Tombée

Wrangling a bear cub can't be easy, but it must be easier than this.

It has never been lost on me that my daughter's name is a near-homonym of violence; Violet commits violence to the air-sickness bag that was tucked (probably for years) in the seat-back pouch in front of us.

After the routine rundown of safety procedures, the lead steward also informs us that our plane, and its carrier, are saddened but proud to have one of our fallen soldiers on board. He explains, in our two official languages, that the Colonel aboard had "given her life" for our Country and, presumably, the principals she seeks to uphold in Afghanistan.

Violet eats a bruised banana and I remember my grandfather. "Soldiers don't give their lives, they have them taken from them," he told me many times.

"Elle est tombée en service," is what the steward says during the French half of the address. That's it, I think, a tomber: you know that you might fall, but you sure don't want to.

As the plane taxis away from the gate, I have to press the baby to my chest in preparation for take-off, essentially assuming our crash position, just in case.

Out the window I see that the grounds crews have halted their peculiar vehicles, standing at attention beside them as the plane passes them. A baggage-lift driver is holding a flag over his head, snapping stupidly in the jet wash and barely visible.

"Agua," says Violet, looking at the lake as we ascend. In the hour-long flight, she doesn't lose any fingers and I sweat through my shirt.

When we land, the sober steward announces that in honour of our fallen soldier, it is requested that we passengers remain seated until the coffin is unloaded. Though he doesn't specifically mention that we should be silent, we do. Even Violet.

We all hear the hydraulics of the cargo bay and a great deal of clunking that probably isn't the coffin but sure makes us think about it. What it must be like, a military coffin? Hard and likely aluminium. Probably sturdy. Surely not actually draped in a flag in transit? I wonder if her parents are at the airport.

Strangely, I hope that she's OK down there. Which, how could she be.

Violet has cheese in her hair and I kiss her between her eyes.

Bells Unrung, Cherries Un-Picked.

There are some moments in life when you stop and think to yourself, "well, after this there's no turning back."

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These are the moments just before you gain motion on a path upon which taking the first step implies wholesale commitment to its destination.

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Some words cannot be unsaid; most pain cannot be uninflicted; no potatoes can be unmashed.

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Everyone's had them, these moments.

From minor adventure: the second that you are in the air between dock and lake, wondering to yourself, "Shit. It's gonna be cold. And are those rocks?"

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And major adventure: wondering, "No one is forcing me to jump out of this plane."

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To the romantic: the brief breath you take before walking into your girlfriends apartment and admitting, "I slept with your sister"

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To the perverse: that same breath before admitting, "I slept with my sister"

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Many of these are in business: putting on your jacket before stepping into your bosses office to say "I quit."

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Well, I've sat for surgery twice in the last 6 months, and I discovered that these moments live in the operating theater as well. Twice now I've laid back, lucidly on an operating table folks in scrubs bustled around the room and thought to myself, "I don't have to be here. I chose to come and I can choose to leave."

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It is the flight-impulse that rises up in your bile, I think. Your mind knows that you are there for your own good, but your animal being also knows that these people are going to knock you out and cut you. Badly.

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Mastering the animal, you think to yourself what a good idea this is. The run through of the logical train is quick and easy, because frankly no one in Canada fights their way through the system without good reason.

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But the moment is still very much there. "I can get up and walk out of here now; in a minute, I won't"

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And after that minute, and the minutes or hours that follow in a darkened heartbeat, it's true: you can't go back.

The Second Season

When I was in college and trying to find my worldview, I spent a good deal of time thinking about beauty. Between half-baked study of Plato & Nicomachean ethics, I began to form a sense that Beauty was akin to godliness.

I posted photos of perfect women neatly cut from pricey fashion magazines on my wall. Careful to note, of course, that despite what one of my friend's girlfriends described as a "a lot of nipples" this was no pin-up wall. These were pre-lad-magazine days so the line between wank-magazine and otherwise was still broad and easy to draw.

The smoky logic that followed from my enjoying these women who checkered my wall was that the closer I could be to their beauty, if only via observation, contemplation, and eventual familiarity, the closer I would be to God.

God made things beautiful because he could. And his most perfect work were angels; these angels were paid thousands of dollars an hour to be photographed in New York and elsewhere in order that they might look down on me and I might know them.

It follows then, that if you could find your real person in the company of models, via legitimate invitation or not, then you had in fact negotiated your way to heaven pre-maturely.

A quick ten years later and miles from the studios of Tribeca, I found myself at the Toronto Four Seasons for brunch with my wife in very advanced stages of her third pregnancy. Her parents were in town and insisted on our enjoying a "date" prior to the arrival of the deciding vote.

She couldn't muster the energy for a nighttime date so we took advantage of the offer and packed her appetite into the car for what is seriously the best brunch in the city.

It is usually quite a relaxing scene there - European couples gearing up for some Yorkville shopping, families walked over from nearby Rosedale, pods of New York types recovering from a big night, the occasional grey-haired wallet with his mistress enjoying some post-tryst sustenance; it makes for compelling people watching and the coffee is great.

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After our first pass at the shellfish tower, we returned to the pancake station and we found ourselves surrounded in Models. They were everywhere. Tall, shockingly well-groomed (probably best saved for another post, but I have always found something deeply disingenuous about overly-groomed people, especially men; what are they hiding?).

You could smell the fashion.

The women were beautiful. And young. The men wore large watches and expensive boots and sported complicated facial hair. Truthfully, our conversation fell off. Their blow dried hair fell into perfect curves. They looked like money had made them.

We returned to our table with plates stacked high with breakfast items we had not intended to take.

"What was that all about?" she asked.

I had no idea.

But here's the thing. We broke into laughter. We couldn't stop. Instead of being impressed with this spread of beauty, we were appalled. I won't go into why, it would seem bitter or petty.

The point is one of perspective. Contrary to its nature, my Platonic form of beauty has shifted.

The sexpots at the omelet bar held no appeal for us relative to the cheerful little specimens waiting for us back home. Someone at brunch had missed the point of life and it wasn't us, we felt.

I had long since let the girls of my dorm wall go, my worldview having found new moorings many times over. But this was the first time these photos had found me again, and I was most surprised by how little they meant - how unbeautiful.

Violet May

We will buy very pretty things
A-walking through the faubourgs.
Violets are blue, roses are red,
Violets are blue, I love my loves

Violet May, born at 8:42pm on Friday, February 27th, weighing in at a fighting 7lbs.

Hard to believe it's only been 13½ months.

Sepember 12th, 2008: LEH, MER, DFW - RIP

On one weekend this past September, between the 12th and the 15th, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Merrill Lynch suffered near insolvency and was folded into Bank of America, and David Foster Wallace died.

A good deal was written about these three deaths and I read most of it. Like many who sit in seats like mine, the disappearance of the major financial institutions that we dealt with, competed with, or simply looked to for leadership (Bear Stearns had already been dispatched to Davy Jones locker in the spring) lead to my spending much of that week staring in rapt horror at my Bloomberg screen and reading about the tectonic shift in my industry.

Despite the hysteria found in most of the newspapers, the disappearance of some of our continents oldest and most venerable financial institutions was met with surprising ennui among those I know who don't work in the industry. And though the breadth of the repercussions of these failings have become more obvious in the following months of economic recession, at the time a sense of schadenfreude was palpable.

Imagine living in a small town, I said to my friends who felt it was time for finance-types take a fall. Imagine that there were five or six grocery stores in that town from which you could choose to shop, though you probably had your favorite one or two. One of those shops suffered from some kind of contamination (listeria?) in its deli department and a number of customers got sick.

You decide that maybe you'll shop at the other store this week until the local paper gives the all clear. But it turns out they have tainted meat too, since they use the same supplier. The first store goes out of business and you are feeling a little iffy about your other store so you start to cross town for your deli slices when you can. Then, without any further warning, two more stores go out of business. Worse still, the two that still have the doors open refuse to sell to most customers.

In a matter of days, your small town has gone from being careful where it shops to simply not being able to buy food at all.

How long do you think this town lasts?

What would you do if you were in the food supply business locally?

These are life-changing developments for consumers and suppliers alike and require a major rethink of past choices and future plans.

And yet, even while these very personally affecting dramas were playing out in the pink pages of the Financial Times, while friends were losing their jobs, the tragedy of David Foster Wallace's suicide transfixed me.

More learned readers and better writers all weighed in on his accomplishments and what his sudden absence meant for letters, but all I can say is I felt a very distinct downtick in the intelligence of the universe. The strange thing about authors (and DFW had actually written about this) is that the nature of their medium gives the impression of a serious intimacy to the reader; the author, or his characters at least, are literally inside the readers mind. To this effect, I really felt closer to DFW than to many people that I know in real life.

And as often happens when you lose something you really don't know how important it is to you until it's gone. DFW was supposed to have been turning out essays and vaguely promising to follow up his masterpiece novel for years to come. I was willing to be patient. And then, all of a sudden, I found myself scouring YouTube for interviews with him so that I might know him better, and quickly.

To get back to thinking about me: even in a week as surprising as that one, I was most surprised that the death of DFW affected me so much more deeply than those of LEH and MER. Sure, one was a person and the other two simply entities, but frankly none of them had been to my house for dinner and two of them represented (indirectly) my livelihood. DFW never once held out any promise that he would help keep my children in jeans. But he did tell me things that I had never known: things about the tennis, things about philosophy, things about addiction, things about grammar, things about obsession, things about myself.

It has taken me longer to post about it than I had meant, but nonetheless I miss him.

1000 hits!

What with the new baby, spring, countless hours reviewing Habs moments on my PVR, and studying for yet more regulatory exams (I had seriously thought I wrote my last one in 1999, and have been wrong about that just about every year), I haven't had much time. So content has been slim here.

Even my new site, which I thought would be easier to keep more regular since it doesn't actually require me to provide any original content (or, for that matter, even to think very hard) has been skinny.

But that hasn't stopped my hardy dozen or so fans from checking this here site on a regular and propelling my hit count over 1000! So thanks. It took about a year, but it was worth it.

Now: some sites are instant phenomena. And tough it was always my intention that this here site be more of a slow build, cultivating a dedicated and highly sophisticated readership, it's time to step up and get some freakin' hits. One Hundred Million Tiny Explosions in the Sky deserves One Hundred Million Tiny hits.

So forward the link to your friends. Make it your homepage. Add it as an RSS feed. Put it on your business card for crying out loud. I must be heard.

My Concubiine

I have taken a mistress and her name is Wii.

I think of her all the time. She keeps me up late at night, palms sweating. I no longer read, nor write. I barely go outside anymore. All I want is Wii.

After dinner, I tell my wife that I'm going to do the dishes and that she should go upstairs to relax. But instead, I turn the TV down low, drain the rest of the dinner's wine into my glass and slide the coffee table away from the fireplace. We get fairly acrobatic some nights. Aerobic even.

Sometimes my brother joins in. I've heard that Wii can actually handle four at the same time. I don't have the equipment though.

I've even gone so far as to encourage my wife to try it, but she's says she's not into that kind of thing.

"Why not take a break?" Wii asks me sometimes. She'll gently encourage me to go outside, feel the wind on my face. But I don't.

Even my old faithful friend, TV, has become an exercise in disappointment. Between the writer's strike and the frusterating one-way nature of our relationship, there just seems to be something lacking. When was the last time TV listened to my needs? I find myself swinging my remote at Roger Federer.

In the strictest sense of the word, Wii doesn't actually listen to me. We don't speak it all, in fact. Purely physical, she feels me. Wordlessly, silently, or, with soothing music. As a good concubiine should.

Juliet

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.

Juliet James McEntyre - January 9th, 3:46 am. 7lbs, 3oz.

Urgency in young music

As I get older, look older, and heck, even act older, the music I listen to is changing: it’s getting younger. And not just in the way the very dazed and confused Wooderson observed of high school girls, the ones who highlight your mortal velocity by merely standing still in their pom-poms. No, my musicians are actually getting younger. And I know why.

When I started choosing my own music as an adolescent, I listened to the blues greats: Muddy, John Lee, Bo, Pop, Buddy (!). Sage old-timers imparting me with lessons hard learned, they bestowed upon me an unearned gravitas. My adventures restricted to the hushed streets of Westmount, I thirsted for something more, grander: something as big as me. And I was unwilling to wait. It wasn’t just me; all adolescents want desperately to grow up. They are ready for life, god-dammit, why won’t anyone take them seriously? For fuck’s sake I’m not a child!

Well, Albert Collins took me seriously. I would lie on the carpet of my room, stuck in there for the night, and listen as he slowly told me about the women he had loved, the whiskey he had drunk, and the cars he had stolen, now that’s OG. And I wanted all of it.

Now that I am no longer grounded, and I look on those years of identity crises with the knowing smile that my parents probably hid from me, my emotional deficits lie in other accounts. I miss the yearning. I miss the drama. I miss the sense that any one moment will define the rest of my life. I miss the complete lack of perspective. I miss the urgency.

But I can find it in music, the music of young people. Their music is all those things and it brings electricity to my grey-suited subway rides.

Floating

“Shuffle your feet here, there are often sting rays and you don’t want to step on them,” said Sam, and it seemed like sound enough advice to me. I didn’t want to step on a sting ray, it was true. Sting ray barb to the heart, died instantly: who could forget that diagnosis? Not me. Nope. The poor Crocodile Hunter. And I think it’s fair to say that it’s possible that I have a weaker heart than Steve Irwin.

One of the nice things about surfing is you are tied to your floatation device.

Let me tell you: my physical victories in the water were few. I spent a lot of time floating or paddling out of the way of large waves and other surfers (Sam’s other advice with regards to my personal safety had been the highly direct, “stay out of the way of the Mexicans.”). Ultimately, other than frequent beatings and a few brief but wonderful moments when the ocean I moved together in just the right way, most of my time on the board was spent swimming or watching.

And herein was the most surprising part about surfing: there is a very quiet, universally understood social order to it. It’s beautiful and fascinating to watch. Some rules are simple, like “the man closer to the rocks/shore is considered ‘inside’ and he has right of way.” But the other aspects of the lineup are much more intricate, and like so much in the ocean, simply elude accurate description. But it is crucial to grasp them, and quickly, because ultimately, the area in which the actual riding gets done, is not very big.

For the most part, people are very nice to each other in the lineup, largely, I think, due to this unwritten order. The very worst thing that anyone said while I was there was nothing at all. Sometimes, as I understand it, there are altercations. Infractions against locals are particularly egregious and often result in light violence or threats thereof. But as my friend Chris told me, “The Ocean is like a dick-drain. Everyone has a little dick in them; you get it just from walking around, taking care of your shit, y’know? But when you get in the ocean, and you take some waves, all that dickness drains right out of you. And if you’ve still got some dick in you when you’re surfin’? Well man, then you must be some kind of dick.”

I certainly felt drained.

By the end of my stay there, surf was pretty much all I could think about, and I couldn’t even do it right. I usually wound up upside down for God’s sake, ass-kicked and sneezing out salt water for hours afterward. But it doesn’t matter. It’s very much a physical sport, but the deep appeal is social, and ultimately spiritual. No opponents, no finish line: just you, the ocean, some other nice people floating around you, and a few sting rays. I can’t wait to do it again.