Bobby Martin VI: Comforter

Cally Webb snuggled into the comforter, eking out her perfect dream. She was in a chalet. With Theo, who actually had taken a vacation. There was a fireplace, and Merlot, and toast, why not lots of toast, cinnamon toast with lots of butter, and she was telling Theo, “You’ve got butter on your nose,” and leaning in, laughing, to lick it off, when he clamped his hand, suddenly icy, on her shoulder. The chalet windows shuddered and broke. A cold, ashy wind blew the fire out and Cally awoke, panicked and kicking. “Theo?” she said. “Theo?”
     But he wasn't there.

Image: mariaemb.

Bobby Martin V

Theo rose early, scribbled a note to Cally, then drove north. The cottage on Fire Box Island had been in the Webb family since his grandfather bought the land from the Crown in 1922. After his meeting with the boy and his terrifying early-morning imaginings he had to come up to sort himself out. It was nearly noon when his tiny boat sputtered across the bay and glided to the dock. The distant clatter of dishes told him that Deb and Cy, his only neighbours, were preparing their lunch and he was momentarily comforted by such a pleasant, mundane thought.

Photo by Yvonne Boothroyd, YJB Images.

Patriot of a nation

Consider me a patriot of the nation of Procrastination. Crastinum is Latin for tomorrow (cras) + a time-related suffix (tinus). It once was possible to call the day after a holiday, or a term, or whatever, its “crastin” or “crostino”. The national custom is to eat cranberry crostini on the crastino of Christmas. You see we are a fine little nation, where first we do no harm. We grant asylum gladly to all seekers, waiving tiresome paperwork gently, like an old breeze. Our citizenship test is easy. Every day you can pass if you just say, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Image: NeighborFood

Bobby Martin IV

Dr. Webb woke at 2 am chilled. His wife had taken all the blankets again. He had dreamed of skulls seen through the flesh — a row of faces, their mouths open in silent screams. Even after 20 years in practice, he couldn’t stop bringing his work home. He sighed, thinking about Bobby. Schizophrenia in someone so young was rare. He turned to the bundle beside him. “Cally, stop hogging.” He yanked on the comforter, and when she didn’t respond, shook her. That’s when he saw — in the glow of the streetlight outside the window — his skeleton hand on her shoulder.

Viagra for Women

The FDA has approved a drug said to enhance female sex drive by activating sexual impulses in the brain.
   Addyi (generic: flibanserin), which is similar to a class of drugs that includes Prozac and other antidepressants, was previously rejected for its lack of effectiveness and adverse side effects (nausea, dizziness, and fainting).
   The drug will be available mid-October.
   Coincidentally, my novel A Person of Letters (generic: APOL) will also debut in October. APOL also affects chemical levels in the brain, notably endorphins, leading to feelings of pleasure and euphoria, without any of the unpleasant complications of its more expensive competitor.

Addyi image: Sprout Pharmaceuticals, reproduced by Reuters. APOL image: the author.

Bobby Martin, part III

“The FBI? Like a Special Agent!” The doctor smiled at Bobby. ”So, you see words? Words that tell you things?”
     Bobby stared out at College Street, slick and grey, the traffic light at Bathurst spattering red across the wet window. “No, just skeletons, and then things die.”
     Eleanor worried her pursestraps, then played at taking notes.
     People outside avoided puddles, ran for the streetcar. Bobby watched. No dead people.
     “So, how do you feel when you see these . . . ” Dr. Webb hesitated slightly, “these skeletons?”
     The boy moved his gaze from the window to the man.
     “I feel cold.”


Photo copyright by Corbis Images.

Why the Conservatives Must Go, in 100 Words

Ideology over analysis. Dinosaur of the day. Newspeak about “democratic reform.” A useless census. Voter suppression. Contempt of parliament. In and out. Impugning the Supreme Court. Killing the Kelowna Accord. Mother Canada. The sanctimonious international soap box. Unprincipled cynicism. Liberty curtailed. Monument to the Victims of Communism. The integrity deficit. Israel right or wrong. The muzzling of scientists. Mike Duffy. Hush money. Cold Camembert with broken crackers. Permanent campaigning. Patrick Brazeau. Tax pandering. Throw away the key. Dirty tricks and smear campaigns. Secrecy. Attack dogs. Scripted answers. Waving the flag, extolling the fight, and screwing the warrior. Robocalls. Pierre Poilievre.

Mother Canada in the Tar Sands by @cartogeek.

For a further 100 words on this subject, click here.

Bobby Martin II: I See You

“Please don’t think I’m crazy,” Bobby’s mother said to the doctor. She knew she had a crazy story to tell and now she looked crazy too. Her hair was stuck to her face in rain-soaked tangles and, when she tried to give Bobby a tissue, all she had in her pocket was a sodden wad.
      The doctor reached for his tissue box. He’s kind, Bobby’s mother thought, and he has polka dot socks.
      “Tell me what’s happening,” he said.
      Bobby stirred. “I see you phoning someone,” he said to the doctor. “Someone called Cyril. From the FIB. I mean, FBI.”

This story began here.

Image: StockPhotos.Ro

Robert Martin’s Hamster and Other Dead Things

It started with his hamster. Bobby barely spoke, “Mummy, why can I see Hammy’s bones?”
     Robert Martin’s mother approached the cage to find the animal playing happily on his wheel.
     “His head…I just see his skull, no fur, no eyes, nothing.”
     Eleanor forgot about the exchange until Hammy turned up stiff and cold under a blanket of shavings a day later.

     It continued.

Bobby’s visions extended to strangers on the street, actors on television, and lately the neighbour’s Labrador. They were lucky to get that doctor’s appointment and barely ascended the streetcar before the sky turned black and it poured.


A graveyard in Murcott, England. Photo by L. Leclair.

This story continues here.
 

Leaps of faith

At 51 I leapt. The occasion was the first washing of a new dress, a first-day-of-classes dress, a dress whose iron gray midweight cotton weave would announce “I’m dead serious” but whose polka dots and neck bow would say “this could be fun.” Hope against hope, the bow came fucking undone in the wash. Enter this diagram. Step 5 was where I leapt, the step at which what’s depicted as an inviting loop really has become a hanging sweat-creased string. (Yeah, you try it). But if you believe it’s a loop, bingo, you get a bow. Next step, finding Jesus.

Image: Frills, Fluff and Trucks.

Looking for the new moon

The east side of the park is lit by the hard white
glare on the tennis courts, neon balls smashing
past, and through the bushes that mask the semi-
rich people’s houses, light glints off their swimming
pool and Mick Jagger pounds on about how this
lady said she’d cover him in roses.

On the west side of the park the air is soft
with smudges of a contemplative joint. The
watery emeralds of the distant tower lights
turn meekly pink, the only flickering star
might be a firefly. I’d come out looking
for the newborn moon. Hush, no, not yet.

Turquoise Bowl

A comfort food of my childhood was rice with cheese. The rice used to be, well, rice. Today it’s Freekeh, a pretentiously-roasted green wheat – I read the package – with rosemary thrown in. The cheese used to be Samso, an über-bland Danish cheese even plainer than mozzarella. Today it’s a 3-year old cheddar, the kind that disturbed my father. “Can’t you finish it before you go back to Toronto,” he’d fret, “it makes a mess, it’s so crumbly.” But the grater I’m using was once my mother’s, and I’m still eating from the same stripey bowl as when I was six.

Purple Prose

Purple was her favourite colour — a sophisticated mix of cool and warm shades, she explained to the unrefined — the colour of royalty. Behr’s Mulberry vibrated on her living room walls. In fact, she filled her house with purple: indigo, lavender, lilac, mauve, plum and lots and lots of wine. Everywhere you looked: an extravaganza of purple — hard on the eyes like purple prose on the ears. Perhaps, we mused, she’s trying to match the three-day bruises on her arms. Perhaps we should have said something  — reported him. They buried her in a long-sleeved dress the colour of puce.

Purple Like Me

Not long after Rob Ford was elected mayor, my first small act of protest was to buy a Bike-Riding Pinko button from the bookstore up the street. When Olivia Chow ran against him four years later, our ward was one of only three to give Toronto a bright spot of purple among a sea of disappointment. Which was no surprise, really, since we’d been voting NDP provincially and federally long before the Orange Crush of 2011. Oh, and the leader of Ontario’s Green Party lives right around the corner. So yeah, I guess you could say it’s a colourful neighbourhood.

Map by blogTO. Glass by GraphicsFuel.

Something Old, Something Blue

Federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau today stepped aside in favour of former leader Jean Chretien. The move follows the return of Gilles Duceppe to lead the Bloc Quebecois after polls showed voter ambivalence towards Whateverhisnamewuz. Mr. Chretien did not comment on his campaign platform or what he hopes to accomplish if elected. “I just want to kick some ass,” he told reporters before wrestling a separatist to the ground.
     In other news, Chumbawamba launched its much-anticipated summer tour, the Colorado Avalanche announced the club’s return to Quebec City, and Microsoft announced it was re-rebooting its popular operating system, Windows 95.

Image: CBC

The Rime of the Ancient Hipster

So Kathy and I saw that lammy peacock on a rooftop just next to the bank. Was its presence here a feathered talisman for our neighbourhood? A haut-gammed albatross guiding us along our daily routines of foraging for organic asparagus and cheese made from Quebecois ungulates? And what would have happened if someone, say from Newmarket, saw it and shot it dead? Would he wear it around his neck too? Would our luck have turned? Would we have our very survival tested by devalued semis and unilingual children? Would my skinny brown hand never again hoist an ironic craft beer?

Photo by Hazel Smith.

The Woman in Gold

After seeing “The Kiss” last year in Vienna I went on a crash course on artist Gustav Klimt. So I was excited last month to see his sumptuous “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” at an exhibit at the Neue Galerie timed to coincide with the opening of a film about the portrait’s history. The painting was renamed “The Woman in Gold” by the Nazis when they confiscated it from its Jewish owners. Why? Adele Bloch-Bauer was Jewish. The Nazis had a rapacious eye for art, and they could well recognize beauty, but they could not acknowledge it in a Jew.

Image: Neue Galerie, New York

50 Ways To Leave Your Dentist

Carol was cool, a woman dentist when there were no women dentists, and her boyfriend-receptionist was a tattooed biker with silver rings. But Carol got this new hygienist, a former oral surgeon from a former Soviet Republic, who cleaned my teeth with violent efficiency, as though I were out cold. Blood streamed down my cheek and that was that.
     Then I found Joel. He was an empath, flinching whenever I’d flinch, yet I liked him and his thin, tired eyes. Six months later, when I came back, he was gone. Joel quit, they said. I always felt he’d committed suicide.

Decalcification

My dentist was concerned about a couple of brown spots he’d found on my lower-left canine. Decalcification, he called it and planned on touching them up with a bit of bonding material. No freezing necessary.
     To his surprise, though, they turned out to be cavities. He was preparing the surface, he told me, “and the drill just sunk right in.”
     And for all of the horror I’ve seen in the spit bowl, I think it disturbed me more right then to hear my tooth decay discussed as casually as I might describe the wood rotting away on my front porch.

Image by Linda Wilson.

4 out of 5 Dentists

It’s a proven fact that the gallons of fluoridated water that ran through our taps helped mitigate the tooth-rotting effects of childhood Tang drinking. But while Gen Xers reared on Cap’n Crunch and Pop Tarts may have been spared a mouthful of cavities, they now must endure the semi-annual harangue for cosmetic enhancements proffered by dentists who no longer earn their keep from fillings and extractions. My tooth doctor's pushing a $3000 porcelain overlay on a wonky molar. She keeps composites in a repurposed Ferragamo scarf box. These she shows me so that I can understand how the procedure works.

Photo by Oleksandr Bedenyuk.