Christ-Off

Sometimes when I'm feeling sleepy and religious, I like to ask myself the question: who's better, the Protestants or the Catholics? This might happen to me after large meals that I've cooked and eaten by myself, or when I'm sitting on the bus and no one is behaving strangely and reading is making me feel ill. I've been occupying my mind with this idiot question at dull moments for years, it's like a sad and ugly old armchair in a Museum of Farm Equipment, when sitting down is both comfortable and depressing. Well, it's time to rev up this old tractor and blow the hell out of here. Go till some fields or something.

In many ways, the question is really: who are the bigger dipshits? I blame the Protestants for putting this whole issue in my brain in the first place, so they go way down straight off. As a child, my family went to a Brethren church of about 30 or 40 people, which was pretty good. I remember the usual Sunday School felt board Bible lessons and the astonishing displays of enthusiasm on the part of adults. At that time, the Catholics had a big church across the street, and they seemed alright in my mind because they had a large cemetery. (What is the deal with these filing cabinets they have in cemeteries now? It's like the apartment complex model of burial.) I don't know how anyone anywhere could enjoy their pastel statuary, the ugliness of which was apparent to me at 8 but which mysteriously charmed me then and still does. At seven or eight, I was still beautifully ambivalent.

Of course, the Brethren church split in two horribly and my family was either ousted or stormed off, it was never divulged to me. Thus began my journey into the thumping heart of fundamentalist evangelicalism. We joined a big-talking church of wonderful lunatics, and I have to say, I loved it. I liked the potlucks, the way they transubstantiated bad casseroles into special luxuries, and I loved flitting around in the enormous geniality of those occasions. The act of traveling to church was also pretty great: the feeling of executing an important, mystical duty; putting on special clothes to mash together in our family station wagon for the 45-minute drive into Charlottetown; the possibility of pleasing everyone by being good. I don't think the Catholics get off on that stuff in the same way, they're both too serious and too slack. Point Protestants.

It was around then that I learned that I stood a chance of falling eternally through fire in utter darkness while being gnawed on by worms with teeth, all in the perfect, agonizing consciousness of complete separation from God. I was eight or nine, and I felt eager to avoid that and go instead to the place made entirely out of rubies and diamonds and giant pearls and the like. (Did you know that heaven is a gigantic cube? It says so in the book of Revelation.) I went ahead and got saved at Bible Camp, which I think embarrassed me on some level because I didn't tell my family, but then somehow they knew about it, which embarrassed me in a different, totally inarticulate way. Nevertheless, some process was put in motion that took me down to the Montague River to be baptized, wading into the brown water with my t-shirt on in the company of my father and stately old Everett King. Surely one of the more beautiful moments in my life, I wish I had been conscious enough to remember it clearly. I think it would suck to only get this experience as a baby, so again, point Protestants. Having accomplished this feat and shyly performed these enormous rituals, I don't remember thinking much more about it. Christianity was Narnia and not being allowed to watch The Simpsons, with intimations of some terrible burden oppressing my older siblings.

At twelve, everything changed. We left PEI and moved to the United States of America, to West Virginia, to the Appalachian Mountains, to Hedgesville, and my family joined the Independent Bible Church. Here I was initiated into the training for adult fundamentalist evangelicalism: Youth Group. Again, it was completely fucking crazy, or maybe just American, but I have to say that I loved it. In fact, I'm deeply grateful for the training I received there, and I'm grateful for the work it's taken for me to untwist myself from it. Those people loved me and respected me and did their best to engulf me the enormous pillowy arms of their Christian culture, which was fundamentally sincere and generous. I don't think it would have been as meaningful for me to discover that God is love if I hadn't been so terrified of him as a teenager. I don't think I would have understood the special freedom God offers us if I hadn't spent so much time berating myself for my spiritual inadequacies. I guess you could call that condescension, but that's the risk of appreciating the people you disagree with. But the machinations of guilt inherent to that system are appalling, and the sense of separation and exclusion they feel for unbelievers or different believers is basically unforgivable. So ratatat, down they go.

Protestants have a lot going for them, but I'll be god-damned if those people don't have a hate on for Catholics. We got that coming and going, it was a real obsession. They once sent me to a special conference to teach teenagers how to hate Catholics at one of their big missionary complexes, with different sessions on why Catholics are so wrong and why Catholics don't love Jesus and so on. I bit into that some, but not long after that conference I happened to go to a Greek Orthodox monastery in Ohio for a week, where I discovered that amazing mixture of privacy and community of the liturgy, and it changed my life. I learned that Christianity didn't necessarily mean putting on elaborate displays of piety and belting out insincere, crappy music and marching up and down aisles to the tune of emotional devastation and feeling like a number in the spinning bingo ball of God. You could be casual about it. You could just do it and not feel like you were coming back from a rave when you left. Two points Catholics, minus two points Protestants.

After that, I went incense crazy myself. I went to school in Ottawa and developed a major grudge against the Protestants. I sat in my sad old chair and talking a lot of shit about them. I started going exclusively to High Anglican and Greek Catholic and Bulgarian Orthodox churches, I was hailing Mary and crossing myself twenty different ways and buying icons and all that. Then I gave up and just kept my Christianity around as a pathetic hang-up, because really my shame was the only thing that made me feel like I had a chance with God. Jump forward a couple years and I'm like, 'Hell, I really believe this stuff. Or some of it anyway.' So I did the thing I'd been needing to do for a long time: I became a Catholic. I got baptized, I got myself a fourth name ('Maria', no joke), I got a certificate, I cried. It was great, I'm happy about it. Point Catholics, I guess.

Now it turns out that the Catholics have taken their whole model for the church from the Roman Empire. Who knew? They use a legal structure to understand the faith: God authorizes Jesus authorizes the Pope authorizes the priests authorizes Joe Soap. The amazing thing is that that is just the opposite of what Jesus was getting on about. What's more, their priests are freaking out from a sort of rarified experience of alienation, the church authorities are terrified of sex, they're stuck in this frozen Aristotelianism, which is like some intellectual fortress of solitude, and the few members that actually give a shit are mostly fixated on political struggles within the church. So, minus a bunch of points Catholics.

Where does that leave me? Well, I'm glad to be a Catholic because I love Mass and I love the eucharist and I like identifying with Christians, because it's totally real, in the sense of human, and totally counter-cultural at the same time. And to answer the question of who's better, or who's worse, or who has the more stupid hang-ups or beautiful insights... it doesn't matter. But you knew that.

The Story of Edward Ng

When I was a child a man from Singapore came to live with my family. His name was Edward Ng, and he was so amazing he was barely human. For example, he knew a hundred ways to kill a man, and he could cook spicy meat balls with his mind. I grew up on Prince Edward Island, which is a small island in the North Atlantic ocean. I was orphaned by some Portuguese fishermen who threw me overboard as soon as I was born and raised on an iceberg by a family of walruses who had learned English not very well in Newfoundland. They loved me as one of their own, and so it broke their hearts when I decided to marry a polar bear at the age of six. Glambi left me for a writer from New York and I spent two years forlornly rowing those icy waters in a small boat made out of reindeer bones, never sleeping. At the end of two years a strange mist enveloped me; I fell into a deep slumber and woke up in Montague harbor, PEI, where my present family, the Manns, took me in.

At any rate, when I was in grade two and adjusting to my new home, this man Edward Ng (pronounced 'nuh guh'... no, I'm joking, it's pronounced 'ng'), who we always referred to by his full name, came to live with us. No one knows how or why he came, but strangely, we all behaved as though we knew him quite well. I was home-schooled at the time because I had learned the bad habit of quietly stalking my classmates for days before savagely mauling them on the playground. In the mornings I would watch Sesame Street, and in the afternoons my mom taught me how to build miniature replicas of famous sailing ships and recite long, epic poems. It was a brief and blissful idyll in my sad, tumultuous life.

Edward Ng fit right into our cozy routine. He never exited his den in the woodpile before two or three in the afternoon, and then our training would begin. Often he took me out to local cow pastures, where we would stand motionlessly for hours, absorbing the scene. On one occasion we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken and ate the very cartilage off of the chicken's bones. He taught me many things: how to wrap gifts, how to tame wild dogs, how to fabricate fish scales. He always refused to teach me any of his techniques for killing a person. Except for one.

Edward Ng had led an interesting life. He had been a famous and promising young movie director in Singapore when the government pressed him into military service. He joined the navy, and on his first mission the ship was overtaken by pirates. He told me many graphic stories of brutal violence from his time as a pirate slave, including filling men's bellies with water and jumping on them. Later the military retaliated and Edward Ng was mistaken for a pirate. The soldiers lined them all up and machine gunned them, but Edward Ng was smart and fell just ahead of the bullet, throwing himself under the man next to him. When they came by to bayonet everyone, they didn't see him, and he escaped in the night.

Edward Ng disappeared from our lives as mysteriously as he came. I remember my last moments with him, looking up at him and noticing the wind tousle his hair even as we were standing in the kitchen of our house. We were all there, feeling sleepy at the end of one of his many day-long feasts, with platter after platter of unimaginable asian cuisine and so many twinkly lights. He had been working feverishly for several hours in the corner while we gorged ourselves, and finally we saw what he had been working on: a human-size gingerbread igloo! He looked at us all one by one with his vast, timeless gaze, and then crawled inside. When I crawled in after him, no one was there. My family lived off of that igloo through all the famine of 1993. I don't know whatever became of Edward Ng. I heard he got married.

A Pair of Poems

The river continues to flow at night
In a different city.
Tomorrow: river broken, smashed.
For us the ancient tool-shed
Holds its heat.
The women lope and maw
With kitten wings.
The men are stupid and strong.
Now the great bird has landed on the ground
And everyone is gone to trees.
Some clattering will get me,
Some squirrelish chattering.
Perhaps some other fate.

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

I put a vision into my heart to destroy it.
I put a thought in my eye to blind it:
Colorless light, extending sideways
Across fields with no wheat,
Yards with no trees,
Unrecognizable streets.
The yellow lights along the highway
Making a loud noise.
A glow to cover every face,
A hum to fill up every space.
I built a fire to burn out while I sleep.
When I awake, I'll walk around
Or find somewhere to wait.

The Weather

I love the silly, foolish sky. I love this idiot winter. I'd take my clothes off for this terrible weather. I'd drink tea all night with my awful feelings, sitting outside in the nude for this stupefied season. I'd take the whole earth into my chest on this glad day in this shit-eating cold for this perfect breath of stupid, frozen air.

Recipe: Dinner Muffin

To Whom It May Concern At The CBC:

I would like to submit an entry to your sandwich competition. There's no story behind it, I just invented it last week and it is awesome. I call it the Dinner Muffin, or alternately, the Dinner Cupcake. The sandwich requires one piece of enriched white bread, one spoonful of hummus (preferably home-made), and one slathering of cream cheese. Also, a toaster oven. What you do is you hold the bread in one hand, and dollop the hummus into the middle with the spoon in the other hand. Then you fold the crusts in to make a cross, or more like an addition sign, gently preserving the hummus in its bready sac underneath. Place the Dinner Muffin in the toaster oven and wait twenty minutes, no matter the temperature. When the twenty minutes has elapsed, remove the muffin from the oven and apply the cream cheese in snowy valleys between the arid ridges of crust. For a garnish, oregano!


Mark Mann, London, Ontario

House and Home

Birds Attack a Falcon

It happened on the boardwalk in Orillia, across from the train that became a failed restaurant and the ice cream stand for sad men. It was a sunny day and I was walking with a lady. In my hands I was carrying books too interesting to read, the kind you look after until you don't know where they came from, on the slim chance that at some moment in this gasp of life an opportunity to read them will appear. Around us there were business travelers and retirees and teenagers and people that own boats, walking the same direction or the opposite or sitting. Of a sudden, we pressed through the membrane of a calamity. Shadows went askew, the air became blotchy, people were walking faster or stopping or turning around or searching the trees, the sky, the lake. No one knew what was happening but we all felt it. Then I saw it: there was a falcon flying low over the water just beside us and it was being attacked by a dozen or two dozen smaller birds. They were swooping around above it en masse, several different species together, all noisy and frantic. As a group they kept the larger bird pressed down, effectively preventing it from getting above them. Every now and then three or four would dart down and create these explosions of bird terror, chaotic and vicious. The falcon had become like one of the great dumb suffering beasts, silently shaping its movements in long curves along flat planes in the air. As the drama unfolded, I realized that the falcon had a falconer, a man walking along the boardwalk with the special wrist perch, but the falcon was unable to return to him. It would slip into a tree, wait a while and try again, only to be driven back, unable to ascend or rest. Finally, one small, sharp bird went into a sustained frenzy, flitting wildly in the air above the falcon's back and stabbing its head and neck furiously. The falcon reeled in confusion. It was very disturbing. Everyone there wanted to see the falcon rise, turn and strike, heavily and decisively, ripping the small bird out of the air and snapping it in its claws, then rising to devour it in the higher sky, the colder air. Instead, this sad display, this upset, and I think what we really felt was scared.

Angry At My Cat

Tonight I threw Charles across the room. I said, "You can't do that. You can't bite me." I was kneeling beside my bed, looking at the globe on my bedside table, not thinking about the North Pacific or Madagascar but the whole planet like a broken snow globe in space, leaking cotton and jell-o and people. My little globe is nine inches in diameter and looks a picture of someone's cousin with leukemia. Or maybe a bit of memorabilia from a favorite teacher who died in a car accident while masturbating on the highway. As soon as I threw him I felt very bad and looked down at the bed, with the sheet and blanket pulled back one quarter of the way at the corner closest to me. What I noticed was the shadows of the folds in the fitted sheet. There seemed to be a great many of them, more than I'd ever seen before.

A Common Way to Think

It's worth taking into consideration that your most basic assumption about life is that it is a commodity. That is, it is like a valuable material out of which you construct your specific life. As far as you are concerned, it exists in a limited quantity for a finite duration. You don't want to waste any of it. If someone wastes your time, you get angry: they've stolen from you. You only have a few tools for extracting life from your time in the world, the senses. Your root motivations are sensual. Everything beyond the senses is an abstraction designed to justify your sensual yearnings to your moral consciousness. Morality is necessary to assist in socialization. But life is not abstract, it is like a physical substance. You seize it and make something out of it. You want to get the most of it. You drink it in, you suck it back greedily. You crave experience. Everybody craves good experiences, though good is variable. You're constantly looking for tricks to make your life yield better experiences, or you're relying on your old compulsions and addictions.

Your life belongs to you. Everybody gets some, yours is yours and it's all you've got. You can do what you want with it. You are not your life. You are what you get out of life (your history and identity), how you get it (your personality and activities), and what you want to get out of it (your desires and plans). If you are an idealist, you think you can get what you want out life without taking it from anybody else. If you are a realist, you know that it is a competition. You know that you have rights: the customer is always right. You accept your obligations: to pay your karmic rent with contributions (you can hope for a new lease). You have needs: upkeep of the experience machine and the satisfaction of its demands. You have to be balanced to hold it all together. If you lose your grip, it can get away from you.

It's all through the language, you turn and turn and it's always there: there's you and there's your life. Since there is no distinction between experience and the experiencing animal, your life is to you both a substance and some strange beast, and you are both the master and the connoisseur. You see your life as a thing opposite to you, a quantity of energy to be expended, bright and organic, dark and diffuse, mysterious and unmanageable. And you are the miner, the farmer, the teacher, the executive, the owner, or perhaps more often, the refugee, the derelict, the slave, the saboteur, the enemy. In fact, you are completely inconsistent, you don't know who you are, and when you look at your life, it fills you with tenderness and disgust. You end up developing very complicated co-dependant relationships with your life, belonging to the various personalities you use to elicit pleasurable experiences from the different situations you encounter.

There are numerous problems with thinking this way. It creates a natural opposition, because we fight with our lives to get what we want from them in the same way that we fight with the world to get what we want from it. It inclines us to be selfish, not only because we are absorbed with our internal struggle but also because we end up thinking we should get whatever we want. It fills us with anxiety, because the stakes are so high and the odds of success are so low. I think this way of thinking is implicit in the human mind, but it is intensified in our culture. I think that the reductionist/materialistic/positivistic-type outlook that is everywhere taken for granted serves to intellectually enshrine and protect the Consumer Self by scoffing at other self-understandings. I fear that the most natural pathways of our minds are really designs laid down over centuries to serve the owners of society. I don't think this machine we've built is working very well.

Race Track

A Dream About a Room in the Ocean

I am on a ship in the middle of the ocean, watching some people getting whipped around by a turbine device floating in the water, attached to the ship by a cable. They are somehow employed to do this, as fishermen-divers or some such, and I am thinking how difficult and unpleasant the activity looks, but also exciting. Next I am under the water with them, swimming to the bottom without air tanks. The water is shallower than I had thought, maybe fifty feet deep and well-lit. We find a room on the ocean floor, and swim inside. Inside is the ruin of an office, with a desk and papers and other items on it and other furniture in the room. It feels like an important discovery, in the formal sense as an archaeological find, but more personally as a place of great beauty, in the sense of 'found' beauty deriving from its obscurity at the bottom of the ocean, the special light, the possibility of finding strange and delightful artifacts, and so on. I am very excited and begin poring through the drawers and gathering papers and pictures and objects quickly. The other people are running out of air and decide to leave, which adds a feeling of urgency, though I myself am not out of breath. There is in fact an air pocket in the room, so you can get your breath and it's not clear why they had to leave. I decide to stay longer, with the sense that I have to leave soon too because they have. I take some pictures of the light coming through the windows, illuminating bits of seaweed and floating papers and rippling of light greens and blues, as in a painting. I take pictures and swim out. The dream ends with an image of journal articles debunking not the existence of the place but the beauty of it, saying that it is in fact very cold, thereby exposing me as a charlatan. There is a picture of the window I had photographed, with jagged bits of glass filling the frame and ice everywhere, and none of the wonderful colors.

First Mass

I'm the guy from St. Thomas.
It's too small and I came here.
I only have my grade twelves.

That was where the old Finn was dying,
and the other one is Hazel's,
who kept cats.

We ate cake and talked like humans,
ate and talked,
a great hairy cake.

I did not feel a thing.
I did not feel a thing.
I did not feel a thing.

Lao Tzu

Old Long Ears, he lived in the womb for sixty-two years and only came out for a piece of fruit (it was a plum). For the rest he was a dragon and kept books, but the city made him lonely and he went off by himself. All his learning was to hide his name. Only Yin Xi, the bridge guard, could ask him what he thought, so he wrote it all down in five thousand words.

Pig's Head

A Sad Comment from an Old Roommate

You hear about people that aren't meant to go to school. To be truthful, I have occasionally been willing to degrade myself to the level of forming opinions, and I've even been known to go around with jockeys and sages, wearing a burlap sack on my head and declaiming against the democratization of the university. I'm in a purer frame of mind right now, and will set my homilies aside for the sake of this account. In the course of my pre-tertiary education I did actually meet such a person, someone who Shouldn't Have Been There. I shared a dorm room with him. To make matters uniquely difficult, we found ourselves at a Christian Institution, a Bible College. They are commonly known facts that Christians eat babies, poison wells, and scheme the demise of civilizations. I myself am a confirmed Christian and I eat my baby chops with crushed butterflies on top, drizzled with a delicious naive sauce. Even if this were either here or there, don't unstick your eyebrows for me, I'm just being cute. But I don't think anyone could wink at this deeper crime of the religionists: that they make people feel awkward. My roommate -- let's call him Denver -- felt awkward. To me. Maybe it wasn't God or Godders that made him do it, but as I understand it, God doesn't mind taking the blame for things.

Denver was a dweeb or a nerd, I'm not sure which. Actually, he was probably more of a dork. (In Ontario they say 'goof'.) This was back in the heyday of the internet, when something like thirty percent of sites not devoted to porn were devoted to the Simpsons. Denver used to sit cross-legged in bed all day posting snappy little comments to obscure message boards. Sometimes he would come down to the cafeteria to eat pizza, and once I saw him lifting weights. He had some friends with whom he would enact fantasy role-playing games in the comfortable security of the dorm room. Once I found them pretending to drink beer from large steins. But I don't hold Denver in disdain, even if he was one of the laziest people I have ever met. Laziness is probably one of those confusing Buddhist virtues. Beyond having good taste in cinema and a wry wit, he was mostly an alright guy who never had to take responsibility for himself before, and he Shouldn't Have Been There anyway. Denver was a rural type person. He seemed to be particularly involved with his family, often returning from weekends home with several apple pies and a strain around his face.

This is the moment that I wanted to share with you: once Denver asked me suddenly, out of the blue, "Do you care whether the toilet paper rolls down on the side closest to the wall or away from the wall?" "No," I replied, "I don't think I do care." "Me neither," he said defiantly, "I don't care at all." He didn't say anything else, he just fell silent with a rebellious gleam in his eyes.

To this day, one of the saddest, most pent-up things anyone has ever said to me. Denver didn't return to school after Christmas. I came back to find all his stuff gone and a note on the bed that said, "I'm not coming back, but I didn't fail." After that, I had a room to myself.

Across The Street

The Meaning of 'Sailing to Byzantium'

Here is the mood of an old poet who knows his worth. The world of his youth belongs to the young, who cannot recognize him. His life and the life that sustains it are ephemeral; he's come to the end of it, and he must travel on into agelessness. This new world is not natural but invented, and to go there he would gladly abandon his natural life. The timeless world he longs for is really the ancient world, the holy city of Byzantium, inhabited by worthies greater than himself. When he gets there, he would like to become one of their beautiful creations, like a golden bird set upon a golden tree. But he knows that when he sings, he will sing again of the natural world, of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Who Lives in my Neighborhood

It's hard to say who lives in the EOA, even when you've lived here for a few months. The reason it's hard to say, and I'll be frank here, is that the Bad People live in the EOA, and you're not allowed to say that. I mean drug users and Natives and men with too-sporty sunglasses. Also, young people who wear t-shirts in the winter. But since the Bad People are really the secret Jesuses and the no-bullshitters and the lonely geniuses and the people who make good jokes and the hilarious crazies and pixies and scapegoats and old men and addicts and recyclers and anti-heroes and cookie-makers. They aren't going to win the culture game, but only assholes think they can. So you can't just call them the Bad People. You need a better term.

You may be asking, why do you need a term at all? Because, conventional or not, human categories are real, and it's both interesting and enlightening to get them right. For example, I once knew a funny little man named Hoppy who was always turning up suddenly, coughing violently and peering at you humorously. He'd get drunk, explain complicated scientific and theological concepts, sell a few stolen goods, and disappear when you weren't looking. One day a friend referred to Hoppy, shaking his head, as "that silly fucking leprechaun." Well, it was just the truest thing you could say about Hoppy -- truer than a metaphor, anyway -- he really was a leprechaun. That's the sort of thing I want to know about a person, not who they are but what they are. I myself am an otter. It's a consolation that you can't actually say anything about anything without being wrong anyway.

In order to find out who lives in the EOA, you need to know my friend Tabu. He is the unanimous darling of the EOA, there's no one he doesn't know, including dorks like me. You can find him on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays at the Town and Country Saloon and Laundromat, singing karaoke. Town and Country is the center of the spinning wheel, but don't go in there unless you know Tabu already, or plan to wash your clothes. And since you wash your only set of clothes in the bathroom sink every night, you should find him first somewhere around the corner of Richmond and Dundas, and you should just hang around until he introduces himself. He will. Tabu had polio when he was a kid, which they treated by severing the tendons behind his knees, for which reason he now requires full-length leg braces and crutches to get around. And he does get around. The first time I met Tabu he claimed to have been following me for weeks.

So one night I walk into TnC with a backpack full of dirty clothes and a defensively aloof expression on my face. Tabu appears with a beer for me and invitation to join him and his friends for some karaoke. I want to interject here with the fact that I am someone who knows his karaoke song. It's 'Your Song' by Elton John. I want to also say that up until this point I had not concretely met anyone in my neighborhood, except for my downstairs neighbors. The first person Tabu introduced me to was a man named Harvey, who claimed to be '300% percent homosexual' --Harvey looked like a construction worker in his late forties, but nothing in his physical contortions or aggressive come-ons give me any reason to think he was exaggerating. I should say that TnC is about the exact opposite of a gay bar, so only a pretty god-damn tough person is going survive there as flamboyant queer. Turned out Harvey was a construction worker in his late forties, and among other things, he was one of these strange beings, a constantly bullshitting Ultimate No-Bullshitter. Obviously, it makes sense that he would be the evening's oracle.

This is what he told me: we were huddled against a wall, I think he'd been trying to explain to me something about primordial male instinct. Every now and then he'd jump up to dance grotesquely with the waitresses or say something lewd to some terrifying bad-ass. But at that moment, he was laboring to convey some horrible and hilarious sexual nonsense to me, with his face about two inches from mine, spraying my cheek with beer spit. All of a sudden he stops and changes tone. He says to me, in the way of revealing a secret, "You know who you're dealing with right? You know who these people are? We're the Aunties and Uncles!" And he laughed, a bit wildly but with his eyes wide open staring at me, watching. When Harvey said that, it hit me with the sort of force of truth that you only get once a month or so. It's just the perfect term, for a hundred reasons that you can intuit. And that's all I wanted to share, that the Aunties and Uncles live in the EOA.

McCormack's Basement Window

The Difference Between an Artist and an Artisan

An artisan works; an artist produces. An artisan makes; an artist creates. An artisan is involved with a skilled trade; an artist is involved with a creative occupation. An artist may be self-taught but an artisan may not. An artist is required to innovate while an artisan is required to perfect. An artisan reveals a thing while an artist reveals a perspective. An artisan is absorbed; an artist is inspired. An artisan is devoted while an artist is passionate. An artist perseveres while an artisan endures.

Fruit Trees

One summer I worked in a plant nursery and became friends with an old West Indian man who visited irregularly with our potted apple and pear trees. He was an admirer of fruit trees, and his presence alone transformed that clutch of trees into a grove. When I could I liked to join him him in there. Once he told me that in Jamaica he had tried to grow an orchard, but when half his trees bore fruit and half didn't, he cut down those that were barren. It turned out that they were male trees, and the following year his female trees were deprived of the joys of motherhood. He explained to me that now they grow male and female together in one arboreal abomination, and breed them to bear fruit much faster than they normally would. I was resonating to the suggestions of a dark metaphor in all this when he intimated that he could establish a romantic connection between me and his fat, giggling daughter, who was eating an apple. She looked to be about fifteen years older than me and shyly willing, but I declined.

Cart and River Structure

Where I Live

In London I live in a neighborhood known locally by the acronym EOA. This stands for East of Adelaide, not to be confused with the AEOA, or Almost East of Adelaide. Adelaide is a street that separates a part of town where at any moment someone might accidentally drop their pants, from a part of town where the people are so desperate to be even remotely associated with reality that they are willing to use an acronym for themselves that includes the word 'almost'. What is east of Adelaide? Well, there's me. Then there's my cat Charles. EOA has taken its toll on him: not long after I moved out here, Charles started huffing Febreze. There's my neighbor Jeff, a minstrel and inventor of silly words, and his son Alex, who'll throw himself painfully off of a tall snowbank for delicious lunch snacks. The lord of EOA is Emperor Krispy Square, ruler of Krispy Square Fortress, which is just down the street from me. The Krispy Square Fortress is an imposing edifice whose shadow stretches half a block at sunset. Many mornings, the whole neighborhood smells like rice krispy squares, which his minions are constantly baking for all his fabulous krispy parties. Other mornings it smells like corn flakes. I don't know why. Don't try to steal any krispy squares from the dumpster outside the krispy square fortress, because the grounds are protected by a Fat Jerk and his army of Truck Drivers. Across form the emperor's fortress is a squat drinking establishment for veterans and other retired warriors. This is notable because there is a tree that looks like an umbrella growing in front, and if a group of a certain sort of men are standing around having cigarettes, the whole scene makes a pleasing composition. All of these things are at the very end of the EOA, including me and Charles and the neighbors and the veterans and the truck drivers. There's Adelaide Street, there's the Krispy Square Fortress, and in between is the EOA. If you go the other direction, past the fortress, you cross some train tracks and enter the Old Factory District, which is very interesting, but no the subject of my discourse.