the mEp.
November 2014
December Came....
November 29
the fish don't know up from down
bleary eyed, i have no headache. what lessons do we teach our sons and daughters.
there is no joy without pain? there is no black nor any white? there is no life without any death?
i'll tell you what brutal is.
brutal is living in a world that loves you more because you're beautiful.
and then,
you get old.
November 27
ONCE in a while,
in the morning, i'm just happy to be alive, in spite of a no-supper-induced headache, a two hour toss-and-turn fest,
cherry juice, and the million thoughts scrambled up in my head.
November 25
the new fridge mildly perturbs the new world order.
it's a phase of settling; some things are new again;
the words we use to describe the past have evolved;
the pain has phase-transitioned from solid to malleable;
hours are spent writing chapters - but why ?
in the end, is it only myself i can save?
so in spite of mid-nightly tossing and turning to the contrary;
i'm awake before all three alarms;
the dark, veiny sticks that would be branches on trees that were planted before i was born
move in a slow-motion Brownian molecular fashion
against the brightening sky, as though beckoning the winter,
they are settled now in their own transition, and will accompany me,
will accompany all of us, on the seemingly endless journey of winter in this town,
prefaced by premature Christmas decorations,
and only ending once her winter boots are, perhaps for one last time,
chaffing her toes.
November 24
let's wakey eggs and bakey correctly.
these longest shortest end of year months sprint towards a holiday
and a month that we never really see.
poots is not a sprinter; taking in the details of the world around her;
she chews; she averts her gaze; a stranger in his boudoir;
where does the line between stranger and confident bend.
the book is about so many things which can only be written once they are gone;
i'll not refer to them as flatlanders; there's an impoliteness to that that they will never know;
it's got chapters and chains; it's got no plot.
Frankie told me to do it: to push beyond what is comfortable here:
for them; for me; for us;
but she makes the assumption that everyone is learning
growing
and even that, i must ask about. why me? why do i care so much?
why can't i just shut up.
"Evil in general, is banal"
Hannah Arendt
love doesn't silence me. in fact, it has just begun to give me a voice.
a real voice.
my voice.
November 22
tomatoes
when i imagine Bill Cosby explaining his actions, i wonder if he will use these words:
"i'm just a man"
historical emotions push around in my head today. a night of real sleep. bizarre.
lingering red wine is gone; a few curtailed yawns without enough calories;
how about the fridge fiasco, who will be here when they come to take it away?
poots is having her own 'triggers' even though she can't recall being raped outright.
no matter; violence against any woman runs through my veins;
the frustration of powerlessness is perhaps, the single largest motivator for me.
my parents worry about the ideals of their flat-lander world;
tomatoes, home-ownership, and Indians.
imagining escaping that world doesn't count;
i whisper this as softly as i can: hoping that these opinions stay firmly in my world.
Frankie, i have never needed you more than i do right now.
November 21
silenced
i am silenced by my self. years and years of trying to figure out why i am unable to speak my real feelings: my real opinions:
and finally, i have figured out that i am silenced only by my own mind.
it is my mind which has racing thoughts unsafe;
it is my mind which find fault in nearly everything mortal;
my mind which is intolerant, unfaltering, questioning.
and my mind is so incredibly fast, that it manages to process everything you have said, everything you are about to say, and even things you don't want to say, filter them through every filter i have, and percolate just the teeniest bit of the iceberg of what might be acceptable; entertaining; politically
correct; while trying to teach you something and only insult your intelligence by the smallest of fractions. i need to leave you with the impression that i actually care. unless my parents ask me what i think about the situation on the Mohawk reserve. then i have to pause, calmly, before stating i could not give a damn. no matter how else i would have phrased that, the interpretation would have been the same. i would have still been asked the question about forty more times. i didn't care the first time you asked me and i won't care after the sixtieth time. so i chose to swear. loudly.
and that does not make me racist. i do NOT have to take sides. you won't force me too.
i cannot care about everything that you care about.
just like you mostly, don't care about what i care about.
and someone needs to tell you, that that is ok.
at the very least it gave me a story for the mEp.
November 21
still angry
hey people, it's not all about you.
November 20
angry
synthesis of anger is tricky. but let me try.
i don't want to hurt your feelings, but you do not exist in a vacuum.
you are allowed to speak your opinion... to a point.
at a certain point, it becomes the same as saying "na na na na na naaaa, i have a car and free speech, lots of cheap tomatoes and a great job, and YOU don't!" nya nya nya nya nya naaaaaa.
no mike, you are not free to complain about the cost of registering your fucking car in this safe, cheap, free city.
you are perfectly free to do something about it though. give respect to the millions of people around the world who don't even have that freedom.
for God's sake. and for mine too.
November 19
alone
no matter how many times you write it, there are things that no one tells you.
unfortunately, neither can i. but, if, at forty-six, you fall madly in love with the man in your backyard,
you get a life that very few of us get; you get a life unplanned; one that doesn't necessarily fit into the molds.
parts of it take getting used to, but parts of it leave you walking through snow-covered leaves on a Tuesday night,
whispering out loud a fantastic story that no one ever tells you, the one that amazes even you, the one that proves
that with just one kiss, the world around you changed in such a way that i no longer recognized it as being the same.
November 18
seven-twenty-nine eh, em.
no phone call woke me up.
this coffee isn't doing much good, either.
it's an achy-body-bent-over morning where nothing matters except this tepid mid-November coffee.
a newly configured machine greeted a semi-slept poot at seven eh, em.
there will be back-ups and file sorting extraordinaire. the man is on a mission.
will be get better and better?
these neurons are really slow today; these eyes are tight.
think through the fog, little one, wake up, past screeds of mary kaye,
which no one cares about, to screeds of a new day, says Fernando on the metro,
it's a new day, and the previous ones somehow, according to him,
should not count.
then what will you do?
November 16
Magical, mystical, Mary Kay
let's just say what needs to be said: the world is primarily white this morning: not surprising since the night was nearly an eternity.
but i made it; i'm alive; ticking on the left and humming on the right; and if my ringing ears don't deceive me, chirping straight ahead;
no doubt a translator might find those chickadees to be saying precisely what i did: WTF?
filter that tri-methyl purine through my neuronal network will ya, so i can tell the story of Mary Kay.
Oh wonderful, magical, mystical, Mary Kay.
Mary Kay is named after the beauty products of the same name, and now has a bona fide British boyfriend named James Fraser which is
not the easiest of names to hunt down on Facebook - and I met her at a bus stop, long ago, about 100 meters from my childhood home.
SHE WAS EXOTIC. SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL. SHE WAS FROM TORONTO.
and we rode the bus together periodically for a short time. She laughed hysterically at nearly everything i said;
but still spoke herself, with a biting wit, a cunning tone, and opinions of an intensity i have rarely seen outside my family.
i was never certain she was real.
now i know for certain she isn't.
if i do the math, those bus rides would have had to have been before 1989, the year i moved out of that house.
(deleted this sentence)
after that, all i remember is bumping into her in the oddest places around the city.
i once decided to attend a yoga class across town, in a neighbourhood i had never been to.
i went to one yoga class there. there she was. another 8 years went by. her stories began to fade.
i think she had a son. i don't believe she got married.
then, yesterday.
i don't recall the last time i saw her beautiful, aging, less made-up face. if i were to pin my best recollection, it was one time since the yoga class, perhaps on the subway. and again. who do i bump into on the subway? there are thousands of people i know from childhood in this city. i could bump into them somewhere periodically. in a fancy restaurant. walking down the city's crowded streets. but i do not. and i have always wondered why.
then last week on the subway i saw two, not one, but two women, on separate days, who's sharp features and wide apart eyes caught mine, and for a moment of two my mind went thru it's neolithic match-game with the memory of her face: Was it Mary Kay? And, on those two occasions, just this past week, the conclusion was, no, that is not Mary Kay. That face is missing that spark, missing that twinkle, missing the match in my brain.
so when, waiting at the Canadian Border for Immigration Services to call the Swiss man's name, I saw, not an imposter, but the REAL Mary Kay following James Fraser up to the counter to obtain his papers, i knew that this woman whose home i have never been to: who, took longer than she used to, to smile widely at the sight of my face, and who quickly recounted our original meeting place on the bus as her British man waited to pay his dues to get into our country,
i knew for certain, that she is most certainly, not real.
November 15
dear saturday: all i ask for is ten minutes of your silence and - how big would the words have to be to cause a storm -
all we asked for was hope. when hope was gone; we looked elsewhere; and we found it in a fresh pot of coffee.
on a wing and a tweet: twitter is fueled by hope; why would Mel Schwarz tweet into silence otherwise?
i almost never get the ten minutes; perhaps it is a lot to ask. where is the boundary of what we are allowed to ask?
lets not make examples lest we know the answer.
half way there;
a wing and a prayer:
for the record, i cry, and i bleed,
but even that, is TMI.
TMI for YKW.
November 14
morning comes and i awake; before the alarm; before the fluttering snowflakes; before the sun;
morning comes and i slept;
what polar vortex decides when i sleep; ADHD sufferers do not handle stress well;
can a woman with such an IQ really get to nearly 50 not know this; or is it in the mastery of how i have always dealt with it;
i did send myself mEpwords yesterday and now where have they gone...
a million years later and Macintosh can't build an email program.
anyone wonders why those of who like stability stick with PCs?
but honestly now, Liz Gilbert favorited my tweet; shout it from the mountain tops;
or through the dangling flakes of snow in the sun;
i have no clue if her dangling particples and my mEpwords match anything in my brain;
she says i'm not special but i know i am;
don't you?
November 13
waiting for broken email for my own thoughts;
words like Sam Smith pass through these filters as i wonder where that email went;
although it was not Sam Smith nor Taylor Swift who even sung it;
Shake it Off, bleed it out, sip the juice, not finishing anything is the worst of all possible outcomes.
what i WANTED to say, through broken email, is,
payday came fast; with a red passport and a bus ride;
did you know you can control your own emotions;
it just takes wanting; once you are well rested, you can decide what you think about;
you can manage your own joy;
i do this.
and i don't know if everyone else does it or if they fall down the emotional landslides without steering their ships
in the same way they watch TV and cook boring things for dinner.
yes, Liz Gilbert, I'm special.
I say so.
November 11
totally and completely
november 10
8:23AM i do like being on track.
dreams unended, and a new theory about my sleep: my brain needs to finish things: and what can ever really be finished.
even my dreams evade the order of what i need to understand.
november 7
8:15am
a nervous Swiss man cleans the kitchen, don't accuse me of ignoring you, i tried very hard.
friday-day-free for a long drive to boston. the famous trip loses it's glamour all of a sudden when i want to go back to sleep.
why does my physical body reject this.
funneling her thoughts, poots and her sweaty pits and her wildly ringing ears type in bed in the dark.
when the pigs squeal in the morning they ring louder. november looks nice to me, because getting to winter is better than waiting for winter.
winter rocks us in our boots every year while we wait for the sun to come out again, and this is a particular mode for montrealers, this scarf-carrying version of who we are, never without our gloves and having our three hundred dollar booties packed away until the last salty snow is black with soot drying in the sun at the bottom of the lawns.
battery life motivates me now, to unwind my mind as i chew my cheeks, unwind it and store it here, in blocks called days, on these walls.
whether anger against twitter bullies, beauty in my body, or some kind of painting of an image of the world i see, my shoulders only really come down
once they are splayed here. filed away, in tiny sans-serif fonts, for no one to read really but me, and just a sort of self-checkism i've invented for myself.
Boston, here we come. see you back here on monday poots.
guard my sanity for the week-end, will ya.
november 6
10:02 pm
i am not a musician but they seem to like me.
i did not write anything last night.
november 5
7:05 am
i observe.
in between the Swiss man's ADHD diagnosis and a rescheduled trip to Boston, i observe. i sleep, i wake, i observe.
without revealing company secrets, empirical evidence says that people are stressed in this place, people are leaving for strange reasons,
there are unspoken words, there are hushed tones, and, the large corner office has been transformed into more space to house people to
be confused as to what they are supposed to be doing. but that wasn't the story i observed. no, this story transpired down seventeen stairs
in the local watering hole. well, our local watering hole is not your average 5a7 watering hole, since for us, that is to say, the unofficial social club of recently divorced or separated people, it's the center of the known universe. that was just the preamble.
and on this tuesday night, there stood at the end of the bar, an odd assortment of recently bonus-paid employees, feting the detached receptionist,
now detached permanently from the company, getting bumped by all manner of scantily clad serving staff, and once in a while by the tiny Asian
manager filling low-balls with ice in preparation for the bar staff to fill them with a keg size amount of post millennial poison.
a strange mix of bedfellows stood in that cramped space and all i could think about was the elephant in the room
there seemed to be more not said than said
which as we all know, annoys the living hello out of me
so there we were, feigning connection that never happened
we all danced around the alcohol
which wasn't helping at all
especially when it was the wrong people who were drunk
so i listened to the receptionists story
about bad communication and working in Silos
it was obvious she doesn't like her boss
but she wouldn't say so
since everyone is so professional
and so nice
and they took her to lunch and no one paid.
her face seemed beat up and i wondered with what
she didn't cry but i thought she might.
she complained to an empty ear (mine)
and we all spoke to deaf ears tonight,
the salsa dancer from my home town,
the half drunk finance girl who held on to her wine like i used to,
the El Salvadorian and his missing glue,
the seven foot tall goofy francophone asking all the tiny people to hunt thru our devices for the name of a james bond actor from the 60's who had never heard the expression 'boobies' or 'booty call',
and me, observing. not to be confused with the Heisenberg principle.
november 4
6:34 am :
what i wanted to say was, it's a wild world, and men are part of it.
in the early dark, it's not really early, devices ploink, i'm worse than chewing, but, i slept.
the ElSalvadorian man had a crappy birthday, generation gaps with his mother make it worse,
and it made me cognizant of my own similarities with mine, which made me feel young temporarily.
we laughed over the situation, in spite of himself, as we strolled through the crowded underground early in november,
not paying as much attention to the sales at the Bay as usual; and certainly he not pointing out most of the women with long legs as usual,
except for the tall one with short dark hair, unusually, and mentioning that he might wonder if she were a boy when grabbing her head;
so as you can see, all of this world, with men in it, isn't safe, even if you are minding your own fucking business walking through a shopping
concourse. and those of you who say i'm lying are just those of you who remain under your rocks, which is fine, but just because you don't see it
doesn't mean it isn't there for those of us who do.
will the Swiss man still hunt down the sugar bowl in the early dark morning, once i am finished with my exposes here...
and, as for selfishness...
i'm guilty of selfishness, yes, but i could have written Sam Harris latest book, http://www.samharris.org
in fact, it's written here, in these 18 years of lines, me and my frantic thoughts as they rise and fall away.
the mEp gets real when it needs to;
there are phases in our lives if we are lucky;
although some phases only become visible
once the next phase has begun.
it's not the passing into the next phase that is so painful;
but the vision one is left with, of the previous phase
which reminds us that nothing we know is ever to be held on to so tightly.
november 3
chewing, i had perfect mEpwords in my mouth before falling asleep; and as i cross over from the exhaustion of not enough sleep into the waking world,
nothing seems as daunting except for the ache in my back as i hunch over this box in the dark on a monday in november.
let's leave the anger alone for a while; let's drink this watery coffee; let's try to see things differently. let's not get stuck in anything.
november 2
landslides
through virtual wars with obscure software, familiar cbc voices stream down the hallway, poots blood pressure rises, with the music of tinnitus in her ears.
words aren't as pretty as she wanted them to be, the red mug is not even tepid, the swiss man has run out of things to read, and poots has only started on
this, perhaps, her final frontier, the last rant of all rants, the fight between body and spirit, man and himself, woman against man, did i mention it's a war.
it is now. thanks jian.
if i could draw these landslides, i would sing a song with the young pouting lips of a girl-band, fresh in their prime and unknowing of real times of my life;
i would sing a dance of middle aged gay men living with lies; and i would also tolerate my honesty here; fresh with the fears of backlash; raw with the admittance
of all women being subject to abuse under the hands of men; covered in the fresh blood of a nearly fifty year old woman; stabbed in my womanhood, fighting for
my proverbial life, that has passed behind me, and facing the very difficult task of explaining it to my daughter without ruining the naive youthful optimism which
otherwise will make her life the palatable joy that mine was until last week.
what i wanted to say was thanks jian, you fuckhead. for honestly; that is all i believe he is; just a slightly perverted version of everyman; everyman who tailgates with my life; everyman who has kicked furniture; everyman who has yelled at his ex-wife; everyman who lives in the soft society that won't allow him his animal.
woman is no longer caged; your anger is no longer tolerated; we earn more than you, we fuck better than you, and we even enjoy it better than you. you are exposed in the nastiest way; and i do apologize, i sympathize with your fall from grace; i sympathize with those of you who buried your anger, who painted a pretty face on your manhood by running marathons, drinking alcohol, or feigning heterosexuality. or of course, just being dumb and sitting on the couch and drinking beer. my anger is your anger; your fall from grace precedes only mine; and a societal landslide may take longer to transform anything, but i suppose, in a sense, it will happen, one nipple at a time.
november 1
oh i wish i were dumb; i've read barbra's lines; and round and round again; i wish i were dumb.
if i were dumb i'd see the world as so fair; i'd not give a care; about makeup or baring nipples;
sex would be just another chore, no countenance for being a whore; and my twitter feed not populated by the masses.
oh i wish, i truly wish, i were dumb. and then i wouldn't know i was.
only a landslide marks a phase transition.
the mEp ... aka my Electronic pen . . . the 2014 edition
...and all of the contents therein are copyright Poot's Place
1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 and 2014
All photography original unless otherwise credited. louern@vif.com