Thoughts That Just Won’t Let Go

Evidently, I have the seduction style of a Prized Object.

Driving down the escarpment on Grimsby’s Mountain road last night, I saw shadowy figures just ahead in the distance, in the road in front of me. They turned out to be a row of skateboarders, wearing wind/motorcycle gear, lined up to skate all the way down the hill’s winding road.

It was just about to become the end of dusk. The lights of the town below, along the lake shore, and across the lake, from Toronto, glittered as the last shade of inkstained blue left the sky during their descent.

At first they annoyed me. Just for a split second. But then I slowed the car and followed carefully, and watched the one in front of me: he appeared to be floating down the hill, poised in the middle of the lane in the roadway, his arms out to the side, like birds hold out their wings. Like the raptors who live around this mountain all year now, circling their way up and down the thermals that spiral over the trees. He never took his feet off the board, never veered from dead centre in the lane. The road was free of ice, free of potholes, smooth and black and steep. When he got to the end of Mountain road, he passed a group of other skaters, all dressed as he was, all cheering him on. He maneuvered his way around a car turning right, then slipped back into the middle of the road again, finally stopping his descent on Highway 8, turning to face me with a look of pure exhilaration on his face, waving to thank me for keeping my distance, giving him his space; running back up to his friends. Watching him, I imagined he felt like he was soaring, just like the eagles and hawks. He was looking at the same sparkling light, the same growing darkness, but he was also feeling the wind against his body, the effect of every one of his movements on his speed, and his control. You could tell he was ecstatic. In his eyes you could see such joy.

Tilda Swinton

A long, cool woman in a black dress.

(A strangely designed black dress, and an unfortunate, lopsided pose.  And yet, still magnificent)

My husband has a woman friend in the city. A confidant. He tells me she confides in him, she’s a divorced woman with a child and a lover who lives in another city, who has a child and family of his own. She gives my husband many little gifts: appointments for manicures and facials at the men’s spa, outings to interesting restaurants together, an hour or so with a Shiatsu masseuse who tries to iron out the snags, physically (but also brings up all the old emotional stuff). He had a massage last Saturday, and told me about the experience the next day.

He said the masseuse said, “How’s your grief?” as he started his consultation, not even giving him a chance to settle in yet.

All his aches and pains reveal him: sadness held deep, halting the lungs; sadness never expressed, made succinct, in the skin; frustration and denial, as heavy to bear as an anvil, hard against a back it makes weak.

(We can’t help but reveal ourselves clearly. No matter what effort we think we make to the contrary).

Molecular Gastronomy, Toronto Style

My friend Geoff is turning 40 next week.

(It only looks like I’m obsessing about age, but I’m not, I’m just thinking about the occasion).

When Geoff and I were students, I made Geoff an involuntary friend. The details are convoluted and odyssean, but it’s the truth. I was in a moment of crisis I don’t think I’d ever encountered before, busy constructing a plan of rebuttal and attack but really kind of clueless about what I’d have to negotiate, and Geoff was a sudden, familiar face. He happened to be around at just that moment, the first I recognized when I scanned the great room in the Steadman Lecture Halls. He seemed poised, serene, and relaxed behind a paper cup of Tim Horton’s, smoking a cigarette by his books and surrounded, as usual, by a group of really beautiful girls. Maybe he was waiting for a lecture to begin. I don’t know if that’s the case, all these years later, because in my state of complete dumbfoundedness I never thought to ask. I just remember reaching my hand out to him and pulling him along with me, as if he’d just been waiting for me to extract him from his group. Good thing I didn’t ask, now that I think back: I have a feeling we’d have passed the rest of our education in separate spheres of study and influence. Then I’d never have acquired the many gifts which came from Geoff, directly.

Here are some:

1. A tape made while Geoff was away, working in the mountains of Lake Louise at a teahouse so high in the Rockies trips to the nearest town happened only once a week. They involved lugging all of the restaurant’s garbage down to the town’s landfill, since vehicles could never make the climb. The tape included the Two Nice Girls’ “Spent My Last $10 on Birth Control and Beer” (an anthem like no other); Dick Siegel’s “Jesus, John, and Elvis” (still relevant, Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton); and Louden Wainright’s “Don’t Leave Your Records in the Sun”, my introduction to Blue Grass music. He named the collection “Songs Like (my) Driving”, as he’d spend every trip in my car with his eyes fixed on a point under the dash whenever we went anywhere, as if they were held open with fear and those tiny braces on Malcolm McDowell’s eyelids in Clockwork Orange. “Any time you change lanes,” he’d say, “you’re asking for trouble”.

2. Divine, John Waters, and the magical, incantatory force of Cha Cha Heels they created.

(I bet Geoff and Nicky were the first to put John Waters on a syllabus in an institution of higher learning).

3. When Geoff came back from living in Prague for over a year, he showed up on our doorstep in Parkdale. Our landlord couple, who lived on the bottom floor, were not getting along well with us because I’d recently insisted on having the rooms painted and they were resisting. Geoff was early, many hours early. When we finally got home, Geoff’s luggage was outside their front door, which slid open as we came in. Geoff stood in our landlord couple’s entrance holding a glass of wine, surrounded by our suddenly besotted and very friendly landlord couple, who absolutely loved meeting Geoff and concluded that we couldn’t be so bad if we had such a friend. The landlords were amazing after that, talking with us for hours and inviting us out for coffee and dessert. When the house was successfully sold and we all packed on moving day, they ended up giving us a goodbye card stuffed with $50 dollar bills plus the interest on our rent deposit, and they cried as they wished us well. They were really great! And we’d never have known if it weren’t for Geoff.

4. Food. Geoff was always a fantastic cook, able to take almost nothing and transform it into something great. His mom tells me he’s been cooking since he was 7, when he took his first cooking class.

So it’s no surprise then that we’ll be having a birthday meal for him at Colborne Lane, an eclectic modern restaurant in the St. Lawrence Market district in Toronto, where the cuisine is influenced by Ferran Adria’s molecular gastronomy. The Chef’s done his time at El Bulli with Adria, but he’s clearly going for a kind of asian fusion molecular menu, something much more personally relevant. So it should be interesting (though I have to say, supplying these people with the chemical ingredients they use was always a little frightening, back when I was “doing my own time” at a compounding pharmacy in the city–you’d always wonder what the hell they were using some of these lab compounds for when they made those “foams”, “jellies”, “freeze-dried powders’”, and exactly how what they were doing differed from General Mills, or Monsanto). Hidden among the usual menu items (salmon, tuna, duck, chicken) in their alien incarnations, I notice this offering:

Beef tenderloin + slow & soft poached

egg + chorizo+fondant potato + smoked salt +

steak sauce jelly + Yukon gold potato puree

And realized that that’s the part that’s all Toronto: the Meat and Potatoes, adorned mostly with adjectives and few chemical reactions. Toronto’s a fantastic city for food and restaurants, and it’s big enough to keep a place like Colborne going for years, even though it’s got competition in the cuisine on the western end of the city; but you know it couldn’t be much of a repeat draw without conceding to that enduring protestant desire for steak and mashed taters.

(I’ll be sure to avoid that selection on the menu).

I haven’t a clue what wines you’d pair with such super-accentuated flavours, in their unexpected textural transformations, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

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Tomen and his big ideas

I met Tomen when I was in Toronto, a few weeks ago, doing another stint for Rogers TV for the weekend. He appears to be softspoken and seemingly very meek, but actually he’s scathingly acerbic. He’s traveled everywhere, lived abroad for 13 years but he comes from Winnepeg, originally. I think I’ve met enough people from that frozen prairie to know that the place seems to pressure-produce some rare human beings. He and I clicked immediately when we caught each other being sneaky about eying a tall, blonde, chiseled- featured man, about our age, with green eyes. Tomen said nothing, just lifted an eyebrow at me and mouthed an “o”. I responded with a, “What? He’s fabulous.” Tomen remarked unnecessarily that Mr. Fabulous was not the kind of “fabulous” which looks twice at ladies. (But Mr. Fabulous did meet my eye and smile in a sweet, friendly way. And that was very nice, as devoid of electrical current as it was).

Tomen has his own blog, a place where he just kind of writes and doodles away with images and photoshop. He’s opinionated, which is fine with me–and he’s someone who makes a nice gay boyfriend. So lately we’ve been writing back and forth to each other, to see if we can’t encourage each other to keep writing.

Sunday’s topic comes from Tomen’s idea that men equate sex with love, and this starting point is the cause of all unhappiness in their relationships (all their relationships–significant others, and all others in the larger social group as well, since they all contend with the fall out). He claims they’re likely to have sex almost immediately if there’s an attraction, and then they’re shacked up together, as he puts it, “the next gay day”, where they find out just like women do that you can’t expect your lover/husband/partner to be your everything-else-as-well. He’s noticed this set up produces one dominant central person, and another who is forever making the concessions. Campy and bitchy, as he puts it. Tremendously unhappy in the set up, as I put it.

This is not something I’ve observed in men very often (but, wait a minute, he may have a point there, considering how little time it took for my husband to get us moved in together after we started sleeping with each other, years ago; and considering how quickly he had to be disabused of the “I’m your sole source of infotainment” notion he clung to. And how quickly I came to learn of the construct’s very solid limitations, bitchy and campy indeed). My observation of most men is that, for them, sex can take place casually, people can enjoy each other all kinds of ways and the entire issue of emotional entanglement is likely never to arise beyond the observation that the whole activity spectrum can be a lot more pleasurable if you actually find your partner entertaining and likable, too. It’s an extra option they’ve come equipped with, with that Y chromosome (well, not as a direct result, maybe as just an indirect, social conditioning, result). The idea of love getting in there at all is optional.

I’ve always thought that’s where we’ve differed–and the difference has been complicated by things like the way the world views a woman who can entertain a man like that, social strictures and conventions that are still quite liberally applied to us ladies, about which far too many of us continue to be too often aware. For those of us still in that mental bind, sex must still equal love, it’s something many of us wouldn’t contemplate without looking for some evidence of emotional attachment beyond “yeah, you’re fun, let’s do this again Thursday”. It seems to me that women are taught from word one that a man’s love is his approval, his assurance that you’re “good” enough. “Good enough to marry, as well as to fuck,” as the old saying seems to drone, long into the twenty-first century. To be good enough for that, you’ve got to be good enough to know that you don’t fuck unless love’s involved, or else people will know–he’s going to know–you’re a slut.

And then it becomes something a lot of us grow out of, when we’ve decided that whatever people decide to think of us just doesn’t matter all that much, especially where sex and sexual relationships are concerned. The negative consequences we’ve all been warned about don’t necessarily materialize. The defamatory words thrown at women can actually become erotically charged, a means by which you can escape all their negative encumbrances (if you can find the right partner to help provide you with this experience–which often means you have to go looking, for specific characteristics and abilities, and not so much “love” as we think of it, here in the emotional suburbs).

I’m turning 45 this week, for me that’s a shock. But even more shocking is the fact that sexually, I’ve the (well, figurative equivalent, let’s just say) testosterone levels of a nineteen year old man. That’s been happening for a number of months now, and it doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon. No one tells you about this in sex ed classes when you’re young, you go about your life thinking you’ll never get old because you’d rather die first…but people never tell you you acquire a few gifts to go along with aging. A little more backbone, a little less concern about pleasing everyone else around you, or making sure they like you so much. You become able to understand that disapproval might not necessarily mean personal disaster or extinction. More truthfully, if you’re me, you realize a lot of people haven’t approved of you for a very, very long time: and yet you’ve survived, kept breathing, managed. And that makes you much more determined about making things as close to what you’d like them to be as you can.

A lot more determined to demand things, enjoy things, like sex, from whomever you might want. Without having to hand over your life, too.

Maybe all this really signifies is that the notion we have of love–the thing shared only by two people, excluding all others (and all other kinds of “love”–sexual, amicable, social–as well) is the problem here. I think we’re all on the verge of finding out that this clean, Christian ideal of marital sexuality, unity, and contentiously defined “bliss” is really just another example of truly bad design, when applied to the human reality.