Late but not Wrong: Sometimes it's not Worth Being Right

On Wednesday night, the Boston Bruins and Vancouver Canucks will step on the ice to put to rest a collective 80 years of futility, misery, and failure. Each team will seek to lift 35 lbs of Lord Stanley’s silver from the finely manicured hands of the NHL’s grinning marionette, league commissioner Gary Bettman, and, more importantly, lift itself from the nadir of mediocrity, gnawing doubt, and loserdom that has plagued it like rust and boll weevils in a rye wheat field ripe for the harvest.
Vancouver heads into the series having left its playoff feeblemindedness in the past with the seventh game, double overtime victory over the Chicago Blackhawks that, moments before Alex Burrows knuckled a slap shot past Chicago Blackhawks goaltender, Cory Crawford, seemed just another doomed effort that would leave local fans writhing in agony like a badly rolled joint in the hands of a high school dropout flogging week old mangoes to overweight hippies and naturopathic medicine majors on Vancouver’s nudist Wreck Beach. But, in a game that the former East Coast Hockey League player nearly single handedly carried for the home team, the Canucks finally put their old lady Mother Bates in the fruit cellar where she belongs. Since then, they have got down to some serious grave digging. The Nashville Predators, done in 6. The San Jose Sharks gone in 5.
Nevertheless, Vancouver fan finds himself gripped by a strange mix of hysterical optimism and crushing fear and trepidation. For a town that plunged into rioting in the streets following its game 7 loss to the New York Rangers in the 1994 final, nothing is more important than winning the Cup this time around and planning a parade that doesn’t involve chasing the local media to the Hooters’ rooftop in a haze of teargas and bitter, unhinged looting. For most fans, closing out this series will be bigger than the Olympic men’s ice hockey victory last year, simply because it will provide the validation that Canada’s paranoid westernmost province craves; yes, a Stanley Cup victory will elevate Vancouver and BC to the rarified glory of being a place in Canada that truly matters, in the way that Montreal and the overwhelming (past) dominance of the Canadiens matter, or Toronto and the 92/93 Jays’ World Series victories matter to the nation. The feelings of doubt and alienation that gnaw at the heart of Canucks’ fan will be but an ugly and receding dream if Luongo, Kesler, Bieksa, and the Sedin twins perform as they have for the better part of this post season. But if they don’t, and Milan Lucic and his Bruins rob them and their fans of the prize, then beware. Beware the fear and bewilderment, the awful gnashing of teeth, the mad rush to Robson St, and the ugly burning sensation reserved only for losers who were expected to win.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: H1N1 CURE

Look. Listen. Let's keep this short. Ah! Just like SARS, Y2K, or sailing off the edge of a flat world, we are in the grips of yet another crisis. But! Fear not. This time your intrepid correspondent has nailed down a failsafe cure. Yes! I am the purveyor of salvation from the insidious pig disease. Come one, come all to the altar of healing. To wit, from the Cassell Dictionary of Superstitions by David Pickering:

Modern medicine still has trouble dealing with flu epidemics and in former times the imaginations of the superstitious were taxed to the full in trying to find cures for what was all too often a fatal complaint. Here are some of 100%, fool proof, iron clad cures, I am certain:

1) Wrapping the patient in warm and still bloody animal skins
2) Placing a hot brick soaked in vinegar and rubbed with garlic on the patient's
chest
Ingesting one or more of the following (more is better):
3) Egg yolks spiced up with a few live lice
4) The urine of a seven-year-old girl or a little soot
5) A few fat slugs and dog faeces, which could if desired be made more palatable by
combining them with oysters dissolved in milk and wine.

Yes! Superstition rears its beautiful head. May you live in interesting times. Remember. Death is at your door and it is snorting like a pig with a runny nose. No amount of hand sanitizer can save you now. So. Bring on the blood soaked skins and dog shit--children, pregnant women and professional athletes first, of course.

It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding *

Wolf: Of all animals the wolf is perhaps the most feared in terms of superstition, being a favourite disguise of the DEVIL and everywhere linked with evil. In times gone by, the mere sight of a wolf was supposed to be enough to render a man dumb, assuming that the wolf saw the man first, and similarly even saying the word ‘wolf’ risked an imminent encounter with one…On a more optimistic note…eating a dish of wolf’s meat will prevent a person from seeing ghosts. Sleeping with a wolf’s head under the pillow will ward off nightmares…
--David Pickering, Dictionary of Superstitions

Look. Listen. The wolf always runs in a pack, but when he is hungry, he runs bolder. A Chinese man said this on Magnum P.I., season 7, episode 16. Yes. I am deep into superstition now. An odd twist, but life is twisted, no? Let me up, I’ve had enough—Tom Petty said that, and I believe him. My life is twisted like a rabbit in flight and I fear there is no solace between here and where I will fall, bleeding in the snow. Ah! But what could one fear in the lotus land of plenty? Plenty I am sure. For these passing years, my life has been a hard corner, but things pass and come to pass, and now, I fear even I must go to ground. How long lord, how long (1)?
But what can I say here that will call off the pack; where are the golden promises to redeem? No. this is the long journey to the end of the night (2) and I know that these things are only faced alone. I am tired. The wolves are at the door and I am nearly struck dumb. Misfortune. There is no appeasing it. Pile the fire high and leave me here to die. There are some things that words cannot explain. Ford Maddox Ford may have written the saddest story ever told (3). Maybe. More than me have suffered, but we only feel our own pain. Indulge me. I feel quite lost. So. It is the wolf and me. Life will go on—but not perhaps for either of us. I miss the friends that I have gathered and the path that I have lost. I feel dumb—frozen with the fear. Where have I come from and where can I go? The ghosts are at the door. There must be some kind of way out of here; I can’t get no relief (4). Please. Even the wretched resent the maudlin. I am too sad to live, but too dumb to die. Let the wolves lick my face: i'm ready Ma. it's only a little bleeding left.
* Bob Dylan
1 Hunter S. Thompson
2 Celine
3 The Good Soldier
4 All Along the Watchtower, Bob Dylan

THERE'S NO ESCAPE FROM GRACELAND

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
--Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Look. Listen. One cannot learn to forget. Memory is a two edged blade forged somewhere in the chaos between heaven and hell. An irony, I think, that chaos offers such a clean and cruel restraint. Where would we be without memory, friend? Ignorant. Blissful. Is this why the gods invented wine? If so, surely for themselves, and surely, to be a god is to live beyond remembering.

But these are heady thoughts, and I am not sure I’m ready to go down such perilous roads these days. The sun is burning hotter than I remember, and the line where the ocean meets the sky is clear but thankfully far away—for me at least—and this is good. Shalom.

But speaking of the horizon, the King of Pop has stepped across it and now lives in the dubious shadow of memory. I was sure that Michael Jackson was a freak and a pederast, but, in recent days, I’ve heard that perhaps he was closer to a martyr. Jesus. A friend I cannot name expounded on this theory at length, and while it burned a little bile going down, it is not…without merit. Martyrs need a crowd. Freaks demand a mirror and an audience demands a sacrifice of the freakish. Empires rest on the shoulders of slaves. Like the sequined man, gladiators ruled Rome from the pits and Emperors knelt with eunuchs, whores, and children. Rome forgot about the Empire, and the Empire forgot it. Enter the Barbarians, cloaked in darkness. 600 years of looking, neither forward nor backwards, but simply blindly. And now, now, slaves, eunuchs, whores, pimps and freaks run rampant…Children—I’m not so sure. Ah. But that is another thread, to be saved for another time. Now, we have long had our own Empire, and it is a white-columned mansion with 23 rooms, never to be uninhabited. No. It is a place where the ghosts of our memory tread without refuge or remand.

Perhaps it is my own Graceland where my memory and Michael Jackson collide. Because I remember a Thriller poster on the wall, and the smoke and Vincent Price’s inimitable tones shuddering from a cassette tape in the home stereo when my mother and father were not home. And I remember the electricity of being a child and hearing bass lines that made my heart jump, and that feeling of pure cool that his music sweated. So what? I was a fan. Sure. But I was also a child. And in my child’s mind, Michael Jackson made me feel good. Alive. Excited. On the verge of something hazy but forceful, raw but assured. But now? Frankly, I feel irritated and at odds with nearly everyone. I have heard the tributes and they ring hollow. What are they celebrating? Who are they remembering? The star that I knew at 8, has been a white shadow for these years since. Was Michael Jackson at 50 anything of what he was at 23? Maybe a most fitting funeral would be for the death of his music—but that is tricky too. His music died, as I suspect he did, long ago. Yet it will live on. Simultaneous death and life. Reverence and revulsion. Black and white. The present and the past. Remembering and forgetting. How strange to find such parallels with a one-gloved man. But they are there, like wisdom in despair.

So, friend, the King is dead. Did he bleed for you and I? In the end, I suspect not, but perhaps he bled because of you and I. Does this earn mercy? Forgiveness? It certainly seems so. But how can you forgive what you don’t know? This seems of some importance. We fear monsters, define monsters, by not knowing them. And we make monsters in the same way. Michael Jackson was our monster and he will be remembered in as much a right as he has earned. But forgiven only in as much as we think he deserves or in as much as we forget.

I guess what I’m saying is that remembering what was so thrilling and endless and cool and seeing it cast against what became so abject, putrid and wretched is grating. And I am part of this, which is a suffering of its own kind, I suppose. I too, peered at the spectacle, and am, in some small way, part of the making of the spectacle. And this is unsettling, because it reminds me of the darkness of my own generation, steeped in the incense of a Roman orgy. There is a shadow over the Empire, and, without due care, it will swallow us, one and all.

In sum, Michael Jackson and his fans and the media at large have robbed me of the Michael Jackson that I remember; for that I am bitter. And if I really want to admit it, I am bitter, because in losing this memory, I lose a little of what it was to be young—without monsters.

SAILOR ON HORSEBACK

“We may lose ourselves again,” said Nikita moodily. He was gloomy because of the intense longing he felt for the vodka; and the tea, the only thing that could quench that longing, had not yet been offered to him.

At the bottom of his mind, Vasily Andreyevich knew that the dawn could be nowhere near; but he began to feel more and more afraid and he chose to both deceive himself and to find himself out.
Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man

Look. Listen. When the longing comes, it is deep and vicious in the purest Russian sense. Yes, the Russians. The people who, in modern history, twice slaughtered the beasts of the fields, poisoned their own wells, and scorched the land to dust in the face of fear and oppression. Yes. Eat our dust you French and Germans. And so fear and longing are bred in Leo’s bones.

But we all have our advancing armies in the darkness, Churchill’s black dog, and the dull ache that strikes beneath the ribs. Where do they come from? How can they cut across the fields and track us down? What dog creeps with such silence and determination? Why does my heart tick over one day and thud the next? If I knew this place, this art, this malady, I would surely track, hunt and medicate my way through it, but as it is, I know only when it is too late and the clash of metal, lonesome howls and bitter taste of a penny under the tongue are upon me. This, friend, is when it is too late.

I told someone the other day that I was a sailor on horseback. It may have solicited much laughter, but it was no joke to me. No. I stole this moniker from a biography of Jack London. Jack London wrote more in 20 years than most men, and a damn lot of it was better than most men write in a lifetime. He had talent to burn and he burned every ounce of it to cinders before he dropped the pen (and the hammer) at age 40. There was a black dog scratching at the door when they found him. But he was a sailor on horseback, and had spent a life running. There are many places to run, and the sea and the range are two of the most trying, I think. Sea to sea, Korea to the West Indies, California to Alaska. He covered miles like words cover ideas. And then he stopped. Dead. So laughter is not appropriate. I said as much and promptly emptied 3 boilermakers at the bar. Fuck the laughter, I thought.

So I suppose I should get down to the nut of all of this. The longing. The Five W’s of it. What, where, when, who, why. The Five fingers of reason and being, dictated in order, because I am tired and I want to get some things straight. Longing to be what you can no longer be. Wishing to be somewhere where you aren’t. Trying to get back to when things were simpler and more pure and forward to when you can just sit back and the sun shines and maybe a fish splashes and you don’t have to look over your shoulder or even ahead, but just listen to wind and you breathe. The people who you miss and you love and you haven’t met yet. The wondering why it’s so hard to wake up in the morning and so hard to go to bed at night. This is longing, and maybe more than just I have felt it.

When the horrors of the Ministry of Love are dawning on Orwell’s Winston Smith, in anguish he cries out to his tormentor, “I understand how; I want to know why.” And that is the question that remains. Why this day or that, these people or those, this feeling or another? Why do I stand naked in the night drinking whiskey by the light of the streetlamp outside my window? Why read compulsively; with what hopes in mind? Why have I been piling up all these words since the day I was born and where am I going to put them? What am I waiting for and when will it come? Who will be left and who will be there when I find it? These are the things that the black dog sometimes says to me when she sits, her head upon my lap with dreaming brown eyes staring up into my mind. Sometimes we sit in silence, but after too long, she and I get restless and we walk. She always takes her place, content to trot at my heels, nipping at me from time to time.

But I said once that there were going to be better moments in this writing too, and I’ll be damned if there aren’t. So, that said, I will tell you that the black dog runs away from time to time, the shadow lifts, the clashing armies stand at bay, and the light shines just right. Sometimes it is in people’s eyes: you know who you are. Other times it is when the road stretches out and the wheel plays beneath the hands. And when the moon is right and the night is silent there are places you can find that you thought you had all but forgotten…And then, then you can look over your shoulder and there is the place and the person and the thing you were missing, and it is not the black dog, it’s something else, just back enough to be a white, warm blur. And you look and you smile and you feel that you are not alone and that there is a sense to the life that casts itself on you like a spell. The sense that all can be right and good and true. And it is a moment of essence, wonder, and hope; you are mortal but happy and you want to look again. But remember, as Tom Petty, a man who bleeds mortality once said, You can look back, but it’s best not to stare.

A Line is an Infinite Number of Points

Memory works in strange ways/cuts you down then makes you pay/one day you’ll be walking fine/the next day lightning hits you from behind…

Blue Rodeo, Last to Know

Look, listen. Forget about betting on football, politics, or the next move that you will make. Forget about the blunders and the calculations. Forget the bile and the choler. Forget about the sorrow, the twisting, the pain and the horror. There will be time for these things later in this life and in the next and the next. Perhaps the past is a shadow, empty, but at your heels. Perhaps it is like water, receding but sometimes flooding above the waterline. It may be the stuff of memory or the stuff of forecasts. It may be a black dog in the night. But never mind wondering about that for a moment and know that it is simply there, crystalline like sugar and salt: frozen perfection.

And so I find myself steeped in it this night of all nights. The fog hangs low on the city and some strange hand has clenched my brain, grasping with wispy fingers. Oh well. It will not relent, so I will. I have memories too, and most of the time I keep them at bay—cynicism works and when that fails there are more brutal remedies. But tonight I feel too tired to fight and maybe it is just and so that I do not. So I will indulge myself, my memories, and perhaps some things that are good and holy. I’m sure I told you there would be heroes; it may be that now is their time.

I remember driving across this country, East to West, roof racks loaded with the detritus of life much younger than this. I remember two girls curled up in the back seat while the sun set low over the green haze of a Northern Ontario forest cut by the grey ribbon of a road that unwound infinitely. I remember eyes and the lights in eyes and the lights in the lights of those eyes that shone like promises that could not be broken. Yes. I am slipping down a sentimental road, but hell, the night is dark and long and the fire burns low in everyone from time to time. Perhaps sentiment is not so bad when nothing else will do.

So I remember what my children can’t, and it teases my mind with the precision of a scalpel. There are photographs somewhere, but none are more real or honest than those in my brain. I prefer it this way; the colours are brighter and the lines more blurred. There can be everything if I can just piece it together. They were beautiful, self-contained and doubtless. Maybe I was too. Fear was just a number, and one that I had not yet been dealt. I remember the road and the long stretch of the sun on Lake Superior and the crooked cut of the rain in a sudden thunder headed cloud burst out above the Prairies. I remember the giant teepee and the truck stops and the cigarette smoke curling around my fingers. The cold in the night in Banff, when all the sleeping bags and winter coats and blankets and piles of sheets were barely enough, but the morning was a flashing of green on green of certain slants of light through the trees. Picnic tables, kindling, pajamas, mugs, sunglasses, roadmaps, and the incessant questions about if we would get a dog. Mountain passes, switchbacks, long arcing curves, the wheel sliding through my fingers, roadside stops, braided hair, and tired fists clenched in squinting eyes. Sagebrush in the sand, motels, gas stations, and more questions. Smiling faces. I see anticipation and expectation, hope in the wilderness. The dawn of the city. Good friends waiting. Cold bottles of beer. A warm heat rising from a street. A first home with a sunken living room and a slate fireplace. Sleep walking children. The first day of school. Pinatas in the park. I have a beard and then I don’t. My hair is long and then it isn’t. Jobs, ladders, the floor of a welder’s shop. Ground bits of steel. Daughters’ first friends. Laundry, waffles, neighbours across the fence. Tears. These parts of something from then transport themselves here on occasion. I do not ask, but time delivers.

I see memory in the face of my two children and for a moment all is good. And that is enough for today. I told you there would be heroes. And there will be tomorrows, but one day those will be less in number than the yesterdays. That is the sad tipping of life. The Hemingway moment. The laying on of impossible odds. But that day is not today. No. There are more windmills at which to tip and the knife of my brain is not dulled. But tonight, tonight the knife is sheathed and that is okay, I think. Pa liao, pa liao (let be, let be).

My Pony Broke My Neck While I Rode Side Saddle

What will I do? Where will I go?

Scarlett O’Hara

Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Rhett Butler

Wait! Tomorrow's another day.

Scarlett O’Hara

Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

Look, Listen. Like life, football is a cruel and brutal sport and gambling on it is even worse. The Carolina Panthers must feel something like that sick nag with the hide scraping ribs and frothing lips that Scarlett O’Hara whipped to death on the doorstep of her father’s colonial mansion, Tara. The Panthers were beaten like stray cats on Saturday, and only drunken gamblers saw it coming. There is no one I pity less than Jake Delhomme and his 5 pathetic turnovers that probably turned over 50 million dollars or more in legal bets and just as much off the table.

Now, I don’t give one damn for any of those sick panthers that slouched off the field against the laughing stock of the playoffs, the Phoenix Cardinals. No. They folded like Confederates in the path of General Sherman and took a licking that they deserved. Thank god that I put no money on those cheap punks, though I would have if I had not been badly disillusioned previously by so many teams in the final weeks of the season. It is better to invest your money in a ponzi racket than place one cent against the bookies. They know more than the South has ever lost and are more vicious and exacting in their numbers.

This is all that I have to say this week. Perhaps this blog can be resurrected, but I will need a serious sure shot, and these things are hard to come by, especially in these mean times. I cannot stomach the world today: something is wrong and I lack the patience to put my finger on it. Perhaps I need a small vacation. Somewhere small, warm, safe and nice. A place perched on the edge of the sea, still forgotten, still lost. Save your money, ignore the newspapers, forget about love, and stockpile smarts while you still have them. If you think that the drunk is bad, wait for the hangover. We live in dangerous times; don’t say that you weren’t warned. Everyone has felt their hearts sink into their boots, gamblers or not, and the road is not pretty. Many are called and many are punished. It is not enough to be rude and thoughtless. You have to be prepared to cut your own throat and those of your neighbours without even waiting for the cock to crow thrice. Peter is staring down the barrel now, and it is not a pretty sight. There is more room in the potters’ field, and there are many bodies yet to be buried. Trust only yourself, and still keep one hand behind your back. I have seen the dawn and it is as blood red as ever. For those who have faith in the big show (i.e. the Olympics), there will be no return. Real estate developers and hair dressers roam the corridors of city hall. There is no honour among thieves. None. The writing is on the wall and only clichés can deaden its sting. But the pain is already here; it has always been here. Everything before was just a postponement. I am serious and you should be too. Thank god for Tom Petty and Irish whiskey. These things have never done wrong. Ever. Il giocare, non e male, ma e male il perdere (there is no harm in playing but great harm in losing).