It seems cows can't go down stairs

I have been resisting. Resisting writing about online dating. This is probably because I know most of you reading this and maybe this is a part of me I should keep to myself. But no. I won't. I am like that. Unable to keep things to myself.

I online date. Frequently. Truth be told, I don't actually date that frequently, I chat cruise for stories and experiences frequently. The dates themselves are fewer and farther between. I love chat. I feel like it is my poetry. My sassy, flirty and irreverent poetry. It is the foray into the unknown, the faceless real time feedback, that I crave. It is wooing with one hand tied behind your back. You have to connect without senses, no smell, no body language, no pheromones. The banter can be intimate and sexy, or profound and revealing. You wonder what the other is imagining you to be. It is romantic. It is like improv for writers. How do you compose quick witted, poignant repartee in the space between the others response? There is a dance, a syncopation and definitely a cadence. Poetry.

Today was a great one. A story was offered to me and it is irresistible. First off, the background. I have encountered a man, a little older and in oil and gas. He thinks I am sweet. I guess I find that attractive, that someone in the prairies would find me sweet. I briefly saw a picture or two of him, but in all honesty, I cannot recall what he looks like. It does not matter, it is not the point. He gave me a story and that is something like a gift. The story itself is about a gift; a gift to his five year old sister.

When he was twelve, he decided to give his sister a present. It turns out this oil and gas man, with his shirt and tie, broken marriage and impending flight to Paris was a poor communist farmer's son. They lived on a farm and he thought that his sister would like a cow as a present. So he decided to bring one of their milking cows up the stairs to his sister's room to surprise her. This endearing act turns macabre when his father gets home. It seems that cows can only go up. They are simply unable to go down stairs. The father has no choice but to shoot the beast in his daughter's room, his guilty son required to hold down the cows legs so it would not kick holes in the walls as it was being executed. He said he did a bad job of it because he was too small and he was sent flailing. The animal then needed to be butchered so that is could be dropped out the window piece by piece. The boy, spanked at the end of this ordeal as milking cows are precious to a poor farming family.

This Todd Solondz-esque coming of age story got to me. This oil and gas man got to me. I feel like it means something, something dark and meaningful, sublimely ridiculous and sweet and tragic. It felt like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale where somewhere within the horror there was an essential life lesson. Maybe a warning to children or maybe a warning to adults. Or a message about growing up and not being able to go back down to childhood. Or maybe it is just universal irony and pathos; a kind and sweet act ends in gruesome resolution. Or maybe that there is no God.

Or maybe it is just part of this man's life. A beautiful and poetically horrific moment in his childhood. A moment to be remembered and a great story to be told. It was told over chat to a person he imagines with the hope that she will be able to know him through it. This is why I love internet dating. You don't realize you are reading poetry but you really are.

Something Canadian

This morning I got into work, turned on my computer and got slapped in the face with the news that Jack Layton had died. At first I was just shocked, and then I started reading facebook posts. I seem to be unable to stop crying. This has only happened to me twice before with public figures. The first was John Lennon but even then I think I was just joining mass hysteria as my elementary school brain could just conceptualize him as a Beatle, not as a voice of peace and dissent. The second, and perhaps more profound, was Jim Henson. In some small way I felt my childhood died with him. I still remember watching the memorial muppet show they made for him and Kermit came out in the end to say goodbye to his "friend Jim" and his voice was not right and I had to go upstairs to my room and bawl.

So why this reaction to Jack? I did not love him the way some did. Secretly I prefer the characters of Trudeau and Chretien with their crafty fuck you attiudes. Jack was too folksy, too sincere. Yet. Yet he spoke to something Canadian in me. He managed to be that reasonable Canadian that would point out that we should take care of people who have less and are in need. That corporate profits were not the holy grail. That we did not AGREE. And people responded. The NDP gave me hope that there were other people in the country who gave a fuck.. and enough of them to make those other assholes get worried. I poked my head out of the sand for a bit to catch the glimmer of hope that was passing by.

After the election, I buried my head right back down into its sandy hole of denial and put the news on blackout again. I stopped watching it a few years back, as its constant screaming was starting to turn my thoughts black. I returned to my blissful ignorance over the summer, popping only briefly on google news to catch glimpses of London riots and imminent world financial implosion. Bombarded this morning by facebook RIPS I started to cry.

Am I crying for his death or am I crying for that sinking feeling that Mordor is winning and the Ents are soon to be no more? Not that Jack and Gandalf are cut from the same cloth, but somehow the image of hope plummeting into a carveruous abyss comes to mind. So melodramatic, I know, but it is the knowledge that Jack will not rise from the pit in glimmering white robes to come save us all which weighs heavy on my heart. I guess it is still up to us hobbits and elves to rally together and do something, but for today I mostly feel like taking stock, feeling sad and trying to figure out how to re-ignite that feeling I had when I first heard news that the Orange Crush was giving the Dark Lord a run for his money.

It is in the cards

Recently I have been getting into tarot cards again. I was sitting outside the hospital on my break a few weeks back and there were some nurses with a deck and I had to impose myself. I have impositional tendencies. Pretty please will you do me? She agreed and gave me the most astounding reading. For once I am at a loss of words to describe, except to say, I was hooked. More please. Tell me what to do cards. Tell me how lovely things will be for me please. Illuminate my insecurities and divest me of the responsibility of decision making. They are tarot, their ancient magic KNOWS.

So I went online. Googling "free tarot" brought me to site after site where at the click of the button, my reading was spread out before me. Love readings, Celtic crosses, goddess decks and Rider decks beckoning me with their absolute insight into my inner psyche. The swords keep haunting me, telling me that all is struggle and love is frought which is mostly pissing me off. Why can't you give me shiny cups brimming over with promise rather than your heavy dead staffs?

Do I think there is magic at play here? Is there some force in the universe that can see all my mistakes and insecurities and can lead me to an enlightened and virtuous path? No. Instead it is my reaction to the cards that I am iterested in. Each time that card telling me I have to make choices comes up I groan. No more choices please. I wouldn't be consulting you if I truly wanted to make any. These days I feel innundated by choice. Should I stay in school? Am I allowed to rest? Chala bread or whole wheat? Love or independence?

The thing is when I think of these binaries. These "either/or's" , I realize they are not real choices. Choice implies one and the exclusion of the other, but in all the ones facing me, I cannot exclude. Maybe this is why I keep going to the cards. In some way I am striving to include all possibilies. I am trying to combine options. I am trying to mix white flour with whole wheat. Is this a recipe for disaster? Let me turn a card and find out..
(readers note.. this it the actual card and reading I got the moment I finished writing this

Your card is "Death"
Contrary to it's dire appearance the Death card is usually a card of empowerment. Rather than doom and gloom, think endings and transformation. When this card comes up, an area of concern for you is facing a "death" or ending, but this opens you up to new opportunities for growth in new directions that could not have happened otherwise. When a caterpillar "dies" it transforms into a butterfly. This process involves some struggle - but it's struggle with a purpose. Without this "fight" to break free from the confines of the coccoon, the newly formed butterfly can't strengthen its wings. Now is a time to look at ways you may need to accept a "death" so that you can find new purpose in your life. Find the courage to spread your wings and fly.

Moist bags

I may have an unnatural relationship with bagels. Not all bagels, just a specific bagel from a specific place at a specific temperature and freshness. There is a debate in my city about which bagel is the "best bagel" and I confess to forming preconceived opinions about people who choose the "other" bagel place. I can't help but have a small distrust about their quality of taste and discretion, much the way i feel when someone announces that they don't "like animals". I can accept that there is a difference of opinion, but somewhere deep inside I may be thinking, if they err on this, what other bad decision making are they capable of? I can be their friend, put away the disdain, but I think it will always be there gnawing at me until one day they do something stupid and then it will leap to the surface with the thought.. makes total sense.. look at their choice of bagel.

I think I know where this love of bagel comes from. When I was a kid my mum used to take us to Arahovas for souvlaki (for you Montrealers, you now know which bagel side I am on). Many years ago Arahovas was just a hole in the wall, you had to wait at least half an hour for a table, which may or not be shared with people you may or may not have known. The garlic was intense. Every time my sister and I would clamour at the end of the meal. BAGELS!

We got along really well as siblings except for two points, whose turn it was to dry or wash the dishes and who got to hold the bag. Holding the bagel bag was the ultimate prize. We would wait for the dozen sesame seeds to be thrown into the paper bag, warm and steamy. It was the smell really. The smell of freshly baked bagels. I would sit in the back of the car, cuddling the warm moist bag, nose deep, sniffing. We would drive over the mountain, look at the city lights and head back to the west end of town and to bed. The smell was delicious and comforting and to this day transports me back to the magic of being 7 and out late for a special family meal.

There is a franchise of said bagel place in my neighborhood now. I go there on a weekly basis to pick them up, fresh from the wood burning oven. I tried to go whole wheat for a while, but my daughter, now almost 7, insists on the "good" ones, the white warm bag dampening ones. She is right so I comply. The thing is, I often find myself burying my nose into the nape of my daughter's neck, moist and warm and sniffing in the very same way as that fragrant paper bag, and it does the same thing for me . Makes me feel like home.

Fun

I think the 7th post is the perfect place to talk about love. I think about love a lot these days. Perhaps it because of my clients at the hospital, where love is such an omnipresence. I see it mostly in the stories people tell me about the ones they have lost or whom they are loosing. You see the intensity of love most in its loss. It is when it is taken away from us that we feel it most profoundly.

What does it mean to really love? Do I go all Tolle and speak of true love being given with expectations of nothing in return, just an outward flowing of connection to the world around you? Or do I go dark... very very dark? Hmmm I think I will go dark.

There was a man who came in the other day. He was a gay man whose lover had killed himself rather than make his partner suffer seeing him through terminal cancer. It was a love story that came through the door. He told it to us with tears and romantic embellishments that gave us glimpses into his idealized memory of his boyfriend. He offered short vignettes of moments of shared love with this man, their most intimate expressions of their devotion. Stories of washing each others hair in the rain and the spoiling of their dog. He was devastated, overwhelmed by love. Why did he kill himself he asks out loud and then answers, because he loved me. He is tortured by this feeling, not believing that it would gradually fade until receding one day into a small corner of his heart awoken only occasionally by birthdays and anniversaries and certain smells.

Why love if pain in inevitable? I told a lover that the moment I loved him my heart was broken. It sounded sad at first. It sounded dark and painful. It was not what I wanted to convey. What I wanted to say was that if my heart was already broken, broken open, then I did not fear him breaking it again. By choosing to love him, I chose to accept all the feeling that comes with it; freeing me to let go of worry as the worst had already happened. Any pain was just a sign of my love. This pain is not pain, it is feeling. It just hurts. Hurts in the way your heart aches when you see your daughter go to her first day of kindergarten or when you hear the song you slow danced to with your first crush. The hurt is just the reflection of the intensity of emotion. Ask a bottom about pain. Ask a tattooed man about pain. Ask a woman in labour about pain How we frame it is how we live with it. I choose to live with it well.

Holy shit. Did I really just go there?

It's Alright to Cry

When I was a kid, my favorite album was Free to Be You and Me. I was, after all, brought up by lesbians, so it made perfect sense that Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda telling right-on politically correct stories would be a seminal influence in my early childhood development. Hits like "William Wants a Doll" and "Don't Dress your Cat in an Apron" still float through my brain at inopportune moments, but the song that always comes into my head at the hospital is, "It's Alright to Cry."

One day there was this very put together woman who came in to meet with my supervisor. She was dressed impeccably and carried herself in way that belied composure, breeding and a comfortable life. Her husband had died. He had cancer, and he been fighting it well, but then one night he had a stroke. She found him, lying on the floor of their kitchen and he was dead by the time he reached the hospital. She had come in to speak with us because she was having more trouble coping than she imagined and she needed to reach out. You could see the discomfort. She was used to being calm. She was used to being self sufficient, the cooler head prevailing. You could see the cracks, the fragile and strained hold she was just managing to keep on her overwhelming grief.

My supervisor is compassionate and sweet. She made sensitive noises as the woman recounted her feelings. I sat slightly to the side and watched, observing how my supervisor interacted, watching responses and seeing how they were received. I could see the brink of tears and I offered kleenex. We use a lot of kleenexes. There is a basket filled with small individual white puffy pouches on the desk, like some messed up gift basket for pain. The woman said, I have been crying. I can't stop crying. I want to stop, I hate showing my friends tears. I was always so together and now I am falling apart. If only I could stop crying.

Of course the chorus of "It's Alright to Cry" comes into my head...crying takes the sad out of you, rain drops from your eyes, it just might make you feel better...

We give her some articles and tell her what she is feeling is "normal." It seems this is the protocol. Supposedly people just want to know that their intense pain is "normal" That this somehow makes grief bearable. Why telling someone that the worst loss they have ever had is average and mainstream helps to ease things I do not understand, but sometimes it seems to help. It is normal to want to sob for months when your husband of 40 years is found twitching on the floor of the house you bought together. Normal.

She settled down and my supervisor wrapped up the meeting. Of course I can't help myself, I need to interject. I need to say something to this person beyond how average and unsurprising her emotions are. So I say to her, it is the crying? Is it the crying that is disturbing you most right now? And she says yes because I can't stop it and I could always control myself before. Now I can't and I don't know what to do. So I say to her, in my massage therapist clinical voice, can we look at the tears differently. People cry for a reason. This is why it is "normal."

When something happy happens we cry, when something sad happens we cry, when something terrifying happens and when something infuriating happens. We cry. Why? When we cry we produce endorphins and lovely hormones that calm us down and that counter balance all that adrenaline and cortisol and the other bad brain chemistry that makes us feel terrible. The body needs to cry to re-balance those chemicals. Maybe if you did not think of the tears as something to be controlled, but instead as your body's way of cleaning out the crap, the pain, the other chemicals, then you could just let them flow. Then maybe you could trust that the tears will eventually stop. They will stop when they need to. It is alright to cry.

She looked at me and smiled and said, I never looked at it that way. Of course in that moment my eyes began to burn and in my head I thought, it is alright to cry, but this time I will wait till I get home to clean out all this shit.

Just Like Fur

I get asked a lot how I am able to be a massage therapist. The usual comments go something like this...what about gross toes? How about smelly people, hairy people, pimply people, fat people, skinny people? Of course they also ask if anyone has offered me money to jack them off. In truth, no one has EVER asked me to touch their junk, which always raises incredulous eyebrows. Really? I don't believe it, they say, never?? I would develop some kind of a complex about my physical appeal, but quite honestly I think I am not unattractive and outside of my massage clinic, I get asked to touch peoples' junk on quite a regular basis. I think my clients just know it is not going to happen and that they would never be allowed on my table again if they crossed that line. I take this as a compliment to my skills. The risk of losing me as their therapist completely negates their urge to get off.

I love what I do. It is physical and emotional. I get to spend an hour or more concentrating one on one with someone. I get to positively effect change in a tangible way. I get paid well for not too many hours work. I also get to hear stories. I love stories. One of the main impetuses for this blog, beyond my obvious call for attention, is that I want to write a book about my clinic. The blog is my practice space. My public writing space. My space to see if I have the balls to disclose. For some reason short bursts of self revelation seem to be ok with me. As usual i am getting tangential, lets refocus on hairy backs.

People always ask me about hair. One of my very first clients was a 6 foot 4 middle eastern man, build like a linebacker. I recall drawing back the covers revealing a forest of thick black hair. It began at the nape of his neck and covered his entire back, curly and springy with no evidence of skin underneath. This was early in my career and I felt my stomach lurch slightly at the prospect of being elbow deep for the next 90 minutes, lost in this hirsute behemoth's body. Then something remarkable happened in my brain. I re framed. I thought...it's just like fur. I have a dog. A Portuguese water dog, and I pet him all the time. Somehow that was all I needed. If I can put up and love my stinky beastly dog, I can certainly rub through some man fur.

I do have a personal philsolophy about bodies and minds and touch. I think the boundaries of our person are a lot more blurry that the limit of our skin. We like to think we can keep ourselves contained, in this neat physical package, cover it with clothing and then hide ourselves inside. But people bleed out all kinds of things, smell,hormones,love,hate, noise and heat. Where exactly one person ends is hard to say, except that it is most probably ending right inside of another's. When you enter fully into that space, especially through touch, things happen, you affect and are affected. It is what makes us essentially alive. This is why I love massage. It is for what happens in the space where two boundaries meld.