HUMAN WRECKAGE

Friday Night Blights

“‘Baby Jesus is everywhere,’ Mary said kindly.” 

“Mother of God, woman,” I whispered, unkindly, “insert a comma.”

Ann and I are sort of in a clearing house mode. Should we be fortunate enough to age and die in place here in the Crooked 9, our survivors will still have a lot packing to do. But we’re attempting to reduce the number of boxes required. Should we downsize, there won’t be a whole bunch of space for a whole bunch stuff. Our bane is books; we love them all. If you were to point to a book on one of our shelves, there’s a good chance I can tell you when, where and how it was acquired even if I’ve lost the plot.

The opportunity cost of a book, no matter how pleasurable its content, is time. There are enough unread books in the Crooked 9 to see us out. However, their subjects don’t always appeal when one of us is seeking something else to read. New stuff keeps arriving. Ann and I confer when we cull our collection. Will you ever read this book? Will you ever reread this book? And then there’s the mystery of curation. Will our survivors grasp that particular authors and certain works were of great importance to both or either of us while others were simply overlooked during a cleansing binge? Will they even care? Does any of this evidence of enlightenment at leisure really matter?

Our community league hosted a book exchange at the hall by the playground and the hockey rink Friday night. I managed to assemble a two-foot stack of spines, an array ranging from decent stuff to good stuff with a smattering of good old stuff, still unwilling to surrender great or meaningful stuff. Ann and I anticipated the social aspect of the event; we thought we might catch up with some neighbours we’d not seen over the course of another winter. The evening’s alternative diversion was blasting my new Who live album (Shea Stadium, 1982, second show). Curiously, Ann wasn’t as excited about my latest purchase as I was – it bludgeons like Lizzy Borden using the blunt end of her ax and pairs nicely with the Clash’s live set from the same night(s).

When Ann and I arrived, we realized immediately that our neighbourhood had transitioned while we were otherwise occupied. We were the only seniors there; the only grandparents. The young people running the league and who occupy the infills and new builds were strangers to us. There were children motoring around, screechy, full-tilt fun. While I seeded the lone and barren “adult books” table, Ann browsed the quartet of “children’s books” tables. She caught my eye, as she always can and does, to summon me with an arched eyebrow and a borderline subliminal nod. Ann handed me one of those glossy, indestructible toddler books called Where Is Baby Jesus? Ann moved on to another table, our grandchildren’s latent reading skills on her mind. Mine too because God knows “Elmo” and “Paw Patrol” on an iPhone just won’t do. “God, there’s got to be another way.” But who are we?

Myth tells us there was no room at the inn for Mary and Joseph, that Christ was born in a barn. They were travelling to be enumerated for Herod’s census. Chances are you’re familiar with the origin story of a Christmas creche diorama. In a different genre, they’d find space at Frankenfurter’s place – I digress. So, where is Baby Jesus? “Is He snuggling with the cows?” “Is He snuggling with the pigs?” Suckling, maybe? A quick read, a real page-turner.

Sometimes you enter a place, maybe a particularly shabby café or barroom whose atmosphere suggests danger rather than slum dive amusement, and you glean in a nanosecond that the wise thing to do is to proceed no further. My silent facial signals to Ann are less discreet than hers. “Let’s get out of here.” She read me. She rubbed an itch on her nose, a finger extended. “One sec.”

I thought, “Oh, c’mon, please, God, Costco’s more interesting. Is Baby Jesus snuggling with Kirkland Signature brand’s soft and absorbent bath tissue?” Ann told me shortly afterward she’d been listening in on a group discussion. The gathered parents were earnestly speculating about the Tooth Fairy’s gender. “Non-binary?” was Ann’s silent guess. Trans? Hermaphrodite and Michael Jackson may’ve fallen out of fashion.

As we made our sweeping exit, exchanging no off-stage lines until we were well out of earshot, a kid darted between us dragging a fuzzy rope: thirty feet of toy snake, boa constrictor, anaconda – I don’t know. When he disappeared around a corner, through a doorway, I stepped on its tail. I watched it stretch. I watched it grow taut. I watched it climb the doorframe to about knob level. When I judged the tension to be just about right, I stepped off it. Snuggle with the Christian reptiles and vipers, my child.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.

EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Coming Up

A flip gets switched. It happens over the day of a few courses. The subtles are sign.

The transformation always commences in the staging area off the kitchen by the back door. The knee-high snow boots vanish, their uppers stuffed with my Montreal Canadiens toque, my black fleece neck warmer and my snot-encrusted mitts. My outdoor work coat, Coca-Cola branded swag from a lifetime ago and which I’m not (and understandably so) permitted to wear beyond the property line of the Crooked 9, finds its summer hanger downstairs in the laundry room.

Up from the depths come Ann’s rubber gardening sabots – the two pairs come in two colours: yellow and red. This is the time of year when Ann can walk the line, actively plan her gardens rather than sketching them on January graph paper or strolling them in her February imagination before she falls asleep, no need to count sheep. Her concerns this year are our June travel plans and yet another season of drought with municipal and provincial water restrictions looming. The going’s getting weird; the wildfire season is already underway. We don’t care if the lawn is parched, but the established stuff, the trees (our lovely birches – two of the last few in the city), the shrubs, the perennials require a wet custodian with an unkinked garden hose. Perhaps the showier annuals, usually proud in their patio and porch pots, will remain unpurchased, wilted greenhouse inventory.

Spring. Possibly. Maybe. Very likely. I’ve put two of three shovels away, but I haven’t pulled out the rakes yet. Experience tells me I’m acting too hastily and maybe Ann and I are tempting fate by wondering about the near future. But, this time of year, God, we are compelled to stretch our spines and square our shoulders. If you’ve ever seen the Rolling Stones perform, watched a concert video or listened to a live album, you know Mick Jagger unfailingly asks you a deeply personal question: “Are you feeling good?” Yes, Mick. “Well, all right!”

My unofficial spring anthem is “Fishin’ in the Dark” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Ann knows all the words and unlike me she can carry a tune. Though “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds” I only played it four times in a row because one person’s giddy happiness may trigger a domestic incident. Now, “Fishin’ in the Dark” might be a little hillbilly, but at least it’s not a wretched sugary confection from fuckin’ ABBA and their avatars.

I feel good. Better than James Brown. I dropped the pen the other day on the second draft of a new work of fiction. It’s halfway toward completion now, the distant goal, somewhere around N between A and Z; 22 months of work to date. The December vinyl release of The Muster Point Project’s 5 KG EP for which I wrote the lyrics received positive notices and continues to benefit from radio airplay. Selling better than my books, apparently. All of this upbeat stuff is necessarily tempered by my wariness of the ides of March – which can be brutal.

There’s no portal to the afterlife. Fact is, it’s impossible for Him to let me in because there’s nowhere to go – should there be 1000 harps in Heaven, I hope Little Walter and Junior Wells are playing them. Still, these past few days, I must confess to a few “come to Jesus” moments.

I was outside on the front porch, early afternoon, basking in the spring sunshine, enjoying a cigarette, trying to bloom like some kind of Buddhist lotus. I imagined I could hear the snow seeping in to the earth. I imagined I could see its surface evaporating in the yellow heat. This time last year, the 300 Club jungle telegraph was alive. Membership in this Gang of Six is granted solely by friendships and constant, if intermittent, contact going back 50 years or more. We were talking about a proper reunion in Palm Springs, a full quorum since I can’t remember when. Ann said to me: “If you don’t do it now, the next time may be a funeral. You’ll be one down.” Somehow, it happened, came together. That trip’s first anniversary is coming up. Its countdown has been reduced to days. My God, I’m still trying to shake the desert sand from my shoes; I just got back to Edmonton last weekend. 

“Those romantic young boys …” Later that same day’s night I was home alone swirling around in the YouTube vortex. I came across live, hi-def footage shot at the beginning of this month: Bruce Springsteen guesting on stage with John Mellencamp for a duet of “Pink Houses”. I thought, “Oh, man, if this had been broadcast maybe forty years ago on The Midnight Special or that PBS music show In Concert, my joy would’ve been transcendental.” And network television in those days, when both rockers were in their primes, one and done. I watched the YouTube clip three times. As I sat in front of the computer monitor, I thought, “Man, they’re getting on.” Mellencamp especially, pasty and doughy, like a too-long-retired elite athlete or maybe Alec Baldwin yesterday. Me? I haven’t changed a bit since, I don’t know, 1984.

An envelope arrived in the post the next day. Something from Service Canada addressed to me. I jogged its contents before slitting its top with a letter opener. Canada Pension Plan registration forms sprang out. I thought, “Surely, this can’t be.” Because it’s tax season, I was able to bring the matter up during a meeting with our accountant. Should I receive CPP now or defer the benefit for a nominally larger monthly sum some five years hence? He said, “You’ve made the contributions. You can’t know how much time you have left. I suggest taking it now and enjoying it while you can.” I said, “Cigarette money.” He laughed: “There you go.”

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.

A FAN’S NOTES

Brian Mulroney (1939-2024)

The death of a public figure who’s had an impact on my life, however remotely or intimately, usually precipitates a pause for reflection, at least for a moment or two. And those fleeting thoughts can encapsulate years. That – me and everything I was experiencing at the time – is always then, which is where it will always remain. Even if I was holding hands with Eddie Money or listening to his greatest hits, I can’t go back, I know, even if I’m feeling so much older. As a rule, recently deceased Canadian politicians rarely jiggle that particular VU meter needle.

“I voted for him.” Not reluctantly, but perhaps out of character. “Me too.” 

This was the consensus on the 300 Club (five guys and me who’ve been friends since Methuselah smoked his first cigarette) instant messaging thread upon digesting the news last Thursday of the death of Brian Mulroney who served two terms as Canada’s 18th prime minister (1984-1993). I was two years out of university with an arts undergraduate degree and holding down a job I hated when Mulroney took power. I harboured no utopian illusions about real life. It wasn’t some sort of anti-social justice crime to vote “capital C” conservative back then. There wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties. Canadian Tories were more pragmatic and more flexible than Reaganites and Thatcherites. Social issues weren’t on the table; Mulroney was all about growing a middling country’s middling economy. I wanted a better shot at making a decent living – as much as that depended on my own initiative and not the government’s. Still, things, all kinds of things, are easier to look after in a healthy, robust economy.

Reciprocity – free trade between Canada and the United States – was a liberal and Liberal goal dating back to Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier, who declared the 20th century would belong to Canada. Things didn’t start shaking down that way until Mulroney flipped his party’s platform, forcing the liberal and Liberal establishment to repudiate its fundamental principle. It’s telling and damning that the legacy of our current prime minister, Liberal Justin Trudeau, will likely be the preservation of the deal Mulroney cut with the States and Mexico some forty years ago.

Mulroney also introduced the federal goods and services tax (GST). Nowadays that legislation would be described as a CLM, a career limiting move, albeit a courageous one. The GST is a fact of Canadian life now. At the time of its introduction, it replaced a hidden and regressive manufacturing tax which had to go if Canada was to be competitive as an international trader. Wealth creation across all strata of society is a noble goal, neither evil nor nefarious. 

Since Canada was essentially granted sovereignty from the will of the British parliament with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, we’ve rarely punched above our weight in international affairs. Future prime minister Lester B. Pearson was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize because he was instrumental in the formation of the League of Nations. Prime Minister Jean Chretien refused to chip in to the Second Gulf War, pile on. Mulroney led the Commonwealth and the States in imposing severe sanctions (they used to work back then) on South Africa’s apartheid regime, paving the way for Nelson Mandela’s presidency. It’s still a bit of a head-shaker, a Conservative prime minister in tune with rockers like Little Steven, U2, Midnight Oil and Simple Minds. But his was the type of firm, modestly substantial voice that elucidated Canadian values, instilling a sort of soft pride in country that contrasted sharply with discontented disciple Stephen Harper’s (by this time the Progressive Conservative Party had devolved in to the Conservative Party of Canada following its amalgamation with the fringe Reform Party) government’s dog whistle, nationalistic spin on that glorious stalemate, 53 years before Confederation, the War of 1812. Action trumps revisionism; patriotism is not a propaganda product where I’m from.

Mulroney, like Chretien, always played up his less than modest rural Quebec roots. Friday’s and Saturday’s newspaper stories about him, whatever the section, emphasized his wit and charm. I’ve always imagined him as a Mordecai Richler character, striving from the sticks for the best house in Montreal. He got that mansion on the hill. Despite serving as part of the Cliche Commission, tasked to investigate corruption in Quebec’s construction industry (the Mafia pours deep sidewalks using low grade cement), while still a labour lawyer, whispers of his being on the take tended to follow him around in his political life. The tired rumours spumed in 2007 with the culmination of the Airbus affair. Mulroney allowed accepting $225,000 (possibly $300,000 – the amount is disputed by the lobbyist) in cash, stuffed in envelopes, was “a serious error in judgment” on his part. Not a crime, mind, just business.      

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.