Hemlock B Bootsalotta

Divorce decree arrived in the mail on Friday. I am officially disentangled as of January 5.

As I put it to a friend, "I appear to be experiencing an emotion. Or rather, three emotions in a trench-coat."

It's a relief to have it done with.

It's sad that it had to be done. It was good for longer than it was bad, and I will miss those parts.

It's a bigger sad that they don't seem to be particularly affected by it. I was important to somebody once and now I'm not.

Such is life. I had a drink about it on the weekend and now I will tuck that part of my life away in the past and move on.

I keep thinking "Oh it's been about a week since I last posted, I should update with something" and then I look at my account and a month has gone by.

Time is from the Before Times. Or something. Not that I was ever good at updating before, mind you.

***

A late-night conversation[r] about supporting the companies that make the software we use led to me renewing my old DW paid account so I now have 60 icons pop back up. I scrolled through them and most of them are variations on a single joke. Prepared to be bombarded.

Gonna retire my John Cleese one though, turns out he's a TERF shitbag. So fuck him.

You know, there was a time when I really would have been saddened by that. He said some things about mental health and his own struggles with depression that were valuable to hear at a time when it was important to me and so I thought of him as one of the good guys. But at this point? So many people I have looked up to over the years have revealed themselves to be shitbags that I find I'm beyond caring. You're now in a position of privilege and oh look! You showed your ass. Into the dumpster with you. I'm too old and too bitter and I have no time or emotion to waste on you any more.

***

I took last week off work and I had so many plans for things I was going to do around the house. And I did none of them! I spent the week hanging with friends ([r] AND [d]) and playing video games.

It was entirely non productive and it was great.

Now I'm back at work and I feel like I've been rolled over by one of those big rolling machines they used to have on Coyote & Roadrunner cartoons. (What the hell were those even supposed to be for?)

***

Axe has apparently been having an allergic reaction to something at his AirB&B that made him itchy and miserable. He asked if he could come home a day early so he is currently passed out on the couch with a cat on him. Both he and the cat appear to be quite content with this situation.

***

[r]Remote. Do I even have to say that any more? I feel like this is important information for people to have if they might have to make decisions about my sanity ever. [r] for remote, [m] for in the same place but masked [d] for in the same place and not always masked but we stayed outside and made sure we kept a safe physical distance. I can have one [d] a fortnight, one [m] a week, and as many [r] as my brain weasels will let me.

So a couple of people said they were interested in reading the Adam Clayton story.

I got this story from my uncle, so if you have any quibbles with the details you can take it up with him.

Anyway, my uncle used to be in An Garda Síochána in Dublin. (He retired years ago.) In '89 he picked up Adam Clayton in a club for drugs. He didn't specify at the time what kind of drugs, but the newspapers afterwards all said marijuana. As my uncle put it, they normally wouldn't have cared but he was "playin' big man, passing it around, and being very loud about it". So my uncle brought him into the station.

Now according to my uncle they had an unofficial policy of not really wanting to arrest Very Famous People for minor shit. They didn't want the reporters, or the publicity, and they especially did not want fans showing up to try to get in to see their hero. So normal protocol was to shake a finger, say "Sir, Thou Shalt Chill Henceforth" and the Very Famous Person makes a shamed face says, "Sorry Won't Happen Again." Then everybody goes about their business and the dance starts over the following weekend.

Only what Clayton actually did was to swan into my uncle's office, sit in my uncle's chair, and put his boots up on my uncle's desk. And say, "Do you know who I am?"

So my uncle did what anybody would do - well, what anybody in my family would do - which is to say, "Yes I do. You're my nick". And threw him into a jail cell. And apparently his bosses weren't too happy about it, but once charges were laid they had to follow through.

(When my sister went to visit my family in Dublin, he asked her if she was a U2 fan, and took her into the station to show her the cell.)

So in summary, in 1989 Adam Clayton got charged with possession of marijuana. But he got arrested for sassing my uncle.

So I buried my mother on Friday.



True fact: I am a disaster human who says "fuck" in a church when everybody is looking at me.

Apparently I am also a responsible adult who can be trusted to organize the finances of another human being without messing it up too badly. Go figure.



Brain weasels have been SUPER LOUD for the last couple of days so I'm feeling more disaster human than responsible adult. And that "drink less" plan has been emphatically defenestrated.



And I've been listening to Stabbing Westward all night. I feel like I should be sitting in my bedroom painting my fingernails black.

So Convergence bids are up for next year, and it turns out it's Louisville vs Toronto.

I have to admit it would be kind of cool for a Convergence to happen in Canada where I could actually just hang out and party with people.

(FWIW, I know at least one of the organizers and I think she would do a good job.)


(Number 26 holy shit.)

I should rename this blog to "I've been meaning to make an update but..."

So point form.

The Good
The job is going great. I got my yearly performance review last week, and it basically consisted of two managers sitting in a room and telling me how great I am for 10 minutes. Bonus & raise numbers haven't been finalized but they hinted that they asked for something good for me, so fingers crossed.

And the really part is that Axel is working again and oh my god I can't even tell you how much a relief it is to have that extra income. I've been holding my breath waiting for the financial juggling act to finally come crashing down around my ears and now maybe it... won't. I will be celebrating by replacing some of my more threadbare work clothes.

The Bad
I am soooo tired.

Work is kicking my ass.

House is kicking my ass.

I got kinda used to having people home during the day who could take care of stuff while I was at work. Axel used to make dinner most nights during the week, but since he's now getting home later than I do that's no longer an option. Me cooking during the week is just flat out not going to fucking happen, so instead I've gone back to cooking on weekends and packing containers into the fridge for reheating later. Sunday I had no fewer than four different things going at the same time. (Plus I made breakfast. I think for the foreseeable future I'm going to call it quits on making weekend breakfasts).

Meanwhile, poor D has been so sick. His doctor reduced his immune suppressants because long term use of those things is dangerous and he's been absolutely miserable. It's been like having the flu for going on a month with no relief in sight.

The Ugly
My province is a shit-show. My country isn't much better. I vote, I write letters, I sign petitions. I mostly avoid reading the news.

I feel like all I can do is keep plugging away.

There was a "heightened security alert" downtown last week that was apparently caused by some guy threatening to copy-cat the van attack.

Nothing actually happened. But still, fuck that guy.

***************************


The Toronto District School Board has a program where adults can take classes in their empty schools in the evenings or during the summer. They offer everything from salsa dancing to basic car repair. I took a household electrician's class once many years ago and it was really worth it.

So I decided to sign up for intro Spanish, just for the heck of it. Duolingo has been great for learning to read, but less so for learning to speak it or understand what I hear. I figured being in a room full of people struggling with the same issues would get me past my initial reserve about mangling the language in front of people, and then after I could go join a meet-up group or something.

So because I am very very dumb, I signed up for a class in a high school. In July.

High schools don't have air conditioning.

It's my own damn fault, I know full well that schools are big brick ovens. There was even an article published about a year ago about how now that summers are getting longer and hotter what used to be about a two-week period of students rendered useless by the heat at the end of June has now stretched into two to three months. Last September was brutal, I can't imagine anybody being able to think clearly in that soup. And of course the online comments are full of people ranting about how when I were a lad we had no air conditioning and kids these days are so spoiled yada yada yada. Cause as we all know, the people who post to comment sections have never actually read the contents of these articles.

The school where the class is being held is one of the older ones in the city and a technical school to boot, so to say it's been subject to neglect would be the understatement of the year. And you know, it's one thing to read a headline about how the province has a $15 billion dollar repair backlog, it's quite another to be walking down the halls. Almost all of the lockers are some degree of broken. The paint is peeling, and there are regular patches on the walls where somebody has obviously filled in holes. None of the water fountains work, but it's probably just as well since I would lay down money that the pipes have lead in them anyway. In the bathroom there are only a handful of stalls that have doors, and there are obvious signs of mold damage everywhere. And of course, because the province had set aside the budget to cover 0.001% of it, our new Premier cancelled the funds.

It's become kind of a subject of horrified fascination for me. How bad will things get before somebody decides it's important? When kids and staff are regularly getting injured? Or will having roofs falling in on top of teenagers just become normal, like school shootings?

But you know, at least all those millionaires will be taken care of.

A lot of people who live in Toronto don't remember the days when we suffered from a bad Nazi infestation. They hear about these assholes on the news and they think these people are a small vocal minority that nobody takes seriously and yeah sure, they start out that way. They started out that way in the 80s. Probably in the 30s too.

So what with the rise in neo-nazis and alt-right all over the western world, we've had another local outbreak and they've been holding rallys at City Hall. In the interest of keeping them a small vocal minority and not something worse, some of the local folks have been holding counter-rallys. I finally managed to drag myself out of the house and attend one this weekend.

There were maybe 30 of them? It was kind of hard to get a head-count because they were boxed inside a wall of bicycle cops the whole time[1]. It was a weird mix. Mostly they looked to be Soldiers of Odin (most of whom showed up late, apparently they took the bus in from Peterborough) and some Proud Boys. There were also a cluster of evangelical Christians who were there because gays. And a couple of middle-aged suburban housewives of the type who get the vapours when they see a hijab.

The cops pretty much kept the two groups seperated but didn't stop people from arguing across the barrier. Mostly it was an effort to drown them out, although as the day dragged on that got harder. I now fully appreciate the value of of the air horns and vuvuzelas that some people brought, they are a lot easier on the throat. On the plus side they didn't get to march unless you count crossing the square inside a wall of police.

Of course the press was there and of course they interviewed both sides and of course they printed the Nazi's explanation they they were just there to protest Trudeau's economic policies without any caveats. At least the photo on the CBC website actually showed some of the white supremacist flags.

Favourite moment: One of the bicycle cops had a Punisher water bottle. I pointed it out to Axe and he in turn tried to point it out to one of the press cameras. She saw him though, and hid it.

Second favourite moment: The Japanese tourists taking selfies in front of the line of mounted riot cops.


[1] There were easily more cops than protesters.

For those of you reading this on Dreamwidth, LJ had a Question of the Day yesterday about whether or not modern musicians are less talented than the musicians from "Back in the Day". (Hint as to where the rest of this post is going: I said No.)

I think when people look back they remember the good stuff they enjoyed and tend not to remember how much of the truly bad and boring was also out there. I remember when I was high-school age with a radio in my room, flipping from station to station whenever a song came on that I hated - and I spent a hell of a lot more time knob-fiddling than I did listening. Eventually somebody turned me on to an independent station in Brampton that I could just barely pick up with a wire coat hanger taped to the back of my radio. That was where I first heard the Stranglers. the B-52's, Stiff Little Fingers, The Jam - so many bands that became 80's icons.

That radio station still technically exists, but it was taken over long ago by one of those big media conglomerates and now it plays the same crap that you hear on every other corporate station in North America. I did some research about a dozen years ago and I think out that outside of Universities there were a total of four independent stations left in the US and Canada combined. I wouldn't be surprised if even the last of those have since been bought up or pushed out.

I had just started University when Much Music started up. (MTV was launched only a year or two earlier.) The cool thing about the early days is that music videos were still a pretty new thing and so the station programmers were scrambling to find content, especially Canadian content. If you were a nobody just-starting-out band that had a friend with a camera you could get your video on the air, and they used to play some seriously weird shit, especially in the wee hours. Things settled down a bit as it became obvious that music videos were where record labels should be spending their marketing dollars, but there was still plenty of room for some creative programming.

Now that's all gone too. The station that used to own Much was taken over by some big entertainment giant. They don't play much music programming at all any more, and what they do is all the same mainstream shlock.

And I think that's where people in my age group get the idea that there is no good music around any more. They look at the music programming that used to have so much much variety and they think that since that's all crap now, that must mean that that's the music that's out there. They forget how the same thing happened to FM radio just a few years earlier.

I remember at some point in the 00's deciding I was going to find a bunch of new music to listen to - and I actually found a lot. On MySpace. Today when I want to do the same thing I go hunting for podcasts. I don't even know if that's the best route to take, it just happens to be the one I know about. If corporations do eventually succeed in strangling the Internet, creative people will just go do their thing somewhere else. And eventually somebody will tip off the old lady to where that is, and I'll go tagging along behind them.

And if previous patterns hold true, I'll do it about once every ten years.

Something I had intended to post about but forgot until a_carnal_mink just reminded me by mentioning Auslan. BC took me to Signs Restaurant for my birthday.

It was a pretty cool experience. The hostess seated us and introduced to our server and they walked us through some basic signs. (Yes and no are the only ones I remember.) The menu has the signs for ordering all the food and there are also flashcards that give you the common allergens and instructions like spicy, medium-rare, etc. There were framed pictures on the walls that showed numbers and the alphabet. The hostess was available for translation if we needed her, but we ended up just using our phones to look up any gaps. (How do I say, "I'd like another wine please"?)

BC has a little ASL, but I have had zero exposure prior to this. But I was able to communicate with no problem and the server was entirely good-humoured about teaching me words and correcting my pronounciation. And the food was excellent - I was completely stuffed when I left.

If I have a single complaint about the place it would be that it is very brightly lit. Which makes sense in an environment where all communication is visual but my eyes were very tired of it by the time we left.

So highly recommended if you are local.