Things Within Things

Day one: Big Raspberry doesn’t stop for winter

The festival was over, the boys were all plannin' for a fall
The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin' in the wall
The curfew had been lifted and the gamblin' wheel shut down
Anyone with any sense had already left town
He was standin' in the doorway lookin' like the Jack of Hearts

I have one hour and then I must leave to go to work. Will there be enough time to write this before the deadline of daylight? Starting from zero, I accidentally brush the built-in mousepad on the new laptop that I purchased about a month ago. Everything that I had written just disappeared.

But wait! One of the beauties of the Substack app is that the program is always saving what was just written. I go out and come back in, and there it is.

Deadlines. We are all subject to deadlines. Deadlines do not wait for daylight. The foreboding. The forbidden. The folks for Biden.

I have been wondering what matters in this life since my wandering at age 5. What is important? What matters? “We only have one shot out of this barrel. We only come this way but once.” So sings Beau Wheeler in their song Open Up Your Heart. I sang this song at the recent Les Goodman Saves Canada show. It was decided that I would go on last, closing out the show with this song. To me this song is much more than a song. To me this song is a shout out to the beauty that is Beau, a cancer survivor who continues to amaze as they write and perform, carving out a place for themselves in the noise.

What is this noise that I speak of? I hear cars driving past my window, four stories above street level. I hear the thrum of the air purifier and the Dyson fan. They say that it is going to be a hot one — most likely over 30 degrees C, which is 86 F for our southern readers. Canada adopted the Metric system of measure back in 1970, some 54 years ago, yet the remnants of Imperial measurement continues like an old pronoun. Pints, ounces, inches, feet, and bushels. Even a peck in a pinch. Did you know that “a pinch” is an actual measure? A pinch is equal to 1/16 teaspoon or half of a dash. This ancient measurement has been used as long as we've had fingers.

Fingers? Like chicken fingers? Buffalo wings? Fingerling potatoes?

Let us consider the fresh raspberry, harvested by the delicate fingers of migrant children. In my youth, raspberries grew in my Grandfather’s back yard, along with his horse radish, which he would grind and make into —you guessed it— horse radish. His backyard was not big, more like the size of a small room. We would visit, and he would have a big bowl of smarties, right next to his can of Export A tobacco. He would roll his own cigarettes, which we thought was revolutionary. His fingers were yellow with nicotine, and he had emphysema.

In those days, most people did not get their raspberries from my grandfather. They would buy a pint from the market. By the time they got home, those fragile berries were already soft, slowly melding into one another, strands of mould growing literally as we watched.

They would congeal into one solid block of mouldy mess with a raspberry fur coat. But at some point, raspberry changed. Oh Raspberry, why did you change? Raspberries can last in a fresh state for over a week. What happened?

To preserve the little raspberries, Big Raspberry unlocked the potential of “gelatin-carboxymethylcellulose with PPE in manufacturing films with antioxidant, UV-light barrier, and pH-sensitive properties.” They experimented with gene splicing. They gave up waiting for the perfect weather, and growing conditions, where sometimes the fate of the year’s crop hung on the capricious whim of Mother Nature. Scientists brought the outdoor raspberry bushes inside the greenhouse, where they could grow all year round, like spots in a Petri dish. Time disappears in a test tube.

Why do Driscoll’s raspberries last longer? The answers are not pretty. If you enjoy fresh raspberries on your morning cereal, please read no further. The truth is not as enjoyable in the morning.

Remember Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Big Raspberry found ways to create the hairless raspberry. Raspberries are genetically grown in greenhouses, harvested with the kind of precision and technology that only the largest of food processors possess. Words like robots, migrant children with delicate fingers, environmental racism, poor labour practices, clamshells, microplastics, unfair working conditions, and on and on. Over $6 billion annually is made on these sweet fragile fruits, now available year round, because seasons are just obstacles to be overcome.

Day 2-4: How do YOU like your apocalypse?

Why is the sea boiling hot? Why can’t Pigs have wings? If the buffalo gets wings, then pigs can have wings. Shoes and ships and sealing wax, because Christ, it’s a new day, papa’s got a brand new bagel, and her I am going on about chicken fingers again. Let me know when I start repeating myself here. Let me know when I start repeating myself here.

You may be baffled by the segue, but let’s talk about Alice Munro. Or more importantly, her daughter. She should be given an award for bravery. This reveal is overdue, and if it saves her life, it is worth the erasure. Our world is full of victims of sexual abuse. Many of these victims end up on the streets, dying of alcoholism or drugs. Suicide is not painless, it sometimes is the only way out of the maze. Or do they repeat the horrid story to another generation?

It had to come out.

We ask how could Alice remain silent, knowing that she and her creepy husband share in the violation of her child? I know of a woman who died from the complications of many autoimmune conditions, brought on by her abuse at age 4 and onward by her father. Her mother also stood by, saying nothing, afraid to say anything, blocking out the cries for help, choosing to live in a shroud, rather than face the horror.

I knew a woman artist who committed suicide in her Fifties, having been abused by an uncle at a young age. Years of psychotherapy did not help. A beautiful child did not help. In the end, nothing could help.

Alice had a special room to write in. She compartmentalized her mind, like her room, allowing herself to invent worlds of award winning short stories, while ignoring the horrors going on in the other room of her own house. What did she get from her writing that allowed her to avoid any duty as a mother to protect her child?

What kind of love is it that compelled her to go back to this vile man she knew was abusing her daughter? In the end, dementia stole her mind. One cannot help but wonder if her own body created the disease to allow her to forget the horrors she had been a part of on her watch.

Perhaps her shame grew inside her mind like a cancer of dementia, uncontrollably rendering her speechless, stealing her gift of writing, all to feed the shame that she kept hidden.

It is horrific, but even sadder for the fact that it is so common. Abuse goes on in so many families. Her husband was living in a fiction where he was Humboldt Humboldt and her daughter was Lolita, meanwhile Alice would go to her special place and create some of the greatest writing ever written. Some of us will separate the art from the artist, while others cannot and will not and morally should not forgive or forget.

"The complexity of things -- the things within things -- just seems to be endless," Munro told her interviewer. "I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."

People lament Joe Biden’s performance in a debate while failing to condemn his role in the genocide in Gaza. I know the alternative is untenable. We are caught in a maze of our own making with no way out. on the other shaking hand, we have the felonious reality TV star with a moral compass that spins like the wheel of misfortune. Trump would do the same genocide as Biden, except he would spin it differently. Yes, it is genocide, he would say, but under my administration, it will be the greatest genocide ever. We are going to have the best genocide, and Mexico will pay for it.

I write in the early hours before going work, my mind is half awake, half dreaming. but it becomes harder to separate the dream world from the daylight trauma. “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality.”

Oh Freddie.

Nothing is rhyming.

Oh, Mandy.

Time keeps on ticking, into the future.

As a survivor, I know each day is precious. But we must be approaching a deadline for daylight, a time for action, where we all stand up and say NO. This loop is a snake slowly eating itself. And we know how that ends. Fangs for the memories. Come on. Seven come eleven. Do we take out our gold teeth and see how they roll snake eyes?

Day five: STOP RIGHT NOW! I awoke this morning with an urgency. Hey kids! I need to start a new band with the Two Ed’s. We’re going to call it The Old Spice Girls. I just need to tell the Two Ed’s.