Dead Letter City

Urban Sublime

2011-11-05T16:44:00.001-04:00

As the fast rat (all verminy back and tail) crested the mound of garbage and scuttled back down into the bin's fetid depths, I recalled decades of great whales in tv clips erupting through the ocean's glossy surface and gliding back in, and the wild grandeur of immaculate, spontaneous life, and this was NOTHING like that.

Buffering Into Oblivion: Tour de Frahnce Live-Streaming on Eurosport Demonstrates, in Real Time, Why We Need to Get a Handle on Population Control Once and For All

2011-07-24T15:01:00.015-04:00

As millions of humans simultaneously open their browsers to stream pirated Tour de Frahnce coverage from a handful of sites, a microcosm of need erupts on the internet like a sucking hole, its maddeningly-sluggish feed harrying viewers everywhere with anxiety. An intolerable glut of people grapples for scraps on diaphanous strands of bandwidth, whittling the live stream down to chokes and sputters. The internet is dying! Get off so that at least a few of us may savour its free-flowing, thirst-slaking feed!

Yet in their characteristic race to the bottom, the humans refresh and refresh and refresh the page because what always seemed to work before will surely continue ad infinitum, unmolested. Mankind is not on a trajectory toward ruin because guess what? Technology to the rescue! Refresh! There aren't too many people blitzing the links, the humans just need more transmission capacity! Refresh, godammit!

It stares them in their gormless faces as they cannibalize each other's ingress, their portals exponentially shrinking: they are crippling the buffer, stifling the broadcast. Most can catch the post-race highlights, no need to clog the live feed, but why should anyone do without? Why not keep shilly-shallying around the same godforsaken links being hewed down by the multitudes? Unite in the death race to scarcity!

Only when the last convulsing data streams succumb in some digital limbo will the humans see the message on the video player, and they will recoil in horror from the greed that wrought the Server Not Found upon their flaky heads.

Cycling Club Ride: Suitcase of Courage Edition

2011-07-15T00:19:00.003-04:00

Crap judgements, naive conjectures, and delusions regarding your own fortitude all consummate to mold the omniscient creature that is the veteran cyclist. Your evolution is gauged incrementally, with many shameful reference points to remind you that when you thought you knew what you were doing, you were actually an inadequately-dressed, dehydrated, bonking noob. On Sunday I met my old fledgling self in long-suffering Stanley, who, like me, is a new inductee into the UTCC group ride, and who, unlike me, did phenomenally better on his inaugural ride as a neophyte-cyclist than I could’ve ever hoped to have done when I decided to “get dedicated” a decade ago.

We began with five: James (a regular UTCC rider and route leader), and me, Monica, Justin, and Stanley (the recruits). The tenor of the ride was a casual 40k and seemed a cakewalk for most of us, though for Stanley - who I noticed wasn’t shifting on hills, in jeans, and it’s like 36 degrees out - it became a downward spiral into merciless rookie hell.

I dropped onto the back about 15k in along the Don Valley Trail, sticking to Stanley’s back wheel like a sheepdog after Monica revealed that that bridge we’d gone over back there? Stanley’d lost control going over it and crashed into some bushes. Then she laughed, and I was tickled, because finally, here’s someone like me who is genetically wired to instinctively laugh openly at others’ foibles.

After a few kilometres on the back I realized that no amount of shepherding would protect me from the hazard of Stanley on hills. With his heaving and swerving and no-shifting - all at microscopic speed - I was more likely to crash into him from behind than to do him any good as an escort, so I shot ahead to rejoin the group, which stopped frequently to wait for him (pained, fading) to catch up.

Adjustment-eager do-gooders are seduced by the novice on a brand new road bike, so after gracefully broaching the subject of improving Stanley’s ride during our first break, we proceeded to raise his unadjusted seat, and additionally advised him on how to properly get on and off his bike and raise his handlebars. Come to think of it, a tutorial on shifting would’ve been apropos, but you can only advise so much before you violate decorum, ie. make the new rider feel like an idiot. With that, we were off.

Justin bowed out early for a prior commitment, and with Stanley at the butt-end of deterioration after an astonishing 32k and many breaks, his plaintive query about the nearest subway station roused us to escort him to public transit. How he fared on his way home or whether he even made it home is unknown, though at that point, any amount of rest and comestibles to keep him with the group would have been about as useful to him as a chloroformed hankerchief pressed to his face.

For the final kilometres, those of us that were left waxed awestruck about Stanley’s perseverance. The cojones! The endurance! James declared him a hero! But such heroism is punishing, injurious. The chafing! The brain/body stupefaction! We know them well. Congratulations on reaching your first benchmark with grandeur, Stanley.

Originally published for the University of Toronto Cycling Club

What to Read: Practical Jean by Trevor Cole Is Glorious Satire

2011-07-11T17:37:00.016-04:00

After the protracted death of her mother to cancer and her inability to ameliorate her mother's suffering, Jean Horemarsh resolves to relieve each of her middle-aged friends from the pain and indignity of aging. Her experience with death has taught her that "to leave old age to chance [is] to open your arms to the dragon's fire, to let the flames lick at will," and the only kindly remedy to her friends' impending infirmities is to kill them herself, immediately. She's ashamed of having been a taker for so long; now she wants to be a giver. Having euthanized her toys as a little girl in the manner of her veterinarian mother - from whom she also acquires a resistance to gore - Jean develops such a fantastically warped notion of mercy and practicality that with each murder (delightful! twisted!) you want her to stop as much as you want her to get away with it. Oh that Jean. So well-meaning.

Since the book's protagonist is female, and a serial murderer to boot, there will inevitably be feminist mouthpieces extolling the book for its gender this, or eviscerating the book for its gender that, none of which I'd normally give a fig about were it not for the author's dig at the vapidity of contemporary feminism. When her discouraged husband Milt hesitatingly observes Jean's hardness (and she is hard on him especially), her indignant response is Cole's caricature of hoary feminist ideology, straight from the armchair:

"Whenever a woman wasn't nurturing, the way a fantasy mother might be, or pliant like a prostitute, she was automatically hard. There was no middle ground for a woman... If she was practical, then she was hard. This was as good a reason as any why women needed women friends."

Zing! Practical Jean heckles the knee-jerk cliché of the whore/nun dichotomy, as well as claims to female specialness and its precious sisterhood in a central character that epitomizes the harmful best friend and lousy wife. Milt is not on her to-kill list because she fell out of love with him years ago; he's neglected, neutered, and not important enough to Jean to spare him the vexation of senescence as she does for Dorothy, Adele, and Natalie, the "true friends" and recipients of her extreme compassion. Like Milt, certain undeserving friends will never benefit from Jean's final gift, and these parts constitute some of the book's greatest satire: in denying some and granting others, it creates within her "a sense of right and wrong, of exclusion and belonging." In other words, Jean's value system is a carnivalesque meritocracy that parodies modern morals, and yet she's on to something. Sure, her methods are dubious, but her reasoning is judicious. She puts her "practical resources" to use, resources that she had been told all her life were "shamefully absent, but were in fact there," in order to selflessly exempt her pals from the heinous certainty of decrepitude.

You will understand Jean. You will probably even adore Jean like I did. But I've had my fill of friends like that, so you can have her.

Trevor Cole. Practical Jean. McClelland & Stewart: Toronto. 2010.
pps. 110; 145; 187; 30

Grrrrrroutrage fatigue!

2011-06-25T10:00:00.002-04:00

The "it" ailment of the new millenium: outrage fatigue. People feeling helpless and mad and lied to, working too much for too little, but too tired to give a shit, too insensate with a chronic rage that 21st century medicine, sewage treatment, food abundance, potable water, equity laws, free speech and mass production cannot ameliorate.

People have been fatigued by outrage for centuries. Get in your time machine and ask anyone who had to spend a night in the Bastille. Then bring me back some delicious unpasteurized cheese.

Public Bathing Not So "Ick"

2011-06-24T10:00:00.007-04:00

I've been rushing out of the office at lunchtime and slipping into the hotel jacuzzi. There is no other way to say this: I cannot go back to ye olde life. Having grown accustomed to should be a legal loophole ensuring the continuation of a life relieved of cubicle-induced body pain.

I finally understand the passion that launched the Roman baths. It wasn't so much that they were rife with communicable diseases and sweaty bastards than they were non-chlorinated thermae in which to unwind from the daily stress of being Italian. Then the Hungarians caught on and are very wisely still at it to this day. Have you met a Hungarian? No? I'll introduce you to my dad. Gevalt!

I was convinced last week during yearly review that what I wanted from work was a colossal raise to keep me shucking and jiving at my shitty job, but now all I want is a good soak. I want to be pacified in a hot roiling bath in the middle of every day, but hot springs and public baths don't exist in Canada for the purpose of staving off insanity and premature degeneration, and if they did, it would probably be ruined by the uptight eye-contact of self-conscious people skulking around crabwise in bathing suits, shamed.

But still.

Originally posted in 2006. The author has since ditched the shitty job.

You Know What's Awesome?

2011-06-23T10:00:00.010-04:00

When you had to leave work at lunchtime, sick, because Second Cup's featured flavour of the day was Bavarian Dutch Chocolate, and you had like 3 extra large ones in a row, and the excess of caffeine made your head start pounding like a battering ram on a blancmange, and you were this close to vomiting every time you moved your eyes, and then you got home and suddenly you were fine.

100% Manmade Materials & Gore

2011-06-22T10:00:00.066-04:00

When a thong sandal breaks at work, there's little choice but to drag your leg stiffly behind you like the Mummy to keep the thing from falling off. It's either that for the rest of the day, or staple it back together and gimp on over to the locus of inferior vinyl footware (Payless) to buy a pair of gladiator sandals, overcomplicated with too many straps and delicate, microscopic buckles held tenuously together with weak, Chinese-manufactured hydrogen bonds.

The ones I settled on had shiny silver octogons sewn onto the front - sandals fit for an ostentatious, new-millenium office gladiator, as opposed to the simpler office gladiator of antiquity, whose venerable griping technique about middle management, immortalized in Poetics, remains an integral rhetorical tool for insurance peons everywhere. I ripped the octogons off when I got back to work, managing to de-razzledazzle the sandals, but when I returned to the lunchtime retirement party potluck that was already in progress, Linda over in Underwriting wasn't looking too hot after I wrestled the big tiger on her t-shirt to the floor and jammed my trident into her back.

Lovesong

2011-06-21T09:59:00.037-04:00

I know I'm not the only person who's used bodywash on dishes when the dish soap runs out, unless your automatic default detergent is shampoo (obviously for detangling cutlery). For two days I've been giving the dishes a bath in the Gerber Baby Wash from the shower. I think the logic goes: if it's good enough to clean feces bacteria off of babies, then it's good enough to clean libertine unctiousness off of Chris. He's the sexual flypaper above the workbench of gaydom, oscillating his licentious snare until some flitting creature gets stuck to it, ripping off legs and wings during fruitless measures of escape, succumbing dispiritedly, taking days to die, tangled, starved, desiccated, as Chris steers his Erebus and Terror through the gayer Hamilton area.

If You Have Time to Lean, You Have Time to Haiku

2011-06-20T21:55:00.000-04:00

I changed my password today
Derelickmyballs
False sense of seditious act

Some idle movie chitchat -
Vanessa
says that
she loved The Big Lebowski

But
Deconstructing Harry -
Karen hated it.
I say
You are a moron

For lunch I had a salad
The caesar dressing
too creamy -
diarrhea

Travails of Affinity

2011-06-20T00:32:00.005-04:00

Such a testament to gentility that this Duke can sustain his composure as he removes his gloves, readying himself, displaying the accustomed sign that he's about to go fucking apeshit on his slovenly best friend for not rinsing the red-tinted cinnamon-flavoured toothbrushing expectorate from the bathroom sink.

He doth do that every blasted time!

Or that time the Duke's best friend had left the house at 6 a.m. to get to his teacher's college in Buffalo in a timely fashion, and the Duke got up later for work at 8, sleepily seesawing to the bathroom with his eyes half-closed, and banged his forehead - abrading it just slightly - on the sharp corner of the cabinet door (reserved for hair pastes, tinctures, pomades) left carelessly ajar. The Duke was surprised that his best friend hadn't used up all the leeches, leaving the empty jar to just sit there for the Duke to grudgingly throw in with the recycling, and was therefore able to apply one to his wound.

Or that time the Duke paid five guineas to gas up his best friend's car, and the attendant at the filling station mistakenly put in fifty-one guineas, and the Duke had to endure a twenty-minute conversation wherein he was forced to engage in one of the most wearying arguments of his life. Plus, he'd also left the house that morning not jiving with his outfit, so he was understandably in much haste to get home and change. One week later, when the Duke borrowed his best friend's car again, it was duly demanded that the Duke must put ten more guineas in the car, as his best friend had used all the fuel for gay cruising.

Living as flat companions had always proven to be fun yet pettily taxing to the two friends, while living apart, their friendship was free from the minutiae that bound them to carp about the other's misdeeds. Established in separate lodgings, the Duke would abscond with toilet paper from his best friend to supplement gratis his toilette, and his best friend once crashed at the Duke's place for some TLC when the friend had had that ghastly oral surgery. Or that time the Duke's best friend came back early from Lithuania after a five-month work stint, through which the Duke had felt the hiatus as though someone had cut his best friend out of a daguerreotype of the world and he had been left with the equivalent of a silhouetted void, and the Duke had been really sad.

The Duke and his best friend are pre-disposed to bitch at one another, as is the inherent factor in most relationships confined to close quarters. What most are not aware of, however, is the bond that requites the two outside this public sphere, and when they are inevitably separated once again, they shall re-attach the cans with string and resume calling each other like five times a day, and the Duke promises to not laugh this time if his best friend comes over in hysterics about possibly having an STD.

Originally posted July 10, 2006. Though the concluding optimism of the piece endorses a transcendent outlook on friendship, the Duke was unable to surmount the irreconcilable differences that resulted from the best friend being an abusive, remorseless reptile. See you in hell, CTS!

The Blood-Brain Barrier

2011-06-19T23:57:00.002-04:00

I know I know! I said I never wanted to see you again, and then I went ahead and asked you last Friday to complement a couple of drinks and the next thing I knew I was igniting you with a delirious friction so heated that you combusted into a hypnotic ruby jewel tip, and I let your noxious char massage my throat and scorch my lungs.

Toxic ecstasy chain! Smoldering beefcake still so familiar after these months without you! Dovetailed between my fingers, the seconds and minutes once meticulously catalogued in aggregate of ash and match sticks.

How I long for you now!

But how you smothered me. How you hectored me to humour you outdoors in the cold, and bent me with rage in your absence.

This was only a slip-up, I am so sorry to say. Perhaps you may be better with someone younger, years to spare? Or someone more willing to abide your fetor? More receptive to the carbony ooze in the blood and lymph?

Can I confide in you how this relentless, sadistically ambrosial love just never fucking dies?

Originally posted March 24, 2006. The author has been clean since October 2010, though addiction is still frequently, paranoically savoured in nightmares.

Quitting Smoking is Easy - I've Done It Thousands of Times

2011-06-19T11:12:00.007-04:00

And now I am a beautiful seafoam-coloured unicorn, breathing easy as I kick at the magical surf without being winded by the premature onset of emphysema. My mane and tail are noticeably whiter!

Also, going cold turkey has made me totally, ragingly feral. I would do myself a favour if I were you and clean up your goddamn mess in the house before I pierce your neck with my enchanted horn, or come down on your sleeping head with my cloud-prancing hoofs.

Originally posted January 2006, when fear of mortality finally became more persuasive than fear of withdrawl.