The cost of ice

ice
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Some moments in life feel frozen – not just me and my inability to take action one way or another. But the moments themselves. Nothing is moving around me – at least not in my vicinity or sphere of influence. Even though I make decisions, make changes, move pieces around the chess board, I’m paralyzed by a sense of being stuck.

A few ill-advised decisions coupled with corporate ineptitude and the most capitalist-greed-driven set of economic conditions of my lifetime (and I’ve seen some blizzards in my day), and I’ve got a whirlwind of new decisions to make. And even though I keep making them and continue to actually skate along, I still feel a bit like I’ve fallen into a frozen lake and can’t find my way out.

I wonder: What does ice cost? Ordering a coffee today, I got the coffee and asked for a separate glass of ice. Normally I get some combination of this to create coffee-flavored ice. But I think I get more coffee and more ice ordering them separately, and I don’t have to pay for the ice. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. At least I hope I can start to thaw some of the other suspended things in my life by thinking about them in a new way as I have done with the cost of ice.

 

 

hepcat

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Years go by and memory, though not erased, dims. Characters who played instrumental roles in our lives, however briefly, also fade into the background. The drift is imperceptible as life grumbles along, shifting under our feet, repopulating with new casts of characters. And suddenly 30 years of life’s adventures, turmoil, joy, curses and cravings pass with almost no connections to these past characters.

When suddenly they reappear – but are no longer among the living – it’s such a gut punch. The tattered memory revives all the conversations you had, the things you shared in common, the influence they had, the tangible help they provided, even when it wasn’t easy for them to do, the confidences they shared and struggled with. The sense of lost closeness floods back in, and the regret at having let the connection fray bubbles up. Nothing really happened to create a rift. Living in different places at different stages of life, wanting and expecting different things, forcing different things to happen… people drift apart for no reason, without actively deciding to, without effort. And all of a sudden, someone who was once a part of daily life, important in a way that words can’t really convey, is gone forever. Not just gone from daily life, which happened so many years ago between us, but gone for good.

It is hard to know what to do with or how to process this information. The discovery of the sudden and unexpected death of someone who was once so close. It’s facile and inadequate to say “they will be missed” but equally impossible to find a fitting alternative tribute.

Desensitized to joy

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So highly critical of everything despite being unqualified to criticize (that is, offering blind critique of films he had not seen, theories he had not studied, and so on), listening to him was instructive in ways not to be, i.e., behaving in pseudo-intellectual going against the grain for the sake of going against the grain… but it was also unproductive, spending time on ineffective, uninformed opinions crafted for controversy’s sake without even being wrapped in the blanket of devil’s advocacy.

It was all Moonlight (which he had not seen) was “pretentious navel-gazing only praised because it was a ‘black movie’”. Or “women are routinely jealous of other women, and that’s why you don’t appreciate Kate Tempest” (now Kae Tempest, whose coming out as non-binary is probably another thing he’d have uninvited commentary on). Or worse yet, and most offensively, it’s “not numerically possible for as many people to have perished in the Holocaust as commonly claimed” (a “theory” relayed to me by phone in the waning moments of our acquaintance, as I sat in a Jewish restaurant glancing across the street toward a heavily guarded synagogue).

Now of course my brain screams the words I should have blurted out then without hesitation: “What happened to you, dude? What happened to you that makes you like this?! Why would these be the thoughts you think are worth sharing?” I was so much in it at the time, in the moment, wanting everything to progress in a linear stitch, that I did not dare voice my disbelief. I was so much in my own cloud of grief and recovery from a variety of unrelated things that I didn’t see it clearly at the beginning of the conversation. I sewed myself into this predicament that could never yield anything. This is what happens when you believe that any change will be preferable to the current circumstances … and the more dramatic and jarring that change, the better.

Years and years removed from this brief, quilted little mess, it’s these incongruous utterances, betraying a strange mix of what I can only characterize as a mix of jealousy, unconscious bias, latent prejudice, and a need to be perceived as driving dialectical arguments that were nevertheless completely subjective, that occasionally spring to mind. It’s impossible to say if these vignettes reflect who he really was, who I interpreted him as being, or someone he projected or pretended to be in a bid to get rid of me without having to be direct. Or some combination of all of these.

While none of these things matter and don’t figure into my life, sometimes while driving long distances in the dark (my favorite way to drive), listening to music I collected during that period in my life, the mind wanders.

And now in the present, I think, my god, what did I see in this person? I was so tightly wound, I’d have overlooked a lot and basted a patchwork of excuses over the top of both of our inconsistencies and shortcomings. All to prevent my own unraveling. In truth, I never knew this person. I tried to live according to a pattern that was less a form and more a bubble. Being in that momentary bubble, we were not who we really are – on so many levels. We were ephemeral, interim people. Or at least I was … just a thread – loosely connecting one part of my life to an entirely different one. And I can only interpret him and his presence in my life through that lens.

Beyond that, though, and once again only through my own filters and limited information, I can only wonder what his actual partner saw in him? I can only think – based on what little I knew of her and what pieces of himself he showed me – that she suffered. For years. Even if he complained about her (which was exceedingly and respectfully rare), he spoke reverently of her intelligence, her potential, and of all the beautiful things that made her her. She sounded so much more enchanting, patient and forbearing than he could ever be, and certainly more than he deserved if he really did put her through the things he described doing in the course of their lives together. I thought I understood why they were, as he claimed, splitting up, given their long and complex history (the first thing of which I can’t pretend to know about), but even so, I could only guess that she wasn’t living the fullest life she could have been by staying with and relying on him. She sounded like she deserved so much more. It’s not as simple as that, and it’s easy for a rootless character like me to dismiss roots, ties, history and even – or perhaps especially – love.

I find myself thinking of these kinds of people – the person in a partnership who must get something fulfilling from it but who suffers at the hands of the whims, addictions, fickleness and capriciousness of the partner to whom they’ve tied themselves. It’s not rare. Another man I’ve known for years is a serial philanderer (I use this word without assigning a moral judgment to it); I have always wondered what his wife thinks and how she feels. She, like the aforementioned woman, is deeply intelligent, worldly, talented, beautiful, and at least on paper, everything her husband could ever want. But it’s still not enough (or rather, he is not enough so constantly has to prove and reprove that he is attractive to anyone and everyone else). To satisfy his own low self-esteem, some aspects of his choices and behavior must erode her self-esteem. I hope not, but I can’t see how it wouldn’t.

But what do I know? Desensitized to joy, indulging in the purchase of preposterously expensive keychains, seeking out highly practical portable air compressors and searching out capellini in a pasta wasteland, I am always casting an eye on the past and the scales that blinded me.

Jekyll and Hyde

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Each year at Christmas, nothing tickled my brother and me more than hearing John Denver’s ”Please Daddy Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas” (since remade by the ever-nauseating Alan Jackson). We laughed uproariously upon hearing, “You came home at quarter past eleven and fell down underneath our Christmas tree”. How hilarious! How delightful! A man so inebriated he could ruin a perfectly lovely Christmas scene. We didn’t think about the painful reality of it. It sounded so comical that we lost sight of the beleaguered mother holding back tears, trying to pretend everything was fine, sending the kid to bed while she dealt with the drunken consequences.

We were maybe five and three years old, if that, and we didn’t grow up in a household with a raging drunk, so the festive, jolly tone of the song masked the (repeated) tragedy (“every goddamn Christmas you do this…) of the song. But we weren’t far removed from this kind of life. My father had grown up with an abusive, alcoholic father, and we had seen glimpses of this man’s mania, his binges, his violence and threats, the way he became depressed and talked to himself – and terrorized everyone around him.

We did not understand then how simultaneously frightening and tedious it is to live with an addict. After all, artistic depictions of the alcoholic often veer toward the jovial: the drunken father coming home, wrecking the Christmas tree laughing and hollering “Merry Christmas!” as in the song, or film scenes in which a drunken rage is so heightened, unbalanced and berserk that you almost laugh, thinking this level of drama surely cannot be real.

A scene comes to mind from the fictionalized bio-series George & Tammy, about the tempestuous relationship between musicians George Jones and Tammy Wynette. In it, Jones comes home piss drunk and, as several media outlets (and possibly Wynette’s own autobiography) describe it, “chases Tammy around with a loaded gun”. This comes to mind possibly because (if I recall) in the series it happened to be set at Christmastime but also because the scene, while it should be terrifying, has the frenetic energy of something willfully comedic. These kinds of scenes on film often feel this way. Someone is fleeing for their life, but it’s almost like the equivalent of Benny Hill theme music is playing in the subconscious mind, possibly trying to square reality with the chaos that’s unfolding.

Watching such scenes in a film, or hearing John Denver croon, beseeching his father not to come home drunk this Christmas (unlike so many others), doesn’t begin to convey the exhaustion, the pain, the tedium, the heartbreak, the ache, the disappointment, the fear, and so many other emotions that living with an addict – in particular angry, depressed drunks – ignites.

The drunk person is insufferable, unpredictable, dangerous, threatening (to themselves and to you) but somehow he truly believes he is fine, normal, more than themselves, entitled and empowered by drink. Yet their self-loathing, bitterness, pettiness, nastiness erupts from them without ebb. And then suddenly, days or weeks later, in a fit of sobriety, they may apologize for what they did or said – but they don’t remember any of it and will repeat it, and worse, later. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde existence, and everyone else bears the burden and picks up the pieces.

In Douglas Stuart’s recent Young Mungo, which was good but struck too many similar chords to his earlier Shuggie Bain to be quite as original as I would have hoped, the strongest takeaway is the realism of the alcoholic mother and the fraught relationship with her children. While you did not get the same Jekyll and Hyde feel from the mother character, Mo-Maw, as you might get from real life alcoholics (I don’t recall meeting Mo-Maw sober in the book, after all), Stuart nevertheless comprehends exactly how the alcoholic lives the life of two distinct people:

“Mungo knew fine well that people had demons. Mo-Maw’s showed itself whenever she jangled for a drink. Her demon was a flat, eel-like snake with the jaw and beady eyes of a weasel and the matted coat of a mangy rat. It was a sleekit thing on a chain leash that shook her and dragged her towards things that she ought to be walking away from. It was greedy and it was cunning. It could lie dormant, wait for the children to leave for school, to kiss their mother goodbye, and then it would turn on Mo-Maw, throttle her as though she was some shivering mouse. At other times it coiled up inside her and sat heavy on her heart. The demon was always there just under the surface, even on good days. On the days that she gave in to the drink, the demon could be quieted for a while. But sometimes Mo-Maw could get so far in the drink that she would become another woman entirely, another creature altogether.”

Her utter hopelessness, selfishness and disregard for her own children is shocking, but worse than that – and this is the hardest part because I understand it so well – is how angry yet still loving the children are. She abandons them, she abuses them, she uses them, and yet despite their suffering at her hands, they keep taking her in and giving of themselves, cleaning up mess after mess.

Alcoholics and addicts will ruin your life and not think twice about it. And it’s a whole lot worse than a knocked-down Christmas tree.

Official report / Troublemaker

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In keeping with the theme of things not being what they seem, it sometimes becomes clear that we are not who we think we are. We think we are one thing, pretend to be another, and are probably some third thing that we ourselves are not self-aware enough to recognize or describe with any accuracy. (And we are yet another thing to those who know or think they know us. Perceptions are manifold.)

These thoughts arise as I read about the doppelganger phenomenon in Naomi Klein’s most recent book, Doppelganger, but also when I reflect on my own behaviors and how they line up (or do not) with what I have always believed about myself.

I’ve never considered myself a troublemaker or boat rocker. But then I rethink. As an adult, I am quite different from who I was as a child but have struggled to see myself the way I am now. I was quiet, shy, and (really) fearful of interaction. I assumed other people also tacitly understood this about me, but I have since learned that most people had an entirely different impression of me.

As a silent victim to mild bullying as a child (which I probably took to heart more because of my own crippling shyness and less because it was actual bullying) and a witness to childhood tyrants bullying others (to whom I rarely stood up), it’s not something I can stand by and watch silently now.

… when I see bullying behavior, I am not someone who will tolerate it as an adult. I don’t always say something in the moment, as bullying unfolds – it depends on the circumstances and how much disruption saying something will cause (i.e., will it do more harm than good?). But I observe more carefully the behavior patterns and words of bullies (usually in the workplace), take note and, if I am in a position to do so, I report it. I have learned that just trying to confront it verbally – without a record, without witnesses – leads to nothing, changes nothing, and gives bullies a chance to regroup and make excuses. While I also replay the mantra “don’t put this in writing” in my head after getting fucked over by things I put in writing, I also recognize the power of putting things in writing. A black-and-white record of observations is much harder to refute or excuse. As many managers confronted with the written record lament, “Now I have to do something about it”. Yes. Exactly. Ignoring it does not make it go away. Someone has to be unafraid of sounding the alarm, even if it ends up making them a lightning rod.

Having been through something like this recently, I felt firmly convinced that this was unusual behavior for me. Like, wow, I stepped outside the lines. But when I really started digging into the past, I realized I’ve been like this for a long time. My entire working life, really: the mousy, timorous child who would not speak up even when asked a direct question has become a troublemaker (when given cause) who directly questions everything.

mock perfume

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Hunkering down in deep snow and sustained lows of -30C (and highs of -15C) accompanied by a painful and persistent cough, I can’t say January has launched the most auspicious start to a new year.

And while I attempt to breathe and sleep through coughing fits, overdosing on more crap streaming films and tv and reading books (at least that’s one joy/goal I can still pursue), I am preoccupied by a burning hatred for perfume ads. The fact that I am taking the time to record my thoughts on the subject speaks both to how deeply annoying I find these ads and to just how incapacitated I am by illness right now.

I don’t generally consume regular television so don’t see that many ads but in Glasgow I tend to watch a lot more linear tv with advertising than I see when traveling. And my god – there is a lot of dismal advertising. But nothing seems more wasteful, indulgent, ridiculous, tedious and overwrought than those for perfume. And for some reason it almost reaches the level of making me angry. In a world where there are countless and unimaginable real problems, over-the-top, insipid ads capture the screen and glossy pages, covered with actors taking home bloated paychecks to hawk fragrances most people don’t want, can’t afford and can’t wear anywhere thanks to the superabundance of allergic/hypersensitive reactions to smell.

I find myself categorizing these ads, angrier at some than others. From the overindulgence of the Natalie Portman Miss Dior ads to the long-running and increasingly out-of-touch and incomprehensible Johnny Depp Dior Sauvage ads, to the more recent ludicrous spectacle of Emma Mackey peddling Burberry Goddess to the frivolous and annoying “Quando Quando Quando” nonsense of Emilia Clarke shilling Dolce & Gabbana’s The Only One. All of these bother me in a way that I cannot explain.

The only ad that doesn’t inflame a sense of injustice and fury is the very brief and basic Bleu de Chanel ad featuring Timothée Chalamet and a soundtrack of “Nights in White Satin”. And this is because it does not seem overdone, although when you dig into the backstory of the brand partnership, you discover that Chalamet is raking in USD 35 million to promote this fragrance. There’s also another 60-second ad directed by Martin Scorsese.

It’s fucking perfume, people. I don’t have the energy to explore why this kind of advertising is absurd and frankly, much like athletes’ distorted, fat salaries, a travesty.

absentee

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I had never given much thought to the experience of not knowing one of my parents. Nor had I really given a great deal of thought to the myriad ways and expressions of not being a part of one’s child’s life.

I spent the holidays with individuals (half-siblings) who share the same mother but different fathers – and neither of them had much contact with or knowledge of their fathers. They met them only when they were older, and for whatever reason have never expressed much curiosity about who these fathers were. During childhood and adolescence, the not knowing appeared to be more tantalizing than knowing for sure. They could imagine that their fathers were anything they wanted them to be – important, busy, wealthy, foreign – any kind of character and lifestyle. Any kind of fantasy life that kept them away.

In reality, meeting these absent fathers made whatever illusions they may have had disappear. But it was not as though they had held onto or truly believed in the many other possibilities they had concocted. It was better to live the lives they had and ignore the reality, even after being confronted by it.

Pop culture is full of these parentless (many fatherless, in fact) stories, in which the father figure’s absence is treated as important but not central. In stories like Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo, the main characters are depicted as living with a ne’er-do-well alcoholic mother and no mention is made of the father. The working class Glaswegian experience is peppered with these kinds of stories – struggling, often strong, single mothers and absent (and barely mentioned) fathers. It’s not clear from the stoic ways characters front whether they miss their fathers or the experience of having known a father.

“They say you can’t miss something you never had,” a little girl, Mad, states, in the story Lessons in Chemistry (which is, incidentally a subtle advertisement for the power of the public library and librarians), referring to her deceased father. She goes on to say that this cannot be true. She never knew her father at all – he was killed before her mother even knew she was pregnant. It is an entirely different kind of absence… but does the way of absence matter? What prompts the longing, the curiosity in some… while others live as though the presence of a father has never mattered?

In the now-ended Reservation Dogs, most of the main characters have absent fathers, and some are without parents at all. Throughout the series, the character Bear pins his hopes on his shiftless, absent father and eventually comes to terms with the nature of the relationship (or lack thereof). As the series ends, a poignant episode follows the character Elora as she seeks out her father for the first time. She had never given his existence much thought until she decides to go to college and needs to complete financial aid forms using the information of her parents. The meeting between father and daughter is perfunctory at first, yet filled with a tense awkwardness. Elora plays tough and indifferent, and her biological father (Ethan Hawke) grasps for the right words to say. Eventually Elora softens and agrees to meet her half-siblings. The shift in their dynamic is small and incremental and depicted delicately through light-touch dialogue, silences, and subtle facial expressions.

For those of us who never experienced such an absence, it would be hard to understand what someone who never had a father at all might feel. One imagines emptiness, a longing or even an idle curiosity, but frequently it seems as though whatever is felt, it’s buried – or out of sight, out of mind – until something triggers the questions. Even if you don’t miss someone or something you never had, surely you would be curious about it?

Into the groovy: Things are not what they seem

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Things are not always what they seem. You know, Phil Groovy Collins is not – and never will be – Lenny Kravitz. How it could seem so is… unknown. But referencing Phil Groovy the other day reminded me that as much as I dislike most of this dude’s music, he continues to pop up in different areas of life.

One of my most highly annoying traits is my tendency to tune in to the music playing in public places, and then I grill my companions, “Name that tune!” So many of my friends are not particularly musical in the sense that identifying musicians and songs isn’t important to them – fair enough – and this activity is a little bit like torture. Somehow, though, I can’t help myself.

Years ago, in Iceland, I quizzed a friend over coffee at a long-defunct shopping mall café. It was Phil Groovy (what song, I no longer remember). Flustered, she blurted out, “Lenny Kravitz”. I’ve never forgotten this. No one wants to be put on the spot this way, and yet, I can’t stop myself from repeating this scene.

In fact last year in Iceland, with this same woman and her now-teenaged daughter (to give you an indication of the time lapse, the woman was pregnant with said daughter during the original name-that-tune incident), I subjected them both to this nonsensical game. We were eating dinner in a loud restaurant, and the music playing was so faint as to be unrecognizable. I was sure, though, that it was George Michael’s “Father Figure”. My friend’s daughter quietly used Shazam to try and pick up the sound and found that I was correct. “How are you even hearing it over all this noise?”

Who knows? This is just where my attention goes. And no matter what, Phil Groovy is never Lenny Kravitz.

But this theme – things not always being what they seem – is important. How many split-second judgments do we make just by looking at someone? How often do we just trust what is presented to us? Lately, having taken up reading and watching series and films more actively than I had in some time, I am struck by how often the theme arises.

In the tv series Silo, those living in the silo are shown the “outside” on a screen and they accept what they are shown. But is it real? Questioning the reality creates nothing but trouble.

In the series Dark Winds, a Native American woman cautions a tribal police officer, “There are those among us who are not what they seem”, seemingly referring to the new tribal deputy (who turns out to be an FBI plant on the reservation). The lieutenant character (the always lovely Zahn McClarnon) already seems aware of this truth but hasn’t yet let on. Sometimes there are reasons for failing to acknowledge reality — for better or worse.

In the tv series Fellow Travelers, young gay men working for the US government during the McCarthy era are forced to hide their identities (in the face of insane hypocrisy – nothing new there). While the whole story is compelling, the idea of surface-level appearance remains acute. Matt Bomer’s character plays the dutiful heterosexual man, marrying and having a family, but leading a double life. Many characters did by necessity. But as time wore on, and the characters make their way into the 1970s and 80s, and a time of new openness, his friends’ lives opened as well. They stopped hiding. But it was not until his character was confronted by the death of the love of his life that he could stop living a lie. To all outward appearances, his character had seemed to have it all, but in hiding his reality, he suffered and lost an unimaginable amount.

We never know what is going on just under the surface. And even when we do, it’s often easier to let it be, not to acknowledge the truth. What someone has suffered or been damaged by, what has hurt and wounded them. Whether it’s searing loss that hasn’t been adequately dealt with, or repeated exposure to the torture of Phil Groovyesque name-that-tune sessions, nothing, and no one, is ever quite what it seems.

phil groovy

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This New Year’s Day, it’s fitting somehow that as I depart Scotland once more, I hear Phil “Groovy” Collins‘s lame remake of “Groovy Kind of Love“. It was always something my once-upon-a-time best friend and I made fun of. She spent a lot of time in Scotland when we were young, and on one of my more memorable New Year’s Eve nights, she phoned my house when we rang in the new year (from Aberdeen, where she had spent that new year). This was back when it was a big deal and expensive to phone people internationally.

No matter how many years pass, when things happen that would have struck us as funny as kids, or when I hear songs we loved or laughed at, I think of and really miss her, as we were then. I don’t know who (or how) she is any more but as always hope it’s somewhere that she can enjoy a groovy kind of love.