I used to be a cocaine addict. Years later, a friend who had never even come close to flirting with addiction asked me Why? I thought for a moment, trying to come up with an experience that we might have in common that would help him to understand. And then it came to me.
“Remember,” I said, “what it felt like to be with your first love when you were a kid? Now, imagine you are sharing the hot delight of a kiss at the top of a mountain pass on a gold and blue summer’s day with the world spread out below you. That’s what my first hit of coke felt like.”
I spent the next five years consuming a lot of coke in a futile effort to replicate that sensation.
Almost two years ago, I got another kick at the can (first love, not cocaine) when a weird internet/work coincidence brought my first boyfriend and I together after a 25 year gap. I walked around in a pleasure-filled daze. The only moments in my day that felt real were the ones I spent with him. All other moments were spent thinking about him. During that time I had so many endorphins flooding my system that I went through a major operation and didn’t require follow-up pain killers. I existed in a perpetual ecstasy. Within a few months of reconnecting we married. It was difficult to tear ourselves out of bed to go to work. We didn’t want to see anyone else. We couldn’t stop touching each other.
I’m old enough to have fallen in love a couple of times. I knew this feeling, albeit not as strongly. I knew that it was an internal chemical high that would eventually dissipate. I decided to savour it and relaxed into it. Somewhere around the nine-month mark, it began to fade. Being together was pleasurable, but no longer super-charged. I felt the outside world again. And I realized how lucky we were to have re-experienced the insane joy of teenaged love. It had allowed us to make a lot of tough decisions (career changes, city moves, home purchase, MARRIAGE) with happy ease. Two cranky middle-aged people had created a life together without any of the stubbornness and vitriol that had previously prevented us making a commitment.
I’d just like to thank evolution for the chemical love rush and now look forward to enjoying the next, slower stage of love.
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read comments (0)I work from home as a contract editor and the last year has been very busy. Somewhere in July I realized that I was experiencing almost the same sensation I last felt when I was working as a bush cook in a survey camp in the Yukon (we were dropped off by helicoptor for weeks on end with a usual population of maybe 4 geologists and half a dozen guys with chain saws to do the line cutting). In the middle of Canada’s capital city, less than half an hour’s walk from the National Art Gallery, I found myself bushed. Which translated into some undeservedly snappy behavior toward my husband. At about the same time, I saw a “help wanted” sign at the local bookstore.
“Wow!” I thought. I’ve fantasized about working in a book store ever since I was a teenager (the second-hand bookstore I worked at during grade seven and where I spent most of my time fighting off the lecherous hunchbacked proprietor really doesn’t count, if you ask me). I applied and a few weeks later got the call. I was IN. I imagined myself shelving books, rearranging displays to better promote my favourite authors, and all the while having passionate and erudite literary conversations with discerning customers. Instead, I spent the first month at war with the extremely cranky DOS system used by most independent bookstores. And it seems that for every book that is sold, two more will arrive and need to be processed, stickered, and shelved. Plus, after a year of pretty much sitting on my ass, standing up for hours made my feet hurt in a way that reminded of my years in the service industry. I came home three days a week in a very nasty mood. My husband suggested that the new job didn’t seem to be having the desired result.
Finally, a couple of weeks ago, it clicked over. I bought a pair of comfortable shoes. I no longer automatically reached for the mouse to make a transaction. I learned the secret codes of each supplier. I created the Halloween book display and watched my favourite authors start to move. I started to choose books from the catalogues, ordering a couple of copies to test the waters. I began to receive publishers’ advance reader copies of upcoming books to read and review–any bibliophile can only be thrilled to read a book months before the rest of the world will. I found the perfect gift book for a difficult customer. I arranged a display shelf that counterpointed Christian and atheist books. And today, an award-winning writer dropped in to find a book and we had a half-hour conversation about the history of the English language and our favourite books! A few minutes later, another author stopped in and, under the guise of asking me to look up some titles, made some very waspish comments about his competitors. Oh bliss, oh dream job. If only everyone had a few short shifts a week in an independent bookstore, the world might be a happier place.
I spent most of the last 25 years living a couple of blocks from the ocean. Labour Day weekend marked the end of my first summer in Ontario. I have missed the sunsets on the beach, the slightly rank smell of low-tide, and the heads of seals swimming close enough to the shore that I often mistook them for the dogs that paddle out in search of sticks. I have even missed the hordes of drunken youth who gather at some of the party beaches, dancing and copulating in the sand, intoxicated surfers of midnight waves who, miraculously, never drown.
The waters here are different; less friendly. Killers, even. All summer, the Monday newspaper has carried brief little paragraphs about weekend drownings. A dog falls into one of the three rivers that trisects the city; the owner goes after it and drowns (the dogs in these stories always makes it back to shore under their own power). Someone else goes jet skiing and fails to make a dinner date. They never will. A woman floats out on an inflatable raft and drowns herself and the man who tries to rescue her when she falls off. Three men who cannot swim ignore the “water closed” sign and wade into a local lake, unaware of the sudden drop-off. The man who goes over the edge into darkness pulls the foolish, brave friends who try to rescue to him down into the depths, too.
In Lotusland, it is rare to hear of a drowning death, even though millions live only a short walk from the shore. Maybe it is the simple fact that it is an ocean that engenders a more respectful attitude. Only the strong swimmers immerse themselves and, aware that the ocean will always be stronger than mere flesh, they do not stray too far. Perhaps, if I am being fanciful, it is simply that the ocean has a surfeit of death and is kinder to its swimmers.
But here, the saltless water takes its toll of grief. Every week the obituary pages carry the announcements of untimely death—sad tributes from parents, wives, husbands, and children who wished that they had gone to a movie, stayed home and painted the garage, hit the mall, or any other number of activities that seemed less appealing than a day by the water. The rivers and lakes are wantonly malicious. Beneath the inviting waters any number of corpses lie, awaiting the moment when bacterial bloat will bring them to the surface to be noted in the reeds or against a beaver dam by some jogger or bird watcher.
More realistically, I suspect it is the fact that these rivers are so narrow and seemingly placid and that the lakes are so small and calm that lulls the heedless to their deaths. We are so unused to physical exertion within nature that we forget it is not tame. We forget to respect its force. And is in that exact moment that a man who cannot swim decides that wearing a flotation device looks uncool and steps lightly into the water that will kill him.
I’ve just finished doing the research and substantive edit of a book designed to help newlyweds through the process of buying a home. The author, a fan of sub-prime mortgages in SOME cases, does ask readers to do some major work before jumping in: make a budget and then stick to it for a few months, instead of just assuming that you will; don’t have a mortgage bigger than what you are already paying in rent (providing you’re meeting your rent payments without a problem); remember that happiness is not dependent on glass-tiled bathrooms with soaker tubs, etc. Basically, reminding people to stay sane.
Sanity has been hard to come by in real estate for the last few years. The early adapters to bubble housing prices and the rise of HGTV made a fortune. Soon, everyone felt that they should be in on it. If you weren’t buying, upgrading, or flipping you were an idiot, doomed to a life as a wage slave. Turn on any one of half a dozen TV channels and you could watch 22 year old waiters and 40 something housewives leverage the finances to buy a wreck and then, a few setbacks and many visits to Home Depot later, reveal the newly gleaming home and their expected profit margin–usually about as much as most people make in a year or two.
I like buying lottery tickets. I probably average a $150 worth of them every year, usually when the jackpots have reached a point where I can give enough away to friends and family and still never have to work. My $3 a week gives me at least as much entertainment value as 75% of the movies I go to. So I consider them a good value, even though I only win about $50 a year. I’ve heard lottery tickets described as a sin tax or a stupidity tax; I prefer to think of them as a dream tax on avarice.
Which is basically what happened with the sub-prime mortgage market. People listened to their neighbours and co-workers, they watched the reno and flip shows, and almost every time they went online a pop-up assured them “No credit, no problem–you can still qualify for a mortgage!” They started to dream of surplus, of quitting the joe job and sitting down to acclaim for their financial acuity and good design sense. Banks and mortgage brokers fiddled with figures to enable clients to go into dubious debt. Clients abandoned all common sense and signed on the dotted line.
And now that dotted line has come due. Housing prices in one overly inflated bubble market, Los Angeles, have gone down by an average of 25% in the last year. That means a house that was worth $400,000 a year ago (probably financed with a mortgage loan of $412,000) is now only worth 300 grand–so, as your special 0% monthly payment of $1,144 switches to a mortgage rate of 5.5% with an unpayable $2,340 payment, you can’t even sell it and come out even. Which is why subprime mortgages may temporarily overtake that old standby, medical bills, as the chief instigator of personal bankruptcy over the next few years.
Good luck to the all avaricious dreamers. They’ll need it.
The civic trees in the last two cities I have lived in bespeak a certain puritanical bent. In Vancouver, beautiful chestnut trees grace many of the older streets and boulevards. In Ottawa, areas of a similar age are planted with apple trees. But, sadly for the poor, care has been taken to ensure that the fruit they drop each year is not edible (or at least, not without a great deal of preparation). The crabapples are bitter, and although one or two of these tiny fruit may be pleasing in the same way that Sweetarts are, more than this causes gastrointestinal distress. The horse chestnuts up the ante—their outer layer is poisonous and their inner layer must be carefully boiled to avoid acting as an emetic.
Both cities began planting these trees in the 1930s. In the midst of the depression, the decision was made to plant fruiting trees that would not provide sustenance to the poor and indigent. This is the kind of compassion we have come to expect from our politicians, grounded in the fundamental work ethic of the puritans. Why should people get something for nothing? Unless, of course, they are the very wealthy contributors to the politicians campaigns. In which case, their neighbourhoods can expect to have a greater preponderance of parks, libraries, and recreation facilities.
Three seasons a year I am grateful for these trees; the stark silhouette against the winter sun, the first tender leaves of spring followed by a delicate flowering, and then the exuberant green canopies that shade the blistering sidewalks. But in autumn, I begin to dislike these trees. They become ugly, a reminder of broken promises made to the poor. They remind me that I live in a culture that prefers to disdain anyone who has fallen along the wayside. In autumn, these trees are not beautiful to the thousands of children who go hungry every day in these rich cities. They are beautiful only to those who are blind to the inequities around them.
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