Niagara-on-the-lake

It’s off-season in this frozen-in-time neat-and-trim slice of Colonialism. Our guide says the Victorian hotel on the corner is mostly a new build. He points out where the Confederacy generals took refuge after Lincoln’s war, and what was rebuilt after the Americans razed everything in 1813.
     “If Brock had lived,” he muses. “He’d have kept his promises to his native allies.”
     Without pause, I reply: “Doubt it.”
     Have I grown too cynical? Are war, pestilence and wild fires too close for self-delusion now?
     Bedecked in Hallmark decorations, the town waits for that bright Christmas snow to make it picture perfect.

Inspired by my recent visit to NOTL. Image of the Prince of Wales Hotel hotel from TimeOut.

Here’s a Day

Now here’s a day
Basking in the digital glow of hi-rez pixels
Eating a handful of peanuts
Drinking yesterday’s coke
I stare at lines of code
Ruin my eyes
Trying to decipher the purpose of this program’s existence
Which is still easier by far than reaching for the purpose of mine

I know it’s in there
All purchaseable answers to our divine questions
How to lose ten pounds
How to find a date
How to remain vastly entertained
Aggregated through large language models
Ten billion voices waiting to be heard
How to reach the meaning beyond the meaning of words

Inspired by Thumbs-Down. Photo by Fred Ni.

Thumbs-Down

The world feels like a different place. There are many obvious reasons. Yet there is something else, inarticulable. It feels akin to existing but not living. Participating in the day-to-day but not experiencing. Searching for meaning in the meaningless. Have our privileged lives rendered us bored? We have grown intolerant of anything that takes time. While paradoxically time is all we have. Speaking and writing in full sentences takes too long, absurdly. We are drawn to the ever shorter and faster, constraining our human interactions when voice, touch and bearing witness to each other’s emotions is what truly sustains us.

Inspired by What Good Can Come. Photo by Wendy Whelan.

Bloor Station Maybe

Bloor station maybe, where I first saw that blood on the tracks, where a woman had fallen in front of a train, or maybe she’d jumped . . . the T.T.C. has never been terribly forthcoming with this sort of stuff. Perhaps in the belief that it could only encourage others, or more likely, that it would frighten their riders. Instead, they announce emergencies and delays and label the box under each platform For Police User Only. It’s certainly large enough to contain some pretty hefty rescue equipment, but the story I’ve heard is that it contains nothing more than a shovel and a plastic bag.

Inspired by Monday Bloody Monday. Photo by Rick Harris on Flickr, some rights reserved.

A Legacy of Borrowed Trauma

I’ve always squinted in bright light. Family snapshots show a scrawny kid with a face like a scrunchy. With my almond, half-closed eyes, kids taunted me with a certain racial slur. It hurt. I wanted to hide, to disappear. Then, one Halloween, my harried mother, with three boys to outfit, acquired an armful of hand-me-down costumes. Score! The only one that fit me was that of a Chinese coolie. (Yes, people used that term back then.) I howled. I cried. I refused to wear it. I missed the school party and missed trick-or-treat. To this day, I can’t stand dress-up.

Inspired by Bears in the Closet and the Corpse’s recent Halloween theme. Image from an article by Nevin Coyne. 

Bears in the Closet

They are just Teddy bears, two of them, old and worn, outgrown and neglected. The ears are chewed. The stuffing on one seeps out at the seams. She takes them from the closet and dusts them off. She displays them on the shelves, among the books he used to read, the toys he played with, and the detritus of his boyhood. There’s no tragedy here. He’s still alive. And he’s not a neglectful son, or an ungrateful one. But when she saw the bears they reminded her again that she still mourns him—the boy who was so fleetingly hers.

Inspired by What Good Can Come. Illustration by Nancy.

What Good Can Come?

Afterward, the night was etched with dreams and multiple wakings to the shadows of dreams. His mind’s turbulences tore asunder any possible reckoning with the quietude of darkness and all he heard he had heard before and would hear again, the plaintiff echoes of the disappearing creatures from all his scorched-earth imaginings made manifest: all flying things from the firmament, all walking things from the earth, and all swimming things from the seas. He sees the last mother bear, the last soaring eagle, and the last mourning whale and wonders, what good have we done here? What good can come?

Inspired by Loup. Illustration by Fred Ni.