Plenty of Nothing

Back Home

Week one of vacation has passed in a blur of traveling, visiting, clearing, chatting, and waiting. Not a particularly restful time but needful things were done.

I meant to take pictures but didn't manage to drag out the camera in time to grab shots of the happy new nephew or the dancing niece or relatives or my old home town.

I spent most of the week clearing out my mother's house, getting it ready for sale. She moved into an apartment with a better support system in November but the house was still full. It's a small, post-WW II house, about 1200 square feet with a full attic and a full basement.

Exactly how full? Well, we filled a 12-foot dumpster and the house still wasn't empty when I left. Somewhere over the last 4 or 5 years, frugality turned into hoarding. And hoarding coupled with memory problems meant that every nook and cranny was stuffed.

Some of it was easy to deal with: twenty years of nearly empty paint cans, broken and ancient appliances, empty cardboard boxes, empty bottles, packages and bottles of stale food, years and years of paid bills and receipts.

Some of it was odd: cracker boxes stuffed randomly amid the linen, caches of sanitary napkins, kitchen objects wrapped in tinfoil.

Some of it was smelly: cheese left on top the fridge, butter left on the the counter, and used kitty litter bagged up in a corner.

Much of it was sad: Bag after bag of fabric and sewing supplies, piles of craft supplies and projects for herself and her grandchildren, hundreds of reference photographs for her paintings. Each object represented a plan, a hope, a possibility. All that hope is gone now and that's the hardest part. Not the sorting out of family heirlooms and memories but the discarding of projects she'll never be able to finish.

She still thinks of herself as a person who can paint and sew and still has plans to make more art, more clothing, a new home. But the dementia has taken away much of her visual understanding and her understanding of spatial relationships. She's only partially aware of this and so her plans go on even though she can't thread a needle, draw shapes, follow a pattern, or easily manipulate tools like TV remotes or coffee makers.

She was a fiercely independent person and doesn't and can't understand why she is thwarted by the objects around her. She's much diminished. Her bouts of sadness and frustration come and go with her attention span. We hope for a long plateau before the next inevitable set of declines and the next move away from independence.

Heather

Lynda Barry

There's a nice long interview with Lynda Barry over at Comics Reporter.  Barry rocks majorly, having drawn Ernie Pook's Comeek for many years, and she is now touring a new book, What It Is, about the creative process, published by Montreal's Drawn and Quarterly.  She talks about the collapse of the alternative newspaper cartoon market, and how her comic has gone from 70 to seven papers.  She's now selling original art on ebay to pick up the slack, and you can buy it!  Search on Shop_Super_Marlys at ebay.  It's like $85 bucks per meditatating monkey!  Honestly, it's the best bargain around!  Buy one and be adored by your grandchildren!  (Image lifted from Drawn and Quarterly.)  Douglas

Trueman House, 1979

Looking for My Reverse Twin

I hate buying new footwear. Doesn't matter if it's boots, sandals, sneakers, or flip-flops. New shoes of any sort have always meant pain.

I have rather vivid memories of walking home from school with wearing new brown shoes and bloodstains. And the next day making the same journey with smaller bloodstains and bunched up bandages futilely trying to protect the open blisters on my ankles. This went on rather sadly for years with new shoes and old shoes until I figured out that I always needed to put on bandages whenever I put on footwear.

I tend to put off buying replacement shoes to the last possible moment. And then knowing that the shoes only mean pain, I often rush through the process just to get it over. Is the sneaker a palatable price? Yes. Is it a tolerable colour? Good. Does it fit? Seems to. And then out of the store. I went through this ritual one morning recently and thought I found a good match even if the sneakers are too white and are ugly.

I take them home. A couple hours pass and it's time to put them to the test: bandages, the athletic socks, and the gleaming sneakers. My left foot is very happy, my right foot is not so sure. I head out to try to find some dirt to shuffle through to take the shininess down a notch. I come home in agony. My left foot is now deliriously happy. My right foot wants to be put out of its misery.

After several days spent agonizing over the waste of money and my willful mutant feet, I face the facts and head out to buy another pair of sneakers. I manage to find the next size up in the same style of not entirely hideous and still-on-sale sneakers. They too seem to fit and I trundle home.

Before boxing up the first pair to donate to the St Vincent de Paul and after moaning and groaning about how happy my left foot was in the first pair, I decide to try an experiment. Size 8 on the left foot. Size 8 and a 1/2 on the right. Amazing. They pass the walking to the grocery store and back test.

It's as if the heaven's have opened and shown me the way. My feet are different sizes. The mind boggles: all those years with painful blisters and thousands of bandages.

Anyone out there who needs an 8 1/2 left and an 8 right?

Heather

Mount Allison to Demolish Sprague and Baxter Houses

If you enjoy press release spin, check out this beauty from Mount Allison University.  The university is gearing up to put the backhoe to two more of Sackville's heritage properties, but before they do so the general public has an eleven day window in which to purchase them, and then two months to haul them off the site.  Will Mt. A sell the properties with the land?  No!  Universities don't sell land!  They only grow and grow, converting their host towns to green space.  Note the use of the soporifics home and family, and the long central quotation from the administrator who commissioned the article.  Especially shiny brass is the way in which the magic word environment has been wrapped around the coming act of vandalism.  As if there's no such thing as a built environment. Of course when no one with a spare vacant lot in Sackville and a few hundred thousands snaps up the housesthe university will be forced to flatten them, however reluctantly.  What else can a poor public institution do?  Douglas McLeod

Miss Wolverhampton Walsall

The Warriors (1979)

Douglas:  I was lent this DVD by a 20-year-old who couldn't believe I'd missed it when it first ran.  A gamer born in the Eighties, he probably came to it by way of the 2005 video game.  The film does have some of the qualities of a video game.  A gang from Coney Island travel up to the Bronx to a conclave called by Cyrus, leader of the Riffs.  His plan is to unite the gangs and take over New York borough by borough, but before the gathering is over Cyrus is assassinated, and the Warriors, falsely blamed, have to fight their way home to the seafront.  Yep, it's Xenophon's Anabasis rewrit.  At the time there was a lot of hype surrounding this picture, and the iconic baseball player in war paint came to represent New York's perceived slide toward anarchy.  I actually thought the film was post-Apocalyptic, like Escape From New York.  But in fact the cops are pretty much on top of things, and during the opening sequence there are plenty of shots of the gang members dutifully paying their train fares, though that gets jettisoned once the chase begins.  For subway and graffiti enthusiasts the film is a bonanza.  Much of the action takes place in the actual subway at the time when graffiti was just finding its form.  The Warriors' tagger, Rembrandt, is of the old school, which is to say he has acquired no form at all since first learning his alphabet.  The Baseball Furies are a bit of a letdown, and lose their bats in short order in a fight in Central Park, and the Gramercy Riffs look a little odd carrying hockey sticks, but David Patrick Kelly's character is nicely psychotic, and there's a lesbian rumble.  I'd put it in a young-and-dumb-in-New-York-in-the- Seventies double-feature with Saturday Night Fever.

Heather: Dude. You've lost it. Saturday Night Fever I'd watch again. This was one of those movies I'll only watch once, in a heat wave, with beer, cursing our lack of air conditioning.  There's a lot of running, badly choreographed fight scenes, and young men standing around trying to look pretty. My guess is that every kid in New York who wanted to be an actor and had, or could acquire, the right outfit, got to be in the thing.  I'd forgotten the whole striped rugby shirts, overalls, and feathered hair look.  And I'll be glad to forget it again. Against my better judgement: here's a site  you shouldn't visit. 

Candy from Japan via Victoria via Port Angeles

At the doldrums of my workday, I heard Douglas trooping upstairs and I yelled out: "Is there candy?" The usual reply is "NO" and an eyeroll. (Yes, yes, "usual" suggests that when I'm grumbly and bored some part of my brain thinks candy can be magicked out of thin air.)  No response. I stuck my head out to repeat myself cause he might just be ignoring me. He rounded the corner and said "YES". 

When I regained consciousness, he handed me a package with a customs sticker on it that clearly said "candy".  Elizabeth had sent me candy from her Japan dai boken! And a little card with more stickers.

There was a small argument about whether we'd open the packages. But calmer minds prevailed.

Banana Kit-Kat has to be the oddest tasting confectionary I've ever had. Each nugget has a yellow, nearly waxy coating that smells very, very banana-like. The banana "flavour" overpowers the interior wafers.

At first glance the Hello Kitty candy looks like wax on a bamboo skewer. It turns out to be a strawberry flavoured coating on top of pretzel-like pocky.

So many thanks to Elizabeth for the afternoon surprise.

Heather

An Allegory Upon Cartooning