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Stevie Wonder - Have a Talk With God
“There is sometimes a miniscule playing card on the floor, it is / facedown & blue with stars”
Hello:
1:
They’re taking the house across the street from us apart. Every time I look out the front window I am newly astounded at how much there is to rip off the exterior of a building, scoop out from its insides. It just keeps going! Like a portal to another world.
Yesterday Carlo and I were staring out at it when suddenly a dude appeared in the empty second-floor windowframe holding a huge plastic trash can, trying to shake out its contents into the dumpster below. He did this for a few seconds but there was something stuck in the can and he couldn't get it out, and eventually he just got fed up and tossed the entire garbage can down into the dumpster. We both figured this was the most hilarious thing we were going to see all day but then immediately afterwards a guy walked out of the front door carrying an ENTIRE TOILET and we got to watch him casually huck it like a frisbee into the same overflowing dumpster. WHOLE TOILET. A vision! A gift! My greatest regret is that I do not have a video of this sequence that I could show to you and also watch over and over and over again. You will just have to imagine it for yourself. But it ruled.
2:
Okay so the other day I was walking down Sorauren in the sunshine listening to Songs In The Key Of Life and becoming VERY emotional about it. Doro recently got me hooked on the Hit Parade podcast and when I was listening to the episode about Stevie Wonder I realized he's one of those artists whose music I feel like I know because I’ve heard it everywhere and often, but also maybe that idea has actually prevented me from really truly ever properly listening to it. I was on my way to pick up my guitar from Penny and Jarrett's; they’d brought it back from the practice zone for me, which was very nice of them. It is wild to think that there was a time in my life not too too long ago when I was semi-regularly playing guitar very badly in front of people and mostly having fun doing it. For our first few months of shows I remember being so nervous about playing that I would “accidentally” turn my amp down a little before we started and hope everyone else would drown me out. I was very afraid that everyone in the audience would realize I could not actually play. This seemed like an absolutely horrifying fate even though we were a very dumb and loud and fun punk band playing to like 20 people at the Owls’ Club or whatever. In moments when I audibly fucked up I would get that nightmare feeling where the world around you just freezes and drops away.
It took me maybe about a year of this to get confident, and then by the time I felt like I actually knew what I was doing Stephan moved back to BC. I was just starting to be able to play without staring down at the guitar 100% of the time. I remember after one of our last shows he was like “You checked all the boxes! Fast, loud and accurate!”, grinning, because he had been with me through the whole journey, and that made me feel very very very good. One of those compliments you take out of your pocket every once in a while and just examine, like a beautiful jewel you can’t really do anything with.
ANYWAY. I was walking and listening and thinking about how the amazing thing about Stevie Wonder’s music is that transcendent & completely bonkers experience where an artist is able to situate you directly and completely inside their mind, inside a feeling. Those moments when it just hits you in the chest like a beam of light and you are overwhelmed by the sheer amazement of true and pure communication. When “Isn’t She Lovely” came on and I got to the part where the harmonica solo plays over the recording of his newborn daughter I kind of freaked out. Thankfully Doro knew what I meant when I texted her THIS IS A SNONG THAT TRULY DEMONSTRATES THE POWER OF MUSIC!!!! When you hear the sounds weaving into each other and you realize that both things are music, the same way!!! The feeling he has when he’s hearing her becomes the feeling you have when you listen to the song he makes out of it. I don’t naturally hear the world or experience it that way. But I’m always so happy to be reminded that this part of the world is always present, that you can access it at any time, that all you have to do is listen.
I got the guitar and it was nice to see my friends. I did not think too much about whether I might ever be in a band like that again. Then I walked through Parkdale for a bit and the light was doing that late afternoon thing where it just hits everything at the perfect angle. People were out and about. One of those real living days.
3:
I have been thinking a lot lately about when we adopted Otto, which was almost exactly two years ago today. My life then was not structurally too different then than it is now - I was at home pretty much all the time - but emotionally it was way, way, waaaaaaaaaaAAAAAaaaay worse. I was in the early part of my second concussion and just incredibly depressed. With the first one my healing process had been terrifying but also pretty linear. With the second one I felt certain that I had fully scrambled my brain. Everything was so scattered and out of order; my memory didn’t work and my body felt limp and useless. I was exhausted and also broke and working a stupid job I poisonously resented but didn’t have the brain or body energy to leave. Never writing but still had to finish my terrible book somehow, whose subject matter made me cry to even think about. I was living in this house with Carlo, who was working extremely hard and had zero free time, and our roommate at the time, who was recovering from his own brain injury and also just didn’t really like living with us. Just a truly grim period.
Back then we had a cat whose name was Lowry. He was beautiful and weird and hilarious and Carlo loved him more than I have ever seen a person love an animal. I will spare you the details but around Halloween of that year he died in a pretty horrible and unexpected way and everyone in the house was devastated. I had always thought of myself as the type of person who would need a ton of time to mourn a pet before she could even think about moving on, but in this case I knew immediately that if we did not get another cat ASAP I was going to be in very big trouble. The horrible memory of his death and the pressure of the empty house and the lack of structure in my life and the encroaching winter darkness were all combining into something big and looming that frightened me.
No one else in the household was really ready for it – Carlo was very sad and our roommate was pretty angry – but I just couldn’t fathom life without the organizing principle of a pet to tie me to the world. I started taking the hour-long trip across town to the Humane Society once a week, waking up early so I could do it before work. Signing in at the binder. Walking through the weird-smelling cat hallways alone, peering into the cages, whispering through the bars.
Otto didn’t have the sparkliest personality of any of the cats in the shelter. He was not like the cuddly but UTI-prone Scottish Fold or the incredibly affectionate diabetic FIV-infected tuxedo with a biting problem I adored but couldn’t afford to take home. Otto had been brought in with another cat; the person who surrendered them had said they were a bonded pair, but when the shelter people split them up to test this out it became immediately clear that while he missed her terribly, she did not miss him AT ALL. When they tried to put them back together she spat and hissed at him until he went away. You could tell he was devastated and stressed out and confused by this new development and also, underneath that, that he was just a very weird dude. I would brush him through the bars of his cage and he’d roll around, try to fit his whole mouth around the hairbrush, making little grumbles and huffing through his nose. He was incredibly curious about and also terrified of everything. If I just grazed him with my hand he would immediately flop over for petting but if there was the tiniest sound anywhere in the shelter he would immediately leap up and start looking around.
His anxiety made him very heartbreaking and also very funny to me. Obviously I was projecting myself all over the place, but I think I recognized that there would be something really nice about caring for an animal whose own inner world seemed so similar to mine. At the time I was really deep in my own mind, and also worried that my flinchiness, my neediness, my depression and the endlessly refractive self-obsession generated by the concussion recovery process were all turning me into a fundamentally unloveable person, impossible to be around or talk to. To feel real love and affection for a creature who mirrored those qualities - to love him because of them, actually - was really…. therapeutic? Reassuring? It was nice. I don’t think I would have been able to explain all of this to you at the time. But there’s a reason I picked him.
And I picked right! Adding him to the house did exactly what I needed it to do, and has been doing it ever since. It opened up another way to see the world, brought me both into and outside of myself, made me feel pleasantly small and the world around me enormous and full of surprises. Also in terms of pure entertainment value, he is maybe the best cat I have ever had. His inner life floats so close to the surface that paying attention to him is like turning on Cat TV. What’s going on in Otto’s World today? You can literally see his mind working; his ears twitch. He still startles at tiny noises from outside but he can also nap peacefully next to Minky for hours at a time, hold his own in a playfight. You can pick him up and hold him for basically as long as you want. He has a very beautiful face and very big expressive eyes but also the slightly vacant gaze of a cat supermodel, which makes him very funny to narrate as he wanders around the house sniffing things. In the mornings he jumps up on the bed and sits on my chest and bonk my forehead very lightly with his forehead until I get up and feed him. When he’s bored he drags his wand toy over to me and spits it out at my feet like a dog who wants to play fetch. His purr is not too big or too small.
But the best thing about him is the grumbling. Whenever he does basically anything, he makes this little noise that sounds exactly like Marge Simpson when she’s dissatisfied. This quality is endlessly hilarious to me. I just think it’s an inherently good bit, to be eternally pissed off with everyone all the time when your life is literally 100% perfect. He grumbles when I lift him off the counter or try to make the bed around him, when I wake him up with gentle pets or fail to pour his dry food fast enough. Sometimes he will just come up to me and stare deeply into my eyes for a few seconds, like he is looking directly into my soul, and then he’ll do the grumble and walk away, like he does NOT think much of what he saw in there. But obviously it’s all an act. What he really wants is for me to pick him up or rub his cheeks, but he doesn’t know how to ask for it except by complaining, even though he has almost nothing to complain about except that sometimes we gently and respectfully clip his toenails. The low rumble of his constant, feigned indignation is the music of my days, this house, my life. It is the song of needing love but being too scared to ask directly, displacing your enormous fears into the everyday and hoping someone will catch on to what you’re doing without really asking you to change in a way you don’t feel ready to do. It is about knowing the people you live with will still love and accommodate you even if you never completely “get better,” or get over the stuff that freaks you out. I know I am projecting again, but I’m also not wrong. It’s ridiculous, and also very very real.
Okay but check this fuckin guy out though seriously:
&&&:
Carlo’s basketball corner:
He’s been in the same meeting for like 20 hours so I can’t ask him for one! I gotta start timing these out better!! Did you know the NBA isn’t going to test for weed this season?