also i started baking sourdough and i'm v good at it but i'm not gonna make you read about that
WHAT EVEN YEAR IS TIME, AM I RIGHT GUYS
Apartment Poem is free, but you can support it (and me) here.
“I owe the government thousands / of green zinnias in back / Taxes, as you know they’re not easy to grow in New York City.”
Hello:
There is one thing I keep saying to people. I was saying it last year too, I went back and checked, right here. Lately I have even repeated it back to Carlo like it’s not his story, like he doesn’t know it somewhere deeper than I ever could.
In his transplant days there were two major eras of Hospital Time - Montreal and Toronto. Toronto had its own terror but at least he had a diagnosis. You could see ahead of you, and even if the path led into darkness there was something about the knowing. Montreal, he always says, was the hardest thing. One day he was living his normal life outside the hospital, a guy with an apartment and a job and friends and a girlfriend and music, and then he got sick, and then he went in to find out what was wrong with him, and because no one could figure it out no one could tell him how long he was going to be there. For weeks - months, maybe? - they kept saying Maybe you can go home tomorrow, maybe tomorrow, maybe, maybe, maybe, and for such a long time he kept thinking of himself as a guy who was only going to be in the hospital for a couple of days, who was going to go home any minute now. That thought stretched every hour out by a thousand years, made each next day a crushing disappointment. And there were so many of them. That maybe is what does the lasting damage, when you’re waiting. The uncertainty gets into everything. It’s too hard.
We got our first vaccines because of the same thing that kept him in the hospital, that almost killed him but somehow didn’t, that never used to matter too much before everything started and that now structures every single aspect of our lives. He biked to the hospital at rush hour and came back unchanged. When I can’t measure the impact of a significant event on him I know I am meeting the imprint of Hospital Time on his very being, just like how he so often runs up against the parts of my past that have bound themselves to my body. I try not to need to know everything right away. It always comes eventually.
I biked too, but in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, golden light rushing down around me, no traffic, lucky, lucky, lucky. I locked my bike to the post outside the hospital and remembered last summer, last fall. I pulled out my printout and searched for a story at every turn - in the halting dialogue with the lady at the front desk, the descent into the auditorium, bored teenager checking me in, nurse with her mind elsewhere, flash of needle in the arm, fifteen minutes of waiting while I scanned my body for new feeling. I tried to leave the building the wrong way and a security guard had to turn me around. I allowed myself the indulgent, untrue thought that quarantine had made me worse at being in public even though the truth is that I have always been exactly this spatially unaware. On my way home I stopped at a corner store and bought a tiny thing of sparkling water, a snack-sized bag of puffy cheetos and two bouquets of tulips. I ate the cheetos crouching down next to my bike, orange dust falling into the mask around my neck, and when I got home I immediately became so distracted that I forgot to put the flowers in water until it was almost time for bed. They survived, though. Some charm in the air. Things do still live.
Here is Audrey the dog, who is perfect:
&&&:
It is hard to describe how it feels to live in Ontario right now. The decisions that could save so many lives - paid sick days, rent relief, systemic support for the people and communities who need it most - are being ignored; instead, we get carding and closed parks. It is all frightening and infuriating and deeply fucked up and all I can really think of is doubling down on support for community initiatives since the government isn’t doing fuck all for anyone. If you are local and have suggestions for groups or organizations that you think people should know about during this time, please send them to me and I’ll include them in the next email. This is not the most subscribed-to newsletter of all time or anything but people do click the links.
Toronto ACORN is looking for people to help with grocery drop-offs and getting people to their vaccine appointments. Email torontoadmin@acorncanada.org to find out more.
Toronto community fridges always need your help, and if you can’t make it to a physical fridge, Project Good Karma is currently accepting donations that will go towards stocking them
ESN needs your help getting new tents for encampment residents
Also: Vaccine Hunters Canada wants to help you navigate the tunnels of our entirely jacked up distribution system; even if you don’t, you probably know someone who could use this feed
Carlo’s basketball corner (as told to Emma):
A lot of best dunk conversation going on these days. Some people think it is MILES BRIDGES ENDS CLINT CAPELA LIFE WITH DYNAMITE DUNK. Some people think it is this hilarious footage of Rudy Gobert absolutely throwing down while the Jazz announcers continue to read trivia like literally nothing is happening. But to me it is this one, which for some reason no one seems to have noticed except this one youtube uploader whose video has a truly fucking amazing opening graphic, and whose title speaks the truth: MO HARKLESS IS INSANE DUNK OF THE YEAR