“And you will never turn it over. To complain of money will ruin / your conversation; if you do not complain”
(I meant to say this last time but couldn’t quite figure out how. Everybody who loves MF DOOM has a different story about their relationship with his music and mine is that when I was in high school, before I ever knew what a panic attack was, when I would feel my breath slipping out and the ground shifting under me I would use his rhymes as an anchor, recite them over and over under my breath. They engage every part of your brain and when you repeat them you can feel the Villain’s voice moving through your body. Flows like water, intricate enough that you need to summon your whole self just to repeat them. A true gift. P-sychiatrist. RIP.)
Hello:
Tomorrow is my birthday! I’m going to be 30. I haven’t been able to say it without quotation marks, though. “Turning”? “30”? I know it’s beyond eye-rolling to be like time has no meaning these days but I think there’s always value in peeling back that particular cliche and reacquainting yourself with the truth at its core.
When you have your birthday on the weekend it kind of expands. We’re in the aura. So far so good. Haley sent me a beautiful plant and Carlo’s sister sent me cupcakes and I haven’t cried yet which is nice. My idea about myself is that I am not a super intense birthday person one way or the other. I don’t usually get incredibly freaked out about it, nor do I like making it too much of a thing. Mostly I just try to engineer as pleasant a day for myself as possible. I like to pretend I am 100% chill about this one in particular but I’m not gonna lie: for the past few days I have been reorganizing the house, cleaning everything and moving pictures around like the Life Inspectors are coming. I often think about the Desus tweet about how birthday is your annual performance review with the universe. I think this year I’d do okay, but I still cannot hang a mirror on the wall without making a billion giant holes and also last week someone brought me weed brownies and I ate just a quarter of one thinking I was playing it safe and got absolutely blasted into outer space, like Maureen Dowd high, cop calls 911 high, a real maybe I died and became a ghost and that’s all this is type situation. Carlo had to sit still with and breathe on me for what felt like a decade. At some point I managed to get my legs to work enough to haul myself upstairs to the bathroom and then for over an hour I sat in there with the door open while he worked in his office. I just kept going “toilet is a safe place, right? I feel like toilet is a safe place” and he had to be like yes Emma you’re absolutely right. So there’s that.
The only age in this general area that I’ve ever felt the need to watch out for is 32, and only then because my mother always says she never thought about having kids until she hit that number and then one day she woke up and was like “I know how to do this and I have to do it” and that’s why I’m alive. Freaky! That number has always floated in my mind like a buoy I’m swimming out to, though I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen when I get there. I would probably like to have children someday but the material conditions of my life would need to change so radically it’s difficult to imagine. I did start a note on my phone a while ago to collect the genius thoughts that pop into my head about the kind of parent I’d like to be, but all that’s in there so far is “jump shot,” “meditation?” and “no one has to smile for photos if they don’t want to.” So that one might need a little more time in the proverbial oven.
It is also maybe hard to get too invested in the idea of 30 being a particularly significant age when two of the people you are closest to are a 93-year-old woman and a guy who spent all of his twenties in the hospital dying. A few weeks ago I was telling my grandmother that Carlo and I had started watching Law and Order every night over dinner like we were some 60-year-old couple and she audibly rolled her eyes and went Oh no, not SIXTY. For her that was OVER THIRTY YEARS AGO. The mind explodes. What could any of this possibly mean?? At this age my grandmother had been pregnant once or maybe even twice, I’m not sure about the math. My mother was married to my father I think, catering, temping, acting, living not far from where I live now. And Carlo was just coming back into the world. Each of these people’s experiences of linear time has been so radically different from the others they might as well all live on separate planes, and yet here we all are at once, together. So, like…. “turning”? “30”??? I dunno.
Mostly I like birthdays as an occasion to have a cool party and reminisce about all the other ones that came before it. As a child I was incredibly weird and did not know how to get along with other children so I didn’t have the greatest time with anything social, but still if you have a party other kids always come. I remember the pressure of the day always loomed a little heavy but my mom would make a cake, I’d get presents, I was an only child, I basically floated around on an enormous glowing cotton-candy cloud of privilege, and plus I always had this suspicion that life would get easier when I got older and found other freaks to hang out with. Which it absolutely did! I know I had fun birthdays in high school but can remember nothing specific about them. In university I was always dating some thousand-year-old pervert with vodka where his blood should be or like guys who made computer art and had an “interesting personality.” Men whose idea of a compliment was telling me I had a very distinctive walk, whose idea of a present was to give me copies of their own favourite books with no wrapping paper or card. Pretty much every birthday would end in a blackout. I had fun, though. This was the part of my life where I discovered I could throw a pretty good party - maybe the most practically useful thing I learned in my four years of undergraduate study.
When I moved back to Toronto was when stuff really got good, because I stopped dating horrible alcoholics and began my annual tradition of hosting exactly one rager per year where I’d just cram everyone I liked into my apartment and let nature take its course. Frequently the cops would come which sucks for multiple reasons but on the bright side it’s an amazing way to ensure your party becomes lightly mythological, and also that everyone clears out guilt-free just when you’re starting to really get sleepy but don’t want to make a whole thing out of it. I love putting the book people and the art people and the work people and the life people all together and seeing what happens. I love just flitting around poking my head into everyone’s conversations, wearing an outfit. Big tangle of boots at the front door, blast of cold air from the outside. I remember at my last place we had a chalkboard on the wall of the kitchen and someone drew a map of the party on it, like my room was the Weed Zone and Layne’s was Art School and the kitchen was the Literary Annex, etc. The party documenting itself. I loved that. Last year I had a house show that was more subdued but still very fun. Penny and Doro and Carlo all played and I wept like a baby. Rudrapriya told me it has sort of become her platonic ideal of a party because it was the last real one she went to before the world ended, which is funny, because that’s how I feel about her birthday, which was a month later and one of the best karaokes I had experienced in a very long time, and also my last before everything. (I did Prince and it ruled. No regrets.)
Anyway. I’m not really sure why I’m telling you all of this except that writing this newsletter has really been the most significant way of marking time in my life over the past however many months. I have not been able to keep a regular journal day-to-day, no matter how many resolutions I make about it, but writing these is better anyway. Dropping a little anchor into the moment, burning a few details into the record. I think maybe the most actually significant thing about a “milestone birthday” is that it gives you a way to use your memory - so you can say to whoever oh yeah, when I was 30 I was doing x and y and z. When I was 30 I was unfathomably lucky, in love and living with a person who was willing to spend hours agreeing with me about the safety of the toilet. My office had a huge mirror left by our last roommate and the walls were full of holes. I had two cats who followed me around the house like animals in a video game, and I was waiting on the last round of edits for my first ever book that wasn’t poetry. Sometimes at night when everyone else was asleep I projected the image of a beautiful woman onto the living room wall; when she instructed me to begin in a comfortable seat, to bend, to breathe, I would do it. Sometimes I would write to people I had never met and tell them everything I could remember. I could barely feel the concussion anymore. Outside the world was the world was the world. Things kept going.
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The PIVOT Resource Fund is offering $1k grants to help Black artists in Ontario adapt through the pandemic; tell your friends!
Carlo’s Basketball Corner:
Jack Armstrong last night, in fine form