Constance' Coma and the Foreboding Footnote

(continued from Candy's Christmas Kick, Dec. 28/2011 &
Aunt Carol's Pubic Display of Affection, Jan. 2/2012)


It was five days after Candy dropkicked her mother’s Christmas tree. New Year’s Eve. Her mother, Constance, lay prostrate in a hospital bed having falling into an “unconventional” coma. Unconventional was the word chosen by the attending physician, one Dr. Sing-sing—a short man with porcelain teeth and dense, thick hair that seemed to sprout from his head in clumps like a spider plant.

Candy’s father, Fritz, stood over his wife’s hospital bed in his penny loafers and thin shoulders. He managed a look of calm composure on his pleasant enough face, but tapped one foot competitively against the hospital’s linoleum floor to compensate. He was exhausted.

To the unexplained nature of the coma, Dr. Sing-sing described such that,

“By all accounts,

 Constance should be awake.

 Her body reacts to outside stimuli

 as though she has been temporarily¹ paralysed.”

                “Do you have any exotic pets in the house?”
                                “No.”
                “Have you eaten anything out of the ordinary lately, wild mushrooms, shellfish?”
                                “No.”
                “Does your wife have any history of epilepsy?
                                “No.”
                “Any known medication or drugs she’s taking?”
                                “No.”

The only out of the ordinary thing they could detect was the dried blood on Constance’s hand, and the tiny sliver of Christmas glass lodged in her palm. “I found her lying below the Ikea dining table,” Fritz explained upon bringing her in.

But elsewhere in the sepia-painted hospital room, in a place somewhere between here and there...

...Constance was in her home, lying under the Ikea dining table. She was completely surrounding by broken bits of Christmas ball scattered and glinting all around her on the floor.  She tried to get up but couldn't without putting her hands on the broken glass. She was paralysed.

Even her cheek was pressed into the floor with glass shards lying in wait beneath it. The Christmas glass was red, green and blue – it might have been pretty in another situation.

The Christmas glass began to shiver all around her, it stirred. Soon the glass began to slide along the ground away from her, towards the front window where the Christmas tree would normally be.

Some of the glass bits began to reconnect with each other, one of the green Christmas balls had begun to form like a 3-D puzzle. The Christmas tree laying on its side began to quiver—it started to stand up, right itself again, glass balls had begun to reform. Some of the Christmas balls seemed to levitate through the open air and find their place on the tree branches.


And there was something else different about the room. Someone was in the room with Constance, someone who shouldn't be there. Constance tried to manoeuvre her eyes to see who it was—she couldn't adjust her position without cutting her face open on the Christmas glass. The looming shape of him was just beyond her sight.
            
                He was a bad man.

[1 Sing-sing shucked the air in an unfortunately clichéd karate chop motion to emphasize temporarily—as if focusing on the word temporary and ignoring the word coma would lessen the severity of the situation.]

Aunt Carol's Pubic Display of Affection

(continued from "Candy's Christmas Kick, Dec. 28/2011")

Aunt Carol had good reason to be critical of Candy. She said to Candy’s mother and father while she swept up the smashed Christmas glass, “You know I have good reason to be critical of Candy.”

This was the first Christmas since the local newspaper informed the public of the untimely death of Carol’s husband Grant. His death resulted from the slippery combination of a bar of Lever 2000 soap and a toilet.

If you saw Carol at the bank or in the town library or driving the speed limit in her 1999 Silver Civic—if you saw her you might imagine that her house was decorated in forest greens and tepid pinks. But Carol liked browns and blues. She preferred leather to wicker; hardwood to ceramic tiles.

In spite of the boldness of her tastes, Carol was frightened by many things. She was afraid of her body’s ability to embarrass her, that she might fart by accident in public or be seen through a window dying the gray out of her shoulder-length hair. Her worst fear was that she’d be overwhelmed by an urge to vomit in a community space—that she might be forced (as her brother-in-law puts it) to “park a tiger” in a public garbage can at the local shopping mall.

Carol lay awake on her individually-pocketed coil mattress at least one night each week. She would lie flat on her back, mulling over the letter to the editor she sent to her local newspaper (The Open-Door Daily). It was in response to an editorial he wrote about “public displays of affection.” Carol absent-mindedly misspelled the word “public," as in “a pubic display of affection.” 

The reason it kept her awake at night was because it was more than just a spelling mistake. It was a Freudian slip.        

Carol had a pretty heavy crush on the editor of the newspaper. His name was _____. Her intention in writing the letter was to dazzle him with her writing prowess. He lived alone in a small house with a blue spruce a few doors down from her on Social Street. He was 12 years younger than she. He could be regularly seen jogging along the Social sidewalk in spandex shorts that were tight around his bum like “two cantaloupes in a carry bag” (she devised the simile but never actually spoken it aloud for fear she would blush).

But on more than one occasion, Aunt Carol had spied Candy entering and leaving his small house with its blue spruce during the late hours of the night and the early hours of the morning…

On Proofreading

Do it, do it, do it.

Even if its simply a fecebook status up date—matter fact, especailly if it's a facebook updat.

Like Rob Ford's face, words are great big fat things. Whenever an "X" of mine hit a brick wall in his rhetoric, he liked to drop the word respect—disrespect to be exact. The miscommunication at hand was ultimately reduced to an issue of respect: he wasn't getting it; I wasn't giving it. I was genuinely confused not because I necessarily felt his argument was confusing, but because I didn't understand how it was related to the concept of respect.

Other words have a similar ability to blanket meaning: love being a very obvious example. God, another.  These words can be used as stops. When they are spoken, we are stopped from getting any further.

A wise man once offered a very simple suggestion to me that affected great change in my life. During my dark days, weeks, months—(years!Don’ttellanyone)—I had obsessive conversations with myself over the "rationale" behind certain emotional responses I experienced in certain social situations (a blog for another day). I didn't feel that my emotions were rational; I felt, at many times, that I was being irrational.

"How about using the word reason, instead of the word rational?"

His suggestion made a dull, unclimactic sense to me. I decided to make the slight adjustment in my conversations with myself. It began to feel a little bit better. After awhile, I started trusting myself more. Today, reason is one of my top ten favourite words. Rationale carries with it a polarization between sanity and insanity; reason does not. Reason granted me power over my choices.

Reason trumps rationale.

When X felt I was disrespecting him, I would ask: "what do you mean?" He would be unable to answer the question. For him, there was no need to go beyond the word respect. He stopped there. It was incredibly boring.

The problem with respect, love, God, rationale is NOT that they can—and do—mean different things for different people. Rather, the problem can occur when the speaker does not accept responsibility for his/her word choice.

              No [word] is an island.

Candy's Christmas Kick

Candy felt funny and awkward most of the time, like a yoga class fart. Christmas seemed to underline the point. Candy believed that the world wasn't as complicated as it was made out to be. She believed that the best way to chortle was most certainly through a snorkel, and for a clothes hamper to be handy, it must also be ample.

 

But when Aunt Carol commented on the french onion dip and chips Candy brought for Christmas dinner, Candy saw red—and green. In a sally of yuletide rage, Candy dropkicks the Christmas tree—stimulating a cascade of clinking bulbs, balls, and an angel that gracefully falls into the grog of Carol's cinna-mint egg nog.

To be continued...

Pre-digging a grave.

I watched the entire first season of The Walking Dead. It was as flat as a front lawn in surburbia.

I have often had a hard time creating characters for my stories. The story part comes very naturally to me—but when I try to place characters into that story, somehow it comes across as contrived. The characters are front-lawn flat.

Recently I've begun to consider the possibility that I have been going about writing my stories all wrong. In the process of creating a story before creating the characters, I have cornered myself. The story is doomed to be an experience of "my" perspective. "I" inevitably become the character in the story.

The characterization in The Walking Dead is extremely one-dimensional. The characters each have a single personality trait that gets flogged to death by the story surrounding them. Like my flat cornered characters, these characters feel to me like they were added to a story that already existed. Probably one of the most ambiguously interesting characters—the guy who gets bitten after pre-digging the graves of the characters who are about to die—gets killed off.

Although, I suppose part of enjoying zombie narratives comes from the one-dimensionality of the experience. In zombie stories, the difference between bad and good, dead and alive, enemy and friend, is clear-cut. When a good character dies, she is transformed into a bad character—a zombie. There is no ethical or moral dilemma to be worked through; no question of right or wrong is wrestled with.

Ambiguity in stories like The Walking Dead has a very slim chance of surviving. The heroes are well-maintained front lawns while the villains are piles of dead leaves. Anything other than that: start digging your own grave.

Dovercourt Road, Toronto

I don't recommend walking down Dovercourt Rd. with your back to oncoming traffic. You may very well get back slapped to the sidewalk by a sideview mirror.

At this particular moment, I live on this street. There are always good-looking folks walking up and down Dovercourt, whether they're leaving from/heading to the YMCA, hopping from one venue to another, or heading home from their day jobs.

The street has two-way traffic.  However, because of the parked cars lining the west side of the street, there are barely 1 and a 1/2 lanes.  The cars squeeze past each other at surprising speeds.

There is also a cop shop a few doors up from me. It is a plane, box-shaped building with all of its vertical blinds closed in all of its windows. In the summer time, someone planted red and white impatiens in the planters of the civilian entrance—but no one watered them and they died. A cave in the side of a mountain during winter is more inviting than this police station.

For the most part I enjoy their presence, assuming that any bike thief or cat burglar might think twice about stealing from me—what with the steady stream of cop cars heading to and from the office.

On a regular basis, I hear the squealing of tires. At the bottom of a slight dip in Dovercourt—a tiny ravine—there happens to be a crosswalk. I quite enjoy the Film Noir effect of the sluggish, flashing yellow lights. The squealing tires come as a result of speeding vehicles slamming their brakes at the last moment, when folks are crossing the street at the crosswalk.

Across the street from the cop shop, a newer, bigger, and better cop shop is being constructed. There are construction vehicles regularly parked or stopped on Dovercourt, forcing traffic to adapt to a one-way. In spite of the obvious need for a police officer to direct traffic during these moments, there has never been one. Yes, we will pay cops to stand unnecessarily all-day at construction sites all over the city—but not here on Dovercourt. No not here, in front of a police station where the construction of another police station causes traffic confusion. 

Sometimes when I see a big huge cop stuffed to the brim in a police car cruising on by with all of his gear and his layers of uniform—sometimes I share a little giggle with myself. It brings to mind images, like marbles in a medicine cabinet, or a funeral for the exclamation point.