Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
a fiction from the granville street bridge (part 4)
here is a photograph:
in this picture is our heroine – she is turning 19 in a haze of MDA (both ingested and smoked) and hard liquor. in two months one of the men in this photo will rape her, within five years the other man in the picture will die of a drug overdose. there is another photo too of another man (same party) – three years down the road he will rape and assault a friend of her so brutally that she is hospitalized. here is the danger she does not see – lurking in leather jackets, waiting for the right alleyway and the right girl.
before the night is out, our girl will come extremely close to having sex on the fire escape of this chinatown apartment, but it being february is too cold. she is not at all self-conscious about sex, she does it for fun and sometimes for drugs, or just to pass the time between parties. 13 years later she will recognize how lucky she was not to have got some incurable disease.
but now at 19, she never thinks of that even though she is officially an adult.
she is in a new house now, with different people – and working part time but still drinking a lot. there has been much illness over the winter, including a brief flirtation with scurvy and a full case of german measles. she is always sick, a typhoid mary of the punk rock set. her immune system has collapsed under the weight of drug and alcohol intake and she is so ill she at one point fears she has HIV because the sick never seems to vacate her body – but she is lucky, for the world does not want to write her out of the script just yet.
in this photograph, she looks like a woman with all the edge drained out of her, pale skin and the half-lidded eyes of the partially present. thin too, not skin and bones, but what you can’t see in the photo is that she lost 20 pounds in a month. also not visible are the bruises on her arms and legs, covered by clothing, mostly self-inflicted.
but this night is fun, she knows she will wake up ill, but the da takes the bitter out of the night wind and there is only a floating, a chemically-triggered inner peace. over the past few months, struggling with suicidal impulses, she has decided she doesn’t want to die just yet – things are just starting to seem better.
don't ever tell anybody that they're not free
George: You know, this used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.
Billy: Huh. Man, everybody got chicken, that’s what happened, man. Hey, we can’t even get into like, uh, second-rate hotel, I mean, a second-rate motel. You dig? They think we’re gonna cut their throat or something, man. They’re scared, man.
George: Oh, they’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to ’em.
Billy: Hey man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody needs a haircut.
George: Oh no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Billy: What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man? That’s what it’s all about.
George: Oh yeah, that’s right, that’s what it’s all about, all right. But talkin’ about it and bein’ it – that’s two different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. ‘Course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.
Billy: Mmmm, well, that don’t make ’em runnin’ scared.
George: No, it makes ’em dangerous.
– My favourite scene from Easy Rider (1969)
skyward
for whatever reason, i have been fascinated with the skies recently – have been really noticing the tapestry as it is laid out and taking shots when appropriate. what is so amazing about beautiful sky is that in the city, it is often the most blatant reminder of nature’s wonders – i am always surprised by how many people don’t seem to notice its beauty. this is another sky shot from the ferry late this afternoon on the way home….
returning from union biz
it’s a quiet friday night here in the creek – just got back this evening from two days in courtenay doing union meetings and a little drinking last night with some of the union brothers. up until last night there were only two women on our union exec – me and a person i can’t stand – so often i have ended up with a bunch of guys having drinks at the end of the night… weird dynamic that i’m hoping will change now we’ve just elected another woman to the board.
suffice to say, i pretty much achieved my objectives at yesterday’s meetings which mostly entailed staying calm and focused in the face of the total ineptitude that characterizes some of our union exec (not all – of course – but there is an undercurrent of inability coupled with a total lack of self-awareness that i find painful to witness). so yes, stayed calm, was elected as a delegate for our national convention in winnipeg this summer, got another woman onto our executive, and partially convinced some of our members of the need to do a campaign to save our jobs (apparently a couple of people thought i was quite compelling in my oratory on the subject…. i thought maybe i just appeared like a radical crackpot – i suspect that it fell somewhere in between those two extremes).
i am often not sure about my own reasons for being involved in my union – besides the fact it is our only political voice in the workplace… i find the level of group dysfunction astounding at times – but i am loathe to abandon ship and leave the running of our local to people who i do not believe represent my interests (or the interests of most of my co-workers)… i got involved two years ago for this reason, and until something changes i don’t really feel like i can take off just yet.
i have a ton of work to complete this weekend and also the intention to post another piece in the granville street fiction series. i’m just too tired to get it done tonight…..
reintegration
how long is this positive frame of mind going to last? i just don’t believe that feeling this good can sustain itself…. but maybe there are some things i can do to keep it going.
saw my naturopath last night and we discussed this… we wondered together if the homeopathic st. john’s wort she gave me for the nerve pain (teeth) two weeks ago have assisted in lifting the intermittent and mild depression that has been a feature of the past few months. i didn’t realize until yesterday that it was a st. john’s wort remedy i had been given – but it does make sense to me – other homeopathic remedies i have described in the same way… as if a switch has been flipped or a something has shifted.
i once viewed homeopathic medicine with a degree of skepticism – but over the past year i have been consistently amazed by the effectiveness of the remedies (my naturopath, btw, doesn’t tell me what she is giving me or what for a great deal of the time – which allows me to discount a psychosomatic response as the cause) . who knows – science? magic? i’m not sure really – but whatever is acting on me seems to be working.
so we talked, anyways, about the writing – about the need to write the past and how maybe i am finally ready to reintegrate *her* into *me*. that means being able to be compassionate and empathetic towards myself, examining some past from a framework of self-forgiveness. none of these things i have much practice with – but i think i’m learning…… certainly i have people in my life trying to teach me these things.
Red Cedar 