Progressively Louder Laughter

This is the best time of the year in Toronto. The essence of summer is creeping in and sounding off earlier everyday. It signals change. We see it erupting quickly around us. The new normalcy. And though it has happened in Toronto somewhat gradually, we get to brace ourselves and decide who we want to be when this tidal wave of change envelops us and carries us back to land.

And finally, a haircut. This will surely resolve the issue of feeling feral and slightly unsure of how to be a human being. All of these years of learning and studying and now: a completely atrophied nervous system. Take out the cartridge, give it a quick blow, it’s like riding a bike!  

I’ve been listening to/watching this podcast Take Your Shoes Off by Rick Glassman. He does a thing where he snaps his fingers and in a showman voice says  “And we’re back!” I find myself doing this (mostly because it’s goofy) but also because I am starting to feel myself creep back in. It’s been a long, languished lockdown in Toronto. I feel that I atrophied while trying to make little attempts to pierce through that constant blanketed hum of an already somewhat sleepy city. 

Lately, I want to walk all of the time. So much that my feet have been torn to shreds and my legs ache. I like it though, I think because it is evidence of movement, of effort, of time invested. Today I was vaccinated and it was one step forward towards something new. Something almost here.

So, what are we becoming? 

Today, I am sitting in my office with the lights only dimly lit and the radiators on strike from producing heat. I am wearing a dress that places me in the dust bowl era. I feel like I should be mending a sock or churning butter, but no. Instead, I am wearing a Korean face mask and smiling lovingly at my framed picture of Barrack Obama. This is 2020. The year of everything and nothing.

Do you ever have a flash of some forgotten, pre-covid part of yourself? Something that you have long buried out of self-preservation? This happened to me a week ago; I was walking down the street listening to a Haitian band with the sun setting over Dundas. It reminded me of traveling alone in a country that my mother would deem ‘unsafe’. 

There is something about the edge that I love. A driver going a little too fast, a slightly unsteady ladder, the sun setting in a somewhat unsafe neighborhood, and the long walk home. The motorbikes driving a little too close to you, the lack of streetlight, and those who pass you by knowing you are a tourist because you are blond and you look terrified and ecstatic and moronic. 

That little spike of adrenaline.

There is a song by the Talking Heads that keeps haunting me: Heaven. 

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.

It achieves a specific emotional paradoxical dissonance: having everything and still longing. It is the grieving of that thing that you thought would make you feel complete, satiated, unburdened. 

In a way this year has been like that, in another sense, it has been the farthest thing from that. It has been one arduous undertaking after another. Death by a million blunt objects. Still, the sentiment is not lost. The remedy to both is the same. It’s the edge. It’s the feeling of how precarious this all is, it’s putting that feeling on a tightrope and making it cross some canyon of fear. It fills your lungs with delight and possibility. It will clear out all of the dust.

And speaking of the edge, I think it would be a great tragedy if I didn’t include lyrics from the Bruce Springsteen song Darkness on the Edge of Town. If you refuse to listen to the song and just read the lyrics, know that these are sung emphatically. There is also an emotional dissonance, but this time, it is searing hope and it is searing pain. It is the disappointment of life and it is fear. It is the dissonance of life: the darkness begets the light.

He GROWLS:

Tonight I’ll be on that hill ’cause I can’t stop

I’ll be on that hill with everything I’ve got

Well lives on the line where dreams are found and lost

I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost

For wanting things that can only be found

In the darkness on the edge of town

In the darkness on the edge of town

I am taking a self-mandated break from working. Sometimes I allow myself a break, but that never works out well. The guilt and anxiety about not pushing the needle forward is just as pervasive and taxing as actually working.

I am thinking that I have been so turned around since the beginning of this pandemic, and so absorbed with work, that stopping to think about it and reflect on it– thinking about next steps– it’s dizzying. 

Before Pandemic

Right before the lockdown, I celebrated 6 months of NYC by seeing Jane Birken at the Beacon Theatre. As I watched her that night, it was really something to watch her take in the crowd, she savoured it. Her ovation seemed to be half as long as the show, she kept leaving and coming back to bow and to bask in the applause. She was not letting the moment slip through her fingers, all of these people together- did she know something we didn’t?

Certainly, in the very least, she knew not to take it for granted.

— 

I am so tired that I want you to speak to me. How have you been? What are you grateful for? What have you learned about yourself in these last few months? What have you been taking for granted?

Here is a not amazing cover of Chicago by Sufjan Stevens.

https://open.spotify.com/user/12177791707/playlist/3NflR6bPYsbovJjOU3CNom?si=qJuBSLdBRxO56RAjdxi4mg