2009: This is Naught a Love Song
It wasn’t even close to New Year’s Eve before Ingrid and I were swearing that 2009 could not end fast enough, like a vampire-queen freshly staked that we wished would stop spitting blood and just fucking die already.
It’s not that it was such a *bad* year, so much as it was filled with such a dense and dramatic amount of events that by early December I simply had no room left in my head; my brain’s capacity was supersaturated with fragments of information without the ability to reflect anymore (reflection, I feel, being the way we digest information, the same way our stomach digests food in order to allow more food to come later). I tell you: such a state of mind is not healthy.
Among the highlights of 2009, this last year of the naughts: I completed work on two feature films, one MoW (movie-of-the-week), bought a house (without Ingrid being in the same country at the time!), moved into said house, started teaching post-graduate studies in film post production, and completed a major revision on my novel (which I’m becoming very happy with). Lastly, we managed to insert a three-country whirlwind vacation after Christmas. I must say, there was some cruel justice in having abandoned the country while the decade died. And what a decade it was…
Our friend, Shannon, who we met in London, upon hearing how things had gone for us in 2009, showed no surprise. “It’s the Year of the Ox.” she said “I can’t wait for it to end!”. According to Shannon, Years of the Ox are denoted by their eschewing of joy and relaxation for the throes of head-down labour and development. I’m not exactly sure how accurate this is – was it this bad twelve years ago, the last time there was an Oxen year? I ask myself – but one thing I do know: I certainly don’t want to go through another Year of the Ox for another twelve years.
And so, to my readers, and to those just visiting, when I say “Happy 2010” I really mean it. The Oxen year is not quite over yet – the Chinese New Year is not until February 14th (at which point, 2010 will be the Year of the Tiger). I wish you all the best for the coming year, and offer the following synopsis, taken from a website who took it from a website, who took it from another website (so it must be true):
Drama, intensity, change and travel will be the keywords for 2010. Unfortunately, world conflicts and disasters tend to feature during Tiger years also, so it won’t be a dull 12 months for anyone. The Year of the Tiger will bring far reaching changes for everyone. New inventions and incredible technological advances have a good chance of occurring. For all of the Chinese horoscope signs, this year is one to be active – seizing opportunities and making the most of our personal and very individual talents. Everything happens quickly and dramatically in a Tiger year – blink and you could miss an important chance of a lifetime!
Hello, It’s Me
Hi there,
First: everything’s fine with me (and I define fine as being “things are going well, no dramas, no chronic issues for me to be concerned with”).
I realized that the previous blog post – written/posted in a vague cyber-scrawl – could be misconstrued. All is well in Cahillland. In fact, things are going well enough that I have very few opportunities to blog.
I wanted to express what I considered to be rumbles (predictions) of change around me.
A diner I went to on the east end (near work) that I hadn’t been to in about a month, where the same waitress asked me the same question she (and the owner) asked a month ago: how’s the new house? I wanted to pick up my plate and whip it across the vintage 50s decor’d aisle, preferably smashing violently against a wall. The new house? I wanted to respond. I’ve been there – every single day – for the past three months! I imagined yelling. I’ve seen its insides, I know what it is, I’m intimate with it. It is many things, but – in the name of the Lord Baby Jesus – it’s not new! I imagined saying, holding my arms out dramatically, waiting for the curtain to close and for the audience to clap.
I didn’t say that. I hunched my shoulders and said: it’s good. Thanks.
At work I felt I had been snappy, officious.
Later I dropped by a sometimes getaway, an Irish pub downtown I know. I sat there with a Guinness and the bartender, a lovely person, said: “You okay? You don’t seem yourself today.”. I was tired. Tired of non-stop work, frustrated that I was frustrated with the waitresses’ question from lunch, my crankiness on the job, and now – apparently – the answer to the question that I didn’t know how to ask was written on my face for her to see: You okay? You don’t seem yourself today.
I’m fine, I said. All’s good. It’s just this (I thought): when it seems that I am triangulated by revelations of change (which I interpret the above to be) or change-which-needs-t0-be-made, I cannot help but ask whether this is a fin de siècle in some way, or whether I’m just looking for fatalistic icons. Stressed and desperate for more drama?
And this: it’s hard to be eloquent with a cellphone, so I appreciate the responses of those who were concerned with the content of my previous post.
All is good, if not necessarily crystal clear.
(One of the problems of being busy is not only not enough time to write, but also not enough time to revise for clarity.)
Mobile: Not Myself
If I am not myself at work.
If I am not myself at the diner @ lunch.
If I am not myself at the bar.
Who am I, if not different? And when, in retrospect, did this revolt happen? And will there be a ransom posted, or will the old me be shot or brainwashed?
All I ask is that I live honestly, if not with clear intents. Or answers.
[Sent via BlackBerry]
It Doesn’t Need To Be This Way
I was having brunch in the Market with my friend, Lady B, whom I’ve known for over 10 years. We were talking about “life changes” (we both being close to 40). We got onto the topic of how her and I sometimes are conditioned to expect the worst.
“With the house, didn’t you feel that, somehow, everything would inevitably go wrong and you wouldn’t get it after all?” she asked.
“Yes!”
It was as if she had read my mind. We were eating palacsinta at a small Hungarian bistro.
We talked about this, because she’d felt the exact same way when she and her partner bought their house. She speculated, correctly in my estimation, that this mode of thinking – let’s call it auto-tragic thinking – was the result of her and I coming from divorced families (the divorces or circumstances surrounding them being particularly destructive). The end-result, if not in all cases then certainly in ours, was that we were conditioned to expect gift horses to have mouth cancer and every silver lining to have a cloud moving in its way. Happiness was a pulled rug away from tragedy.
I thought about moments in my life – moments that everyone experiences – like applying for a job, asking someone out for a date. Moments where, realistically, we hope/aim for the best. The difference between the average person and people like myself and Lady B is that, in the event we don’t get the job we hope for, in the event that special someone isn’t interested in us, we tend to see it as a fateful inevitability; a symptom of a curse. Of course, we say to ourselves. Why should this be any different than any other time?
The subject clearly struck a chord for both of us.
“You expect it to be like in Carrie.” she said in a follow-up email, discussing how we became conditioned to expect the worst. “You’re at the prom, thinking that everything’s turning around in your life and then suddenly you’re covered in pig blood.”
The best male equivalent I could think of was Laurence Harvey’s character in (the original) The Manchurian Candidate; a tragic puppet whose fleeting tastes of freedom coincide with horrific end results.
So, no, neither Lady B nor I are cursed. Our houses have not fallen down or been taken away from us by a nightmarish bureaucracy. If anything we are only beginning to sense just how much re-wiring is necessary for us to see things clearly, without the faulty psychological infrastructure that led to us to believe that, indeed, the odds were stacked against us.
The mind is a frightening thing. This is why I read books and watch films which challenge my preconceptions. This is why I am lucky to have friends such as Lady B.
Returning
Although this will go down as a formative, self-defining year, one of my great frustrations of 2009 is the inability to find the time and/or energy to collect, polish, publish all of the things, happenings, and concepts that come across my path – not even a healthy fraction. I’ve had more success capturing visuals but that’s due to being in the right place/time with a cellphone camera rather than wilfully executing a deliberate agenda.
Work is going like gangbusters, which I am thankful for, the novel is improving with every moment I spend revising it (helps that people actually want to read it), and most recently/surprisingly I have become a homeowner. Just two days ago I was offered a part-time teaching position from a respectable college for a respectable film/TV program.
And yet, at risk of portraying myself as spoilt (or tetched), it seems as if it’s not enough. I feel there is so much going on that I want to grab hold of: the recent (Twitter-inspired) trend of authors turning around and publicly accusing peers of personal attacks when in fact they are just doing their jobs (eg. book reviews), the aesthetics of stereoscopic imagery (that’s 3D for you junior rangers), and the way in which the world unravels and combines at the same moment in time like a Möbius strip, and what about the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo…?
It’s too much for me. Everything: life, art, work… I hit the mattress every night and practically pass out. I used to read… I read War & (f’ing) Peace in the time between laying down and actually sleeping. Luxury! says the current me. Mind you, he gets more sleep and perhaps has a better grasp on the whole “early to bed, early to rise” thing. Maybe I shouldn’t be visualizing the voice of “current me” as being spoken in the harsh brogue of a Scottish authoritarian.
Things felt as if they were falling apart in the spring, like when the aperture ring on my Zorki-4 came loose, right in the middle of shooting some nice “golden hour” shots on Dundas West (just south of Kensington Market) after a fallow 35mm winter. Little could I guess that within a few months I’d be living in a house just five minutes north of where I took these photos. Thankfully, most of them came out fine. Perhaps it was all an elaborate metaphor for being patient, for trying hard to see the forest rather than scrutinize the pines, the mouths of gift horses, etc.
This may all be true, if terribly clichéd. And who would give a horse as a gift in the first place?
This is not a lengthy letdown friends, as if to say that this blog has served its purpose and is to be cast onto the great cyber-somethingsomething where cyber-things are cast and probably set on fire. No, I will not be taking this blog on a walk into the woods, with Daddy and his shotgun. I’m just reaching a threshold where life is requiring more concentration and energy, leading me to ask (hello, rhetorical!) how imaginary magnitude can adapt to suit these changes without looking like an outmoded vehicle or an abandoned hobby (or both). Yes, as I said, rhetorical. But since when has rhetorical ever been a particularly devastating accusation?
Rhetoric is just a temporary building material, made up of the same stuff that kludges are moulded out of. Hope (if not faith), led by patience. That word again: patience. I think I met you somewhere, at a bar maybe, when I was younger and looking for your type. It is true that rhetoric cannot keep a tower standing, but it can inspire the building of towers.
Where am I going with this…right: things are odd, and unbalanced, and it all points to a giant (fictional) neon sign blinking just above my head, big-city halo-like, which says: TRANSITIONAL PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT. Fair enough (if not sexy).
I suppose I am writing this to say that I’m here for you, but not in the way that I was, which is not to say that I am not still here. My focus is changing, not changing for change’s sake but fermenting into something more stable and powerful. I guess, if I may go back and answer an earlier question, the reason why I am not as prolific here as before is that – now that I am slipping into a new stream of life – my energy must be treated as a finite commodity. Perhaps this, for now, is “success”, and I’m just looking at it like a paleontologist holding a magnifying glass against a piece of the Arctic ice shelf, unsure of what is before him.
Tell you what: when I find out, I’ll let you know. The long and short of it is that I’m still here, but here may be changing to suit my needs. We’ll see. We.
