For real, really

Seriously, the garbage in this neighbourhood is 100% food today. And I'd love to hear ideas on why a giant puddle of meatballs might be lying in the middle of a parking lot.

Revenge of Garbage Chicken

In my old neighbourhood, there were these people. I didn't know anything about them, except that there was a man and a woman, and they spent their weekends in their garage, seemingly moving the same stuff around all the time.

The other thing I knew about them was that their garbage bags were always torn open. And that every week they contained significantly sized pieces of chicken meat. Or chicken bones. Or chicken skin.

Which Abby would always find. Because Garbage Chicken is more lucrative than regular chicken, or chicken in kibble. Sometimes you'll see it out of the corner of your eye, in its true form.


So today when we were zipping along on our morning walk I was surprised to look down and see a whole chicken breast in her mouth.

And it possessed her. It possessed her mind completely. I told her to leave it, leave the Garbage Chicken, but its grip on her was too strong. I shoved my hand into her mouth and her teeth were just locked together - she didn't try to bite down, she didn't try to open up. I bent down on the sidewalk and I yelled, like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, I yelled "free my little dog, ghost of Garbage Chicken. Let her go."

But it wouldn't. So I reached between Abby's teeth, and pulled it out shred by shred.

And we ran, ran home to safety.

But Garbage Chicken's wrath grows. It wants all the dogs it can have.

We are walking tonight, and within a minute or two of getting outside, the wind begins to blow a little more sharply. And we hear the cries of ducks, a little farther from the river than you usually can. Something is uncomfortable, not right.

I know it is Garbage Chicken, looking for us.

We speed up, go in the other direction. Garbage Chicken is losing its grip, so it opens up the skies and it begins to pour, to piss fucking cold rain out of the sky, punctuated by chunks of ice that are pounding us.

So we scurry, like the girlfriend in the Michael Jackson Thriller video, in the other direction. By now there are big puddles of icy water that have a layer of ice on the bottom and we are slipping and sliding as fast as we can.

When we see a new demon - Puddle of Meatballs.
Puddle of Meatballs manifests itself physically exactly the way you think it does. There's an oozing, flowing mass of gravy and in its salty centre are twenty, maybe twenty five full-sized meatballs.

This is too much for any dog's mind.

Abby is pulling, craning against her collar to get to it. I can feel her yearning, her longing for it. Even if they say dogs can sense evil, they can not always sense it when it comes in the form of Garbage Chicken or Puddle of Meatballs. Both of whom work for the evil powers that are too dangerous for any of us to comprehend.

I start to slip in an icy puddle of dirty water, I waver and wobble. I am resisting the demon with all my strength when I feel myself being pulled down into it. Then I remember to invoke Vegetarian Power, and I am able to right myself just in time before we sink into its depths.

Puddle of Meatballs has not succeeded in getting into Abby's mind or her mouth.

We pull away, and with a mighty roar we skid through the hail and the rain, and we get back to our house and lock all the doors and turn off all the lights and hide under a blanket.

We're safe in here now. But be careful if you have to venture out tonight, because evil lurks among us, in the seemingly safest and most normal neighbourhoods, it is all around us, hiding in banal objects and dumpsters across this land.

Bad equation

Argh. No time + no time management equals frustration.

Dispatch from the holidays

Just wanted to update y'all - I have some groceries now. And I have learned how to make the most fantastic red pepper cream sauce that is vegan.

And my baking curse has ended. Perfect, perfect cranberry bran muffins rolled out of the oven yesterday. They are moist, but with a slight crispiness to the top. The cranberries burst during cooking and swirled them with red. They are sweet but not too sweet. And they contain exactly enough ginger.

Tomorrow, lasagne.

I'm glad the oven and I made peace. I wasn't sure how long we could go on fighting before one of us had to move out.

Mmm, sacrelicious.

So when everything is closed and you are too lazy to leave your house for more than ten minutes at a stretch, your diet becomes very restricted. Particularly if you haven't gone grocery shopping since the first week of December, because you're always thinking "if I'm going to be away, I'd better not buy any more food."

I do have condiments. In fact, the entire door of my fridge and another shelf of my cupboards are full of them.

It seemed like the most nutritionally sound idea I could think of to go to subway, get a couple of big veggie subs without sauces, throw them in the fridge, and pull out a piece a couple of times a day.

But I need sauce, right? You can't eat those things dry.

I guess I'm here to admit that I am eating fast-food sandwiches with a dressing made of meyer lemons, fair trade palestinian olive oil, and dijon mustard.

Mmm, sacrelicious.

Perfect horoscope

Google "Free Will Astrology," if you don't already read it. Here's mine for this week:

CAPRICORN Dec 22 | Jan 19 French author and statesman André Malraux observed that Jesus Christ was the only anarchist who ever really succeeded. It’s no coincidence that Christ was a Capricorn, I might add, since the evolved members of your tribe have many of the qualities necessary to thrive in situations where there are no formal rules or laws. If you would like to move more in the direction of being the highly evolved Capricorn you were born to be – and I think 2008 will be a very favourable time to do just that – you should cultivate the qualities of a successful anarchist. In other words, be self-motivated, disciplined and respectful of the needs of other people. Do the right thing without having to be coerced to do the right thing. Foster in yourself a reverence for freedom and a knack for making constructive use of your freedom.

Famine/feast/fight

So it looks like a proposed famine to be followed by much tension, fighting and bureaucracy, to be followed by something better.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will."

Frederick Douglass

This quote is on the back of my business cards. I should stop once in a while and remember how lucky I am.

If you've never listened

To Mark Eitzel, you should immediately pick up a copy of 60 watt silver lining.

Home Alone

I've suspected since last night that I might not be able to get home for the holidays.

A freak warm patch, about ten degrees above zero, caused everything to melt. Then a flash freeze and some flurries on top. It's like an accident sundae waiting to happen.

So I've been rapidly cycling through the process - feel irritated, guilty, sad, then hopeful, then repeat.

And as I always do on a Sunday night, listened to This American Life. The episode is called Home Alone. Not in a funny way, like those delightful movies (okay, the first two are delightful), but rather about people who die alone in their houses and the people who try to investigate whether they might have a friend or relative in this world.

So after about six hours of wondering what will happen to me when I die alone, who will claim my valuable (?) collection of signed Canadian poetry books, what will happen to the dogs I have then, whether my siblings will be able to take care of me, etc., I started to think a bit differently.

For crying out loud - it's just one day.

So I am trying to think of the perfect plan b xmas. So far it looks like this:

go out, get stuff to make lasagne
walk dog in the park - let her stick her whole head into rabbit burrows, don't let her get stuck
listen to motown at top volume
call family several times
think for a long time about going to the giant ukrainian catholic church
watch newsies
make paper balls filled with catnip for cats
bake a loaf of bread
light tree!

But honestly if I knew the weather gods were going to curse me I would have saved my shopping til boxing week.

feast or famine?

When you approach your first day at the bargaining table, you never know what it'll be.

But I'll tell you tomorrow.

so so mojo

I think my baking is cursed.

First, I make a pan of lemon squares where the crust tastes like paste, the lemon goo only partially solidifies, and all of the flour in the recipe rises to the top and creates a white foamy layer.

The next night I make a batch of chocolate chip cookies, from a recipe I've used a thousand times. Except this time, they are heavy, oily, and crispy on the outer edges.

So I don't know whether to try to make a batch of ginger snaps for a holiday meeting at work tomorrow, or whether to curl into a ball and hide from the oven.

Say it ain't so

So when, late at night, you see a hooded figure peeking in your window, what do you think?

That they're maybe looking at your cat, planning to break to your place, or what?

Actually, it's just an (ostensibly drunk) woman who is struggling to get her pants down enough to take a piss on your lawn.

Best warning ever

"This bedding contains pigment dye stuff that should not harm your dog. This is not meant for puppies, who chew their bedding."

Proud moment

I just want to say I'm proud of my little brother, who made the difficult decision to stop eating chicken.

Plus, he taught me something I didn't know about animal rights.


Only mammals are protected by animal cruelty acts. This makes it possible for chickens to be debeaked, overcrowded, pumped full of drugs and hormones. It permits people to keep them in filthy environments where their stress levels are so high they will injure each other. In cages where they lose their ability to walk because their legs are so badly damaged.

When I have a country house, I'll be able to house some rescued chickens. And I'll name one of them "Zaussome." D, you know what I mean.

How long does it take...

Until you stop feeling embarrassed about crying in front of others?

I don't know why people make such a big fucking deal, but I certainly didn't keep it together too well at the December 6th vigil to remember the women who've been killed by their partners.

They read the names, of all the women in our province who died this year and where it has been verified that their deaths were at the hands of their partner.

Because when they read the names, there are so many. 22 in 2007. Although the average each year in Ontario is 44.

And you hear "Jane Doe" read. And then another. And another.

Three women, that we know of now, who died with no one to claim them. Who are unnamed on this horrible list of lost lives.

So in my mind I gave them names, and interests and faces and jobs. And houses and friends and favourite songs. Because I don't want to forget, even though I don't know their names.

Where credit is due

I don't know why I was thinking about this, but I was thinking my mom deserves some credit (I hope she thinks this is credit), for giving me access to ideas that helped me become the troublemaker I am today. Lots of this happened because of books she shared. Did I mention my mom was a vegetarian? Who did yoga? And knows how to play trumpet? And dance? And start a food bank out of your house?

But let me tell you about some of the books.

There were books like Alex Haley's Roots, which taught me about racism.

There were also books by people who risked their lives to stop injustices and save lives. The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, taught me about the holocaust and the courage of resisters. Ten Boom hid Jews in her house, and was interned, along with her sister, in the death camps because of it. Ten Boom was also the very first woman watchmaker in Holland.

Underground to Canada is a book by Barbara Smucker that's meant to teach children about the movement to get enslaved people to a safe place.

No Easy Walk to Freedom is Nelson Mandela's autobiography which is inextricably linked to the rise and fall of South African apartheid.

Or Black Like Me, a white journalist's story about taking drugs that altered his skin colour, to tell the story of what it is to be black in America.

And maybe When Rabbits Howl, about a survivor of childhood abuse who was able to tell her story through her network of different selves. Trudi Chase and the troops are the author, and they have dissociative identity disorder.

I still cry when I think of Life With Billy, the story of Jane Stafford who was, along with her child, so brutally tortured by her husband that she killed him. And committed suicide some years later. I couldn't finish it.

Do not read those last two books unless you are in a really good place, and you give yourself permission to stop when you need to, and you have someone to talk to about it.

Really, those were just a few examples I could think of off the top of my head. The fact that my mom knew about them and shared them, and now I can share them with others, is a remarkable testament to the power of books and words. And to the concept that there are positive things, things other than suffering, that can be transmitted through generations.

And I am grateful to have a list of things I know and have found, that I can give, too.