Minutes

Location: The Commoner, 2067 Dundas Street West.

Time: December 7, 5:00 P.M.

Attendees: Nancy, Ron, and Roy—plus Fred and Wendy.

Absent: Laurie.

Unfinished business: None.

New business:

—Impressions and engagement are essentially unchanged. Our two recent pledges expressed their enthusiasm, the veterans their acceptance.

—Problematic stories and f-bombs.

—Dog stuff, both pro and con.

—Complaints regarding neighbourhood infrastructure, mostly water-related.

—The fastest way to get downtown.

Actions:

—Going forward, members are asked to announce their posts in the regular group e-mail, including the due date for the next contribution, so that Roy isn’t always stuck being the deadline bully.

AI image by Gencraft.

You Wish

Before there was online shopping, even before there was the Internet there was the Sears Christmas Wishbook. Thick with potential, its arrival sparked a frisson of excitement among us Webbwood Estates snipes. I’d pore over those still-cold pages with the discerning eye of a Harrod’s merchandiser, nodding over the artistically back-lit dinosaur and Hot Wheels dioramas. I’d submit my list—with purchase order codes—in plenty of time. I rarely got anything I asked for, but disappointment never dampened my enthusiasm each year, when I could nestle that catalogue on my chubby little lap and pretend we had money.

Inspired by Virtual Therapy. Picture of the much coveted but never possessed Easy Bake Oven, from the Sears Wishbook, 1972.

Virtual Therapy

Feeling empty. 

Check social media

Scroll...

Scroll...

Everybody so happy, so fulfilled— 

Close IG, close Facebook, close TwitterX

Surf internet 

Deals, DEALS, DEALS— 

Click

Click

How did they know I needed that!? 

“Three left in stock” 

Gotta have

“Sixty-five people are currently viewing this product” 

Gotta have. Something, anything, to fill this emptiness

Hold it. Wait. Stop! Need to think…

“Take another 10% off at checkout” 

Now! Hurry! Click to get there

“Expedited delivery?”

Yes! I want it now!

“Your order is complete”

YES!

Close tab, rub hands, look out window

Feeling empty. 

Check social media. Everybody else so happy—

Inspired by Here’s a Day. Photo by Cliplab.

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.

Loup

It’s 3 A.M. It’s always 3 A.M. That heart-racing shadow time between first sleep and ragged consciousness. It starts by the stairs, announcing itself with a quiet scrape-scrape-scape like something in the walls. And then it rests, takes in the air around it. Scrape drag-scrape drag, closer, louder now. The creaking railing and floorboards mark its progress toward me. Eyes scrunched closed and pillow over my head I burrow deeper into the covers, wishing stillness, invisibility. But the blanket at the foot of the bed tugs back. Then that strangely soft brush of fur against my ankle right before the bite.

Inspired by All Work and No Play. Image of Tala by the author.

All Work and No Play

I remember the houses that never gave out treats, They stood alone, foreboding and yet alluring. Our eyes peered, searching for life, ready to act when the attic light started flickering. We expected a silhouette of a man unshaven, grinning and beckoning us with his bloody axe.

Fast forward 40 years, I rush home from work still to get a pumpkin and carve it. I’m too late for the candy and buy a box of regular size O’Henrys. The tots are beginning to arrive in their bunny costumes. And I wonder after all if Wendy and Jack were just tired.

Inspired by the Spooky Season. Photo from the Bettmann Archive.

A Break in Her Morning Routine

She woke reluctantly to the unpleasant sound of eggs and bacon coming in from the kitchen.

     She’d heard that taste before, but didn’t think to inform the superintendent until it was too late, until she’d gotten up to find the breakfast engine dispensing the morning traffic report instead of her coffee and the grim news that followed, a foul stream of information flowing over the countertop and down to a growing pool on the floor, swirling around the tiny drain to the recycling system, overwhelmed, and backing up quickly.

     The door, hearing nothing unusual in her frantic greens, stayed shut.

Inspired by Cocooned. Image by DALL·E.

Cocooned

Saturday. Jane’s condo door was stuck. The Super wasn’t picking up, so she busied herself with chores until he’d answer. Sunday. She awoke to a bedroom door, left open but now locked from the outside. Hours of shouting and pounding the walls. Her dying cell unable to reach neighbours, friends, even 911. Hoping a reset from this waking nightmare, she forced her anxious mind, her hungry body and bruised and bloody hands to bed. But Monday’s Reaper clawed at her racing heart and breathed on her neck. She couldn’t lift her head. She was boxed in on all four sides.

Inspired by Kazimir Melvich’s Black Suprematic Square (1915).

The Fall Cometh

When I see ancient ruins, I'm struck by the ephemeral nature of the societies that built them. Mycenae was a powerful empire, it traded widely, it was a central antagonist (with Sparta) in the Trojan War. And then it was sacked and burnt, no one knows by whom. It fell and never recovered. Other city states and empires rose and took its place—until they collapsed in their turn. All their impregnable fortresses were breached, their eternal tombs robbed, their people thrown into chaos, often for generations. What is history telling us?
        Looking for a scary Halloween? Ponder that thought.

Inspired by the Exquisite Corpse’s recent Halloween theme and a visit to Mycenae this week. Photo by Sergii Figurnyi.

Young Atomic Drivers

young atomic drivers
bend round the highway curve
all the way
to an electric LED night
they love the smell of an ozone fog
the way it irradiates as their headlights shine through

dashing boys and girls
working to be equal amongst equals
new climate babes
born to the tune of celebrities’ calls
howling at wifi satellites streaking across their night sky

they study the brand new truth:
things will get worse before they get worse
so they hold the world up and kiss it goodbye
then eat the billionaires’ flesh, sun-dried russet, shriveled-chewy on the asphalt in the heat

Inspired by the Spooky Season. Illustration by Fred Ni.

Original Haunt

I was alone in the house with my younger brother. We were emptying our pillowcases of candy and doing the usual trade offs between Caramels and Tootsie Rolls hoping for a surprise Popeye Cigarettes’ box. An old woman in ragged clothes howling like Regan’s exorcism suddenly appeared at the window. I was utterly terrified. I threw my brother on the back of my bike and raced away like he was E.T.  Turns out, it was my cousin playing a prank. It was the kind of scare that stirred me and still does. An original. Unlike the latest and greatest inflatable. 

Inspired by the Spooky Season and Monday Bloody Monday. Image from from The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Monday Bloody Monday

All this just happened, the stories passing quickly through the schoolyard, all the way down to the first-grade kids: A twelve-year-old taken away in handcuffs, a bunch of kids expelled for something they’d done in the old warehouse. Another broke his leg in a challenge on the stairs. Someone found blood there later, then blood on a newspaper outside, then someone else said the hallways were haunted, maybe even a vampire in the cafeteria. 

So, today, powerless against this spectre of delinquents and bullies, we sent our boy back to school, but with a clove of garlic in his pocket.

Inspired by the Spooky Season. Image by AtlasStudio.

The Habs and the Hab-Nots

As mobile homes went, ours was rather swishy. We had three bedrooms and four televisions. This material aggrandizement was less middle-class preening and more Hockey Night in Canada. Good luck trying to sneak in a Saturday episode of M*A*S*H on the “Big TV.”

Banished, I’d sulk to my room to wrestle with the rabbit-eared 16″ Zenith. Mom would just sew. But Dad, a cable-TV pirate, jerry-rigged all the trailer’s electrics. So, when the Singer ran it killed the TV reception. At any moment, Dave Hodge’s voice could be dashing through the frizzling snow.

     And—ho, ho, ho—we knew it.

Inspired by Single on a Double. Image by Roy Schulze.

Single on a Double

It’s 1989. We meet in a sports bar for a Talk. I haven’t been a very good boyfriend. It’s crowded, Jays and A’s, Game 3, and the Jays have dropped the first two games. We haven’t seen each other, and the conversation is stilted. Finally she gets to the point: I haven’t been a very good boyfriend. And then, Tony Fernandez cracks a double, and the place goes wild. She’s talking, but I cheer along with everyone else, and she gets mad, and I know for certain that it’s over, that I’m more invested in this game than this relationship.

Inspired by What You Remember. Image from Eater on Pinterest.