To honour an amazing day, the day I watched my first grandchild Caitlin's birth. She gave me a new life, a new self, and a reason to carry on when all seemed lost. Today she is eleven years old. We do mad scientist crafts together, baking experiments, make YouTube videos (ferociousgumby!), and have all sorts of riotous fun.
If you want to scare the shit out of yourself, listen to these. NOBODY can explain what is going on here. Scientists are saying things like, "A glacier moved". Obviously the people involved are way freaked out.
I want to write about hearing shit, I mean the shit I hear that I don't even want to hear. My hearing is so hypersensitive it's almost a joke, and lately it seems I can hear a ladybug walking up a plant stalk somewhere on the next street (while I'm sleeping). Makes no sense. I'm even using noise-cancelling YouTube videos to deal with it.
I tried to find out something about tinnitus, which I don't think it is, but was completely intimidated when I read in Wikipedia that some forms of tinnitus can be heard from outside the person's head. In other words, they are BROADCASTING the thing. Science fails us.
This is a chairy tale,
but a nasty one, a Grimm with a bad ending.
I hate office equipment.
I wish I could type inside my head, make the words float out on to the page or
even suspend themselves in mid-air like in Stephen Hall’s Raw Shark Texts. Instead
I’m left with typing, which is as awkward now as it was in the class I took in
high school. Imagine being a typing teacher all your life, trying to teach a
bunch of sullen kids a boring skill on the “qwerty” keyboard which was designed
when typewriters were first invented. The whole board was set up to slow
typists down, because the only way to correct errors back then was to spit on
the page, or cut the piece out with a scabbard.
So. The chair. My office
chair always sucks, and I’ve been through a few of them. There is always
something seriously wrong with them. For years I played musical chairs with my
husband. “This thing is made of vinyl!” I’d complain in the summer, peeling my
shorts-clad legs off the seat like Velcro. So I’d get his fabric-covered one
for a while, the one with hard plastic arms that bored holes in my elbows. The
proportions just weren’t right on this thing, so I ended up with backache and
fatigue.
Not to mention eyestrain.
Let’s get into eyestrain, shall we? Being an author, I’ve had to edit
manuscripts. Back then anyway, we used a marked-up hard copy and a computer
copy and sort of fixed one using the other. So I needed some sort of stand to
hold my papers, double-wide, and still see my monitor.
God.
I hunched and squinted as
I tried to see the damn monitor, jacked up as it was to make it just visible
while I shuffled papers. I got used to
agony in my lower back, the price of my art, perhaps. The truth is, I just
didn’t know how else to do it.
“This thing is a piece of
shit!” I’d cry in the winter, as the cold plastic froze my arms to my sides. So
once again we went through the old switcheroo.
This latest chair created
more problems. I began to slide down farther and farther on my spine, at the
same time hunching forward because I couldn’t see my monitor at all. “Why do
you do that?” my husband would ask. “I need my paper stand.” “Why?” “I
might need to use it again.” “Why?”, and so on.
Another switch of chair.
Finally, when my bizarre posture had actually given me medical problems, I
decided I needed a Brand New Chair that would fix everything. Since we’re
cheap, and since they had a nice selection at a good price, we went to Costco.
Like the Three Bears, I had to sit in each one to see which of them was “just
right”.
Amazingly, it was the
second one I sat in. Like a first-class airplane seat (and how the hell would I
know what THAT felt like? I’m guessing), it just cradled my body, but kept my
back straight. The arm rests were lavishly padded and curved to match the curve
of forearm and wrist and hand.
I! Loved! That! Chair! I loved it in the morning, I loved it in the
evening, I loved it –
Then I got it home.
My keyboard rests on a
tray that pulls out. Keeps the dust off n’ stuff (supposedly, but in reality my
keyboard is just as filthy as everyone else’s). Every time I pulled up to my
keyboard, the deluxe first-class arms of this thing pushed the tray back in.
But it got worse. The new
chair wouldn’t go down far enough. I almost felt like a little kid with her
feet dangling up off the floor. I could not believe this. “WHY WON’T IT GO
DOWN?” I screamed. “It’s as far down as it will go.” “This was designed for a
six-foot man.” “Why didn’t you notice that at the store?”
I didn’t notice ANYTHING at the store.
You don’t sit back and
lounge in an office chair. You work from it. You keyboard, you mouse,
you do stuff. You roll it forward and back. (And that’s another thing.
That big plastic mat-thingie underneath the chair just kept sliding all over
the place. The casters made dents in itthat the chair kept falling back into, and they were about a mile back
from my computer. My wrist was in agony, like a toothache. Everything
was wrong.
“So (sarcastically), do
you want another chair?”
Bastard!
He had groused and grumped
about buying a proper plastic floor mat with those little teeth in it to grip
the carpet, refusing to even consider it because it cost something like $40.
00. I kept trying to explain it to him, how the casters were cutting into the
rug. “Then pull the plastic mat back,” he said. “I’d need to do it every five
minutes.”
I like my chair, I
really do, and if I had a circular saw, one of those things with teeth all
around it, it would be no more. Right now my tray with my keyboard on it has a
shelf sitting on top if it, an old shelf left over from one of those really
tacky particle-board book cases. My monitor has one under it too, to jack it up
at least an inch to make up for the fact that the chair is too high up and
can’t be fixed.
Now I am nagging him to
PLEASE let me get a proper mat so the thing won’t slither and slide all over
hell’s-half-acre like Bambi on ice. He gets this squinched-up, disapproving
look on his face (I can read his mind: “God, what a waste of money”), doesn’t
even make eye contact with me because I know he does not understand my needs.
He complains all the time
that I spend too much time at the computer. I have this little habit of
writing. In my entire life, I have had maybe two people understand what I do,
and my husband is not one of them. He thinks I play at it. Everyone thinks
I play at it, that I pretend and delude myself that I’m “doing something”. So
how can my back hurt, I wonder? If it isn’t even “work”? And why won’t I come
out of that room and go to Costco with him to look at bulk sausages and stuff?
To all but those two
people, ANYTHING would be better than doing what I do, the waste of time. Even
having books out is futile, isn’t it? Some sort of Hemingway fantasy? (And
didn’t Hemingway end up shooting himself in the head?). Why do you need a
special chair, for God’s sake, and a plastic floor mat with little
dit-dots on it so the chair won’t buck and heave under you like a wild horse?
I threw my keyboard at
the wall once, so that the underside is secured with masking tape. I have
slammed innumerable mice, and thrown a few, which is satisfying because the
cover pops off and the battery goes flying across the room. I can’t throw a
chair, can’t lift the thing, would like to throw a husband but he is rooted seventeen
feet into the ground. Not getting it. While I sit there mousing and hurting.
Mousing and hurting.
Postlog. This is something I wrote a long time ago, for That Other Blog, Open Salon, which I didn't really know how to do. I didn't realize you had to "like" people's stuff (usually without reading it) so that they would "like" yours (usually without reading it). It got worse and worse. I didn't need junior high all over again, though it surprises me how often I have to relive it. Then someone dissed me in a high-and-mighty fashion for using a photo of Sylvia Plath without writing to her estate for permission to use it. This photo had been blogged and reblogged hundreds, if not thousands of times, but then these two women, chittidy-chattidy, yatter yatter yatter, we're in and you're not, finally drove me out. When I said I thought the photo was in the public domain, one of the bitches said, "I'm speechless." They simply could not believe what a yokel, what an uneducated idiot they had in their midst. I set this blog up on a whim and haven't changed it much, though most blogs are sleeker and look more sophisticated. I hate sleek and sophisticated. I like simple blogs with lots of pictures, because part of me never left kindergarten. I was a lot happier then. My happiest time was when I was ten and in a special class and we ran riot and gave our teacher a breakdown. For once in my life, someone called me "smart" and even acknowledged it. It wasn't to last, for the biddies of mediocrity would ultimately close in, as they always do. I don't even have this font any more, isn't it wild?
Ahhhhhh. . . such flavour. Such an ecstasy of sensual pleasure. TV advertising was new then, and the mad men of Madison Ave. were exploring the potential of the moving image. No longer did they have to limit themselves to glossy still pictures.
Back then, it was all good. Nothing was "bad for you". Later in the decade came the ads, tinged with a little desperation, describing how "mild" the cigarettes were, how easy on the throat, even claiming that doctors recommended certain brands. Which they probably did.
I don't know what this creep is selling, but I wish he'd go away. I think it's a lead-in to an ad presented by the host of a very early TV show, perhaps from the late 1940s. TV ws remarkable then. I even found a show where two men stood in front of enormous microphones and read off of sheafs of paper.
Incomprehensible that these cops would break up a couple for innocently kissing on a bench, then hand them cancer-inducing tubes of tobacco. More socially-acceptable, I guess. Put a smile in your smoking! And note the flamboyant way everyone seems to blow out their smoke. Why?
This woman cleans her breath and guards her teeth by rubbing her finger on them. And I love that MISSING MISSING MISSING part.
Garrrrr-dollllll.
A woman facially masturbating with a cake of soap.
The Cancer Ballet. Can you hear the coughing, can you see the black lungs and congested hearts? Obviously, they couldn't.
Just stumbled on this while wasting time and not writing (my fave activity, it seems - writing is for the birds, I'm done with it anyway). It's one of the better themes of '60s TV: a mini-Western in 2 1/2 minutes. Back then, a theme/intro lasted long enough to tell a story, to let it unfold. Whoever directed this was a genius - the stark black-and-white images, one after the other - the drums, the broken sword, the stripped buttons and braid. And Chuck Connors, my God, who remembered this face, he is a GOD! It's not craggy so much as enigmatic, mojo-loaded in its sere stillness like some Easter Island statue about to be toppled. Western heroes were known for not emoting, and he's so good at it that it flips over and becomes its opposite. I did watch a few of these, but I was ten years old, for God's sake, and what did I know of exile? Since then I came to know it by name, I ate that dust over and over again and had my gold braid torn off by any number of varieties of shame. I walked in that desert and went eye-to-eye with snakes and hallucinated with Moses and searched for water in the rock. It changes you, such exile. You never find your way back. Not entirely. That's just not the way it happens.
Yes, I remember Tom Ewell, who could forget, he was in that movie with Marilyn Monroe, Some Like it Hot, wasn't it, or no, it was The Seven-Year Itch I think. But this is a way weird-ass show because, uh, The Tom EWELL show? Who'd a known.
I don't have dates for these, but I suspect they're 1958 - 1962-ish, because in that era most sitcoms began with stylish but very primitive animation. This one reminds me just a little bit of a later gem, My World and Welcome To It, loosely based on the works of James Thurber. William Windom, I think. I'll never forget his turn, or turns, on Star Trek, sweating and freaking out. Or was it someone else?
You can't tell me there was actually a show by this name on TV. Looks like a failed pilot, or something that maybe lasted a season. Then again. O. K. Crackerby! with Burl Ives was a real show, and it knocked me over to realize it. Notice how they cleverly combined "cracker barrel" (folksy wisdom) with "cracker" (po' white trash, which he was supposed to be in the show, and probably was in real life).
This reminds me so much of another '60s sitcom intro I giffed, that also showed a couple driving home and doing zany things, but now I can't remember either of their names. Peter and Mary ring no bells either.
Love that station wagon.
I've heard of My Sister Eileen, but not as a TV show, and the intro is so bizarre and '60s that I just had to include it.
I don't know why this doesn't say The Weird Brothers. It looks like three Swiss guys, bellringers or something, with bells for hats. A kindergartner using left-handed scissors could have made better cutouts than these, that's all I can say. I said weird-ass, and I gave you weird-ass.
William Windom's finest hour in The Doomsday Machine.
Jonathan Kay | October 24, 2014 | Last Updated: Oct 25 2:30 AM ET
Andrew Burton/Getty Images Police guard the Canadian Parliament one day after gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau infiltrated the building before being shot dead
‘Our world has changed forever today and we don’t even know yet how much,” Canadian Senator Fabian Manning declared on Wednesday, after a shootout in the heart of Canada’s Parliament buildings, which ended with the death of rampaging gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. In an editorial entitled “The End of Innocence,” the Calgary Herald solemnly declared that “Canada will never be the same again.” “Just as America changed the moment the planes hit the Twin Towers, Canada was forever altered the moment Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was struck down [by Zehaf-Bibeau],” wrote Susan Clairmont of the Hamilton Spectator. “In the hours and days and years to come, we will know that this was a pivotal moment that we can never turn back from.” Is all this true? Are we indeed living in a dangerous new era in which the desecration of public spaces by bullets and blood becomes a part of daily life? The promiscuous use of phrases such as “loss of innocence” and “new normal,” as well as the nation’s generally traumatized state this past week, suggest that many Canadians believe we indeed have undergone a massive and terrifying shift. But the quantitative evidence for this is shaky — non-existent, really. The two Canadian men killed by Islamist-inspired terrorists this week were the first domestic terror casualties since 9/11. Put another way: In a single spasm of random evil, Justin Bourque produced more deaths in Moncton (three) than Islamism has yielded in all of Canada in the 13 years since 9/11. And despite the fact many Canadians worry incessantly about violent crime — not to mention spectacular but obscure threats such as Ebola and religiously motivated terrorism — our society actually has become much safer in recent decades.
In response to the Angus Reid Global survey question “In the past two years, have you yourself been a victim of crime which involved the police?” 25% of respondents answered yes in 1994; 13% in 2012; 9% in 2014. This is part of a worldwide trend. According to data presented at the University of Cambridge last month, “nations as diverse as Estonia, Hong Kong, South Africa, Poland, and Russia have seen average recorded homicide rates drop by 40% or more in the course of just 15 years.” So why do so many of us feel such a sense of fear and dread so much of the time? One theory, enunciated by countless experts, is that the ultrasafe nature of our society hasn’t extinguished our baseline level of anxiety: It simply has rendered it dormant, ready to awaken the moment some shocking stimulus (such as even a small-scale terrorist attack) jolts our brains. Moreover, our capacity for psychologically processing human tragedy has been systematically degraded in recent generations, because so many of us go through much of our lives without experiencing any real loss. In my grandfather’s youth, it was not an unusual thing for mothers to lose one or even several infants to disease. The wars that were fought during his lifetime ground through tens of millions of human bodies. These days, on the other hand, an insane man with a dim knowledge of Islam runs screaming into Parliament with a gun and everyone suddenly declares that we are at “war.” Winnowed to nothingness by our hair-trigger sensitivities, the very word has lost all meaning.
There is another factor, too: the power of video. Literature and the spoken word can be used to bombard people with facts and arguments. But only video can transport us wholesale into a world of horror — short-circuiting our rational side, and hitting our emotional core. ISIS, surely, understands this: With just a few beheading videos, it was able to taunt the world’s most powerful nation into a new Iraq war. (The gambit seems to have turned out poorly for ISIS, but at least they get to issue the ever-popular jihadi boast that they are directly confronting the Great Satan.) On Wednesday morning, everyone in Canada was talking about the events at Parliament Hill. But more than taking in the news by reading and listening, we were watching — focusing our attention on a short but shocking cellphone video of the moments when Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was taken down in the corridors of Parliament. It’s that video that my journalistic colleagues had in their mind when they wrote those soaring accounts of “lost innocence.”
As it happens, Lortie’s invasion of the legislative building, and Jalbert’s heroic intervention, were recorded on a fixed-mounted video camera. You can see the whole thing below. But that video was released to the public only after the passage of a full year. That was the way things were done back then: Such shocking images were reserved first for police inquiries, court proceedings and only eventually (as in this case) CBC documentaries. By the time the public saw it, the first bloom of the event’s terror already was dead. This week, by contrast, the video was uploaded to the whole world within minutes. We took in the fear before we could process the facts. And therein lies the source of so much of our anxiety.
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