Stolen Excellence

(or, A Childhood Cheat Repents At Leisure)

At the age of twelve I committed my first wilfully dishonest act. I do not mean to suggest that up until that point I had been a shining example of childlike virtue and purity because this was certainly not the case – I had lied to stay out of trouble, perfected an innocent “who me?” look and learned to carefully replace my step-fathers orange jockey shorts back in the drawer after putting them on the dog for the afternoon. What I did that year, however, was deliberate premeditated fraud for personal gain – I cheated during the Canada Fitness Award testing to win the Award of Excellence.

Grade 7 was a weird year all around. We were the oldest kids at the school and we had the best teacher most of us would ever have. Mr. Reese was fun and relaxed and he somehow managed to make us fit together as a group as we never had before. The carefully established pecking order my classmates and I had been working on for six years was suddenly suspended. Further evidence that hell had frozen over was the fact that I joined every single sports team. I have never been a joiner and to my recollection at that age I did not really excel at anything other than reading. This demented joining of teams found me playing basketball and volleyball, running track and long distance and executing a diffident triple jump. My performance in these activities can only be described as consistently inconsistent – some days I drew on a sort of magnificent mania and found I could run and score with ease, other days I was floppy and actually kind of spastic.

At some point that strange year we performed the then annual rite of all Canadian children - the Canada Fitness Award testing. We trooped down to the gym day after day during “Fitness Week” to confront again the activity stations with their humiliating companion posters that specified, with nifty graphics and statistics, what was normal and what was exceptional. Marching in orderly lines in our gym strip to be timed and measured seems to me now to be the misplaced memory of some Soviet child. I remember the events in strange flash memories like after a car accident: the murderous Flexed Arm Hang that was the downfall of many a fat child, the Standing Long Jump that unintentionally prepared me for the large puddles caused by the eternally leaf-clogged Vancouver drains, the Shuttle Run performed with little home made bean bags that smelled compellingly of floor dust, hellish feeble bum-sagging attempts at Push-ups, the Endurance Run with its lap after lap of the gym dodging classmates and old Christmas decorations, the 50 Metre Dash in the rain in the playground, and that exercise that pains and eludes into adulthood - the Sit-up. And just in case fitness was not reward enough in itself there were the awards – the humiliating participation pin, the badges of bronze, silver, and gold and that holiest of holies – the AWARD OF EXCELLENCE. By Grade 7 I had at least one of each except the elusive Award of Excellence with its distinguishing extra crest on top of the ordinary circular badge that, in my memory at least, had stars and spelled out the name of the award in embroidered letters.

I was twelve, in the last gasps of childhood, in the last days of that manic age of collecting trading cards, stickers, badges and pins. As a non-joiner I had missed out on Brownies and Girl Guides. Badges representing achievement outside of those clubs were hard to come by and this one represented achievement in a universally experienced hell. I wanted to sew the whole progression from Bronze to Excellence on the sleeve of my satin roller skating jacket to demonstrate my manifest athletic prowess to the world. I wanted it very badly.

Grade 7 was my last chance and when all of the stars aligned and I took advantage. Our wonderful, trusting teacher foolishly put my classmates and me on a sort of honour system to keep each other’s scores. I practically killed myself with subterfuge and childish intrigue to get the scores I needed. When necessary I repeated events over and over. I worked so hard that in the end I felt no guilt at all - I felt my efforts alone were worthy of the award. And I reassured myself that as I was on every team it was the first and only year where it might potentially be believable that I could be “excellent” enough to actually merit the award. I cheated my ass off and was granted the Award of Excellence.

In retrospect I cannot fully explain this lapse of ethics, my parents certainly taught me better, but I learned then that whatever your parents do not manage to drum into you the universe inevitably will. The year I cheated was the year they changed the award. At the presentation ceremony in front of the whole school I was handed something that I did not recognize. My coveted Award of Excellence looked like exactly like a gold and was distinguished only by a different background colour– no more crest, no more stars, no more embroidered writing. I had my first experience of karma before I knew the word. I learned the lesson early and well and have taken it to heart. I no longer try to mess with fate because I have learned that fate messes back.

Happy Canada Day

579

I don’t think about my fingernails. I type for a living so beyond keeping them clean and keeping them short they just don’t signify for me unless I have a hangnail.
I am clearly in the minority.
There are 579 nail salons listed for Vancouver. That seems like a lot to me. And I guess because there are 579 it gets hard after a while to come up with a unique name when you are setting up shop. Vancouver is a big multicultural city, which means lots of variety in food, lots of potential for misunderstanding and apparently really great nail salon names.

My favorite for its abrupt simplicity is Steve Nail. I drive by Steve Nail quite often and have developed a rather elaborate fiction about the place that I do not ever intend to destroy by actually setting foot inside. I picture a Filipino version of Vernon Hardapple (from the movie Wonder Boys) answering the phone with an emphatic and heavily accented “Steve Nail!” In my imagination Steve is a horrible boss but he makes all his “ladies” feel special, which keeps them coming back. Steve sings along in a showy way to 3 cd’s (Milli Vanilli, Ricky Martin,the original London soundtrack to Cats) played over and over, except on the days that he is sad and then he plays Air Supply and doesn’t sing, and no-one talks and the “ladies” pat him and are worried.
So Steve Nail got me thinking and a fast read through all 579 names led to this list – in less than five minutes. Really, I was spoiled for choice.

Grotte Nail Spa Inc – this is not a good name – grotty, grout. Also “grotte” comes from the Greek meaning crypt – all very yuck associations.
Sassy Nail – this is just annoying.
Professionail – They put two words together, wow.
Twenty Two Nails – this must be the salon for people with congenital deformities and yet for some reason also has a sort of ominous crucifixion type vibe.
Chrysalis Your Urban Refuge for Nailz – you know its urban because of the “z” because everyone knows if you put a “z” on anything it becomes really street, though this message is somewhat undermined by the inclusion of the words “chrysalis” and “refuge”.
Tips and Toes – this is the salon with dried flowers in white wicker baskets and a wallpaper border running around the room with ducks in bonnets, I fucking hate ducks in bonnets.
White Angel Nail’s – what do the nails possess? Now I am really curious.
Best Top Nail – this has an awesome ESL thing going on. Also saying it fast out loud is really fun.
Nail FX – they drive fast, jump through widows, blow up and yet…stay shiny.
Phansastic Nails – why ph? Seriously, why?
Nails Care – they do, don’t they. They really, really do.
Frieda’s Nail Garage – I simply cannot picture the nail garage, unless it is actually attached to Frieda’s house.

Despite the desperate creativity going into the naming of these businesses, nowhere in my scan of the listings did the words clean, healthy or natural appear, which I think is kind of scary and also a strange sort of testament to just how weird the whole nail thing really is.
The bizarre store names go beyond nail salons. Other favorites of mine are Golden Spray clothing store – which is just unfortunate, and Emotional Rescue Hair, Etc. All I can say about that last one is the owner better be a licensed therapist or a huge Stones fan or this is one hell of a guarantee to put on a haircut. And really, after already promising emotional rescue, doesn’t the Etc. seem somehow excessive? It makes them look finally like they are just showing off.

Game trails

I have recently become obsessed with shortcuts. I have started noticing them and taking pictures of them. And when you start looking you see them everywhere, lines between anywhere and somewhere else. They cut across weedy vacant lots, school fields, run parallel to roads, and mostly connect two places I don’t go. We use them so often when are children but when we grow up we seem to just get out of the habit – or maybe we just start caring about our shoes.
The thing I love about shortcuts now is how very winding they are. By definition they should be the shortest cut – as the crow flies at the very least. But they aren’t - they wander. We proudly live our lives in boxes and straight lines and yet here, in this moment when we are trying to save time and distance, we meander. I love that all of the feet it took to create the path were responding to the same subtle dips, to roots and bunches of grass. It reminds me, in the middle of the city, that we are animals. I love this evidence of the freedom and mess we allow ourselves when we are unselfconscious – like during sex and laughter.

For one day only!

Now, lest this whole thing become altogether too pretty and maudlin I should confess my love of mess, sleaze and sideshows. I love cheap motels and roller coasters. I am sure I was a carnie in a former life. I am convinced I have been a series of cruel men. I have no patience with people who claim to have been Catherine the Great or Napoleon. If I lived before I was a large breasted cockney bar wench with six bastards clinging to my skirts, I was a cowboy, a sailor and a thief.
In this life I love things which are orderly, smooth and clean. But there is a part of me, a not so secret part of me that adores the tawdry. I take pictures at carnivals, the more cheap and Mexican the better. I am fascinated by conjoined twins, gypsies, dirt roads and things held together with twine. Impermanence has its own architecture; a meandering, transient perfection.

No place for poetry

I make the critical error of talking about poetry at work with Melissa and them I’m fucked, surrounded as I am by paper clips, message pads, minutia and my own ennui. Talking about poetry and art and ideas at work can actually hurt when you aren’t a poet or an artist or a scholar – they make you forget your place, or maybe put you in it.
From about the age of 11 I used to meet my mother in the kitchen at 3:00 am (I come from a long line of practiced insomniacs) and sometimes we would trade poems. We would read each other our favorite passages and thrill at the sharing of the words and the cadence and that perfect truth expressed by another human that made us feel somehow finally understood. This was wonderful. I would go back to bed and think, “I never need to sleep again.” I would be full of racing thoughts and images and fleeting snatches of perfect understanding that I would never, ever, be able to communicate later.
The time for poetry is Saturday afternoon - when the house is clean, when you can make a long-distance phone call that inadvertently lasts 6 hours, when you can drink too much and say too much and then apologize and sleep it off. Poetry is a distilled and spare and heady truth that may cause me to quit my job or never, ever, sleep again.

In no order other than that which comes from my fingers now: Yeats, Emily Dickinson (and for being a shut-in), e.e. cummings (and for using all lower case), Michael Ondaatje, Charles Bukowski (and for staying lucid long enough to write any of it down, for not losing the scraps of paper under the sofa and for the title “Play the piano drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers begin to bleed a bit”), and all the others - recited to me haltingly by impassioned others, or read to me by my mother at 3:00 am. Thank you.

Today this photo

This woman sat opposite me on the bus. She was very carefully dressed in a stained yet oddly jaunty nautical ensemble. She had dyed hair and painted fingers and a carefully tied hat. This all distracts from the fact that she is also very old. I have seen her since but I have never heard her speak. She is a wearer of outfits.
She blends with the bus and puts her feet up.
I love her.
The graffiti beside her reads "latino lover".
The whole thing pleases me more than I can say.

Blackbird

I think I need more red winged blackbirds. I need grackles and starlings. I need the thrill of birdsong. I grew up in a desert. In a desert filled with orchards and it was all birds. As I child I measured the seasons by their comings and goings.
In the spring I sat on the chilly front steps in warm sunlight and listened to the blackbirds liquid exalted trills as they clung sideways to the bullrushes. All black and red boldness. They arrived with the robins and the finches and everything was a shouting at the thaw, and the sweet, sweet dirt.
In summer, in the dry dusty heat under willow trees, I sat with no skin touching other skin and heard the tired flap of crows. At dusk the peewits burst from the tall grass and landed and my long brown-skinned, bare-footed dusk was full of the short sound that named them.
The fall was filled with gatherings. The small dark birds would line up on the power lines for days. They would gather and chatter and wheel away as one and return and then suddenly they would be gone and the air would be empty except for the smells of burning and sound of chainsaws and dry stalks clattering. Then, weeks later, on the day we put up the storm windows the geese would go and those long forlorn v’s would point away from where I lived.
I live now in a place filled with the endless sound of crows and seagulls, the same lack of variety and pace as the endless green and alien wetness.
I miss the blackbirds. I miss the measure.

Too early for all this

On the bus listening to the new Modest Mouse and so, so happy. I love a new album from a favorite band, book from favorite author, movie from favorite director. I listen with my heart outsized in my chest and I want to paint huge canvases filled with flowers and tiny horses and the kind of details that restore people’s faith in goodness. I can’t paint so I think I will write a poem about a specific upper lip. I want to say aloud the word “balalaika”, whisper to myself the word “wasps”, just for the sensual pleasure of their utterance. I want to learn to play the autoharp, banjo and squeezebox – to be the singer of countrified sea-shanties. I want to act on my urge to get a tiny tattoo of an anchor at the base of the thumb on my right hand. All this before 9:00 AM.

Pronk

I started thinking about what my sister said about her blog – that she gets more hits from her post that included a picture of a mountain goat than anything else, she says that goat should be her mascot.
So I thought I should put a picture of a gazelle here. And not just any gazelle, but a tiny little gazelle that marks its territory by poking sticks into its eye glands – I mean, of course!
The other thing I love about gazelles, or really I guess what I love about the English language, is that someone came up with a word to specifically describe that springy bit of locomotion we have all seen on a million documentaries about Africa. You know what I mean, that bouncy, high jumping, wild-eyed thing that gazelles do when the lion attacks.
This specific thing is not called anything as pedestrian as running. No, this needs its own word, this is called pronking.
Pronking – just spend a minute with that.

All good

I kiss my dog and it is all there – his perfect smell of grass and fabric softener from sleeping in my bed and just that little hint of nacho chip from the paw area. I kiss him and he endures me, he knows the drill.
Let it be known – I am a sniffer. Or rather, I am a nuzzler. That’s what Kevin always said my superhero name should be “The Nuzzler.” Fighting crime with spontaneous displays of affection.
I nuzzle people and things I love. I need to know that perfect personal smell of them. With my cats it has always been that dry dust, long grass, sun basking fur smell that gets me. A hollow smell that you get for one moment and then pass through. You have to back off and then come back at it. With Kevin it was his right eyebrow, never the left.

Rain on hot blacktop, resinous pine needles fallen in drifts and sun baked, fresh dirt, clean sheets, clean skin, fresh sawdust, new concrete, drugstores, bakeries, and my dog’s paws.

That which makes no sense delights me