a word. 

“I’ve been living online for the last three years.” 

He nodded. She took a deep breath and continued.  

“If you can call it living. I don’t, not anymore….

“I used to, you know. Back when I first discovered the Internet, it actually…injected life into me. Or it seemed to.  I was…I was in university back then. It was awful, university. Professors acting like petty gods, you weren’t allowed to think for yourself. I spent thousands of dollars for them to read textbooks to me. Verbatim. And I had to buy the textbooks.

“My degree was English. Stupid choice. I had no idea what it would do for my future and didn’t care. I thought I was living in the moment. 

“Then the Internet came. It was the exact opposite of my classes: I could write my thoughts online and people all over the world would look at them and praise them. Or mock them. It didn’t matter which…at least people were paying attention to me. I felt back then like I had so much to tell the world, if only the world would listen…

“I spent whole days online. I’d forget to eat. I’d get up after twelve hours straight to go to the bathroom and I’d be in there thinking maybe somebody just emailed me. Back I’d go to the lab. It was like crack cocaine.

“And I fell in love on the Internet after I fell in love WITH the Internet. Several times. It was so easy. Nobody had to look at me, this was back when the Internet was all-text. My weight, my mousy hair, my glasses, none of it mattered. My words mattered. I was good with words. 

“The online relationships sometimes moved into real-world relationships and when they did that they petered out. Of course. I wasn’t suited for the real world.

“Eventually the inevitable happened. I dropped out of university. It…it fucked up my life even worse. I lost access to the online world—I didn’t have the money to buy myself a computer back then—and for five years I just…drifted.

“Nothing like how I’ve drifted lately, though….

“And then I met someone, a man. I met him offline—we were married within a year and a half. He didn’t actually fix me, but he showed me how to fix myself, and made me feel like he accepted me no matter what, and so life was good. Life was REAL. Do you understand?”

He nodded. “Yes, I understand.”

“Good, because I don’t.”

The lights buzzed. The traffic droned by outside. 

“Have you got any water?’

“Right in front of you.”

“When did you—?”

“Never mind. You were saying life was good, life was real, but you still don’t understand. What don’t you understand?”

“Why I kept migrating online. I had everything I could ever want in my real world life, but I still went online. All the friggin’ time. It’s addictive, the sense of connection you get online, you know? Hellishly addictive. You know what they call it when you visit a website?”

“A hit.”

“Yeah, a hit. That can’t be a coincidence.

“So many people writing so many pretty words.  For a long time I didn’t notice they were all fake.”

“Fake?” Again his eyes caught her. They were so perceptive: hazel, flecked with green, a piercing gaze that didn’t miss much.

“Yeah, it’s a fake place, online. There’s a reason this is called “the real world”, right?… People say they care, they say lots of nice things. They don’t mean them.”

“Why do you say that? That seems like a blanket condemnation.”

“Oh…I have no doubt they think they care. I don’t blame them, really. It’s the Internet. The fucking Internet. It sucks all the reality out of…everything…and it sucks people into it. It’s a vampire, and I’ve been bitten but good. Maybe pills won’t work. Maybe I need a stake through the heart or something.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Joe got up and starting pacing. “You say the Internet is a vampire and it sucks people’s…good intentions out?”

“Yeah. The Internet is a vampire.”

He looked even more confused.

“Joe, do you know how many times people have told me they love me online?”

“No, of course not.”

“Dozens. I’ve lost count. I’m a hit on Facebook, I’ve got a blog people love to read, I’ve got heaps of Reddit karma. I don’t tweet much, I hate the length restriction on Twitter, but every time I tweet something it gets favorited and retweeted. I’m not famous online, but in my own little circle, it’s like I’m adored.”

He sat down again. “That sounds…that sounds like a good thing.”

“Oh yeah…sure. And I was Problem Central. Got a problem? Go to Tara, she helps. That gave me my purpose in life for many years. I was good at it.  A real problem dumpster. You know why I was good at it, Joe? Because I care, that’s why.”

“That’s great, Tara. You’re obviously good at helping people.”

“Yeah? Now ask me how many of my online “friends” have the slightest interest in seeing me OFFLINE. In the REAL world.”

“Ah. I think I understand now.”

“No, you don’t. For a while I’d try to set up meetings, for coffee or whatever. People would agree to them, enthusiastically, and then when the time came they’d beg off and say they had to stay home and wash the pipes or iron the cat that day. Sometimes they’d actually have reasons, not excuses, but I’d hear the same reasons over and over again…and more importantly, I noticed that I was always the one asking. I thought, maybe I’m too pushy. I’ll relax about this and they’ll come to me. They never did.”

He winced. “That’s hard.”

She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Each new acquaintance would work the same way. I might meet her offline…once. Then we’d keep in touch online, and it was as if…like…as if all the blood would get sucked right out of the friendship. It became a bunch of pretty words on a screen. And I thought, do they see me like that? Is online me fake, too?

 Joe sat forward in his recliner. “No, Tara, it isn’t. Is it?”

“I don’t know, Joe. I really don’t. What I do know is that I can’t stand the online world, even though I’m drawn to it like a moth to a flame, and the real world is so…goddamn…desolate…maybe the next world is better.”

“You’re still married, though, Tara, right?”

“I am. He’s such a good man, he doesn’t deserve to have a hollowed out husk for a wife. And when he’s at work, I think…I think “I’ll go out for a walk, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll get out of the house and feel real sunshine and real wind and see real people. Sometimes I even manage to do it, to escape the pull of the computer for a while. And you know what I find out there as I walk around all alone? People walking around out there all alone too. Alone with their phones. Because the Internet has invaded the outside world, too, now. It’s insatiable. I don’t have a cell phone, Joe. It’s the last vestige of real Tara trying to escape the online world. Part of me wants a phone so bad, just so I can keep pretending.”

“I don’t want to pretend any more.” She stopped, and took another sip of water.

Joe sat and thought for a minute, giving her words real weight.  “Okay, but you still haven’t answered my question. About the note.”

Tara looked at him as if he was an idiot. Maybe his eyes weren’t so perceptive after all. “I can’t write a fucking note, Joe”, she said, wearily. “If I put a note on Facebook it’ll look like I’m trawling for attention.”

“You aren’t?”

“OF COURSE I AM!!” Tara screamed. She jerked herself to her feet, picked her half-full water glass up in her right hand, drew in back over her head, and hurled it with all her strength towards the fireplace. It struck the back wall dead centre and exploded, spraying shards of glass back out into the room. 

Joe had gotten up with her. Mindless of her anger, he stepped towards her, arms stretched, and enfolded her. Tara was thrumming with tension and she didn’t even seem to notice she was being hugged, at first. Gradually, bit by bit, her body relaxed and her arms crept hesitantly around his waist. 

Joe hugged her, hard. It looked intimate—it was intimate—but it wasn’t a sexual hug at all. It was two real human beings sharing a real embrace. A number-one hug, not the letter-A obscenity that passed for a hug nowadays.

Tara was crying, her tears staining Joe’s shirt. He pulled her even closer for a minute, trying to push as much of his life-force into her as he could. The nice thing about doing this, Joe thought for the thousandth time, was that there was an inexhaustible supply of that life-force to draw on. 

Tara’s flow of tears slowed, then stopped. She snuffled snot and reached behind her, towards the table for a Kleenex. Joe sat back down and waited for Tara to compose herself.  

“I..I’m s-sorry.”

“For what?”

“I made a mess with that glass.” She started to get up and Joe put his hand up to stop her. “Never mind, it’s no big deal. I’ll clean it up later.”

Tara regarded Joe carefully. “Thank you.”

Joe laughed a little. “For what this time?”

“For that hug. My husband hugs me at least three times a day and your hug felt like one of his.”

Joe’s gaze sharpened again. “He doesn’t know what you’ve just told me, does he?”

Tara looked around, guiltily. “He…he suspects, I think. But I don’t know how to explain it to him. I’m not sure I’ve explained it properly to you, just now. I think I’m afraid if I tell him he’ll think he’s not enough for me…or something…” she trailed off.

“He’s not?”

“Joe, I—I…all my life, I’ve been looking for connections. I want to feel like I’m part of the world—for a long time when I was a kid I didn’t feel that way at all. It’s like there can’t be enough connections. I want to heal people’s pain and be—not at the center of everything, I’m not that narcissistic, but…I just want to show people how much I care. For real.”

“And I’ve always said that real love didn’t have to be reciprocated, and I meant that—what kind of unconditional love only exists if it’s returned? But I guess I lied.”

He looked at her questioningly. 

“I don’t care if I’m loved or not, but I care DEEPLY if I’m connected. Online is all about connections, right? You can connect to so many people so quickly. But you’re not really connecting to the person, just to the pixels. It’s not real. That’s what I’m telling you.”

My husband, Steve—he is a wonderful, wonderful person, I love him so much, and we connect so well. But most of the time he feels like the only real connection in my life and I know I’m burdening him with that. He doesn’t deserve to be burdened with that.”

Joe stopped her. “That’s where you’re wrong, Tara,” he said.

She sniffled again. “Huh?”

“Of course he deserves that. He signed up for it, and he loves you just as much as you love him. Really. You said in that web interview you’d been married fifteen years?”

“Yes, fifteen.”

“Ever cheated on him?”

“Of course not. Even if I wanted to, nobody else has ever even looked twice at me.”

“But he looks at you at least three times every day, when he hugs you, Tara.”

She brushed Joe’s words aside. “Yes…but…Joe..he’s it. There’s no one else. In all my life I’ve met maybe four people who really cared about me, and sooner or later they don’t any more. It’s me, I’m sure it’s me, but nobody’s honest enough to say what it is about m—“

“Tara.” The command he could put in his voice was amazing.

Joe had reached into a drawer and pulled out a poster. It said:

IF YOU HAVE ONE GOOD FRIEND, YOU ARE LUCKY.

IF YOU HAVE TWO GOOD FRIENDS, YOU ARE BLESSED.

THREE IS IMPOSSIBLE.

She gazed at it, feeling her inner world rearranging itself.

“You’re blessed, Tara. You’re blessed, and you don’t even realize it. You’re blessed with two friends, and you’re blessed with the perception to recognize that the online world isn’t real. Do you know how rare that is? I see people walking around with their phones, too. I go on vacation and wherever I go, there they are—not the people, just the phones. Nobody wants to experience anything any more. You still do. That makes you a pretty smart person, in my books.

The Internet?” Joe continued. “It’s a tool. That’s all it is. A way to keep in touch with information, and yes, people. It’s not meant for relationships and never was. Real friends see each other offline every now and again—as often as they can.”

“Joe, I’m telling you, there’s only St—“

“So, Tara”, he overrode her, “how about next Wednesday? 

“Huh”?

“I can meet you earlier, of course. Tomorrow, even, if you want. Unless I’m with another client, I’m pretty much free.”

She stared at him. “Joe, you’re just saying that.”

“I am”, he said. ‘Saying it, not typing it or texting it.”

“You can’t be real”, said Tara.

“Try me”, said Joe.

in memoriam Rev. "Uncle Roger" McCombe

and with warm thanks to Spider Robinson

Am I Sex-Negative? (Yet another "coming-out...")

WARNING: This one is definitely NSFW. Some people may consider it TMI; they'll want to GTFO now.

As you can imagine, I've learned a lot in the past year. Some lessons have come easily, some much less so. Some have come as a surprise: I *do* feel jealousy, on occasion; I'm not yet the communicator I aspire to be; and apparently, I am "sex-negative".

I've had a lot of insults hurled at me in my life, but none that surprised me quite as much as that one did. "I've never been sex-negative," I thought, "unless, well, there were those periods where my life tested negative for sex."

What I always, and I mean always, have been is questioning of the place sex has in most people's lives, especially most men's lives. It is reflected in our language. The suffix -er denotes "one who": a runner is one who runs, a driver is one who drives, a hammer is one who hams, and a grocer is one who groces. A "lover" is not one who loves, but rather "one who has sex".
I've found that weird since I first noticed it, which was right about the time I was hitting puberty. We have another one that's even weirder: "to sleep with". Buddy, if you're sleeping, I think you're doing it wrong.
French, incidentally, has the verb baiser, which ostensibly means "to kiss" but which, in almost all contexts, really means "to fuck". I can't speak for other languages, but I suspect what Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory insists on calling "coitus" has thoroughly supplanted other, more "innocent" words in many of them. And I find that odd.

I get that sex is a biological imperative. It still shouldn't, in my humble opinion, have the power it does over so many minds. You need to eat: three weeks without food and you'll likely be dead. Three weeks without sex is no hardship at all, in comparison. But many men claim to think about sex at least as often as they think about food. In fact, I've sometimes joked that "sex to you is like food to a starving man, it's all you ever talk about."
That joke doesn't go over well. Implying that someone doesn't get regular sex is--again inexplicably--a grave insult to many. It's no mistake that among the myriad of euphemisms for "penis" is "manhood". Insult a man's virility and you've kicked him in it.

I don't get it. I am more than my penis. All men are: being reduced to a set of genitalia is offensive. Just ask a woman who has been called a twat, let alone a cunt. (Again, it's considered much less offensive to call a man a "dick". Some guys seem to take it as a compliment.)

Let's keep looking at the language, because the words we use reflect our values. Consider the phrase "friends with benefits" (FWBs).

Ugh. That one really bothers me. What it says to me is: there are friends, see, and then there are friends you fuck. Only the latter kind of friend gives you "benefits".

Tell me that's not sickening. (I asked on Facebook if there was a term even more dismissive towards friendship: one friend came back with "fuck buddies". That one, interestingly, doesn't bother me at all. Take the fuck away and you're still buddies. Take the "benefits" away and why be friends if the benefits are gone?

Ken, you're overthinking this.

Am I? Am I really?

Suppose I told you I haven't had sex in the last three years. (Not true, incidentally, but play along with me here, okay?) You know I'm married. Suddenly my marriage is diminished in a critical way. The automatic assumption is that there's something wrong. Seriously wrong. That's ridiculous on the face of it: there is much more to a marriage than sex. But it's taken as read that there's something defective about a man, or a marriage, without regular sex in it.

I'm supposedly "sex-negative" because I dare to think thoughts like this.

No, let's get even more sex-negative. There is an ongoing, insolvable debate in poly circles as to whether or not any ethical non-monogamy qualifies as polyamory. My take on that is an emphatic no: the Latin for love is right in the term. I'd tell you that swinging, for example, is about sex, and there may or may not be love in it. (Almost certainly isn't: many swingers' resources online warn you in giant flaming letters about the dangers of falling in love with a swinging partner. But enough people have angrily told me they love their swinging partners for me to lighten up on that just a tad.)

Whereas poly, to me, is about love, which may or may not include sex. Human nature and sexual obsession being what they are, it often does...but it certainly does not have to.

This lands me firmly into sex-negative territory online if I dare to say it.

My inability to have sex without love strikes many people as, to put it charitably, highly abnormal. I've called sex, absent emotion,  "fifty pumps, a tickle and a squirt" and a "genital sneeze"--wow, you'd think I was a rapist, given the negative reaction to those phrases. But, for me, they are nothing less than the truth.  (I love relatively easily, it's true, but I absolutely need that emotional bond to even be interested in sex.)

I did cross over the line, the line I try so hard not to cross over, thinking that my way was the better way, not just for me, but for others. I'll cop to that: That's sex-negative. It's just: anything in life without love is flat. Neale Donald Walsch: "Whether it's joyless sex or joyless spaghetti and meatballs", an ingredient is missing. Spider Robinson: "We weren't making love, we were fucking. Nothing wrong with that, just not enough right with it."

Others have corrected me, gently and occasionally harshly. Sex, I've been told, is fun, and certainly doesn't need all that pesky emotional baggage tied to it. (That "pesky emotional baggage" is a huge part of who I am, but again, that's just me.) Some have noted that they invest even their random hook-ups with love...as Can't Help But Fly (The Poly Song) puts it, "It's not indiscriminate fucking, it's indiscriminate loving". That made me feel better about it all, but guiltily so: I'd forced something else into my paradigm instead of making a concerted effort to accept a different paradigm.


 It recently came to my attention that there is a term for people like me: demisexuality. (That description fits me to a T: sexual attraction not a necessary component of friendship, but friendship a necessary component of sexual attraction (former part bolded so my friends don't get all skeeved out);  completely boggled by sexual attraction to celebrities, and so on. I'm not repulsed by sex the way two thirds of demisexuals supposedly are. I enjoy it. But it's not the most critical component of a fulfilling relationship, for me.

I don't care so much about the label, certainly not as much as I care about polyamory. But it is nice to know I'm not alone in the world. It often feels like I could be.

La dernière classe et mon autre chemin/The Last Class and My Other Way

Tonight is my last French class. After this I will have a Certificate of Fluency from Conestoga College...which means...well, I guess we'll find out what it means. I'm not fluent in my own eyes. I can carry on a limited conversation on a number of topics, and I can read French fairly well and write it passably. But the certificate says otherwise...or does it? Who knows?

That's the thing about credentials. I had a sociology prof in first year, an old man who could get his class snoring in major triads. Word for word, spoken in a quiet, breathless and wheezy voice: "Now...Theory A and Theory B have many similarities. One could in fact say that...Theory A...and Theory B...are the same theory! Isn't this fascinating?"

No. It isn't.

Anyway, his favourite word was "credential". He used it in the singular, in the plural, as a noun, as a verb...he probably said "CREDENTIAL" when he sneezed instead of A-choo or that mouse-squeak well-bred women sneeze with that makes me dodge the nose I'm sure is about to come rocketing off their face. It got so the word meant nothing to me. And really, what does it mean? In university, it means you can read and regurgitate the textbook the professor wrote, look at the puddle of puke you spewed forth, and pronounce it factual puke. Veritable vomit. In computer science, most of what you take is obsolete within months. This "Certificate of Fluency" is a credential...I guess it means what I want it to.

And what is that, exactly? This was supposed to be a bridge into an office job. It may still be. I plan on taking the government test to see where they think I stand.

Regardless, I will be keeping the French up. It's something I really enjoy. It opens up whole other worlds for me.

Not least in music and literature. I've posted a few French songs here with English translations...this will be the last of them. It's definitely the most challenging I've tackled...I only did so because of the subject matter.  As to that subject matter: three guesses and the first two don't count.



This song ROCKS. Musically and lyrically.

English translation by yours truly:


Je l'aime aussi -- I Love Her* Too -- Fredericks, Goldman, Jones (1990)

We shouldn't meet the pretty eyes of beautiful strangers in the streets
Above all we shouldn't hear any more the voices
of these sirens with their outlaw scents.
I didn't kill, deny, or steal--I didn't even manage to have regrets. 
When I'm (laying) against her, it's not(hing) against you.
And when people love, first they don't keep score.
One day you'll forgive every fact of the war.
 But you hardly forget the effects of love.

Chorus: (It's a) common story, abnormal, amoral. 
An unlawful gap between right and wrong.
Beautiful and blasphemous, one and the same.
For one thing I love you, I love you...
But what can I do if I love her too? 
We will never have trains for love.
Never any schedules, no straight tracks in life.
I love her too.
And Rome sermonizes, the bells ring,
even though there are so many (people) who love nobody.

If the Western Man is monogamous.
Do we know that love is too?
Not far from here, some kilometres away,  It is said that "the game is poly"**.
"Jules et Jim", and "Jeux interdits" (French movies with poly content) --
When music in trio is  (so) nice, 
Tell me, who here deserves the exclusivity of a a whole life? (to Chorus)

Bridge: In the low tides of missing love,
Bless the living with a double dose of envy. 
I love her too.
Where and when, to whom, for what,  apologize?
There are so many who hate at will. (to Chorus)

*For a gendered language, French is sometimes surprisingly (and here pleasingly) ambiguous about gender. This song could just as easily be called "I Love Him Too"--you only know for sure it's "her" because of one word in the first verse. Change that single word and it's "him".

**Something I find fascinating about this song is its recording date. 1990 is widely cited to be the year in which the term 'polyamory' was coined. (I first learned the word in early '92 when the alt.polyamory USENET newsgroup was founded...)  Yet here it's casually invoked ("it's said the game is poly") as if it was a common word. Granted, 'poly' is just as translatable in French as it is in English, but still...

------------------------------------


The last line of this song...that's the thing about polyamory for me. If I had to sum up why I choose this often chaotic and challenging path, it would be with one of two sayings, depending on context. The first would be "too good not to share", which is something I have heard applied to anything fantastic that isn't a romantic relationship. The second would be even simpler...I LOVE. It's what I do, what I strive to embody. "There are so many who hate at will"--to counter that, I love as widely and deeply as I can.

But back to French for a minute. This song proves I'm not fluent. I listened to it three or four times before I even had the chorus (sort of) understood--then when I had a French copy of the lyrics in front of me I puzzled through the rest of it, even having to look up six or seven words. That's not fluent. That's barely out of diapers, as far as I'm concerned.

I've always done things srdawckab-ssa and inside out. Getting this, ahem, credential in adulthood is just the latest example. I should have been in French immersion as a kid: I'd be miles ahead of where I am now. Let me pause for a bit to see just where that is--and then I'll come back and tell you where I'm going from here.

The Little Joys of Working in a Grocery Store

I know there are many people who think there can't possibly be anything enjoyable about working in a grocery store. They're forgetting that all you have to do to make something en-joy-able is to inject joy into it. If you keep that joy close, it's easy to do it with even the most mundane of tasks.

I've been doing the same basic job, with varying levels of responsibility, for almost fifteen years now. Most recently I've been knocked back to the level of pure grunt--but I refuse to act that way, which has raised some eyebrows. I've made a sustained effort to keep in touch with my counterpart on days and also the assistant manager responsible for dairy (which this place inexplicably calls 'fresh') and frozen departments...raising concerns and offering ideas for improvement. I've been dismissed out of hand a couple of times, but I expected that. There's a certain attitude, very prevalent in many managers, that anything coming from a subordinate, particularly one who just made probation, can't possibly be of any use. That's fine: I'll keep politely communicating, and sooner or later she'll listen. The mere fact I'm speaking up puts me miles above most people who just show up, do something that somewhat resembles their job, and go home.

Working dairy and frozen is not rocket surgery. All you do is stock shelves, build displays, and--if your work hours align--help customers in any way you can. That last is an art, and I miss practicing it. My store closes one or two hours before I show up and opens the minute I'm supposed to punch out. I've had precisely zero customer interaction since I came off my two weeks of training shifts. 

But there is a certain joy in making the mindless mindful. After so much experience, I can walk down an aisle at a standard pace and spot one item facing French-side forward. Give me a box of something I carry, and I can tell you what shelf it goes on, in which of 89 doors, and what's on either side. I can also tell you approximately how well it sells, and give you about a 95% accurate prediction as to whether or not all of the units in that box will fit on the shelf.

This is utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. But it gives my mind something to process over the course of eight hours, and it makes me, if I do say so myself, pretty damn good at what I do. 

My current workplace only allows music if it's playing in your pocket rather than on your head. It's a health and safety issue, as far as they're concerned, and that makes sense when you consider there are sometimes twenty plus people bopping around the store at all hours of the night, one of them on a Zamboni (they don't hire out floor cleaning, like everywhere else I've worked) and many more schlepping pallets from place to place.
 I *really* miss the music. My productivity is fair to good without it--speed is not my strong suit, thoroughness is--but give me a little of this or this (or this or even this) and you'll get more work out of me, and to the same standard.)

Even still, there is a real pride of accomplishment in getting more done than you thought you could do. This is definitely the case now, as my eight hour shift translates to about five and a half hours of actual work time once you take out breaks I never bothered with before, more than two hundred temperature checks I'm obligated to bother with nightly now, two nightly meetings,  an hourly run to the front of the store to turn the damn lights back on (half the lights go out every hour and so help me, I like to see what I'm doing) and all the transport time between cooler/freezer and department--a cool hundred and forty paces each way. Try dragging a skid taller than you and heavier than your car over that kind of distance, multiple times each night, and you'll understand why I can now, once again eat huge portions and maintain my weight. I break a sweat every single night, then have to call Maintenance to clean up the sweat spill in the dairy aisle.

There is something about a well-built display, with good colour segmentation and cross-merchandising. that just makes me feel good. I took one last night that was a dog's breakfast and turned it into something that drew the eye and, I'm quite certain, increased sales.
Even the nuts and bolts of my pedestrian job can be a meaningful, mindful, joyful act. Take a pallet out of the freezer--rejoice that you got it out to the floor without it falling over--marvel at how much of it you managed to stock--reassemble what's left into a nice square stable and ORGANIZED pile that you couldn't knock over even if your name's Ken--and then bring it back and wonder of wonders ELIMINATE IT...you start out with nine skids in your freezer and there's four at the end of the night and how does that NOT feel good?

In the summer, the dairy cooler and freezer are, respectively, a haven and a heaven. On humid nights like last night,  I can't wait to get in there and I don't want to leave.

Dairy and frozen get to call the breaks, on the grounds that we have perishable product on the floor, and I have made it my nightly mission to make at least one creative page. "It's one in the morning. Do you know where your break is?"...or doing the Wal-Mart cheer except spelling out L-U-N-C-H...I award myself points if I can hear somebody laughing. One of the receivers gives herself points if she can spot my reference, so I've really upped my game since she came on board. Matchbox 20--"It's 3AM, it must be lunchtime"; Futurama--"Good news, everyone! It's break time!" She was an English major with a Shakespearean concentration, so I'm working on pages in iambic pentameter...

And of course, home time is always home time, and something to be rejoiced at. I like my job, but there's a limit. And once I've reached that limit--it happens in about, hey, eight hours or so!--it's time to come home to the Love and the Tux and the Mooch and the Bubbles and a nice morning supper and a comfortable bed.

Not everyone shares my attitude towards work, I'll be the first to tell you. There's one man there who seems to specialize in doing as little as possible while making it look like he's busy--those types are everywhere, I had a direct supervisor just like that not all that long ago. He has no idea what to make of me, and treats me with that endearing mix of exasperation, disdain and superiority that I am all too familiar with. But it's a big store and I don't see much of him.

The way I look at it, they're paying me to do a job. Not as much as I'm worth, but they're just learning that, right? And since I'm being paid to get out of bed and go be with friends, it behooves me to put an honest night's effort in. Not to mention something the lazy people don't seem to grasp: the busier you keep yourself and the more work you do, the faster the night goes and the sooner you can go home.

Yeah, it's only a store. You're a hundred percent right, there. My job is not important. I've always been eminently replaceable: proof of that came a little over a year ago when I was unexpectedly laid off.
You know what? I was never cut out to change the world through my employment. The world I want to create doesn't even have employers in it, after all. Any modest world-changing I do will come through my relationships first and my words second. The job? It pays the bills. Make of it what you will.

Father's Day

I've been blessed with two fathers.

I don't see much of either of them--geography and circumstance have conspired against it--but not a day goes by that I don't think of both of them. Not a day goes by where I don't apply a lesson I learned from one or the other. And not a day goes by that I don't manifest, well, one of them. The birth one. My dad and I aren't carbon copies, exactly, but we share many traits, both positive and negative.

My mom and dad divorced when I was five. The less said about that the better--suffice it to say both of them have told me I was the only thing worth salvaging out of that relationship. Because my dad had limited access, and because he loved me, I was spoiled rotten, in the manner of children of divorce everywhere. His place very quickly assumed the characteristics of Nirvana and Shangri-La all rolled into one. To this day, "going North" has a talismanic power in my mind. He calls his homestead Rose Point. I call it Sanctuary Much.

Dad, I don't see you near as often as I'd like to...you have no idea how much I'm looking forward to seeing you next month. But I should tell you: just because I don't see you doesn't mean I can't be you...and it's almost scary how often I am. We have gone down different paths in life, but many of our values converge: we both have a very strong sense of social justice and fairness; we both work to see the good in everyone, and to make sure they see it too; we both have, if I may say so, a power to persuade.  And of course we both live our lives according to those values. Integrity matters.

And yeah, we have quite a few of the same foibles. I come by my absentmindedness honestly. Both of us have a knee-jerk reaction to unexpected emotional shock (give us a second or a minute to adjust, and we're fine, but that second or minute might be a tad rocky. And both of us are prone to withdraw and brood rather than force conflict.

I take pride, Dad, in the quirks. The absentmindedness is entertaining as hell to everyone but us, isn't it? Whether it's me trying to burn my house down or you--well, you've tried to do that too, haven't you?--we make life interesting for the ones who love us. That jerk of the knee--you were the one who told me, and I've never, never forgotten it--to "say what you feel, even if it's wrong. That way at least you have something to edit." And contrary to popular belief, good can come out of brooding. Either the problem diminishes with thought, or we change our perspective so it isn't a problem anymore.

My father, in his life as a police officer, volunteer fire captain, Lion, and pillar of his community, has actively done more good, for more human beings, than any ten other people I know put together. I respect, admire, and love the man immensely.

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My stepdad had a dream sometime in the winter of 1972, when he was 12 years old. In his dream he was marrying an older woman who had a child of her own. I was born in February of 1972...it wouldn't surprise me overmuch to find out he had that dream at 9:06 on the night of the sixth of February.
I met him for the first time in 1980, when I was eight. My first impression of him was that he was a giant. His first impression of me was that I was a polite and well-mannered little boy. Only one of those impressions turned out to be correct. John is only 6'2". but there's something about the way he carries himself that suggests he's taller. And inside, of course, he really is a veritable giant.
I, meanwhile, was--how to put this nicely?--ah, screw it. I was a jerk. Sore loser, chronic liar, pretty much zero social skills with kids my own age, and sheltered as the deepest shade.
John, somehow, took all of that in stride. Trust me when I tell you he must have loved my mother to the moon and back. Most people would have run screaming from me at eight. Or ten. Or fourteen. I know I would have. But not John. With unending patience, superhuman reserves of calm, and an absolutely rock solid conviction, he pulled me through adolescence and into adulthood, modelling his strength, character and wisdom every hour of every day. Again...integrity. It matters.
There really aren't words for the gratitude I feel, nor for the debt I owe John. I respect, admire and love him immensely, too.

Happy Father's Day to both of you, and to all the fathers out there who have done so much for their sons and daughters, never knowing if it would "take" pr not. Current fashion is still, inexplicably, to minimize the role of a father in a child's life. I'm so glad this life has been blessed with two fathers.

Rage

I simply do not understand the level of rage it takes to sustain this.

It is my considered opinion that, if you hate somebody enough to saw everything you jointly own in half, you couldn't have possibly ever loved. Her...or yourself.

Many of the commenters agreed with me, but many others found this hysterically funny, noted that "some women deserve this"...and one guy wrote "this is awesome...he's done what every guy's thought of doing at one time or another."

"Not all guys," I wrote back. "Some of us aren't children."

"Some of us aren't liars, either, Ken," he retorted.

Really?

Yes, I've had a couple of messy breakups in my younger years, when everything was messy. Yes, of course emotions ran high--which meant raised voices and tears on both sides. I don't hold with hitting people--it doesn't solve anything. And destroying property--what are you, five?

I'll admit, I've always been really sensitive to destruction in any form. It's one of the things that made me feel so isolated from my peers for such a long period of time, before I decided screw the social consequences, I am right and they are wrong. Boys in general, seem to love destroying things, the more spectacular the explosion, the better. I ask people why they love this and they can't answer beyond "it's so cool!"

Not helpful.

Cool? Huh? If it's somebody else's stuff, do they think it's cool when you destroy it? If it's your own, don't you just have to replace it? And if it doesn't really belong to anyone, if it's just sitting there waiting to be destroyed--isn't "leaving it alone" an option?

I find myself having to explain my way of thinking quite often, because it is so utterly alien to so many. Like them, I can't tell you for sure where it came from: as far as I know, it's always been here. Any violence I saw from earliest childhood, whether it was perpetrated on a person, an animal, or an inanimate object, affected me, often to the point of bawling. This perplexed and worried my parents...I was actually put in therapy for a time because "I couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality". Why are you upset, Kenny? That's just television. It's not real. Monster trucks: Those are old junker cars, Kenny. They're not good for anything anymore and it's not as if the metal can feel  pain when the truck's squashing it.

Still destructive. I can feel the rage, even simulated rage on television, and it's that I'm reacting to. And with the monster trucks and demolition derbies and such like, obviously there's no rage there. What offends me in cases like that--and it's a deep offense, I actually have a very strong urge to cover my eyes and scream even now--is the casual nature of the destruction, the sheer GLEE people feel watching it unfold. My first thought when an inanimate object is destroyed in front of me is either "that belongs to somebody" or "somebody made that". That was built for a purpose, damnit, and whatever purpose it had surely didn't involve getting blown up.

For some reason I'm put in mind of an old housemate of mine. Second year university. He drank like a thing that drinks a lot. A lot a lot. Like... a barf a lot. And every time he'd wake up from his blackout in a puddle of his own puke, he'd announce to everyone in a terribly put-upon voice that that was it, he was done with drinking alcohol. One time I think that vow lasted almost an entire week.

Obviously an addiction, right? I could never get it through my thick skull why the ralphtastic results of last week's binge never seemed to seep through his thick skull before he embarked on this week's. I was deep into my thirties when I first read Stephen King's memoir, ON WRITING, in which he discusses his alcoholism. He writes that it used to infuriate him to see people leaving half-full bottles of wine on restaurant tables. "Aren't you going to DRINK that?", he'd rage in his head. When someone asked him how much he drank, King looked at him as if he was an idiot and said, "All of it."

I think our society has a collective addiction to violence that makes alcoholism look like a trifle. And unlike alcoholism, the addiction to violence is fully normalized. It infects popular culture to an insane degree that you have to stand outside to really appreciate. Movies. Television. Music. Videogames. It's everywhere.



And it's normalized. It's expected on some level that if you think somebody has wronged you, you can take it out on his stuff. It's played for laughs in many cases, because rage is funny, apparently. I've heard people defend the violence in, say, videogames by noting it's much better if somebody blows up a virtual city than a real one--and again I'm at a loss to find a motive for blowing up things virtual or real. Free-floating rage. It's gotta be. Where does all that anger come from?

I'll grant you my reaction to being wronged probably isn't much better. I figure I must have deserved it: it feeds that ravenous beast called Insecurity that lives deep in my gut. I've reacted that way all my life and seem helpless to do it any other way...and so I'm working on  being a CREATOR rather than a REACTOR. Those two words are the same word...only the "C" has moved. When you change the way you "C", you can create, rather than react. And creation is, of course, the opposite of destruction. It's fed with love, not hate, and as far as I'm concerned, its fruits taste much better.

Flaws in the Design

I can't be sure where I'm headed after death 
To heaven, hell, or beyond to that Great Vast 
But if I can I would like to meet my Maker 
There's one or two things I'd sure like to ask

--"At My Funeral", The Crash Test Dummies

Oftentimes I feel like there are a variety of ongoing cosmic jokes and that I've yet to be let in on any of them.  Many of them are fundamental design flaws.

I'm not talking about human design flaws. I'm not referring, for instance, to the kitchen that contains a heat-maker which spills money on the ceiling and a heat-loser that spills money on the floor; both of them next to each other and not connected in any way. Or the bathroom that contains a bath/shower combo which is not safe to shower in and not comfortable to bathe in (not to mention a toilet that mandates an extremely uncomfortable seating position and wastes both fertilizer and gallons of potable water with every use).
 I'm not talking about whoever designed automobiles so that if your foot slips off the brake pedal it will cause your vehicle to plow into whatever's in front of you--nobody seems to have noticed this, let alone corrected it, in over a century.
No, I'm not even going to ask why we still force, let alone ever forced our children to learn four different alphabets (majuscule and minuscule printing and cursive writing).

It only stands to reason, you know, that our best designers can't even put together a kitchen, a bathroom, a car, or an alphabet that makes sense--and that any who try are ridiculed rather than revered. It's inevitable that we can't design worth shit because we aren't designed worth shit.

Why is sugar, something to which we seem to be irresistibly attracted, a poison? What conceivable purpose do nose and ear hair serve, and why do they grow out to obscene lengths once we hit middle age? Ditto fingernails and toenails and facial hair for that matter. I should be able to select lengths for all these things and have them stay the way they're set.

It's natural that we should be prudent around "the other", but why do people take that fear and magnify it into a defining characteristic of their worldview? Consensus is much more socially rewarding than conflict, so why do so many people seek conflict as a first and only solution to their perceived problems?

What sadist designed the human pain system? For millennia this alarm couldn't be turned off or even dimmed; it often blares totally out of proportion to the problem it's trying to alert us to, and even now we can't do a damned thing about many of the things it shrieks about.

There's enough food to feed everyone on the planet thrice over, yet people are starving, still, and next to nobody cares or even notices. There's enough drinkable water to serve everyone on Earth, and there are still about a sixth of us who have to walk for miles to get water that people living elsewhere wouldn't give their pets. There's enough money to assure everyone a more than comfortable existence, and inequality is rampant and growing by the day. There's enough love to go around--it's one of the few truly renewable resources we have--and far too many people, including people I don't even have to work to find highly loveable,  feel unloved and are thus unloving.

Virtually every large-scale problem we face as a species has been solved on a small scale somewhere. But rather than take note of those solutions and try to scale them up, we decide in advance that it can't be done--or more likely that it would cut into somebody's almighty profit margin. The indifference to human suffering is the most perplexing bug in our system.

Sometimes I don't feel human. Sometimes I wish I wasn't.

Reflections on two months of nights with no end in sight

What I'm about to write is going to sound a hell of a lot like whining.

Okay, it is whining.

What kind of whine?  It's not sham pain, I'll say that much. Maybe you'll just think I'm bored-oh, I don't know. I'll just line up my problems in neat little rows, eh, and we'll go from there.

First world problems, right? I have a full time job: millions aren't so lucky. I make only a little over minimum wage: more in one shift than about a billion people make in a month. I like (most of) the people I work with and the fringe benefits where I work are better than those anywhere else I've worked (with the possible exception of McDonald's before they abolished free meals).

And there are lots and lots of other people on this shift. More than fifteen at my store alone (and we're short five full timers at the moment).  Some of them even have families--which would suck, at least until the children are school aged and you could sleep while they were off at school.  The night premium of a buck an hour is most welcome, too. We won't mention how my last job paid almost seven bucks more an hour for essentially the same work and workload (oops, we just did).

I did nights once for the better part of eight years. I've worked Close-Open at McDonald's, and night shifts at three different variety store chains. At 7-Eleven I even had the same schedule I have now: Tuesdays and Wednesdays off.

7-Eleven was a pressure cooker that I firmly believe took years off my life. My current job isn't, at least not yet. If I make manager, it probably will be: the night manager at my store has had one day off in the past month. Her choice, but--well, lacking any other experience, I'm not sure whether it's the same in other environments. You can choose to have your two days off a week, but you are held fully responsible for what goes on during that time, and so what kind of a choice is that, really? That's retail for you. Almost everywhere, once you get above the level of grunt.

As much as you want to leave work at work, when you work nights, every minute is a reminder that you're backwards. Monday night is my Friday and Thursday night is my Monday morning. Supper is at breakfast time and breakfast is after eight p.m. And somehow the 'days' seem shorter when you work graveyards. That's ridiculous: we all have the same 24 hours. But I definitely had more energy to do things after work, when after work was 4 or 5 in the afternoon. Now it's eight a.m and



"DON'T MAKE ME DO STUFF"

I'd get up the energy to do stuff if anyone was around to do it with. They're all working normal hours: by the time I get up it's coming on bedtime for the rest of the city. And on my "days" off? Yeah, Tuesday and Wednesday are primo hangout nights, you know?

(This should be changing once my class is over: actually, I might be going to six days a week for a while, but my day off will move around.)

Bluntly put, I feel disconnected. With myself, with the world, with everything and (almost) everyone.

This is, as I have been told in no uncertain terms by more than one person, nobody's fault but my own. I get it. I come home, eat dinner, and go to bed; get up, have breakfast and go to work. Same as any other working stiff. I'm sure there are whole nations of nine-to-fivers who tell themselves every day that there's got to be more to life than eat, work, eat and sleep. There's just something about night shift that drives it home a little bit harder, is all.

Somebody call whine-one-one and summon the wahmbulance.

The positives, aside from the bunch I've mentioned, are that I can do all the things that use electricity without bankrupting us. I'm not even exaggerating overmuch: the hydro rates in Ontario are insane, and off-peak is the only time they're even close to affordable. I have this mad urge to go around unplugging everything between the hours of eleven a.m. and five p.m.

I get entirely too much pleasure in virtually tucking people in at night on my nights off and virtually wiping the sleep from their eyes in the morning. The off nights are great for filling my head with music. (Can't listen to music at work anymore: it's a safety hazard.)

And people have really gone out of their way to accommodate these weird hours of mine, for which I am very grateful and  because of which I really hesitated before writing this out. I don't want to seem unappreciative: I'm anything but. I just wish I didn't feel like so much of a burden on people. Would I feel this way on days, too? I doubt it. I didn't.

It's almost 8:30 in the morning. Time to make supper.

Please pardon my snivelling. This blog is for sharing myself, warts and pustules and all...

"Call Me Caitlyn"

Late to this party, but I have had a lot to sort out.

Whenever I am confronted with something completely outside my experience--and it's both exhilarating and sobering to realize how many things still are--I try to look at how other people are reacting. In high school I did this to try and follow the crowd. Much later, when I pulled my head out of my navel, I noticed the world had become polarized and no matter what the issue, there were always (at least) two crowds pulling with all their might in opposite directions. That struck me as needlessly destructive: the world needs more consensus, or, failing that, at least understanding.

And so now I figure out which crowd I'm in...and then spend some time in the other crowd(s).

This doesn't always work to temper my opinion. On marriage equality for gays and lesbians, for example, you can't move me. But even now I'm still seeking someone from the other side who can articulate their opposition to it in a more coherent, sophisticated way than EWWWW GAYS ARE EVIL.

Transsexuals, transgendered people and their issues are waaaay outside my realm of experience. To my knowledge, I've never even met a transsexual or transgendered person. And so once again I surveyed the field of reaction. It took a week or so before I found somebody sharing my little patch of field. Unsurprisingly, it was Tabatha Southey, who is probably my favourite columnist.

Our patch of field is...no field at all. I've watched in puzzlement as people have either leapt on the Caitlyn bandwagon or tried to ram it off the road, all the while thinking whether you think she's Caitlyn and beautiful or Bruce and a freak, just leave her alone.

One of my closest friends happens to be gay. That's the least remarkable fact about him, something he chooses to minimize in any interaction. Not because he "isn't really gay", not because he's ashamed of himself, but because it doesn't matter.  Tabatha would note that he's also tall...and then engage him as a person.

That's what I think we should be doing with Caitlyn. If we're seeking understanding on what it means to be transgendered, we'll go a long way towards doing that just by talking to her as if -- gasp! -- she's a human being. Doing this will convince us that she is, in fact, a human being.

The haters--I'm not sure where the hate even comes from, to be honest.  I think it's probably a variant of homophobia: I've noticed that just as with gay-hatred, men are much more likely to feel it. I think a man presenting as a woman really fouls up these men's  sense of the world. Pardon the dip into crudity, but their mindset is crude: people are divided into those with holes and those with poles. A hole where a pole once stood is unthinkable to many men whose poles are basically the essence of their being. They're dicks, to be blunt.

This, needless to say, really bothers me.

Like Caitlyn, my wife. Eva, has undergone a fundamental transformation in how she presents to the world. In Eva's case, she lost about two hundred pounds and is still losing. Does that sound trivial by comparison? It shouldn't. Just ask a fat woman about how people look at, and treat her. Just ask a fat woman about how much her weight defines her.

Now every time Eva posts a picture of herself--she is justifiably proud of what she has accomplished--people say she is beautiful. And she is.

SHE ALWAYS WAS.

I actually have this perverse urge to stem the flood of compliments she gets, as richly as she deserves them, because damnit she always was beautiful and it shouldn't take her being thin for people to suddenly see it.

Yes, it took a great deal of courage for Caitlyn to do what she did. But as fundamental as her transformation is, she is only conforming to what she was all along. And what she was all along is a beautiful human being.

Now, it's clearly too much to ask, but what would really make me stand up and take notice of Caitlyn Jenner is if she dared to present not as a woman, but as a 65 YEAR OLD WOMAN. A senior citizen. Which is what she is, by her biological age. You'd never know it from that Vanity Fair cover: she looks to be in her thirties.

She isn't. She's 65. She has wrinkles. Whatever colour her hair is, it isn't the colour it looks in photo shoots.

We're willing to concede that women that old might be beautiful people...so long as they don't look anywhere near that old. Isn't that sad? Whether we're born into the right body or not, we all get old. Where is the acknowledgement--no, the celebration of that fact?

For karen: a response.

For the first time in seven or maybe eight years, a comment on my last blog entry has prompted a whole new blog entry.  I LOVE when this happens; I wish it happened more often. While it's true I would write these things even without readers--hell, I think I did for about three years--what I really cherish about this here Breadbin is the exchange of ideas. It gives me a chance to refine and sometimes outright reconsider mine.

Reader karen writes:

The polyamory stuff you post is interesting. The only experience I had of such a thing before I started reading your blog was a young couple I met in our local environmental/political activist community. She was married, he was not but they were together everywhere just as her husband fell quite ill. Fairly soon they were handing out poly information at every kind of rally and meeting. Before the husband recovered she left him to do a solo pilgrimage of sorts and now the woman and the husband are divorced and she and her poly guy are in a monogamous relationship. I wasn't particularly close to either of them, but something felt *off* about it. It was clear there was passion between them, but I had a very strong feeling that the polyamory was a kind of rationalization rather than something they understood and lived. I found it off-putting.

I like the case you make for a kind of web of support - multiple connections for giving and receiving love and nurture, but I don't know if I actually know anyone who could manage it without jealousy.

------------
Goldmine.


Not knowing the backstory of this couple/triad you mention, I can't say for certain whether they were practicing polyamory or a refinement on cheating. Having read your blog and your excellent, insightful comments on mine, I have reason to trust your intuition that the woman, knowingly or unknowingly, seized on polyamory as a justification for her behaviour. I'd caution that nobody can say for sure, but your words have a good beat: let's dance to them for a bit, shall we?

God knows I come across such off-putting behaviour often enough. People stumble, mentally bruised and bleeding, into various poly forums seemingly every day, in tremendous emotional pain and ready to spread it around.
The story is a cliché: Man with wife -- or just as often woman with husband -- falls in love, or at least lust, with someone he or she isn't "supposed" to--which in monogamous relationships means, well, anyone. Cheating ensues. Cheater then discovers polyamory and thinks oh wow, a get out of cheat free card! "Honey", he or she says, "I slept with somebody else. But don't worry, I'm polyamorous. I love you both." Bereaved party finds a group of online poly folk and accuses each and every one of us of treason, sedition, and complicity in the destruction of a good marriage.

There are several hidden assumptions in the accusation, as understandable as it is. The biggest is probably the characterization of a good marriage as one in which cheating takes place. We all know that's not the case, but it seems to me that when partnerships implode, people look everywhere but within those partnerships to find the reasons.

Right behind it is the notion that polyamory is cheating dressed up in fancy syllables. I hate this statement with a white-hot passion because it is so totally the opposite of what polyamory actually is, and yet it's so beastly hard to knock it and all of its implications out of people's heads. Because of this mischaracterization,  many people believe

• that poly means less love to go around, especially amongst new or "secondary" partners
• that poly means coercion, manipulation, and deceit
• that poly means selfishness
• that poly means a fear of and a lack of commitment

Whereas 

• while there certainly may be less time to go around, love is abundant, not scarce, and shared joy is increased, meaning more love is created when love is shown.
• Poly actually means connection, communication (tons of it) and transparency. Some people practice DADT (Don't Ask, Don't Tell) relationships in which somebody is free to have other relationships so long as the primary partner doesn't know about them. That, I would argue, violates a part of the definition of polyamory: multiple committed loving relationships with the knowledge and consent of all involved. There is no need to overshare: each relationship deserves its privacy, and the need to know everything means insecurity and lots of it.  But you can expect to know your partner has other partners, and to connect with your metamours on some level. 
• "He's got three girlfriends and I have none, what a selfish jerk." I prefer to put the focus in poly on the partners your partner is encouraged to pursue: it really twists the accusation around. "He's demanding that one woman all to himself, what a selfish jerk." (No, I don't really think this way...unless I see signs of possessiveness in the relationship. Mono or poly, that irks me to no end. 
• And on commitment: From More Than Two, the definitive guide to polyamory, by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert (a link to their website has been in my sidebar for nearly a year now):

Some people imagine that polyamory involves a fear of commitment. The truth is, commitment in polyamory doesn't mean commitment to sexual exclusivity. Instead, it means commitment to a romantic relationship, with everything that goes along with that: commitment to being there when your partners need you, to investing in their happiness, to building a life with them, to creating happy and healthy relationships that meet everyone's needs, and to supporting one another when life gets hard. Unfortunately, society has taught is to view commitment only through the lens of sexual exclusivity; this diminishes all the other important ways that we commit to one another...

No, polyamory is not cheating: the two are mutually incompatible. It *is* possible to move from cheating to polyamory...just barely. I wouldn't advise it. In fact, I get a bad gut feeling whenever I hear so much as "well, there's this girl named Katherine at work that I'm falling for, but I'm happily married to my wife Edith..." I always tell these people they *can* have their Kate and Edith, too, but they'd better hold off on dessert until they've talked...and talked...and talked it over. There's nothing quite so self-serving or threatening as announcing you're poly and pulling a partner out of your hat in the same flourish.

I can't say if this happened in your example, karen. For all I know, the couple spoke about this at great length and agreed to it. The fact that couple is no longer together should be viewed neither as an endorsement nor an indictment of that theory. The further fact she's now monogamous with his "replacement" is also not, in and of itself, damning. Together, though...yeah. Very strong feeling. Could be gas. Very strong feeling.

When I came out, the concern was overwhelming, quite literally. It seems to me that everybody knows of an open relationship that dissolved: it was therefore insisted upon, with great force, that mine would not only dissolve, but was in the very process of dissolving. I keep saying it, but everybody knows monogamous people who divorced: it's odd that nobody ever seems to bring them up.
It took a great deal of explanation on my part to assert that one relationship need not preclude others, and that the decision had been made jointly after many years. To this day I feel like people are just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sorry to disappoint you, folks. I'm just as committed to my marriage as you are to yours.

---------


"...but I don't know if I actually know anyone who could manage it without jealousy."

Neither do I, karen, and I include myself.

I've heard tell of possibly mythical creatures who don't feel jealousy. We'll call them Nessies, because as far as I'm concerned they live deep within a loch somewhere and only surface to breathe when nobody's looking.

I thought I was one of them, once. I used to hate jealousy. I thought of it as pain at another's happiness, as compared to schadenfreude, happiness at another's pain, and I was utterly horrified the first time I recognized it in me.

Of course, the first time I thought I was feeling jealousy, it turned out to be envy. (Envy: wanting what someone else has. Jealousy: wanting what someone else has, *such that they can't have it anymore*.)  And I have since felt judgment that manifested very much like jealousy: righteous indignation, hurt, and bewilderment. That happens when you discover your relationship isn't what you thought it was, or that your partner isn't who you assumed they were...and you blame your partner for your own unquestioned assumptions.

But yes, I have since felt jealousy. Actual, soul-deadening jealousy. And do you know what I found out after I got over the shock and horror of feeling such a hateful thing, and started seriously wondering where it came from?

It came from me. It was my own feeling, my own problem. Always and without fail brought on by some other emotion that *also* came from me and was my own problem.  Reading up on it, I realized that just like envy and judgement (and, for that matter, happiness and contentment),  neither a partner nor a metamour had put it in there...and neither a partner nor a metamour could take it out.

There are a whole bunch of different kinds of jealousy: speak to ten psychiatrists and they'll give you twelve different ways to characterize the emotion. Most of them lump all the jealousies polyamorous people feel under "Romantic Jealousy" and leave it at that. (Then again, most psychiatrists aren't even aware of polyamory in the first place; finding a poly-supportive therapist is a nontrivial task.)

The framework I like posits four different kinds of romantic jealousy, any or all of which can be felt at once.

• There is the Hollywood kind, the possessive  'IF I CAN'T HAVE YOU NOBODY CAN BANG BANG BANG! jealous rage. People who are prone to this sort of thing would obviously never even consider polyamory. They should instead seek help: no relationship should be forced to exist in such madhouse conditions. I've heard of far too many that do, and none of them are even remotely happy.
• Less extreme, there's what I call Common Jealousy, which is quite common in monogamy and very easily spills over into polyamory (because scrubbing out the monogamous belief system so deeply engrained in us takes time). It's your basic fear that your partner is about to up and leave you for somebody else. The only way out of that mindset is through it, and even then, there are no guarantees in life. But the way to deal with your fear is to treat each person in each relationship with the respect they deserve, because people tend to live up, or down, to the level of respect and trust you place in them. Yes, you'll get burned by the odd predator. Everything I have seen in my life has convinced me that most humans are fundamentally good, though. Treat them well, you'll be treated well in return.
• There is "exclusion jealousy", very common in poly relationships when one person has other loves while the other has none. "Why do you get to have all the fun?" The cure for that is to be self-confident enough to attract your own additional partners (recognizing that it takes time--after all, how many years did it take to find your first?) That kind of self-confidence recognizes that having one partner is not a handicap (there are some poly people with no partners at the moment) and it also learns to value compersion (the opposite of jealousy: happiness at your partner's happiness). 
• There is "competition" jealousy, also very common, where you compare yourself to your metamour and, gee gosh it's funny how this happens, come up short. It's actually amusing that more often than not your metamour is doing the same thing at the same time and coming up just as short in comparison to you. New partners are jealous of the older partner's level of connection; old partners recoil in the face of what poly people call NRE ("new relationship energy").  Both may recognize how silly they're being, but who says jealousy is rational?

Well, there is such a thing as rational jealousy, If you are being treated like a doormat -- if you're being ignored and left to fend for yourself while your partner pursues others; if your agreements are broken and boundaries are forever being pushed and stretched to include things you are not comfortable with--go ahead and blame that on your partner, and take corrective action...which may include abandoning that relationship. Note that this behaviour is not even close to what polyamory is about. 

But most jealousy you're apt to feel is not rational, and you must resist the temptation to pin the blame on this partner or that metamour for your own insecurity. The cure for any jealousy, rational or no, is trifold:  communication, self-awareness, and partner-awareness. 

Poly done well takes a level of trust and respect that can, quite frankly, be difficult to sustain at times. You have to be willing to respect other relationships while simultaneously trusting the others in those relationships to respect yours. If you can achieve this--and many, many people have-- you get that web of support - multiple connections for giving and receiving love and nurture that is the hallmark of love without limits.

Thank you so much, karen, for your comment.

The Downsides of Polyamory

I guess I'd better say right off that I have no particular reason to write this blog today.

In my coming-out blog, I said -- and meant -- that I would respect everyone's privacy, and would not write anything without the express written consent of all involved. I also said, in one blog or another, that you wouldn't be able to tell from any given passage what is or what isn't going on in my own life. That remains true nearly a year later.

I have written a number of posts about polyamory, dispelling (I hope) the many misconceptions I have run across on and off line.  I've made a point of putting myself out there in various online forums as someone who lives in a polyamorous world, because many people are unaware, even now, that such a world exists. And despite efforts to maintain some kind of objectivity, and continually insisting that I don't expect anyone to "try poly",  I have probably painted an overly rosy picture of polyamory.

There are downsides. Quite a few of them. Sometimes some of them can be enough to make you wish you weren't poly.


The biggest one is non-specific and informs most of the others: a lack of understanding and support. There has been an explosion of resources on the subject in recent years, which is fantastic...if you're the sort of person who can glean all the support you need from books. There are several (closed) Facebook groups and a (mostly) supportive group on Reddit, which again is fantastic...if you're the sort of person who can glean all the support you need from a screen. For honest to God human contact, of the sort most recommended by humans everywhere, you're almost totally restricted to other polyamorous people. If you can find us. We don't tend to attract attention: in many places the stigma is nasty.

I said almost totally restricted. I have a couple of monogamous friends who are nevertheless able to "think poly"--a rare skill, in my experience at least. Their support has been invaluable. Not everyone is as lucky as I am.

But consider, for instance, breaking up with one of your partners. Monogamous people -- most of them -- will say two things upon finding out that you've had a break-up. One is that this is proof polyamory doesn't work.  The other is what the hell's your problem? You still have another partner.

Both assertions are incorrect. The reason relationships end is the same whether they are open or closed: because of flaws in the relationship. We don't look at 'traditional' divorces, whether Hollywood or otherwise, and say 'Monogamy is to blame!"
The second assertion is equally specious. If you lose a friend, you grieve. Why? You've got other friends, right? They'll pick up the slack. Grow up, already. Hey, the problem is you have too many friends. Most people only have one, you know.

Now consider this person is -- was -- more than a friend, by the definition of "friend" most of us use. Yes, we may have other partners, but again, each relationship is its own thing. Even if you're a poly triad or quad living together, each relationship maintains a degree of independence from all others. No, breakups SUCK, no matter what.

I won't say they're worse. They're different. In mono-world, if you break up, you find out right quick who your friends are and who your ex's friends are. Were.  That's its own hell. When you're poly, most of your mono friends will mouth empty platitudes you can tell they don't really mean. Some of them might even take a step back upon hearing the news, because they're afraid you might decide they're next in the endless line of partners you're accumulating. (?!) So many things are wrong with that assumption that it would take a whole blog to dispel them. To address just one, speaking for myself at least, I'm not interested in even trying to break up somebody's monogamous relationship under any circumstances. As I think I have said before, what kind of an expression of love is it to hurt the life partner of someone you love?

You hear in poly circles that "there is no right or wrong way" to be poly. There are two reasons people say this. One is that there are a myriad of different poly arrangements, almost as many as there are human hearts, and what works for one group of people won't for another but is no less "right" because of it. The other is an "us-against-the-world" mentality we will eventually drop as acceptance grows. (Acceptance has gone from seven to sixteen percent in the U.S. over the past ten years; the younger generation is, as always, more accepting).

There are LOTS of wrong ways to do poly, and chances are damned good every single polyamorist is going to fall afoul of several of them over her lifetime. Adding people to positions of intimacy of one kind of another in your life is complicated. One of the common questions from people interested in poly is "how does this work"? And there are so many answers that there is no answer. What works is what works for all people concerned....and that's highly variable just just between relationships but within them: people change. It's common to forget that even among highly experienced poly people. Yes. each relationship is independent...and each relationship has its own requirements and deserves its own space. Chances are excellent that at some point somebody's going to want more of your partner than you're willing to give. Or more of you than your partner is. YOU HAVE TO KNOW THIS, GOING IN. You have to be ready for it, for at least ready to talk about it...just like you have to be ready to talk about half a hundred other things that don't come up at all in your standard monogamous relationship.

There's also getting "vetoed". That's a uniquely poly slice of hell. The closest equivalent is your girlfriend's parents putting you off limits...except that happens in high school and it often drives your beloved right into your arms. A veto is your beloved's other partner feeling so threatened by your existence that she  says you can't be seen or spoken to again...and that almost always sticks. What hurts most about that is that in essence it's two people rejecting you: one who may or may not know you at all, and one who knows you very well indeed.

Metamour conflict is another issue that just doesn't happen in monogamy. Your partner's other partner is your metamour, and there's nothing written anywhere that says he or she has to like you at all. You'd kind of hope that your partner is discerning enough not to fall for a total bitch or bastard...but just because you intensely dislike somebody doesn't make them a bitch or a bastard. (That's a lesson in and of itself.)  Also, that person can't be all bad if he or she loves your partner and your partner loves him or her. So: how do you deal? You'd hope you can all be at least civil. Sadly, that's not always possible, especially when insecurities arise, as they inevitably do, on three (or more) sides.

Speaking of insecurity:

By far the most common reaction I got when I came out was "I could never do that". It even came from some people I suspected could do it, if they wanted to try...not than any of them ever heard that thought from me. But I can richly understand why people would feel that way. It's not an easy road, and I think some people who knew me well probably wondered why this man, who has openly craved stability his entire life, would willingly introduce the chaos inherent in multiple loves. In my defence, I have actually always been this way...a very loving person who is  utterly unable and unwilling to deny love. Or turn it off. Everybody I ever loved, I still love. It became necessary in the interests of love to let them walk their own path away from me, but any one of my exes could call me up tomorrow and I'd do whatever I could, subject to the agreements already in place in my life.

Love is chaotic, yes. The potential of heartbreak is always there.

--

Dress Codes

Ah, summer.

Even if it's not calendar summer yet for another three weeks, in Canada the May long weekend kicks it off. Barbecues. Cottage trips. And, at least while school is still in session, protests over school dress codes.

That last is relatively new, it seems to me. Doubtless I missed all the protests when I was that age: I was too busy trying to assert my individuality by dressing just like everybody else. As an adult now, I'm supposed to come down on the side of wisdom and reason and rational behaviour and say kids should dress appropriately for the learning environment and yadda yadda yadda.

Screw that. Didn't I just get finished saying I'm not rational?

You should understand who you're dealing with here. I look quite dapper and fetching in a suit and tie, or so I have been told. You'd think that would make me want to dress up every day, and if you think that you couldn't be more wrong. If a suit and tie actually makes me look that good, then what happens when I come home and take it off? I'd honestly rather be ugly all the time then have people think I'm not just because I'm wearing some cloth or other.

There's a modest dress code where I work, even for the night crew that has zero interaction with customers. We are to wear black tops (or white--though anyone wearing white stocking shelves is rather clueless, if you ask me) and black work pants. Night crew can wear black denim "in good repair". Black steel-toed footwear is mandated: we can buy one pair each year, at cost.

This rule chafes at me, just a little bit. I get the intent, or at least I think I do: we should all dress alike because we're a team. I'm pretty sure they'd invoke "respect for the workplace" in there somewhere, too, and that's where I start to get a little antsy.

In certain contexts, yes, I agree, clothing is important and (supposedly) shows respect. I would never dream of showing up at a funeral in shorts and a tank top, or a job interview in jeans. But even these examples are culturally conditioned. Funerals really aren't supposed to be somber and stuffy affairs. I hope mine won't be. I want people laughing at mine. As for job interviews. unfortunately being uncomfortable for half an hour or an hour is the price somebody set long ago for being hired.

There's this widespread perception that what you wear determines your pride in doing a job. How I do my job determines my pride in doing my job, but whatever.

Did that sound teenager-y enough?

So long as my shirt isn't emblazoned with something like "MY BOSS IS A GRADE-A ASSHOLE", why should it matter what I'm wearing? I'd probably work better in jogging pants.  I'd sure be more comfortable and thus more productive.

Workplaces have it backwards. They dangle relaxing the dress code as an incentive work harder--when people work harder in a relaxed, comfortable state.

My biggest issue with these school dress codes is that they are almost always aimed squarely at women. Even the ones that include males explicitly--no ripped jeans, no muscle shirts--are invariably more rigidly enforced with females. Because women's skin is somehow so much more distracting than men's, right? It's exactly the same mindset that surfaces in courtroom rape trials. Your Honour, I couldn't help myself, I saw skin above the knee. Oh, in that case, rape dismissed. Young woman, you should know better than to provoke him like that.

Sickening.

When you send a woman home because her skirt is too high, you're telling her that the wandering eyes of boys are her problem, not theirs. You're telling her that the education of those boys is more important than her own. You're telling her that clothing makes the man and breaks the woman.

Clothing doesn't make the man. Clothing doesn't break the woman. Clothing is something we wear to keep the sun and rain and snow off. It's something we wear if our fat rolls aren't big enough to tuck our keys into. It keeps the mosquitoes at bay and it stops your back hair from getting entangled in the threshing machine.  People have attached a whole lot of arbitrary meanings beyond these, but we shouldn't have to be bound by them.

The people I cherish most in my life get this. They talk to paupers and presidents, peons and princes, all the same way: as if they are people. Because they are. It doesn't matter what they're wearing. It doesn't matter how much they paid for what they're wearing. Focusing on clothing is even more superficial than focusing on skin.
The same people have no problem venturing out to the store in their pajamas. Hey, everything's covered and propriety is served--what's the problem?

If there's a problem, it's in the eye of the beholder and there alone. Let people be comfortable and express themselves. So long as their expression isn't hateful or obscene, let them be.

And isn't that what we should be teaching in school?

Therapy Blog, volume one...

There are many Facebook trends I dislike, and (usually to always) refuse to take part in:

• the modern-day chain letter that says "share this with sixteen friends in the next seven seconds or your CPU will implode";
•  the bait and switch post (a version of which is going around again); 
• the passive-aggressive status update aimed at one specific person that nevertheless makes everybody uncomfortable;
•  cruelty to animals and children packaged up "to raise awareness"; 
• the branded posts that force you to like and share something in order to actually watch it, rather than the other way around;
• the pointless posts that ask assign your birth date/the colour of your underwear/the first initial of your last name a silly word and yield a sillier phrase (the colour of your underwear plus the last thing you ate is your star ship name. Camo Cheerio, hahaha);
• The dumb amateur psychology/personality tests that sometimes give interesting results but just as often completely misread you

And yes, in order to know about that last point, I've taken more than a few of those tests. I just haven't shared many of the results.

This one I took, and shared, because the conclusion was more than a little unsettling.

Look, I've always known I am an emotional thinker. I'm intuitive, empathic and (often overly) sensitive to slights both real and imagined. If you've ever been at a point in your life where one of your pastimes was slight collecting,  you can flip a mental switch and see them everywhere. That switch is a bitch to turn off.

"I'd like you to do an inkblot test. There are no right or wrong answers, but what you see in these random splotches of ink will tell me a lot about how you think. Just say the first thing that you think of when I show you these images. Ready?"
"Ready."
flip
"That's a penis."
flip
"Those are a couple of boobies with protruding nipples."
flip
"That's an orgy: there are five people having various kinds of passionate sex."
flip
"Lesbians".
"Okay, I've seen enough. Sir, you have a filthy, filthy mind."
"Me? I have a filthy mind? You're  the one showing me all these perverted pictures!"

I recognized in Eva, and right quickly, a rational streak. Maybe "streak" is the wrong word: if rational were a colour, Eva would wear several coats of it. This doesn't mean she is cold or emotionless: far from it. But her emotions are usually rational emotions, in proportion to whatever the situation is, and she's able to own, categorize, process and deal with stray emotions, even powerful ones, in a way I frankly envy. (Part of what makes her ongoing medical issues so frightening is that she is suddenly much more emotional than she has been in the past: more like me than her. Two mes in the same room can be a tad volatile.)

One of about a thousand reasons I chose Eva to marry is because her rationalism complements my emotionalism very well. I figured she'd be very good at reining me in, and so she has proven to be. In turn, I believe I've taught her something about affection.

If you asked me sixteen years ago how our personalities would mesh by now, I'd have told you we'd grow to be more similar to each other. It only stands to, uh, reason.

Bzzzt.

Ken: 92% emotional
Eva 86% rational

I had a (surprise) emotional reaction to my score. It struck me as rather imbalanced. Emotions are fine things, don't get me wrong, and they have usually served me reasonably well in life, but to base all but a measly eight percent of my thinking on emotions is...kind of scary.

Yes, I know this test is far from scientific. But I'd be willing to lay money on a scientific test returning a similar score. Especially over the last year or so. My emotions -- all of them -- have been stronger, more irrational, and harder to contain.

I am well shut of the demons which plagued me last summer, which is a good thing, believe me. But I'm not where I should be...need to be...and  that bothers me, because it's like you can't get there from here. I'll devise some rational plan and it'll be swept away by the next emotion I feel. Ever tried building sand castles at high tide?

I think the hallmark of an emotional thinker is that he believes his emotions to be rational, perhaps especially when they aren't. I'm self-reflective enough to suffer no such illusions. I recognize when insecurity, or indignation, inadequacy or infantilism is irrational, and that's just the I's. Maybe that's the problem: I'm too caught up in I, I, I.

Except so many people tell me to pay more attention to my own issues rather than always concentrating on other people's. That's been said to me my whole life long, evidently because people don't "get" that making others feel better about themselves is the only way I ever learned to feel good about myself. Also, I'd rather not turn a spotlight on myself, not when everyone else is dealing with much worse. Just writing these last few paragraphs has been very difficult. Uncharacteristically, I've had to stop and start, back up and revise, and then look at each sentence and say do I really want to write that?

I have a friend whose carrying capacity for crisis is awe inspiring. You know how some people are drama queens? In her case the drama is reality: every day brings with it a fresh emergency, and more than a few of them would crush lesser people. I vented to her the other day about these damned night shifts making me feel removed from the world. She responded (very rationally) that I only become removed if I allow myself to be removed.

I want to write a long, long entry on all the ways this is wrong. Normal people sleep at night, with all that entails. The world's schedule, either professional or personal, is heavily biased against night shift workers. Even the weather interferes: the bedroom is unliveable without air conditioning at noon when I'm in it.

Whine, whine, whine. First world problems all the way. I'm far from the only person working nights--there are about twenty others at my store alone (though most of them seem to survive on three hours of sleep a day). I actually see more of Eva on this schedule than I did when she was on afternoons and I was on days. My social life hasn't suffered markedly because until recently I didn't have one and people have been extremely accommodating. (It turns out some friends of mine don't mind getting together for breakfast. Or hanging out on a Tuesday evening. Eva put up some black construction paper to block out the sun and the bedroom is actually comfortable at noon. Adapt and deal, Ken. Adapt and deal. This isn't rocket surgery. Any other problems I have are my problems, not problems that were thrust upon me, and I have the unmitigated gall to whine about this shit? Let alone to somebody who would cheerfully commit murder to face the "problems" I face? Let alone when Eva, the wife of my life and companion of my journey, is having her own issues that dwarf these?

How attractive.

My friend is right. There's a quiet voice, a rational voice inside me that's stuck at about eight percent volume, that knows damn well how stupid all this is. I'm feeling insecure when I shouldn't, indignant when I have no right to be, inadequate when I'm by any measure blessed with more love in my life than I deserve. Now if I can just tape myself saying this for the next wave of emotion that's due in about half an hour...and amplify the volume. That'd be entertaining as hell to watch. It'd end with me sputtering 'b-b-b-b-but..." and shamed into silence by the implacable voice of reason.

My strategy for coping with these waves so far has been to ignore them in the hopes they'll go away. They're not reasonable, they're not worthy emotions, do I really need to bother Eva with this (again);, there's no need to feel this way, "turn it off". Which has this odd side effect of turning off everything: all my emotions, happy and otherwise, my perceptions, even my memories. I tend to be an unthinking, unfeeling robot. And because that's so very removed from my natural state...there is seepage, and eventually an explosion of pent-up emotion that demands release out of all proportion to anything currently going on.

Not flattering. But true.

Writing this blog has been like pushing a rock uphill. I feel kind of drained right now. I'll save the actual therapy plan for a future blog. Mostly because I, uh, don't have one yet.

But I'm working on it. Emotionally AND rationally.

Life's Not Fair

I was an overprotected kid.

Not by today's standards, of course. By today's standards--let's just say Children's Aid would have been around to confiscate me many, many times over. I mean, my God, I rode my bike all over town. Once I moved to London (1980, age 8), you couldn't contain me. London is a city made for cyclists: even that long ago, there were bike paths spanning most of its width. Most summer days I cycled twenty or thirty klicks. Alone.

Except for the "alone" part, I can't say this was by choice.

Just look at me: I'm obviously what you'd call an "indoors" sort of guy. I've always been this way. My rationale was simple, albeit simpleminded: the worlds in books far outstripped anything I might find in the "real" world. The "real" world was...dirty. In all kinds of ways.

I wasn't worried about getting hurt, which seems to be what terrifies parents now. Skinned knees, broken noses (I tripped on a sidewalk crack once and landed on my nose...the pain was so intense it was almost pleasant); I'd felt pain and it didn't scare me. But I didn't like getting dirty or making a lot of noise. Boys that age are noises with dirt on them, which means I had no interest in interacting with boys. Girls were much more attractive--so much more mature--but I got glasses in 1980, which meant girls suddenly had no interest in interacting with me.

I was a piece of work, let me tell you. This will be hard to understand, and probably hard to believe. At eight years old, I did not know how to tie my shoes.

Why would I? I had my mom to do that for me. It was an act of love for her, the same as laying out my clothes every day, cooking my meals, and working fourteen hour nights dispatching ambulances only to come home and drive school bus in the morning. Ends had to meet: in a single-parent family the ends rarely seem to come within shouting distance of each other. What little time there was, she determined to fill up with little acts of love. Like tying my shoes.

When my stepdad came along in 1980, he put an end to most of that right quick. I was told to "get outside and make some friends". I couldn't "make" friends any more than I could make duck à l'orange, but Hobson's choice, outside I went. That led to some truly pitiful scenes, in retrospect. Riding around for three hours, coming home, and making up a story about the baseball game I'd played, and all the people I'd met, people whose names conveniently matched the names of characters in my books. On at least two occasions, talking to dial tones for half an hour. (Younger readers: the modern equivalent would be carrying on a text conversation with yourself.)

But I was outside...sometimes on the other end of the city. I was told never to go east of Adelaide Street, so of course that was the first place I went. On my bike, on major arteries, without a helmet.

More than that: I was put on intercity busses, alone, either meeting my dad in Toronto or (horror of horrors) transferring all on my own and meeting him in Parry Sound. My mother had grave misgivings. This was many years before Vince Li, but I had long since shown myself to be an absentminded child who was also a stick-figure: easy pickings, in other words. But she sent me off, many times, alone, and I'm still here.

They arrest parents for that kind of thing nowadays.

I walked to school every day, almost always alone, starting in grade four. I would have walked earlier but I lived across highway 7 from the school and there was a bus. I didn't understand why I had to bus--there were traffic lights AND a crossing guard--but questioning parental decrees was unthinkable.

I know parents of teenagers who drive their "children" to school every day. Maybe it's similar to why my Mom tied my shoes every day: an act of love that's also an unwitting act of sabotage. Hey, we're all doing the best we can with what we've got.

Parents have convinced themselves that all the dangers are not just real, but omnipresent--everywhere, and yet somehow still avoidable. There are pedophiles behind every bush, just waiting for any kid who might come along. Your child has to wear a helmet to play in the yard, because otherwise he might get a boo-boo.

I got lots of boo-boos. I had a tire blow on Oxford Street at something like 35 or even 40 km/h and substantial parts of skin merged with concrete, quite painfully. Could have been much worse. I'm good at ditching a bike. I've learned to be. I've bruised, cut, scraped and punctured various things, all of them superficial and none of them permanent (other than the scars, of which I have approximately a metric buttload). A Honda Civic driven by a police officer ran me over with no lasting effects beyond being instantly and totally transformed into a law-abiding cyclist.

But most of my problems came from other kids, who saw the geography of my face and wanted to rearrange it. Back then, that was something you just put up with. Adults didn't, couldn't understand. Some of them told you to fight back, which was a laugh and a half: my cotillion always changed names with every new school (five elementary schools, one of them twice) but the faces never seemed to change and neither did the ham-sized fists. Some adults told you to ignore it, which in my case meant simply enduring it without protest,  hoping that this particular ham-fisted bully was the kind who would be satisfied with tears rather than the kind who needed to see blood.

It's weird. I've talked to parents who say that the kind of bullying I and many others dealt with has been all but eradicated. That's great, except like everything else in the world, it's migrated online.  Meanwhile, parents have done everything they can to minimize all the rest of childhood's petty dangers. Out of the best of intentions, they've been tying their kids' shoes every day.

It started with spanking. Now, I don't agree with spanking your kid: there are many other ways to get the point across, and it's not a great idea to teach a child that problems are solved with violence. If I had children, I would not spank them. That said...our parents were spanked, their parents were spanked, and their parents were spanked, all the way back into the mists of time. I was spanked: frequently. Often hard enough to redden the skin, though NEVER to draw blood and NEVER specifically to inflict pain. My stepdad put an end to that the same way he made me learn how to tie my own shoes.
I don't blame my mom one bit. Reason didn't work with me as a child. Even as a teenager, I learned to endure the lectures from my stepfather (who had the patience of Job), say the appropriately contrite words and in the appropriately contrite manner, and then go on living as before. It honestly must have been a real temptation for John to haul off and smack me one sometimes. He never did.

Kids nowadays may not believe this, but teachers spanked kids, too. It was called in loco parentis --"in the place of a parent"-- and it still exists. It's just that parents don't use corporeal punishment anymore, so neither do teachers.

Most of your spanked ancestors grew up to be fine upstanding adults (who admittedly spanked their children). But seemingly overnight, it became socially unacceptable to use physical force under any circumstances whatsoever. We went through this in the aborted adoption process. Your kid could be hurting you or another child--physically beating on someone--and you're  not to touch her.

Then again, this came from the same person who told us if our adopted child forgot her lunch on a school field trip to Toronto, we would be expected to drop what we were doing and bring the child her lunch.

I still shake my head at that. I forgot my lunch once on a field trip somewhere.  I was too ashamed to tell the teacher I'd been so stupid, so I lied and said I finished my lunch quickly.
If I'd had friends, I could have cadged off them; maybe the teacher would have paid for my lunch and got the money back from my folks. As it was, I went without. And it didn't kill me.

But I know parents who cook their darlings separate suppers. Not just separate from what the parents are eating, different suppers for each kid. Why? "Because Billy doesn't like ____." Not because Billy is allergic, because he doesn't like something.

This strikes me as patently insane. Growing up, I had two choices: eat what was on the table, or eat nothing. Fairly often it was something I liked. Sometimes it was something I hated. Liver. Blecch. Complaining was not encouraged: if I  tried -- probably invoking the "IT'S NOT FAIR!" statement of spoiled brats everywhere, I'd have been instantly met with the rejoinder "Life's not fair, Kenny-me-boy."

I have long been a proponent of fairness. It rankles me to no end, even now, that life is, indeed, not fair. I remember having an unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object argument with my parents over car insurance, back when it was still a given I would drive a car. Boys pay more in premiums than girls, because boys are more likely to get into accidents and drive like assholes. While conceding this undeniable fact, I still argued passionately that all the underwriters in the world don't knoe every boy (or every girl, for that matter). I certainly wouldn't drive like an asshole: why should I pay the asshole premium? They kept falling back on statistics, and I kept falling back on righteous indignation, and neither of us budged.

I still haven't. In a sane world, we'd all pay the same premium starting out, and then we'd get hit with whatever asshole premiums apply, when they apply. Maybe the rates would have to be juggled to maintain reserves and the sacred profit margins. So be it. That would be...wait for it...fair.

But my parents were right, as parents almost always are, about life not being fair. I see it almost everywhere I look: unrequited love; well-thought-out positions drowned out by inarticulate ranting; most notably,  people who did nothing to deserve the pain they live with every hour of every day. (Sorry, I don't believe "capacity to carry pain -- the "ah, she can handle it! defence -- as a just excuse for randomly inflicted pain.) I've spent so much of my life trying to make a difference there, and the source of much of my own pain lies in my inability to do enough, or in some cases anything at all, for everybody else's.

Loneliness is the pain that calls out loudest to me. I want to heal it, by any means necessary, for whatever period of time is permissible. I've been profoundly lonely in my life, you see. Until you've experienced  not being lonely, loneliness is a default state; once you have, it's insupportable.

But I can't heal the world. I can't even heal my world. Because life's not fair.

What I do notice, though, is that we've reached a point where any kind of failure or injury at all is considered unfair and to be avoided at all costs. This is, it should be needless to say, unsustainable: eventually you WILL fail, you WILL be hurt both physically and emotionally, multiple times and in some interesting ways,  and you WILL have to develop the tools to cope with all of that. It takes a lifetime to develop those tools, for most people, and many parents have inflicted their children with delayed development.

I want to know where this came from. The kind of pragmatic tough love that many of us and almost all of our parents were subject to breeds self-reliance and resiliency...tools that have long been respected and highly valued. Mollycoddling and helicoptering does the opposite: it creates weak, dependant men and women who have no idea how to cope with adversity. Why those should be seen as desirable traits is a mystery for the ages.

You do want your kid to know how to tie his shoes, right?