Cat Dragged In - A Variety Show

In 1991 I was an outspoken preteen feminist, and it was an exciting time to be a feminist in Canada, because this woman, Gwen Jacob

was working on winning the right for all of us Canadian women to go topless. Yessss! As a ten year old who didn’t understand all the issues, like equal work for equal pay, or violence against women, or… nevermind…anyway, I could tell that this issue was an obvious one. 

This was and is Legal:

As a ten year old girl, I wouldn’t like to look at that man with his big hairy useless nipples, but there he is, he has his rights.

And this is Legal: 

Insert photo of a woman’s body, all but ‘legally’ undressed, sexually displayed and unnaturally posed, culturally broadcast far and wide in Calvin Klein’s context, Cosmo Magazine’s Context, A phone sex line’s context, but  never her own natural context. I won’t reprint one. We’ve all seen plenty.

As a ten year old girl I had seen enough of those images, and they made me feel uncomfortable, and I see the same discomfort on the faces of little children who see them today, when they are displayed more, and more graphically. But I digress. 

1991. I did like swimming in the bare, and I did like playing kick the can on hot summer nights, and I did like running around in the dust with my brothers, who never though to cover the same flat little nipples that I had at that time. But my flat nipples were becoming something else- Not yet biologically. Socially. They were becoming something not wholly my own, something fused other people’s reactions to them- with the male sexual gaze and with social condemnation if they were worn freely- and fused with the feeling of shame.

1991. This is illegal:

And this:

Law Struck down, 1991. Go Canada. Ten-year-old Hilde has a private topless feminist party in her room, plays her Paula Abdul tape loud. 

Okay. Here we are, 2012. Women going around topless? No, we aren’t. It is still very uncomfortable to do so, and I am aware of this because I currently enjoy functioning breasts. When I see this image: 

I am heart-happy like the rest of us. Nothing could be more peaceful, more natural. Also, I am envious. Noticed how the whole torso is exposed so baby can switch breasts easily. Notice how very relaxed, how un-self-conscious Mamma and baby are. Many blogs on the internet are devoted to sharing beautiful photographs of women breastfeeding, but few of these pictures are of North American women. That’s because women breastfeeding publicly in north america don’t look at-peace. We are fidgety, awkward, often more concerned with covering up or with fighting an internal battle against social discomfort than with enjoying the opportunity for nourishing love that each feeding can be. Lest we get to caught up in romanticizing the breast feeding of another culture, I’ll repost my own favourite public breastfeeding photo. 

Public BreastFeeding in Canada, 2012, a best case scenario:

In this picture I am in the Abbotsford Tim Hortons (what could be more downtown Canada?), and I am doing my best to enjoy feeding my baby, despite the fact that there are stares and whispers. I am not doing enough to cover up. I feel the burden of other people’s reactions. I feel as though I am a needless exhibitionist. It was a hot day. Tugging on shirts while feeding a baby in an unfamiliar environment is a pain. I would have loved to have been completely topless in this photo. But that other breast, the extraneous breast, there is no excuse for it- it bears the burden of shame.

Why don’t women in Canada excercise the 1992 ammendment to obscenity laws?

Because shame is a feeling that burns. 

Because culturally, a breast still belongs more to the male sexual eye than to its woman. 

Let’s have a look at breastfeeding in North America, a worst-case scenario:

This woman (does she look like she’s ever been pregnant?) is advertising something called a Nursing Cover. It is ugly, it is awkward, it is bulky, worst of all  it prevents the woman from seeing her baby and thereby adjusting her latch, or assessing  the comfort and mood of the baby. The baby is stuffed into a ridiculous tent, with the breast-of-shame. As nursing covers become more common, I feel pressure to wear one. In the state of Massachusetts, home of Harvard University, the nursing cover is the recently won compromise to obscenity laws which prevent public breastfeeding! The irrepressible Ben West suggests that women in the United States mount a campaign to rebrand this contraption the ‘Nursing Burqa.’ Culturally insensitive as this is, there’s a point to it. 

Some women are shy. I get it. But for the most part, we women have overcome the shame of wearing pants and bearing our ankles.  So is the culture evolving gradually to allow women to expose whatever amount of breasts they like without bearing an overwhelming burden of shame? It is not. The breast remains a line in the sand because it remains such a potent source of advertising revenue, pornography revenue, and shame, and opression. The breast is a physical location where every woman becomes other, becomes object. The only remedy is….

Breasts Breasts Breasts! Summer of 2012,  Bare Your Breasts! Bare them for us all! Bare them on the beach, bare them in the street, Bare them at the park, bare them at the dinner party! Breastfeeders, bare them proud, you are the reason we are called mammals. Women, i hereby challenge you to go topless at least once in the last  days of summer 2012.

A proposal: There is a little-known but new and growing holliday called Go Topless Day. This needs to blow up. Celebrated last year on August 28th, it would be perfectly timed for the August Critical Mass bike ride, which is usually the ‘wedding themed ride’- badly in need of reclamation as the Topless Ride, I’d say. Topless Bikeriding feels great, by the way. The air around your breasts is scientifically designed to be ‘breathable.’ 

One more proposal before I turn your breasts loose on the world: what are we going to do with the waste problem created by these nursing covers? 

Let’s use them to help us deal with the really obscene visual blight in the world: the hunters of endangered animals who fill the villainous pages of Sports Afield magazine, Sworn Enemy of this blog. Don’t you forget it, Sports Afield! This woman and her breasts are out to get you.

Kaza!

Thanks to Lisa Corcoran and her breasts for these appropriate nursing cover images.

I can feed maple leaves to the goats. They know it is a social thing. They like it, and I like it. The goats are covered with bristly fur. Actually, it is hair, like I have. They chew with a mouth like mine. They think about playing, and eating, and they think about how they love the mountains with a mind not unlike mine. But a chicken… 

What is she thinking?

The Chicken: aggregate of feather and hollow tubes, she is architecture of fluff, bathing in the dust, six inches of complex feather arrangements surrounding what little flesh she has, she is surprisingly light when we pick her up- which we could only do against her wishes. She seems to be made of feather, the love of foraging, and barnyard drama. I can penetrate no further into this fowl mind. 

What is she thinking?

I can observe. Her fidelity to Chanticleer, the older Leghorn rooster: total. Violently she eschews the advances of the up-and-coming exotic Americauna rooster, the other rooster, that one called Toothy.

Toothy!

She and her sisters cluck about him all day long: “Did you see how he tried to get at her?” “My Stars!” “Sneaky!” “And so Rough!” But ladies, I must ask, is he only so rough because he is so frustrated, so universally shunned? It is best to leave one’s feminism at the chicken gate. 

Indeed, no human ideas seem to apply to these soil-scratchers, these worm-catchers, these dust-bathing egg-hatchers. The cock their heads at me to ascertain intent, and they are never satisfied. What are they thinking? And what am I thinking? that beedy eye betrays no thoughts that I can recognize. What is in the bird brain? Most people are at least a little bit afraid of chickens. They swarm picnics. They don’t seem to feel fear. They don’t respond to swatting or herding in a way I could call logical. But human logic is my yardstick, and it is not up to the task of understanding the barnyard.

What is she thinking?

Now take these goats.

They make milk. They are motivated to mouthe, to suckle. They have teats. This is why we have these goats, here, wild and mountainous and trouble-making in our barnyard: For the delicious, musky miracle of their milk. I also make milk, and my little babe suckles and suckles and suckles. 

She is a milk-fed babe, and like those milk-fed pumpkins of legend, she is nice and fat, enormous really: a prize-winner, juicy with life, her upper lip sparkling in the sun. 

Even dads have nipples, just in case

This is the reason for the whole Phylum: Mammalia. Mammaries. Milk. The breast. The breast our first love and milk our original food, suckling our first obsession, the nipple our fresh-from-the-womb replacement for the constant rush of life from the umbilical chord, sweet warm milk our reward at the end of the treacherous trip through the birth canal. This is the reason we call our galactic home The Milky Way. Our ancestors looked into the night sky and saw the sweet twinkling beads of the Mother Goddess’ milk, squirting across the cosmos. My baby nurses with her arms wrapped around my breast like someone trying to hug a giant Sequoia. So I can look at these goats, and the neighbour’s cows certainly, and grandma’s dog, even a whale, or a lion, or a monkey, I can look them all in the eye, and know a little something.

Sweet beads of twinkling milk. 

But take yonder broody hen in the barn. 

Four little fluffy peep-peeping babes she has- not even her own, likely, you know, she just took it into her unfathomable head one day to sit down on a nest where the girls had all been laying, and she stayed sat until the eggs cracked open. Who knows- one of these little ones could have even been fathered by the sneaky and aggressive Toothy! 

But how does she feed these little sweet fluffs? There’s no milk! No milk, no heartbeat connecting , no umbilical chord mediating between mamma and baby. There’s just these eggs, these self-contained little hard pods of breakfast, but because this hen decided to sit down one day in June, there’s baby chicks, emerging perfect and ready to eat solid foods, twenty one days later!

Now how can I relate to that? There’s no milk! Got milk, mother hen? She hasn’t. She has two sets of claws and a sharp beak, and a plan to show her babies how to use their own. All my babe has done, at three months old, is mouthe a little strawberry pulp. She treated it like a nipple made of fruit.

It was the rooster, at last, who reached me. Not the teen-aged and exotically plumed Toothy, of course, but the elder statesman and favorite of the ladies, Chanticleer the leghorn.

I think I know what she’s thinking

I stood in the barnyard on a fine spring morning and it was in gratitude, a morning of my heart beating out thanks, thanks, thanks, and in this gaze my eyes hit the eyes of Chanticleer, and he was doing the same, he was thanking the Great Mother Hen in the sky, and he knew that I saw his heart, and I knew that he saw mine, and none could say which of us was more surprised.

Not releasing me, gripping with his beady look this first precious connection between us, he leapt smoothly onto the back of the hen directly in front of him, and he mated with her, staring at me the whole time. These things, finally, I can share with a chicken. 

Like all writers, I produce mass quantities of throw-away journaling-  anxieties recorded, dreams, and tons and tons of caffeinated stream-of-consciousness silliness. Most of it never gets a second glance, but I found this one and it frankly cracked me up. So if you’ve ever seen me in a coffee shop scrawling away as if it was something important, or have seen the towers of scribbled up graph paper notebooks at my house, what’s actually going on is like this:

Ever since Michelle Obama came into the sordid picture (of my love life!) I’ve been doing a lot more baking. I bake to the tune of her heart, which is pumping extra fast to expel all the tea and hot chocolate. All the women who write for allrecipes.com insist that singing or laughing over your baking will make the bread tast like love/home/Gradma/puppies/some of the less sexy First Ladies.

I insist that having a fight over your baking will make the cake a masterpiece of triumph, or despair, or floury angersex on the kitchen floor. I don’t know which, dear bakers, this is up to you. Either way, tasters will clutch their breast and try to keep these strong emotions to themselves. Its not seemly to show such feelings.

That’s why I started my own website, recipestodestroyamerica.com,

which has become such a success that I should be rich, what with representatives from Walmart and Gucci always taking me to lunch and trying to seduce me over the Cristal and pear cobbler to let them advertise on my website their own lines of fashion designed to look as though it was created by crafto-lution-istas in their downtown lofts, fashions inspired by the Indie slogans ‘Rivet till it burns’ and ‘suck my left one.’

Sure, I could take the money and pretend, as have many before me, that all this co-option is actually a hyper-sophisticated element of destroying America, but that would be a lie.

Even Michelle Obama knows this. She told me, this morning, from the bed in the downtown loft apartment  which is also the headquarters for recipestodestroyamerica.com, while she thoughtfully chewed the Cherry USSS (United Soviet Socialist Strudel) I’d heated up for her in the biodeisel powered microwave I had made specially for my onsite recipes. 

Good God! This is more relevant now than ever! Obamas 2012! 

A sheep named Rose is shorn, and she shakes off the trauma and returns to the barnyard, where her friend John rubs her skin. His hands come back to him smeared with grease, Rose’s waterproofing grease, her own precious Lanolin.

Her wool-nobody has time to wash and card and spin it in Rosedale these days- is stuffed into a green garbage bag, left in the barn.

Years later, Rose the sheep is dead and burried under the new willow in the back field, but her wool remains in the green back where John, grown and returned, finds it and brings it upstairs to where he lives in the loft above the barn with his wife Hilde, and he shows her the wool, and remembers to her the story of rubbing his greasy friend Rose, his hands smelling for a week afterwards.

The wool has a barn smell now, overtop of the Lanolin smell. Hilde uses it to winterproof their little house, and there is so much of the wool left that she decides to learn woolcraft, and wonders if she can take off the barn smell but keep the smell of Lanolin, Lanolin, which she learns will be what protects her nipples all through feeding the baby that grows inside her, Lanolin, ancient and best nipple protector. Hilde daydreams that Rose is still alive, and she can just go downstairs and find Rose in the barn in the spring, and rub her wool, then rub the nipples to keep them from cracking. 

As Hilde learns in a washtub how to coax the thick coating of Lanolin off raw wool, John buys her a new pair of granny-knit mittens. After Hilde dries her hands she coats them in Rose-scented hand cream. She rides her bike around Rosedale in the mitts, and when she has worked up some heat, she lifts the mitts to her nose: Lanolin, Rose, Lanolin, Rose, Lanolin, Rose.  

Picture this:

kd Lang and Wayne Gretsky, eating avocado rolls on the patio at a very fine little out of-the-way Japanese restaurant in LA, chatting about the glory days of Edmonton. That’s right, 1983-1990. Edmonton owned the world then, and it was thanks to these two.

“this place has the best Saba”

“Meat is murder. Pass the ginger, Great One.”

Cowboys and Long Haul truckers of North America had as their late night soundtrack Concept Country and Western Music produced by a Canadian vegetarian lesbian.

I don’t know if all this had an effect on you, where you lived, but at the time I was a child in a town called Dawson Creek- we’re talking cold hostile people in a cold hostile climate, everyone hating the town and certain the outside world didn’t exist for them, anymore, their chance was over, they had just better stay in Dawson, and work at the sawmill, and for God’s sake don’t hope for anything nice out of life.

But Wait!

1983! Wait a galdarn minute!

Just six away by car, Edmonton! Winning Cup after Cup! Why, that’s the home team! And they’ve got culture, too, that kd Lang is a fine country and western singer! Why, she won six Junos this year (And collected them in a wedding dress, which made total un-ironic sense to me at the time, as an 8-year-old)

Is this pride, this feeling in my chest?

I think it’s time to bring up the Mall. Some of you readers may not know this, but Edmonton is home to the World’s Largest Mall. World’s. Largest. Mall. Floor three is a water park with over 50 waterslides and a giant automated wavepool. Two roller coasters in the basement. On the top floor they only sell fur coats and cars. This is a big deal. Edmonton was tops. I only made the trip a few times, as a kid, but it was sort of like going to Disney Land, only Disney Land was winning the Stanley Cup all the time 

Am I feeling something I shouldn’t be feeling?

I like to think about kd and Wayne, now, because they both live in LA, and maybe they don’t like each other, maybe they never get together to talk about the old days, but I bet they have a lot of good memories.

Did Wayne ever smoke hash with kd and the Reclines backstage?

All this was on my mind, recently, while I was visiting in Northern Alberta with two friends who grew up together in Edmonton. They talk like this: ‘Oh yeah, Daddy-O’s downtown makes that Banannas Foster’ and “Remember When we worked across from each other at the food court in the Mall, but then you got amazingly promoted out of the Frozen Yogurt Caste and into the Club Monaco Caste” and “The River Valley at this time of year” and so on.

And I got to thinking about all the people I know from Edmonton, how they all share this hard-boiled true-heartedness, and how they all really know how to put together a dirty old winter jacket and a scarf, I mean, these people know how to look good on a thrift-store budget in a dirty-winter-town.

So of course I’d say to these Edmonton friends, “I want to go to Edmonton!” expecting them to say, “Yeah! we’ll meet you there and show you all the cool spots! We can go to the Mall! World’s Largest Food Court! Awesome!” Or something like that. Instead they did this: “Nooooooo Hilde noooo don’t go to Edmonton” “Noo Noooo don’t start thinking you want to go to Edmonton.” And when questioned, they’d just shake their heads. They shook their heads.

What happened, Edmonton? There is no resolution here. This is a question. Edmonton, how have you so fallen from grace in the eyes of your own children? This blog demands answers.

This summer at DCMF my friend J——- broke into the basement of a historical building in Dawson. He found a lot of garbage, and a gold rush era shovel, and this previously unpublished poem, signed Robert W. Service! Because of the illegal nature of the find, this blog has the  exclusive scoop! Critics will no doubt soon be cranking out papers about Service’s new rhyme-free style, but here at Cat Dragged In, we can just enjoy this poem for what it is: a heartfelt farewell to the Yukon.

Goodbye Yukon

You wild girls running cold and naked on the beach

You loud loud saunas, ringing steam and wet hair dripping snow melt water on the rocks

You backwoods boys with your ragged beards and hands, hunting knives from your fathers, also some conservatism from your fathers, but hearts hot for the Goddess, that’s from your mothers

You deep winter makeout parties with all the beauties in moonstone jewelry

Goodbye Yukon, frost-bearded husband blissful in starlit snow on the hill, with a sled and a thermos, under the new moon

Goodbye Yukon

I dreamed picking cranberries in the forest- they were still bitter, and in the dream i couldn’t find any kinikinick, but someone was turning into a bear by way of a dog

Goodbye endless forests, forests like santa clause, forests like a glitter parade, forests like dragon’s treasure, forests like a fat woman- so many trees, so many trees

It’s supposed to be dry here but it rained the whole summer. I have never seen such a scheming bunch of arrogant and obese gophers 

Goodbye Yukon. How will my heart find itself without your dark, your blue, your cold?

-Robert W. Service

Historical Facts.

May Twenty-Ninth, 2009: Jian Ghomeshi,

Host of popular Canadian Radio Program Q, interviews Gordon Lightfoot,

Canadian songwriting legend. According to the CBC website, One blogger noted that Ghomeshi’s interview with Gordon Lightfoot was “nothing less than seminal,”

Same Day, simultaneously, Sasquatch,

no context needed, intercepts the interview Via low-Fi Backwoods transistor radio. Lightfoot, as we all know, speaks at a frequency which Sasquatch cannot hear. Sasquatch assumes, naturally, that these questions are directed towards himself, and answers with a candor and vulnerability that one blogger describes as the cat’s ass. Happily, a CBC radio technician was in that forest that day, and he captured the moment.  

Excerpts Now, from both interviews

Ghomeshi: You are a legend

Lightfoot: Well now, that’s, that’s an honor, but come on (laughs) I’m still alive, man!

Ghomeshi: So, do you think that there is a unique Canadian Songwriting identity?

Lightfoot: Oh, yes, without questions, I think there is a unique Canadian Songwriting identity

Ghomeshi: Why do you think that is?

Lightfoot: I think it’s because of the Celtic heritage in Canada. Many Canadians have Celtic ancestry- Scottish ancestry and Irish ancestry, and I think that runs in the soul, the soul of our nation.

Ghomeshi: What are the songs, the Lightfoot songs, that you want to remain as your legacy, the ones most closely identified with you?

Lightfoot: Well, there’s, I mean, that’s kind of a weird question to answer about yourself. I guess, you know, If you could read my mind, and Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, but not so much Sundown, you know, because it’s such a seedy, back alley type of song, from a pretty low time in my life.

————————

Ghomeshi: You are a legend

Sasquatch: uhh, yeah. obviously. What - that was a really stupid thing to say. Like- “you are a radio host.” 

Ghomeshi: So, do you think that there is a unique Canadian Songwriting identity?

Sasquatch: Yes, definitely, there is a unique Canadian songwriting identity

. 

Ghomeshi: Why do you think that is?

Sasquatch: Well i think it’s because Canada supports the world’s largest remaining Sasquatch population, you know, and also Boreal forests, and the largest surviving wolf and bison populations as well, so it’s only natural that that would run in the soul of our nation. 

Ghomeshi: Anything to do with Celtic populations?

Sasquatch: Oh geez… (laughs), well, Canada certainly has a rich and diverse cultural, uhhh, makeup, and a very interesting history… but as you know, many great songwriters are alcoholics, and one of the cheapest and most common beers in Canada has a picture of a sasquatch on the can, and so, you know, probably a lot of great songwriters had that in their hands, and consequently in their minds, at key moments.

Ghomeshi: So nothing to do with Celtic populations, specifically.

Sasquatch: I got no comment there.

Ghomeshi: What are the songs, the Lightfoot songs, that you want to remain as your legacy, the ones most closely identified with you?

Sasquatch: Wow, that’s a hard question to answer. I love Lightfoot! I guess, gheeze, I gotta say that tune Sundown, you know, because it really… well, you know, I’m not as young as I once was, but every time I hear Sundown, it just puts me in mind of my old Girlfriend, Gloria, and these long, endless sunsets we have in the Canadian north in the summer, and watching the sunsets with her. God, we were so young, and she had such hairy legs, she was so sexy… I think of her whenever i hear that song. 

It is late summer but it does not yet smell like fall. No autumnal breezes wafting, but here in Yukon on the sixth of August we can feel autumn, as surely as we can feel spring on a cold cold day in March, still under four feet of snow. 

Late summer is not revealing itself so overtly in the forest. No, the forest is instead becoming more regal. More stately. Each tree is proudly luxuriating over this year’s few millimeters of height gained. The forest is quieter. Mosquitoes are on the wane, and the birds, having done most of their reproductive work, are enjoying the company of their spouse in this year’s fine nest before it’s time to move. The forest is like a Queen in the late period of her rein: seasoned, supremely confident, needing no words to express her power.

Late summer is showing itself in the garden. Everything is rusty, and there are raspberries, and the annual flowers are wishing they lived somewhere else. Even the dandelions are looking rusty in their leaves, and every plant that bears fruit is expressing itself fully, its seeds presenting themselves to us animals in the final act of botanical reproduction: “Eat Me, scatter my seeds.”

But I  not a plant. Iam an animal,  am more like a beaver, or a bear, and I am facing hibernation. In fact, I am facing my most magnificent hibernation yet, a hibernation which will end in March, with a dramatic calving season, and a new leggy colt. I am very pleased to be in sync with the deer, actually all wild fur-bearers, on this one. Spring is the time for babies.

I have been trying to explain to the cats that I am pregnant, that is, with child, or ‘there is going to be a litter,’ or ‘I’m going to have a human-cub.’ Inter-species communication, difficult at the best of times, is really breaking down on this one. Too Conceptual? Cat gestation periods are nine weeks. These are the responses I seem to be getting from the cats. 

Hilde to Pony: “Pony, I’m going to have a baby.”

Pony: ” Mmm hmm. Let’s snuggle.”

Hilde to Pony: “Do you get it? A baby. You’ve always been my baby Are you worried? Jealous? Are you ready to be a big sister”

Pony: “Hmm hmm hmmm……”

Hilde to Gretchen: “Gretchen, I’m going to have a baby.”

Gretchen: “You know Hilde, I don’t actually live in this reality.”

Hilde: “This is pretty important to me. I’m going to have a baby.”

Gretchen: “Listen, I think you’ve known for some time that I only barely live in this reality, because I have a mission to show passionate love to you and John. Let me show you love. Feast your eyes on the exquisite fur of my stomach”

Hilde: “So the baby….”

Gretchen: “This communication is over.”

Writing this down has been very illuminating. Time to enjoy late summer. Time to eat fruits and fatten up. Time to look forward hibernation’s best activity: sharing body heat with the mammals you love to love best. 

Finally, at long last, we have my post-show interview from the incredible debut of Whitehorse all-female metal band Carnal Romance.

The show kicked ass. Shock waves continue to reverberate throughout the community. Audience members profess to having been both frightened and aroused. We were back in the coat check room and got the raw, straight goods from three out of four band members.

Thanks to Angel Bootstrap as always for producing the audio. 

This has taken so long to get up because I’ve been looking for photos of the show- the visual experience was not to be missed. I never managed to locate any (but the group Does Remember posing for a photo! So if you’re that shooter, please share!) Happily, I did manage to get a little re-enactment action this past weekend, so all you fan-boys out there don’t have to suffer disappointed. 

Just, for God’s Sake! Go to the next show!

Out in the yard a few weeks ago, gathering firewood, I met the neighbour’s kids for the first time. This meeting would be the instigating force in a series of chaotic events, but I could not predict the outcome at the time. I was just thrilled to see that there are children next door, and that they are friendly.

There are three of them. The little girl, Alexa (not her real name) is probably about seven, and for sure the ringleader of the gang. Her hair is died a candy-apple red. Her two brothers, Calen (five-ish) and Trae (probably three), hung back and let her do the talking, and they did that sort of peering-out-from-behind her move. They also threw in short little incomplete sentences from time to time, mostly lies. Here is how it went the first time:

“Excuse me, Hi!” (Alexa, of course) “What are those things you have?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, as I wasn’t holding anything except logs. “What things?” 

“Those things, that are, uhm, were, well- can we play with them?” Alexa started giving me the self-aware cute face that surely signals manipulation. Of me.

“What do you have? Show them to me and I’ll tell you if it’s okay.” I put out my own manipulative ‘friendly-adult’ face, and you know I had no choice, because she had some stuff of mine, probably crystals, because, and I think this is obvious, there are a lot of crystals hiding around my yard.

Calen started playing then with a little rag-tag fragment of a wooden ladder he had leaned against his side of the fence that separates our properties. “I put this too close, and, then…we fell in-over” His face straining as he worked hard on making up this lie as he went along.

Alexa smiled so very winningly. “Are we allowed to play in your yard?”

“Can you show me what you have? Is it nice rocks?”

“Sort of like rocks…We don’t have anything.” The self-contradictory nature of this statement was so maddening that I decided to give up and go inside. I don’t remember if this was strategic or not. Probably not.“‘Kay Bye!” I said. I love that you can just say “‘Kay Bye” to kids, and there’s no hard feelings, no emotionally charged conversation about when you’ll next see each other.

John, my husband, who stayed quiet through this whole thing, continued to chop wood outside. I could hear them talking to him as soon as I leave. He finally poked his head in the door, yelled, “Hilde! They really want to talk to you- it has to be you, I think.”

So I went out, trying to look just a little bit stern/business.

“Uhmmmm…. Is it okay if we play with those things?” I Like this about Alexa. her guilty conscience was definitely up and running, in my favor. 

I gave her a huge smile. “Just go get them, and I’ll let you know if it’s okay or not. I’m not mad. It’s okay! Go get them!”

Calen decided to make a confession, staring off into space: “We came into your yard….”

“Okay! We’ll go get them!” And Alexa ran off, brothers more or less following, but not running. She came back, indeed with two crystals, a selenite wand and a carnelian wand

and I let her keep the one and told her I needed the other. Great. We’re all friends now, things are honest and in the open.

Anyway, last Sunday I came home and They were out playing again, in the little space that’s in front of both our yards. When Alexa saw me she ran over and gave me a hug. This kind of thing destroys whatever defenses I should have against a little lying thief like her. What can I do? The hug was so genuine. This time, instead of asking me about any specific items, even though she and especially her brothers were running hungry eyes all over the yard,

she asked if they could just play in my yard. “Sure!” I am so magnanimous! I waved to their grandmother to signal that it was all cool.

The brothers immediately fell on the most tempting of the glittering items laying in the garden and at once there was the same question asked three times, more of less simultaneously, in the slow, glazed voice produced by the hypnotic lure of other people’s stuff: “What’s this? Can we play with-” none of them quite finished the sentence, so strong was the hypnotic state.

I realized immediately that I was in over my head. “Nope! Don’t touch anything, okay? Just play!” Then I closed the front door on a bad situation.

Actually I opened the front door on a brand new bad situation. The dog I’m taking care of was standing, guilty-face, over the wrapping-remnants of what once held probably about 80 grams of dark chocolate. I started in on the kind of fussing that you can probably imagine, checking the dog’s heart rate, admonishing her, asking if she is okay, looking to see if she’s started shitting or throwing up any blood, looking for the phone number of her owner, doing frantic, low-quality research on stupid internet sites with a bunch of amateur anecdotal thoughts on the subject of dogs and chocolate.

Have you ever noticed how much humans like to talk about how chocolate is bad for dogs? They like it a lot. They Love saying it to their dogs. Think about it. How many times have you heard this phrase: Chocolate is bad for dogs. People love saying it to one another, as if there’s anyone who doesn’t already know this. Well you can quadruple this effect for Internet forums. These people love talking about it so much they decided one day to  really expound on the subject, at their leisure, in the anything-goes, edit/critical review-free publication media that is the internet. There is no real information on this topic, just a bunch of people saying, “Who among us can express in print most emphatically that chocolate is bad for dogs!”

All this time, All this time, Alexa, Calen, and Trae are clinically deconstructing the yard, stripping it like a trio of really cool hard-core south east asian bike mechanics in a chop shop with a brand new shipment of the sweetest stolen bicycles. Periodically they knocked.  Six little feet thunder up the porch. Tap Tap Tap. “It’s not a good time!” I yelled back, somewhat pathetically I thought.

Anyway, the dog seemed to be fine, and I have known much weaker-link dogs than this dog who have survived much bigger doses of chocolate with not much more than a few mild seizures and some bloody diarrhea to show for it. Okay, I only know one dog like that, plus a few other comparable dog-eating-chocolate-and-being-okay anecdotes, but it was enough, combined with the dog’s apparent good-health, to make me feel intuitively that it was going to be okay. I was still on emergency watch, however.

So i dialed up my buddy Angel,

who I like to talk with about dogs and art and life and cats and crystals and music and all the really fine things, to ask her opinion, and generally to get calmed down by my best friend.

And we started swapping anecdotes about how chocolate can’t be all that bad for dogs. It was nice. The next time Alexa knocked, I was sort of ready to be the friendly neighbour-lady again.

The kids had questions, pretty much along the lines of what is this, can we play with it, can i keep it, and I fielded these questions with a semi-genuine grin, and I sent them on their way. 

At one point I put Angel on hold to go out and chop firewood. They swarmed me, of course, and I was very impressed by their capacity to swarm, there being just three of them. I told them to keep away from the axing. They didn’t. I used my physical intention to shove them out of the way, by being  facially unpleasant and walking at them with my shoulders raised. This worked for a few moments, but then I had to start again, so I got in maybe one log between a round of shoving them all off. Little Trae was the worst. I tried to enlist Alexa and Calen to keep their little brother safe. You know, give them a job to keep them occupied. They were able to ignore me so easily, whenever I talked, the deeper they got into the ravaging-the-yard-mind.

Alexa: “Why are you chopping wood? Girls don’t chop wood. Boys chop wood.” I wish I made this up, reader.

Hilde: (chopping, frustrated) “I like chopping wood.” I will note at this point that throughout my adult life, with no intention to do so, I have served as a  living gender-identity-crisis catalyst for a number of pre-teen girls, and although I am always very happy with the fruits of these crises, my own role is nonetheless a very uncomfortable one.

Alexa: “Oh…. because you want to be strong?”

Hilde: (unsure and vaguely defensive in this moment of her own intentions, as women so often are when asked unveiled body-image questions) “Partly!…. But mostly i just like it.” Look at me floundering. This is a terrible position to ever be in with children. A little time went by.

Alexa: “Don’t you wish your boyfriend was doing that?”

“No!”

Another quiet moment of chopping and shoving them off. Then Alexa called out, “Who killed this mouse?”

I didn’t need to look up. “My cats.”

“Your cats are mean!”

“No they’re not! It’s just in their nature!”

“Awe! This poor mouse!” I saw that Alexa had the mouse in her hand, and it was still all soft and unfrozen, which in this weather indicates a pretty fresh kill. “What’s this mouse’s name? Let’s bury it. Otherwise it’s a sin.”

“Yes, a sin,” the brothers murmured solemn agreement. “Can you get us a shovel?”

“There’s no shovel!” I yelled.

“Don’t worry! I know where there’s a shovel!” Calen yelled, running towards our tool storage area.

I turned around and went for the door.

Alexa: “Can we come and visit you inside your house, and see inside your house? Can we bring the mouse in?”

I did the same sort of total ignoring that they were good at doing. Then I turned at the front door to say, “It’s nice that you guys are playing in the yard, but I’m busy in the house, so please don’t come on the porch and don’t knock, okay? I’m very busy.

I got back inside, on the phone, and the dog was all chill and relaxed, and there ensued the day’s most peaceful period of chatting it up with Angel

as Alexa instigated and was victorious in a long series of around-the-house marathon races, and they looked so great, running hard in the wind, all apple-cheeked in the late autumn cold, tapping into those deep reservoirs of childhood physical energy that make the rest of us weep for youth.

The only real intrusion on this time was an occasional smell of burning plastic wafting around. This smell came but mostly went, and it seemed that, much like the dog having eaten all that chocolate, there was nothing I could do and it probably wasn’t so bad. Of course, even this relative peace couldn’t last.

They started tapping again and I just ignored for a while, but it got insistent, and I have no doubt that Alexa was genuinely caught up in feeling that she had no choice but to tap and ask if she could play with and keep whatever, that she was morally obliged to ask this.

I slid open the window.

“Can you fill this up with water?”

“And wash- can you- I found a carrot!” This one from Trae, who had a little carrot. Alexa had a small brown glass bottle I didn’t recognize.

“Where did you get that bottle?”

“Under your porch” Alexa shrugs, like, ‘i don’t know anything about it,’ and then got Calen to pass her the jackpot, about eight of these little brown glass bottles. Understand: These bottles were extremely suspicious looking. I imagined the previous owner of the trailer indulging a casual rural recreational abuse of Special K, bought in and injected from little brown glass bottles, out on the porch in the gentle Yukon sunrise, and then chuckling to himself as he stashed the empty bottles in his secret cache under the porch.

“Gimme those bottles.”

“Are you gonna fill them with water?”

“Mm-hmmm” I lied, and took them through the window and slid the window shut in their faces, leaving Calen enough time to shout out “And wash the carrot!” (which carrot I had not taken).

I put the bottles in a bowl with hot soapy water and went back to my phone conversation. Probably about two minutes later they pounded on the window again.

“Open it!” I yelled, not disengaging from Angel, who had already had to ask, too many times, ‘What’s going on?”

They tentatively slid open the window and Alexa started yelling about where were the bottles, and Calen just jumping up and down in his blue and red and grey winter coat, yelling, ‘carrot! carrot!’ and I could tell that they were all getting overcome and totally exhausted and burnt out by the ‘lure of my stuff’ hypnosis effect, and I started in on the whole sweet-voiced,

“Okay you guys, no, you can play in the yard, but-“

“Go Home!” Angel suddenly yelled in my ear. “Hilde, say, GO HOME!”

‘Yes,’ my mind whispered back, and I yelled,

“Go Home! Go Home! Go Home!”

“But the bottles-“

“Go Home! Go Home!”

“But can we-“

“Go Home!”

“Okay. We’ll listen” Then Alexa lifted her hand to wave goodbye and in her mitt a flash of light showed me my beautiful Optical Calcite crystal

which had been missing for many months.

“Hey! Hey! Where did you get that? Put that down! Alexa hey just leave that right there on the porch, okay?”

No dice.

When John came home I told him the whole story, and he said, “You’re like Mr. Wilson!”

It took me some time to get the refference

But that was all last week. The dog was totally fine-no diarrhea of any kind, much less bloody, with seisures. The burning plastic smell has not re-emerged. There were little minor waves of chaos that seemed to ripple out from the central chaos of that day, like oven-burners only being capable of maximum heat, and wet firewood, and lights turning on for no reason, but things have settled down remarkably. We are all pretty chill around here right now.

The dog went home yesterday to her beloved Mom, leaving everyone around here considerably relaxed, especially the cats.

Don’t get the wrong idea: The dog is truly wonderful.

It’s just that the period just-passed saw the sustained development of the same stressful live-in love/animal aggression triangle (three’s a crowd!) that began when the cats were adolescent kittens, and we all lived together (more of this story). It, this love triangle, was actually disappointing in its predictable ‘she wants me therefore I don’t want her’ /’she doesn’t want me therefore I must have her’ fault lines. Some very cute interspecies kissing did happen, though, in the first few days before everything went south.

So anyway, today we are seeing some serious relaxation, some very deep stretching out on the livingroom floor, a little flagrant cat-nip abuse, with John cooking up the Jackolantern on a stove burner which is working fine again. I have tried knocking on the neighbours’ door to ask about my optical calcite crystal but so far no answer. I have actually heard a rumor that they are moving. They may have moved today, for all I Know, first of the month and all.

Chaos, thy name is other-people’s children and animals.

Profuse thanks to Shauna Jones and Angel Bootstrap, whose generous donations to the blog made the up-to-date photos possible. Thanks ladies!

I put a picture of David Foster Wallace up in the house.

Isn’t he beautiful? He was a writer, and I have always liked the idea of putting up pictures of one’s departed heroes, but I’ve never actually done it before. I rolled my mind over the idea for a lot of people- writers, physicists, artists, the odd guru, but the D.F.W. is the first one to actually make it up.

He wrote this book

Which is my favorite book ever. That seems like it should be a hard statement to make, conclusively, but there it is. My favorite book ever. I finished reading it in springtime and I couldn’t read any other books until last week, and I’ll tell you the feeling I had: I was lovesick. Sick with love for the book, so lovesick that I had eyes for no other books, couldn’t imagine how I could try to love again. I read two novels last week, and I had to do it because I was home sick, and yes, the novels were alright, but it was rebound reading. My heart is unmoved. Time is healing the wound, but I’m not, you know, over it yet.

Now I like to read books where the writer writes about depression, especially from the first person- I like it when a first person narrator talks about not leaving the house for three weeks, about wearing the same filthy egg encrusted p.j.s for that entire time, and they smoke sixteen cartons of cigarettes, until the walls are bleeding yellow tobacco juice, and the stack of takeout cartons is getting to be like dangerous tall, and the narrator is so full of self-loathing that they just slide the money for the takeout under the door and yell that the delivery boy should just leave the food and get out of the apartment, and they start to turn around in their mind with all kinds of queer theories and rancid hatreds. That kind of writing is very cathartic for me. I really can get into cheering that person on. Go For It! Yeah!

Infinite Jest was not like that at all. There was some depression in that book, for sure, but it was too terrifying to enjoy.

David Foster Wallace killed himself in 2008. It is terrible. We’ve got these books of his around the house- one other novel and a couple of books of essays, and a non-fiction- and John and I are getting into the essays slowly- he’s so smart I have to go very slow with the essays, and I don’t have the heart to start the other novel yet- It’s just an invitation to heartache, I’m sure. Oh but I’m reading this one essay about Television! Holy Crap it’s so so good!

These books are treasures. Treasured little scraps of a mind I love deeply. Thank you, D.F.W, for writing these books and leaving them for us.

So!

I am starting my Christmas Crafting!

Just kidding! My Christmas Crafts are, uhm, really different from the ones depicted above.(I would show you a picture but camera missing blah blah blah).

Would you like a literary sneak preview? Okay, this is part of one of my crafts:

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This divinity, this Goddess who rises from the Ocean, whose flesh is made of scuttling crabs, whose infinite wings harbour a million treacherous eels, whose depths shelter enourmous aquatic minds, minds and memories of the unfolding of a billion years of life, She has been hidden from us for more than two thousand years, but our need for Her is now so obvious, so clear, now that Nana Mouskouri has captured it for us in song. Nana herself claims that she had no choice but to go to the studio and bring her to us.

Getting Started on Christmas Crafting is like yodelling out a battle cry against the forces of depression. Why Start?

Why get up in the morning and make these weird crafts? Who wants to make these crafts? Just because I’ve been fantasizing about making them for months!

What are you going to charge for these crafts, Hilde? Will it be worth it? Is anyone going to buy these crafts? Where is your focus as an artist? Collage? What’s this? Why would anyone want this? You think you’re bringing something original into the world? What is the purpose of these kitten collages? You should definitely just smoke weed and watch tv instead.

These thoughts are insidious! And they are always twisting around so as to present themselves to me in new, fresh, credible lights! I don’t even recognize them.

Often I cannot enjoy my work because of these thoughts, work that I have been fantasizing about for months. Why! Why is the human so conditioned? Who is this saboteur inside?

Are you feeling it, reader? Are you cheering me on?

You know what? I have been fantasizing about these crafts for months. Here’s a night I remember from last winter.

I remember one night, sewing, in the dark by the fire, and John my husband was reading War and Peace to me while I sewed a cushion. I had to stop sewing to cry for Natasha, and all she was going through in the book, and I cried onto my sewing, my christmas crafting, quiet tears at first, so he wouldn’t stop reading, but then I had to really wail, and cry myself to sleep, and John swore we shouldn’t read that book for a little while, and he even cursed himself for not noticing the buildup and stopping before I got so upset.

But I remember an even better night than that. I remember a night near the end of it, everyone else asleep and I crafted deep into the night, by lamplight, crafted my whole trailer forward through space, and it was so easy after many months of hedging preparatory work, I knew just how everything was supposed to come out, and all the elements were liquid, moving elegantly under my hands.

And when I was done crafting I really loved what I had done. I either sold it all or gave it away, and I have none left. So I have to make more.

I don’t know why D.F.W. killed himself, but I think his depression was much much harder than mine. I wonder how often he couldn’t talk himself out of bed to work on those books I love so much. Thanks, D.F.W. I would have liked to send you some Christmas Crafts…

Ha Ha Just kidding! I would never send you those, D.F.W! I would send you my very best Christmas Craft. Maybe the kitten collage…

Putting a beloved hero’s picture on the wall seems like a sacred act. His eyes are so alive, and they’re in the house now, looking out into the world. I put him on a spot facing the window where he can see a lot of nice snow, and cat action. It also seems that he’s brought with himself some of the sadness that killed him. I wonder if it is rude- does he want this little scrap of his soul here, in my house? He left the planet of his own volition.

I am keeping him up, in spite of the sadness and what may be his wishes. I want him to be here with me while I’m crafting.

Kombucha, Oh, my Kombucha. I had to throw it in the compost a few days ago. I wept.

Kombucha- miraculous health drink.Born of the fermented culture of a Symbiotic Community between bacteria and yeast, asking nothing to eat but black tea, white sugar, and fresh air, Someone, we don’t know who or when, but mostly likely in Russia or Japan,  discovered you floating globularly in a forgotten mug of sweetened tea. They must have known right away that you were special.

You are special, so special. Normally when bacteria and yeast meet, they do battle. But your mushroom body is made of a harmonious coupling of these two foes, and you make a very sour and odd drink which imparts miraculous health properties which have not yet been verified by the FDA. Whatever. I know what you mean to me.

I recieved my dehydrated Kombucha culture in the mail, courtesy of the international free Kombucha exchange website (everyone has their own way of trying to save the world. This guy Gunther W. Frank has looked deep into his soul and decided that maintaining an international free Kombucha exchange website is his contribution, his destiny. I applaud him. Know Thy Self.)

I followed the- frankly confusing- directions in the package sent by the fanatical Kombucha warrior nearest me.

There were signs of trouble from the start. Kombucha likes neither cold nor dust. As my house is wood- heated, everywhere inside is either cold or dusty.I was always fretting over it, moving it around.

But here I will let you in on a secret. The Kombucha had a magnificent personality. Every time I touched its little fish bowl home I was overcome with joyful giggling. Floating in its bowl, first a tender jellyfish, later the startings of a blobbish mushroom and smelling like apple cider, seeming to sweeten the air all around it, responding to Debussy, it was a delightful and beloved pet.

To try to preserve warmth I put a little green hoodie on it, and I put the little hood up, too, and it looked so cute, like a frog, or like Little Green Riding Kombucha. That’s the same time I got into putting little scarves, and sometimes necklaces on it. It seemed to like attention. One of the cats got into cuddling up next to it.

That second incident of August 17th, which I never got around to telling you about, was about the Kombucha. On August 17th, fresh from telling off Michael Ignatieff, I came home and saw a man, let’s call him Seamus, barbequing in my neighbor’s yard. Now Seamus and I have a particular dis-functionality in our acquaintanceship, which dis-functionality is characterized by our inability to stop playing a game I call, ‘The Hippie One-Up’ with one another.

This miserable little social game basically works where two hippies try to out-granola, out- mayan astrology, out-free love, out-buddist-principles, basically out-hippie one another until one Hippie is lying in a bloody heap confession to watching prime time television, or, as my famous last conversation with Seamus had ended,

Seamus: I designed these windows so that every evening in the summer we can just take off the screen and herd the mosquitoes out, because I don’t like killing any ilving thing.

Hilde: I love killing killing mosquitoes.

As you can see, I lost. On August 17, however, I was still riding high from my incident with Ignatieff, and when i headed out to the Greenhouse to pluck some tomatoes for our supper, I couldn’t resist.

“Seamus! Come here! There’s something in the greenhouse I have to show you!” No hello. No ‘how’s your wife and infant daughter.’ I just thugged him into coming to the greenhouse. The Kombucha was in there, of course, trying to catch a little afternoon heat.

“This is Kombucha! It’s a symbiotic community of a bacteria and a yeast! It makes a tea with Super health properties!”

“Oh! Are you an afficionado of this tea?”

“Not yet! But as you can see I am becoming one!”

Hippie One Up Pre emptive strike with the latest health craze out of California. Seamus recovered quickly and segued into telling me how he’d just discovered that menstrual blood was the world’s best garden fertilizer. Clearly I had him on the ropes. Finish him!

“Yeah, totally!. I’ve been using my menstrual blood for years.” (Implicit: You, Seamus, have to go begging for menstrual blood, having none of your own. Don’t you imagine I was born with the intuitive knowledge that my menstrual blood is the most nutritious possible substance, being as it ismy monthly offering of food and a nest for my unborn babies?) Kaboom! Who’s the hippie now!

Man, I felt like such an asshole after this conversation. What a thug! And to use my Kombucha, my sweet Kombucha, to bolster my own thuggish ego so as to not come down from the rush of thugging Michael Ignatieff. I did indeed apologize to my Kombucha. Have not yet had the opportunity to apologize to Seamus, but you know I think he’d be more offended. He’ll be coming out swinging next round, so I’ll have to be on guard for that.

Anyway, at some point the Kombucha started to go downhill. The culture floated to the bottom. Some websites (all Kombucha websites are still sketchy) promise that this doesn’t necessarily mean cultural collapse, but I had my doubts. I went on vacation. I just left it, up on a warm counter. It made me sad to think about it so I didn’t think about it. 

Finally, this weekend I decided it was time to look into it, as I hadn’t for nearly a month. I took off the covering, and the same sweet air, the same feeling of a smile came rushing up at me.

My heart leapt! Two distinct things were clear.

One: The Kombucha was rallying, had stabilized and decided it wanted to live in this cold and dusty Yukon, albeit in a strange form- but it was still growing bigger and continuing to ferment the tea, and flourishing at the bottom of the fishbowl. It wanted to live!

Two: There was some black mold growing on the top. In spite of the Kombucha culture’s decision to rally and continue on, some unwanted visitors were making their own fungal home in the Kombucha, and the entire community of sketchy Kombucha websites is unanimous in insisting that Kombucha thus invaded is unsafe.

I took her out to the compost in her little fishbowl, and I tell you, she was cheerful to the end. It was windy and cold and my hands were unprotected but I stood out there for nearly fifteen minutes, holding it above the compost bin but not dropping it it- how could I? It was very sad. The culture managed, in my state, to transmit some of her joyful giggles to me- how could she inspire such laughter, such happiness, floating silent in a bowl? It is a mystery.I took one last whiff of the fragrant ferment. I poured her out.

Epilogue: As I promised the Kombucha as I poured it out, I have a clone- the other half of the dehydrated mother culture. My house is no place for it, but I know two beautiful women in Downtown Whitehorse with a sunny  and well insulated apartment warmed by radiant heat, not wood fire. I’m going to give it to them. I’ll keep you posted. And if someone would like to donate an old digital camera to this blog (c/o H. R. Alden, 110-200 Lobird Road, Whitehorse, YT, Y1A 5V4), I’ll post a picture of these lovely ladies in the act of rehydrating and bringing to life this fine and mysterious, this cheerful and magical culture-pet.

Did Anyone Else notice that Newsweek chose to explore masculinity three days after I did?

mmm hmm. Finger On The Pulse!

Listen, I tried to read their article. I even did read it, sort of, but I didn’t understand it. Is it because I’m a poor reader? No! these articles are terrible! They can’t decide what they want to be. Who they want to be. What they want to say. It was so timid. They didn’t even talk about boys making out with each other. Just statistics, and Grab Bags of theories about who men are, and how they have defined themselves, and cutesy references to the men of the past. There was even a chart of the highs and lows of masculine icons over the last 100 years. Also posturing as being academic and prudent. Listen, I surely could have read more attentively. I’m also sure there was a thesis in there somewhere. But what was this thesis? Maybe,  ‘Something seems to be happening.’

Something is happening on this blog, also, and it’s a real danger, too. Media! Media! Media! I could talk to you every day about media. It’s so easy to get hot under the collar about culture and media. It’s so easy to make smart remarks and criticize and come off looking intellectual. But it’s not worth it. It’s not! And you deserve better from me! What is this, reality TV? A news show about reality tv? I am pretty sure you come here for something more real.

The best thing for me to do with Pop Culture is ignore it. That’s right. I’m going to start right now. Here’s some local culture.

This isn’t my own sourdough starter. I am using file photos because my camera is still missing (If anyone has an old digital camera they would like to donate to this blog, pelase send it to 110-200 Lobird Road, Whitehorse, YT, Y1A 5V4. I’ll reward you with an exclusive picture of one of the cats looking sexy).

Funny story about Sourdough. Last winter I had a nice starter going, but I got a yeast infection in May. I went on a Candida cleanse (let’s get to the root of the problem, right?), and about five days into the cleanse I checked in with my sourdough starter- sniff sniff- and Oh Ho! Candida Incubator! I could smell it, that Candida Yeast, and I knew it on sniff. Some minuscule drip of spittle, perhaps, had fallen from my lips into my starter, and it took over, proliferated, grew, multiplied. Nothing left to do with this starter but throw it in the compost. “Candida Incubator!” I yelled, and then I threw it in the compost. This is a good lesson. Fermentation is all the rage these days amongst hippie women,

God Love Them, but we have to be careful about what we’re fermenting. We have to make sure we’re not putting the spores of harmful symbionts in a glass jar where they can grow, and develop new powers, and eat all our nice rye flour. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yes, there’s probably a metaphor here which can be extrapolated to popular culture. But I Won’t be the one to Explore it! Ha!

More Local Culture.

This woman

And this dog

have recently shown up in my life in a big way. (File photos, of course. They both have longer hair now, and a lot of new ideas.) Nothing grows culture like two women who really get each other, hanging out all the time. It’s like putting white sugar in your sourdough starter. It’s like, ‘These bitches win the Nobel Prize for their research into their own Lives.’

Yesterday we went walking around the lake, in the snowy autumn forest, and the dog wore a red hankerchief. I felt exactly like I was in a hunting story. Exactly like it. Only I wasn’t hunting.

The dog was hunting. I promised I would field dress and roast anything she caught. And I got very excited by her powerful huntress moves. I made wooping noises every time she loped majestically out of the trees, some squirrel just evading her. Yes, she was hunting squirrels, or so she thought, but the squirrels were clearly just messing with her. The squirrels were hunting their own amusement.

Speaking of squirrels, did you know they eat mushrooms?

!

I mean, i had known this as a ‘nature fact’ for some time, but this summer I actually saw a squirrel running up a tree with a mushroom in his mouth. How did he know it wouldn’t poison him, or make his mind all freaky? Do you think he has a field guide? Maybe scratched into the bark of the special ‘squirrel library tree.’

Okay, obviously the nature of ‘animal knowing’ cannot be described in cutesy anthropomorphic ways. Neither can it be understood by me! I guess I’ll put on a suit and call it instinct! Ha ha ha! Hurrah! Onward, Squirrel, with your mysterious but total knowledge of your environment!

I Also learned firsthand that slugs can eat deadly poisonous mind altering Santa Mushrooms. Remember these?

On a recent walk I found clusters of these mushrooms, all being munched up by huge slugs.

Here we have an artists’ rendition of what was actually happenning

(image from http://ferntreestudio.blogspot.com/, permission pending)

What happens to these slugs? Do you think slugs are always ‘Hanging with Santa’ in their minds?

They didn’t seem to be dead or dying. I guess it just affects them differently.

pretty cool, hey?

Anyway, on a last note, the snow is falling here in Whitehorse, and it’s the end of the hunting season for my kitties, so I would just like to say I’m very sorry, and thank you for being you, to all the little Animals, furred, feathered, and, uhh, bugs, who’s untimely deaths continue to inspire and keep real the name of this blog. Nothing cute about it.

Let us take it as a starting that the culture is unhappily insane.

For those unprepared to take this as a proof, Consider the cover of this month’s Sports Afield Magazine.

Sane, Joyful, life-affirming cultures do not produce high-gloss, widely-distributed magazines dedicated to facilitating the hunting of animals who are facing extinction, such as Grizzlies, Buffalos, and Caribous, in places where laws are lax enough to allow these atrocities, such as Alaska, and game ranches designed to guide you through your own real Canadian/African/Alaskan wilderness kill your own endangered species experience. But this is not about this blog’s on-going mission to expose and bring down Sports Afield Magazine (send hatemail to 15621 Chemical Lane Huntington Beach, CA 92649 [yes that is their real mailing address]). (Look at how beautiful that moose’s eyes are. Anyway!)

This is about what’s going on in Men’s Fashion.

And all the strange new trends in mens fashion, and all the strange new trends in selling men, and marketing to men.

And men as sex symbols in a new and disturbing way.

Look, I can see their ribs.

At the bookstore where I work, we have a growing selection of magazines about men’s fashion, and the images of the men in these magazines are fascinating. They are sexually provocative, for sure, and they are exploring male fashion characters in a new way. The men featured don’t have the male model’s historical ‘He-man goes to the office’ look. Many of them are scrawny and androgynous. Many of them don’t look self- assured. Some of them are on secret missions, so that’s cool. Some have gaunt faces. Some of them were clearly nerds in high school. Many seem to have British DNA. Don’t pretend you don’t know. Some of this seems really interesting and creative to me. I’m also disturbed. The question of male identity is on the table, and some of the answers presented are the same bad old answers we have for women.

The fashion is not functional anymore. It’s decorative. These men are dis-empowered sex objects, and the fashion is there to decorate them, and to inspire fantasies, and to sell clothes and cosmetics to an increasingly insecure and body- image obsessed generation of men.

Obviously, making money off men by making them as insecure as women is the driving factor in this cultural shift. Good Job, insane culture. Now we have men with eating disorders.

But I would like to discuss some other causes and effects around this issue.

First Question: Who is the female counter-part to all these coiffed, groomed, well-dressed, insecure men? Is it equally scrawny, high-fashioned, hairless females?

Nope. It’s me. 

Yep. Barely-groomed, physically powerful, supremely confident, bathe-once-a-week me. These men need a strong woman to make them feel safe, and to overwhelm them with her aroma. It’s not about window dressing anymore. These men want to be dominated. Or are they just being told to act like they want to be dominated? I can’t tell.

I must throw in here: I took a break after writing that section. John, my husband, was working on this computer and I asked him to copy and save the draft I’d just written. As he scanned past the pictures I’ve place above, I was A-shamed. Ashamed I was re-plastering those pictures. What if he were putting pictures of women like that on his blog? I wouldn’t like it, that’s what. I don’t like what’s being put on display.

This feels especially weird since I’ve just posited myself as the female counterpart to these images. Am I the consumer? Ah! No!That’s not what I want my relationships to look like, how a woman might respond to that man leaned over the water feature! I’m just saying that I am clearly the model for tomorrow’s woman.

My Second Question: Does all this sexualizing of our young men have anything to do with the growing trend towards casual male bisexuality?

Nobody likes the word bisexuality, fine, shall we just say experimenting? Whatever. Either way, the young men I’ve been talking to seem to be experiencing more and more of the freedoms young women have granted themselves (and each other) for years: The freedom to have a crush on one of your same-gender friends, and for that crush to sometimes manifest physically. Hurray! Good times, good learning, good loving! Good job, young men.

We can’t thank the fashion industry for this emancipation, or can we? Maybe in part! I put this to a very smart friend, and she said this:  “They’re dressing for each other now. Once that starts, it’s on.”I think this is a very astute comment. And a positive trend. Interesting Growth venue for male identity.

Not Really a Question: Scene-ster stay at home Dads. 

I was in Vancouver recently. This is a phenomenon.

That’s all. I just want to note that i saw many many guys in hoodies and skate shoes pushing strollers at 2:00 in the afternoon. I am actually pretty excited about this, and i feel like it’s  related to the topic at hand. Many women right now, myself included, seem to be interested exploring in their power and influence in the world. Great. Let’s leave our cute boyfriends at home in their comfortable pants to watch the kids. I think this is awesome. Growth venue for male identity.

Question Four: This is so messed up, right?

really, this is all so messed up, particularly how young men are being portrayed in the media lately. Probably you’re aware of Tayler Lautner, our current Teen Wolf Symbol. He has 18 years old, as the French would say. Us women at the bookstore, we were all drooling over some very racy photos of him in In a certain magazine’s fall fashion preview. Fashion? yeah right. More like fall workout preview. Anyway, I won’t republish those photos. 

Here is where the party stopped for us. We were reading the astonishingly informative news captions which accompanied these photographs, and one of them posited the question: “What has Taylor been eating to fuel this astonishing physical transformation?” ‘answer: “mostly meat cooked by his parents.”

Meat cooked by his parents. Meat cooked by his parents. Oh, this is a child! I forgot! What are we doing to our children? Has anyone seen Justin Beiber lately? I will publish this photo, because we all as adults should be aware of this, and having a public conversation about this. This is a photo of Justin from one of the dozens of widely distributed magazines devoted every month to Justin and a handfull of other child stars.

This is the youngest looking sixteen year old I know. Who is the consumer of this photo?  I don’t think it’s only produced for 13 year old girls. It’s for all of us. It’s a product of the culture for the members of the culture. This is acceptable now

This is Britney in a school girl outfit all over again, but I’m de-sensitized to it happening to young women. Justin, poor Justin here, is helping me be aware of how terrible this is. This is awful.

Final Question: is this process a necessary means to a greater end?

 Will male culture really only understand the epidemic of eating disorders when it hits their sons? Will ‘The new male physical insecurity’ TM, in the long run, dissipate and develop into greater understanding and compassion amongst all of us?

I don’t know. My heart is with the Justin Beibers of the world. I hope they can relax, focus on beloved hobbies, and take a few less baths. Get those natural oils going. Develop love for your own aroma, and your own intrinsic fashion sense. You too, girls.

With Love,

Hilde

This is Stella blu. She is a fellow Tumblr blogger.

Isn’t she lovely? Also very interesting.

She lives in LA, which I am pretty sure is a great place in a lot of ways, for example: carribean food, live music, Gillian Anderson buying her groceries. But there is a lot of concrete, and really  nowhere good for dogs to run around, and nowhere nice to smoke weed, all stealth, in the out-of-doors. Like in a field. or by a little lake. under a tree at dusk in a wetland habitat.

I live in Whitehorse, where we have pretty much nothing but free green grass (plus trees and snow, also wetlands. And dogs. Teams of dogs.) Many good places to smoke + frolic. I really feel for Stella on this one.

Here, I read Stella’s early August blog entry, ‘Lack of Free Green Grass,’ all text by her. Enjoy!

Two Incidents of August 17th which left me wondering if I could have said something different. Something better. It must be noted that The incidents are illustrated with file photos (has anyone seen my camera?). I wrote up these conversations within a few hours of their happening, to try to preserve my clearest memories of what was said.

Incident Number One, in which I horn in on Michael Ignatieff’s Gladhanding.

I was backing up in my car out of a parking spot and my friend Kristy, who was in the back seat with her 4 year old son, said “Is that Iggy?” It was indeed, Michael Ignatieff, Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, strolling in front of the Edge Water pub at the shaggy end of Main Street, with a small crowd of Media and Liberal party faithful.

I got back into the parking spot and got out and yelled, “You’ve got to stop supporting the tar sands!”

He came over and said, “What gave you the impression that I support the tar sands?” He’s trying out a Jedi mind trick here- we both know he supports the Tar Sands. He wants to confuse me.

Then I said, “Because- Because friends of mine have been at your talks and you were supporting the tar sands.” And then (I probably pointed at him) “I need you, as the leader of the opposition, to be strong on shutting the tar sands down.”

He said, “I probably can’t satisfy you there,” and then he said “We need to green our energy industry,” and then he started talking about CO2 emissions, I can’t remember exactly but he was really focused on CO2 emissions. Politicians just Love talking about CO2 emissions these days. It’s like candy in their mouths.

I don’t really know how to talk about these numbers, even though I know it’s so much bullshit, so I said, “What really concerns me is that the process of the tar sands requires steam to extract it. We’re draining our rivers. What we’re doing is trading clean water for oil.”

And then he said, “Yes actually. So-and-so, our such-and-such shadow minister, is working on a policy paper. He will be delivering the paper to the House on the Athabasca Water Resource Management (type-of-thing, with buzzwords). And then I said, “I need you, as the opposition, to not just be some guy who came to Canada to oversee resource extraction.” (I definitely pointed at him this time).

And then he said, “Well, the whole country’s built on resource extraction. We need oil. Gotta put gas in the car, gotta put gas in the car that drives your children. We need to keep the country moving.” (This was in a very reasonable-guy tone of voice, and he actually pointed to the child in the back of my car. This is how his handlers have coached him to act like a regular man’s man, instead of a hereditary Russian Count, which he is.) I’m pretty sure he also said, “You’re driving.”

(This is where I am kicking myself. I should have said, ‘Yes! I have to drive because there’s no public transportation in this town! Why not put people to work by aggressively investing in public transportation. Mend your evil ways!” )

Here is what I said: “I need to inspire you to build the green economy, not just rhetoric. It needs to actually happen.”

And then he was like, “Yeah, it’s really good to talk to people like you, to hear your concerns,” and I was like “Yeah.” I just sort of waved and got back into my car. I expected him to shake my hand but he did not. He sort of left me hanging on the hand-shake. I got back in the car and I beeped the horn as I was getting going, I accidentally beeped the horn, and it was right in their faces. They all looked, like, ‘is this part of her protest?’ And then I pulled an illegal and slightly dangerous U-turn, because I was all nervous and jittery. Kristy, in the back, and her little boy enjoyed the dangerous moves. Then Kristy talked sort of trashy about Ignatieff and Stephen Harper. All in all it was pretty great, and the media caught up with me on the street and asked me to spell my name, which means I’ll probably be in the stories of his stupid, glad-handing visit.

Still, I wish I had been more aggressive. More on-point. This guy is such a Lurch. He has no imagination. Let me tell you, I have never had much confidence in this fellow, especially after he killed that cool Progressive Coalition Idea. He never knows what he wants to say, especially about Canada. And he has this really terrible way of holding his mouth, especially in person, like he’s afraid the truth, or bloody teeth will fall out.  His snobby hemming and hawing at me about Policy Papers did nothing to improve my opinion. Policy Papers. That’s really great. I’m really glad someone is here to step up to the plate and save Canada from sinking into a disgusting tar pit. Lead us, Ignatieff! Lead us to your Policy Paper!

Here is a Liberal Party leader I would have followed, at least into a progressive Coalition.

People said this guy had no guts. People were fleeced! Look at him! “I am coming for you, Harper! And when I get my progressive coalition I am going to feed you to a starving Polar Bear!”

“Mom, can we please have Stephen Harper for dinner? We’re really hungry. It’s hot out.”

“Yeah, i can’t take the heat, Mom. The only thing that would cool me off is Stephen Harper’s cold Reptilian heart.”

“No, darlings, but you can probably have Michael Ignatieff after he’s been the Prime Minister of Canada for one miserable term of selling off all our resources as cheaply as possible to the Americans who put him in power.”

But I digress. Stay Tuned for….

August 17th Incident Number Two, in which I am kind of a Creep in my Neighbor’s Greenhouse.