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The Year in a Deluge

It’s snowed again.

I barely noticed it this morning, and I forgot that the drive to the train station last night took place in the soft snowfall, the flakes glistening in the headlights like diamonds.  We’ve had so much of it lately.  We’ve had more water this year than we’ve ever had before, for as long as anyone’s been keeping track.  When it falls softly  in the hard cold it’s easy to be surprised by the amount.

Now that she’s been gone a good three months, I’ve begun to understand my mother in a way I never could before.  There was something wrong in the way we related to each other but I always had the sense that it was determined, unchangeable.  Fixed, failed reactions to a persistent reality that wouldn’t change.  That the variables in the dynamic had been set in place and they would not be moved, no matter how aware we became of the motives. And they were fixed, that’s a certainty. I spent almost all of my life angry at my mother for what turns out to be good reason–but I couldn’t see how helpless she was until she was gone.  I couldn’t see how helpless everyone was until she was gone.

Christmas eve I counted out dinner plates with my brother, we were trying to determine the number we’d need for his family, my family, parents, and his guest.  ”We need nine,” I announced, and my brother thought a second before saying, “No, we need eight.”  I corrected him, “Nine…count them out:  four for us, four for you and your family, and one for…”

“I know what you’re doing, but we need eight,” he said.  I was still counting my mother in the “us”, even though she wasn’t there.  It’s an old habit I can’t break.  Now that she’s really gone it’s occurred to me how much I missed her when she was here, how much I needed her when she was here but I had to do without her.  How angry that made me, for so long.  How I could never get past that anger, long after I became “an adult”, even long after I could see how desperately she tried to make that up to me.  How much she needed me and how impossible it was for me to respond.

I let that anger rule over everything.  I have trouble determining where it starts.  The first time I knew it was there I simply walked away from home.  I was barely old enough to walk, but I climbed and kept moving.  There were a number of instances when I was a schoolgirl where I just walked.  I’d walk out of my house and into the street and into the city, it would be hours before anyone knew I was gone.  I took myself out of school and out of family life and out of whole days this way, and it was rare that anyone would notice.  It was the only way to take myself out of feeling furious.  The only way to make myself think of something other than what I was contending with at home, why no one could seem to stop it.  By the time I got to be 12 years old it was so painful that physically removing myself was the only way I could cope.  I was completely broken, and I knew my mother could see that.  What I couldn’t see was how badly she wanted to change that but could not.  How sorry she was for not acting, not being able to act.  I never forgave her for that, not for the trying, but for the inability.  I never saw it until now and now it doesn’t matter.  Blame is such a stupid thing–all it does is confirm your own poor judgment.  Whatever it was I needed her to do for me, she needed me to do for her.  We were both limited, both blind, both paralyzed.  Anger was just a dumb animal response I wish I’d been smart enough to see past.

What do I think?

Of course I have an opinion on the matter of the dreaded “Political Crisis” in Canada and the matter of the Coalition in the House.

And my opinion is: the vast majority of Canadians who talked themselves past the known futility of the election process in this country did not vote for Harper. Despite what Harper wants to say about Stephan Dion’s weakness as a leader, despite what he says about the Quebeçois and their insistence on having the nerve to be heard in Parliament, and despite Harper’s fondness for whinging about Separatists and Socialists destroying the country (after trying desperately to form a coalition with the very same “separatists” himself, unsuccessfully, not six months ago–who says Harper has no sense of humour?), 65% of Canadian voters did not want a Harper government of any kind, regardless of the leader of the opposition in question.

Because our voting system isn’t actually representational, we’re stuck with a Harper minority government (truly, no one voted for his party outside of his own riding). More accurately, we’re stuck with a Harper government shored up by Mike Harris’ former Goon Squad. Let’s everyone in Ontario remind the rest of the country how much good Harris did for our economy here, shall we? From the fact that we’re still counting up the death toll, literally, from the closed hospitals and gutted public health system that failed when SARS hit the city, to the thousands dead from poisoned water when Harris privatized the water quality monitors, and to the Harris-orchestrated assassination of Dudley George when he protested the theft of his peoples’ land, contrary to a signed treaty.

A Coalition aligned against Harper’s minority government is not only not a “crisis”, it’s actually the government most Canadians elected to power. If this is the way we have to go about getting what we want in this country now (until we get to work on fixing the enormous problem we’ve got with actually representing what voters want in their ridings) then so be it. I’m all for it.
On top of that, this is what is supposed to happen in a minority government. Forming coalitions is the opposition’s job, especially if there is no confidence in the government’s agenda.

And there is no confidence.

Not What I Expected But Welcome

Something exciting has actually started to take place here, it seems the entire country is terrified of ending up with the current PM as a leader of a majority government (even in a minority position he managed to do a lot of damage, in just two years–no one wants to see him act out full bully tendencies without stops) so one of the latest trends is for groups to create an actual political party out of their membership and “campaign”…but their platform is “Anyone But The Conservatives”. There are two of them at the moment (I’m thinking specifically of the Sinclair Stevens’ Progressive Canadians Party, as well as the Animal Rights party, who’d like to see more attention paid to Green Issues but really want to tell the world how Harper betrayed them on a promise in the past). More seem to pop up and enter the election every day. They’re just out there to be heard, since media will only report what other candidates are campaigning on, not opinions on issues, or the way the campaigns are being received or debated. The “first past the post” voting system we have in Canada is outdated and it makes us all vulnerable to a majority Conservative government even if the vast majority of Canadians vote for anyone else, so the second largest message in the Canadian election at the moment is “vote strategically” to eliminate the possibility that the Conservatives will win in any particular riding. If you’re curious about the extent of this message in Canada, just google up Anyone But Harper, there are numerous websites with maps and postal-code tools to help anyone in need of figuring out who’s most likely to win against the Con in their riding, sites put up by individuals and groups who just want to make a majority Conservative government an impossibility. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone run in an election solely to tell others not to vote for the incumbent–in each case, this is what these parties are all saying. Not a single one among them is actually running a candidate or raising money to accomplish that, and that’s telling in itself. This is the first time I’ve ever seen that particular drawback (you cannot run for office without a lot of money behind you) being used to an advantage.

Another interesting thing is people in the arts who’ve had their funding cut drastically in the past two years have also just decided to speak up in the media they create, cross country–so for the first time I can recall, well known film makers, actors and actresses, musicians, painters, people who write and produce literature, plays, and television have all decided to use the media by organizing public speaking engagements along the campaign trail, and by buying advertisement spots as well–to make the whole issue of restored Arts funding very, very big. Suddenly it’s on the agenda, nation wide (when Harper simply wanted to ignore it and continue cutting funding). And since they’re all involved in media, these artists have an access that can match the one held by the candidates. They’re really undoing a lot of the “spin” put on the issue by the Conservatives–that the arts are frivolous and not important, for example, that artists aren’t entitled to “hand outs” and we need the money for more important things (such as sending lots of young Canadian kids from the economically depressed provinces over to Afghanistan so that American soldiers can keep blowing them up). One television and theatre performer, Rick Mercer, has a satirical television show (the Mercer Report) on which he often challenges political leaders on their positions and tactics–I’m quite sure Harper hates him–however, in his “ad” Mercer simply says (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s close) “You may hate my show, but the bottom line is all about jobs. I employ more builders and technicians and electricians every week than everyone in parliament has employed or will employ in their entire lives”. It’s easy for people to forget that so many people in the trades alone are dependent on the arts for work, aside from writers and actors and directors and producers. And that pitch seems to be putting the importance of arts funding in terms everyday people can “get”; a clear and simple retort to Harper’s costly ads, and his contempt for things like the arts, child care, health care, and women’s shelters funding as a kind of ‘extra welfare’ given to the undeserving.

I’m fascinated by the way the actual media is reporting events in these elections, as opposed to the way the new media (bloggers and online news sources which are more interactive and immediate) are reporting events. And there does seem to be a “struggle” in the conventional media to break away from a very restrictive means of operating, of “reporting” (with a script) what is happening cross country. Some of the most revealing footage of President Bush over the last 8 years has only been seen on a late night talk show–the most satirical and subversive daily media source in the United States over that time. David Letterman’s daily 5 and 10 second shorts of Bush flubbing speeches or reacting to a pertinent question in his characteristically incapable way has been the real news update for so many….and that kind of behaviour–the actual president in action–is never shown on mainstream news. Letterman has been so successful at indirectly creating and furthering debate and knowledge that other satirical comedians have since joined him to do the same thing–John Stewart and Stephen Colbert being two of the best known on American television. By now, everyone must have heard about David Letterman’s coup last week regarding the scheduled guest appearance of John McCain–McCain canceled on the show at the very last minute saying he had to go to Washington to deal with the economic crisis, which left Letterman both insulted and determined to show up McCain on that statement (McCain has no history of any involvement on economics during his time in the administration. so there’s no way the excuse could be taken seriously). McCain actually turned Letterman down to do an interview with a news broadcaster, in a studio not far away from his own. So during the show, Letterman ran a live feed into the other studio where Katie Couric was interviewing McCain–and the entire live audience and extended television audience witnessed McCain being caught out in a big lie, first hand. Letterman roared, “The road to the white house goes right through me, Senator McCain!”, a statement funny enough to be ridiculous, and (as Letterman well knows) ridiculous enough to be absolutely true. McCain will have to work extremely hard to undo the damage done there.

And to undo the damage Sarah Palin’s done in the same arena–failing egregiously under Couric’s obvious questions. Tina Fey’s uncanny resemblance to the Alaskan Republican, coupled with her easy comedic grace, result in the best documentation of the Karl Rove-selected candidate’s fall. Both McCain and Palin are really out of their element in the media, but that’s where seasoned and talented artists are willing and able to show them in their true light, to an audience more than ready to hear the truth from somewhere.

Perhaps that’s why arts funding is being so completely shut down, everywhere: the artists are the only ones talking about what’s really taking place, politically. I suppose that will never change, but it’s awfully nice to see how all the money and effort placed on controlling how we understand what’s going on is being countered simply with observation and thought and debate, on the ground level and now on an equally widespread level of media. Gives me some hope.

Our Lady of Sorrows

14 January 1922 — 15 September 2008

This was my mother.

When she died, she was in severe distress. This was after a number of days in growing pain, after a few years of daily discomfort and a growing frustration with being capable of less and less.

I knew it was coming, I could tell. There were events that I knew would bring it about–my aunt dying last month, and years before that her sisters moving completely out of her reach, where each of them would suffer from the separation with their own personal sickness of loss. Alzheimer’s for one, cancer for the other. Leukemia was my mother’s last diagnosis, post-mortem. It was, apparently, in its nascent, turbulent acute stage–white blood cells all cytoblasts; red blood cells almost extinct. Like a rousing, futile, furious last ditch effort against an insurmountable invading virus. Death.

I always thought I’d be completely prepared, as she was 86 and she was in pain–I also knew, as she went along, that her very mild heart condition would turn into full blown heart failure. I even knew, about a week ago, when it had started to happen. There was a moment when the paramedics were taking her to the ambulance, our eyes locked and I realized in my bones that she would not be coming home, she was telling me goodbye, telling me she loved me, telling me that that was it. But even then I followed her to the hospital, feeling like I had time, hoping against all hope I’d meet her best doctor doing his rounds. I did meet him while walking in, then I heard him being paged to her room in emergency. And I knew.

She could not be stabilized, she went wildly down, then wildly up as one organ after another failed. Morphine calmed her and the monitor over her bed slowed till her blood pressure disappeared, the alarms sounding at first, and then silenced while every one of the displays turned into flat lines and question marks. Morphine masquerades as a legitimate painkiller but it’s the only euthanasia we can get away with, too much and everything causing the pain is crushed in its beneficent paralysis. And that was it. No more distress and no more pain but Holy Fuck, she was just gone.

Olivia Chow wants me to what?

Nobody is surprised, except me I guess (what kind of a Governor General would give assent? That’s what I want to know), but yes, we’re having an election here in Canada.

The timing is disturbing. After all, we’ve got a Prime Minister no one can relate to: he’s no orator, he won’t– and can’t, I suspect–negotiate, and he’s coming under quite a lot of scrutiny for yet another misappropriation of public funds scandal. When he speaks English, he doesn’t make eye contact, when he speaks French he speaks the Franglaise of a million testy, mushmouthed schoolchildren, huddling and giggling with puerile contempt over the bilingual labels of their breakfast cereals. When it comes to women, he’s cut funding nationwide for daycare, women’s shelters, and even the Status of Women offices. When it comes to growing poverty, he simply doesn’t see it; when it comes to everyone’s concerns about jobs disappearing from the Canadian economy in the millions since he took office, he squeaks out an annoyed “let them eat cake” and makes a big show of handing out long-ago earmarked auto industry bail-out money, months after it was alloted, yet seconds before calling the election, to a Ford plant that will build cars with wasteful, unwanted V-8 engines. When it comes to the environment, it’s an enforced “business as usual, and climate change be damned, no one can prove Sour Gas is deadly, Green Ideas cost Jobs” nonsense. Those tar sands are the reason he’s in office, after all.

Mr. Harper is no Kennedy.

He’s certainly no Obama, and just to drive the point of inadequacy home, God love ‘em (as the Maritimers say when they despise you beyond civility), he’s not even a Bush, in terms of might and connections. He falls short but manages to scrape up to the status of a Palin: shifty eyes, an offputting demeanor, and a questionable red hand in the middle of a conveniently overshadowed spending scandal. Maybe he didn’t get around to banning books from local libraries, one of Palin’s biggest political thrusts–but I think in enough time, he’d have banned reading all together.

I suppose I’ll have to admit that I watched the candidates give their platform speeches once the election was confirmed, so I’ll admit it. I watched Stephan Dion, I watched Jack Layton, I watched Elizabeth May and our country’s right wing version of the Green Party demand a place in the official debate, and I watched Gilles Duceppe. Here is what everyone knows: Gilles isn’t leaving us anytime soon, Lizzie hasn’t got a hope, Jack is certainly being portrayed as the Rock Star (complete with claque–but you can see they’re paid to support him) and Dion is getting the same kind of bad press we’re seeing against Obama and Biden in the US (so you know he’s the real thing, the bona fide threat). In the States, all the journalists have been given the same script, and variations (or deviations, your choice) are simply never heard. On speaking of Palin, they snort and announce, “This woman shoots Moose!” as though that were impressive and politically vital; or they talk (even the women do this, including the women on Public Television) about “that cute ‘Bewitched’ thing she does with her nose”, then yell out, “Adorable!!” How anyone can watch these performances on television and take them as “real” commentary puzzles me, they’re sexist beyond the pale of anything that’s even been acceptable for decades. The stakes here in Canada, for a journalist, simply can’t compare to the salaries and celebrity available in the States, but I have to wonder what it is that would drive all the broadcasters and commentators to recite the same lines even in Canada, despite what we can see with our own eyes. I don’t know how many more times I’ll be told, in the precise array of words, that Dion “is no communicator, not even in his own language”, while Harper mumbles and works hard to answer a limited and approved set of questions he can address quickly and without much ado.

Last year around this time (well, actually, a little later into the autumn) there was talk of an election too, and for me, that meant offers of work with the NDP party. Oooh, that was seductive, but ultimately the offer was impossible to fit into my life, with its 24/7 demands and its distance. Still, I was screened, and interviewed, and head hunted, and called, and not called, and kept “on file”, and now that the election’s on, a position has come up for me as Olivia Chow’s assistant. For five weeks. The timing is just wrong for me, and the group of interviewers who want me know damn well I’m miles away from her riding, and just minutes away from one of the most steadfast NDP strongholds in the country, I could work here just as well, with Peter Kormos, if the job were created. In my opinion, Layton is their big hope but he’s not a natural, he’s not really comfortable around people and he never seems quick on his feet or lacerating in his critique in parliament (remember parliament?). Olivia, on the other hand, could do it. I wish her the best but they’re certainly blowing an opportunity in my area by having Layton front instead of Kormos. They could make a lot of friends out of voters who are watching their livelihoods disappear out here, who’d only need a little bit of support to start things moving in a far more advanced and profitable direction–but I guess they’re not the kind of people you want to know in politics. Besides, how many votes could you win if you created jobs in the country’s currently most economically depressed region?

On the other hand, I take a little bit of heart from the scattered (but officially “unreported”) evidence of voter awareness, it helps me to know that, contrary to what the media and several Americans I know believe, voters really aren’t stupid. This is an ongoing argument I have with my American friends, who shake their heads in disbelief because they fear that the doddering and proudly ignorant McCain will win this election, they fear Americans are easily fooled and will ignore the cynicism of the Republican party to retain the status quo. I’m not so sure, I think Bush won two times in a row despite being the worst leader in the history of humanity (that we know of) because he had his people rig the elections, we’ve already read about how this was done, who did it, and how much it cost to do…but Americans prefer to believe in that “democracy” nonsense, and they actually think people really want to see the Republicans in office again.

The world’s largest financial institutions are bankrupt, people are losing their homes in the millions, and even real estate is losing its value (when does that happen?). Unless you’re part of that elite group of oil merchants and bankers and warmongers and pharmaceutical corporation owners and media moguls who make up the “Us” in the Bush administration, no one in the US has seen any benefit from the past 8 years of business. That group is far too small to keep “winning” elections, but they’re obviously wealthy enough to buy them despite what anyone wants.

Sarah Palin for Vice President

And cynical enough to present us with this as a candidate for high office.

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*&^%$maledicta#@^%$*&!

Do I use this blog as a place to rant? No? Maybe I should.

I have had a hell of an August, after one mind numbingly frustrating July. It’s not the weather (maybe it’s the stars, though) but I’m definitely confronting my share of obstacles these days. I’ve not yet figured out if I’m supposed to clear them, like hurdles; or if I’m supposed to turn back, rearrange my plans, and take an alternate route that doesn’t involve collisions at every turn. All the sensible thoughts lead to “abandon plans, abandon plans”, but I just press ahead, punch drunk. I certainly am stubborn (mostly because it will probably make me crazy to figure out what else to do, should I abandon the plans for real).

I’ve been trying to set up a practice office nearby in St. Catharines. The location’s ideal, it’s in the charming old section of town, and the older business offices around me have become re-inhabited with the city’s business stalwarts, right in the midst of the city’s gorgeous old homes, the old Carmelite abbey, and right across the street from the Olmstead-designed Montebello Park. I’m surrounded by old trees and roses, an architectural legacy that covers the last 150 years of building design, a quaint little fountain corner where you can sit and play chess on the stone tables, and doctors, alternative health care practitioners, lawyers, and accountants of every stripe. Right next door there’s the old Used Books store. I plan to spend some time distracting myself in there.

That is, if I ever get myself in there. Technically, I’ve been “open” since August 1. In actuality, I’m struggling to get my phone line in, digging myself out of the mass of unnecessary stuff I’ve moved over just because it was all part of my business office at home, trying to locate items I desperately need there (but didn’t realize I’d need till I got there) and I’ve been hit with a variety of “setbacks”. Let’s just call them that. They include a cell phone Telus email software has destroyed (which held all my contacts and all their information) plus appointments I’d set up until the end of the year. The cell phone has also been my lone source of business contact, since the land line will still be weeks in coming (oh my, yes, phone companies in Canada are lousy), and the pda features on the phone were supposed to substitute for an actual computer I’ve yet to move into the office (since there is no phone). I’ve been driving to and fro, moving things in, throwing things out, coordinating printing and marketing supplies, and generally running my practice via mobile, in exactly the same way I was before I got the office, just because it’s not ready yet.

So I’ve been driving extra long kilometers these days, the one thing I decided I no longer wished to do. And that has resulted in a car accident, to top everything off. A four car one, commuted to three cars, because the last one in the line up said “no damage here!” and pulled away, quite happy to be free of the waiting-for-the-cops nonsense I had to endure for three hours. One overly helpful participant, however, volunteered the information on that fourth car’s spectral presence to the police officer when he finally arrived–something I stressed was Absolutely Not Necessary, goddamn it–and she even passed the PC the fourth car’s license plate number and car model information. So because he opted to help me out, that man will probably be charged with something asinine too–such as “Leaving the Scene of an Accident”, even if he swears the accident did not happen for him.

There is such a thing as being too perky, and too helpful.

Anyway, I got the charge on that one, so I’m going to fight it because who could pay that fine anyway? It’s added another “to do” to my list of growing errands in futility. I’m feeling quite a lot like that hamster on the Habitrail these days. More so than ever before, and I felt like that much of the time, before.

The cell phone is my latest peeve. I was supposed to have it replaced, finally, by a new unit last night, and after spending three days of forcing the phone to try and stop freezing while “booting up” so that I could successfully get to my contact information and my appointment schedule (there is no way to reset the phone without losing this information for good) the sales staff at the Telus store immediately did the absolute wrong thing, and while I was explaining that they should not take the battery out of the phone as it would force the phone to shut down again, they took the battery out of my unit to put it into the new one (instead of just getting the new phone’s battery out and using that instead). They were feeling a little lazy about not having a battery pack for the new unit, something they’d need so that they could transfer my contact information from my broken phone to its replacement, so they ignored me and ruined my last chance of saving my business vitals. That immediately shut it down, which meant they would now have to reboot it to start it up so that it went to the screen where I could get the data. When I explained that it took me many days of doing that repeatedly to get the phone to stop freezing, they went ahead and rebooted it anyway, smiling at me like I was just so silly. When the phone froze as I’d predicted, they looked at me like I didn’t know, and said, “It freezes at the Sync page–did you try and sync it with your computer?”

My heart sank, probably because it was so full of a raging desire to start slapping people until they started to cry. I desperately kept that phone under watch when I got the phone to finally open up to me, and I’d have fully written out the contact information if I’d known these people would have destroyed it for me….but they weren’t interested in actually listening to me about saving it. They had me sign up a bunch of papers for the new unit and they were ready to push me out the door but I finally said, “Look, reverse all of this paper work right now. I have to take that phone home and just keep trying to reboot it over and over again until I can get to that screen again. It literally took me two days of solid shutting down and booting up over and over again, and playing with buttons that might force the phone to stop freezing instead of starting up, and you just ignored me when I asked you not to take the battery out”. She looked at me like the inconvenience I’d become, and said, “Well, get it back to me in two days, or we can’t replace your phone.”

What? Those are fighting words.

So now I’ve been wrestling with the phone again, trying to get that screen to come back up again, and that’s been very difficult and frustrating. I want to be convinced to stay on as a customer, and they’d better convince hard. I’m not leaving that store without a much better phone that can sync to my computer with no effort, immediately. Why? Because this phone was destroyed by Telus’ software–and this phone can crash because it runs on a Windows system. This phone doesn’t sync to a Mac unless you download some specific Mac patches for it–but they cost extra money, and they don’t always work, as I’m finding out. But the reason I’m getting a new phone (on top of the $300 credit I received as a consolation, which now has not become quite enough consolation for last night’s stupidity) is because now the battery on this phone won’t hold a charge, so even if I do manage to get to the contact screen, I’ll have to hand write every one of those names and addresses out by hand before it runs down again. And that doesn’t leave me much time to save my ass. This cell phone company’s cost me some time, and some money.

And that’s just not damned acceptable.

Nor is the time I’ll have to spend emailing the company’s president and marketing director, their customer placation people, who’ll put up a fight I know, and the weasels at the Telus store who’ll shoot evil eyes at me when I go and get the replacement set up. Once again, instead of getting on with things, I’m working like a bastard at trying to save my livelihood because Telus and their people don’t think it’s a good idea to just pay attention to me when I’m there to do business.

I’m arguing and pressing the point and gathering my evidence for my arguments all the bloody time these days. In a past life, I was a lawyer, I know it: one of the many condemned to a specific Hell in the Inferno, the one which mimics being on earth yet again and doing the thing you “do best” against your will and only in unpleasant circumstances from which you can glean no benefit, eternally, no matter what else you think you’re meant to accomplish in the world. Funny, the only other place in my life where I can “build a case” is in my practice, treating patients–and that’s exactly what I’m not able to do right now.