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Waking Up Alive: How to Weigh Nothing.

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I’m obsessed with a video of two humpback whales floating beneath the ocean surface, observing a miniscule diver, who is in turn observing them through a camera.

 

These living monoliths hover, float, enigmatic, barnacle covered, taking a tiny break from orbiting the earth from within.

Because they can.

I thought of them yesterday while I was standing in line at the grocery store. The elderly lady ahead of me was struggling to get her 123 items checked through the Express Lane, so I had plenty of time to contemplate my paradoxical surroundings.

 

(She had offered to let me go ahead of her, this being the 1-20 items only lane, but I didn’t want to get caught red-handed by the Express Lane Police with my own 116 items, so I magnanimously declined and told her to go ahead and take her time, ignoring the heavy sighs of the man behind us clutching 1 carton of milk.)

 

To my right there was a wall built completely of sweets. In fact, I think the shelf itself was made of pink striped peppermint knobs. There were bars of chips, and chips of nuts, and nuts of lollipops. There were tiers of cellophane wrapped cakes sparkling next to the most colourful array of candies seen since Willie Wonka. There was Hard Case chocolate glowering at Less Judgmental chocolate, Milk chocolate necking with Lactose Intolerant Salt Infused chocolate, giving birth to Rainbow Glossy Yummy Bears. Yes, an orgy of sweets, everything up to, but not including Jigg’s Dinner chocolate.  (Someone should get on that.)

 

To my left, opposite all of this, there was a disheartening array of “Women’s Magazines.” Each magazine blaring headlines such as “She lost ten pounds by just eating cabbage!” “How to get that body swimsuit ready!” (My swimsuit is sucking back the Hot Pepper Double Cream Chocolate with a Grand Marnier chaser and says “ Kiss my double latex bound derrier.”)

Weightless.

Other screamers included:

 

“Kate’s secret to losing the baby bump!”

 

“How to love eating nothing!”

 

“How to LIVE while eating nothing!”

 

“40 recipes for instant weight loss! Just add water! In fact, it’s ONLY water!”

 

Not one magazine in sight with a headline about great new books, carburetors, or tips for fuel efficiency, or how to survive the apocalypse, or how to train your zombie to devour victims while outside only, and not bring body parts inside as gifts. Or how whales float like feathers and refrain from eating tiny peanut sized divers.

 

A humpback whale can weigh as much as 79,000 pounds.   It can propel itself out of the water in a vertical breach at a speed of 30 kilometers an hour, and never once wonders whether it can or not.

 

At the Express Lane there were bags of JuJubes, bags of “100 Calorie Only Cookie Micro Bites” opposite the magazine which proclaimed “Recipe your ‘weigh’ to success!”

 

When the elderly lady ahead of me was carefully and slowly packing her groceries into her bag, I noticed she had bought mostly tinned goods., all sale items marked: 3 for 5 dollars. 4 for 7 dollars. Way too many dark brown and ugly tins.

 

Humpbacks eat mainly Krill, which is to say, a lot of really tiny candy coloured fish.

 

There were bags of chips and healthy chips and vegetable chips and kettle cooked chips, kettle not included.

 

So much glittering food across from the headlines encouraging us to starve ourselves, while in reality with the power rates hijacking us, and the economy what it is, being able to eat at all is becoming a luxury.

 

I asked a friend of mine who is a diver about how a planet sized being can hover in the water like a delicate soap bubble, and she told me about buoyancy, and the weight of the water itself.

 

I’d like to say that when I gave the bag of candy to the elderly lady in front of me that we shared a Hallmark moment but she was suspicious, although she took them. The guy behind me with the single carton of milk accepted his also, still with the pained look on his face, although less gruff than before.

 

I walked home eating a full bag of Cheezies, the puffy kind that leave the artificial colouring all over your fingers and clothes and teeth. Moving slowly. Imagining it was me looking down at the peanut sized diver.

 

(Oh, and lest you think there aren’t any Express Line Police, a very harried man yelled at me recently to put the bloody magazines back in the rack in the same order in which I found them, madam!)

 

 

Waking up Alive: Adventures in Living.

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Ode to a Brussel Sprout. Or, L’Air du Brussel Sprout.

 

I’ve noticed this thing that’s been happening to me a lot of late. I’ve only gradually become aware of what a phenomenon it is, a gift I never appreciated until now. It happened to me again this morning.

 

I woke up alive.

 

I’ve been waking up alive my entire life, of course, but never woke to what a miracle it is until recently.

 

I don’t know why the entire world isn’t in a mad fever of celebration every single day, when we all wake up alive.

 

Granted, some days I squander my bounty of time on earth by finding reasons to justify 10 a.m. cocktail hours and cancelling social plans made mere hours before, because just because.

 

But, lately I’ve been trying to remind myself that every day I wake up alive, means I have won the life lottery. Every night I go to sleep knowing that there is no guarantee I will wake up alive.  So when I do, it’s an automatic get out of jail free card, pass go, spend that 200 dollars, frig the diet, drink the wine, eat the cake (cause I don’t want to waste my life lottery calculating the caloric content of anything) eat chicken parmesan with spaghetti, drink more wine, go for a walk later, and if I can’t go for a walk I ask someone to take me for a drive and then I make them go for a walk. No matter what I did the day before….unless maybe I count that little murder thing…even then…no matter what, I woke up alive. I can be whoever the frig I want and no one can say anything. Even if they do, I tell them to mind their own beeswax. I can burn bridges, unburn bridges, my life lottery drive- through window is closed to assholes. I go to get a coffee and a breakfast sandwich even though I just had my luxurious 30 minute lunch break, and I may fritter away hours, and then I am going to Italy for the weekend, in my head. Even while I am sitting here working, I am really in Italy, in my head. I give myself permission to be embarrassing, trip up, fall down, get up, get down with my own self. I wear all the sparkles to the grocery store.

I’ve looked at life from the Boobie side now.

Every time you wake up alive you get to start over, your entire DNA is reset, I don’t know if that’s right but it sounds right, your soul DNA is reset. Even if there is someone lying next to you in the bed whimpering “But you promised to stay with me forever” do not die nice.

 

I’m going to die happy if it kills me.

 

So many people, as in Victorian times, wake up dead, in small boxes, with no benefit of a little bell and a snifter of brandy beside them. Or worse, they wake up having already been cremated.

 

It’s possible that once in a fit of pique I asked the Google Goddesses if it was possible to lose ten pounds overnight in order to fit into a particular dress in order to go to a party in order to accidentally on purpose run into the person who cracked my heart in thrice in order to reduce that person to a pile of regretful rubble, thereby eliciting many pleas (please please please) from that person to reconcile, pleas which would fall on my deaf ears for at least eighteen hours before I succumbed into a torrentially torrid reunion.

 

Facebook put a thing in my feed that warns me against empty calories. My calories aren’t empty cause I fill them up with wine. Plus, stop sending me videos on how to make Brussel Sprout Chips. The wine makes them soggy. Brussel Sprouts are not chips, they are failed cabbages.

 

It does not go unnoticed that we each have a Facebook feed, rather like we used to refer to the cattle feed.

 

Do not make the mistake of early onset death. Don’t think you are waking up alive when you are really waking up dead. You are not dead until the doorknob test comes in, and even then, don’t believe it.

 

Remember, there is just too much time set aside in life for being dead and not enough for living.

Lucy loves life. Maybe not Brussel Sprouts.

ODE TO A BRUSSEL SPROUT

 

O tender curling inward

 

Guarding close your heart

 

Curving soft

 

Holding dear your secret

 

Peel away

 

Peel away

 

O tender curling inward

 

So close in intention to a rose

 

But not a rose

 

Or even an artichoke.

 

Or cabbage.

 

 

I debuted this new material at a recent benefit performance for the Jennifer A. Cutler Foundation. You can find out more about them at:  www.jenniferacutler.ca.

Ode to a Brussel Sprout is a variation on Ode to a Cabbage, as it appears in my book “This is the Cat.”

And, you will find my plays and books now on sale in my on-line shoppe (I like the ‘e’ on the end) plus more about more things on the go. Thanks so much for supporting my work!

 

 

 

 

 

Killing Time in Airports: And a seat for my lobster.

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Intrepid me.

The man behind me in the line-up for security is not respecting the invisible electronic fence of my personal space boundary. He keeps bumping into me with his box of lobsters and inching his wheeled carry-on forward so that it looks as if it and I are going steady. If I lean backwards into him (and I just might oh why don’t I and show him) my knapsack will come to rest against his box of lobsters and together we will form a new type of interstellar being. Or, better yet, maybe I will grab his box of lobsters, open it, cut the bands off the hapless claws, and set all those tasty crustaceans free right here in Halifax airport.

 

Here we stand in the line for security, which is inching forward at the pace of a line which is not moving one bit. This is my third attempt to get home, what will all the apocalyptic weather besieging St. John’s right now. Maybe if those four horsemen come thundering across the sky with their swell horns and mighty steeds, one of them will swoop down and give me a lift. But now I see that they, too, are stymied because of the torrential winds and inscrutable wind resistant fog. It’s written on the departures screen: “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Delayed. Please Check Back for Updates.”

 

I remember when the Catholic Church decided that purgatory wasn’t a thing anymore. But, I wailed, what will happed to all the poor souls lined up at heaven’s gate, waiting for the liberation that only a five dollar mass can buy?

 

Rest easy. They are all here, with me, at the airport.

 

There is an older couple in front of me who have been griping at each other with deadly sniper accuracy.

 

She says, “I don’t ask for much, do I? Do I? “ He says, “It wasn’t on the list.” She says, “But why do I have to put it on the list when we’ve already talked about it?” He says, “It’s not a real thing until it’s on the list.”

Thought balloon with no thoughts.

To my right there is a young woman travelling alone with a baby. The baby is old enough to be squirmy and unhappy in some sort of elaborate front-loading strap-on thing. In addition to her baby, the young woman is also staggering under the weight of various totes and bags which seem to hold diapers, formula, Onesies, and possibly a parachute.

 

The man with the box of lobsters bumps me again. I try to zap him with the powers of my invisible electronic fence but he weathers the zaps of my psychic darts and prods me again. He looks so unassuming, I can’t gauge his motives. One of the older security guards at the gate decides he is going to lighten the mood of us, the human centipede, and he begins to say things in a hearty jovial voice.

 

“Who’s going to the bingo game! Ha ha ha! Who’s going to the bingo game when you get to Newfoundland? Ha ha ha!”

 

No one cracks a smile, which does not deter him. He is affronted that we are not erupting into gales of mirth. Now he tries to pick on us, one by one, like a stand up comic gone mad with power. And, it is very intimidating because he is wearing a uniform, and we are at his mercy if we ever want to get out of this hellish hell, and so some of us attempt feeble resentful smiles. This is a mistake. He starts a running commentary.

 

“ What’s the matter? No one got a smile for me today? You sir! You there! Where’s your smile for me today? Look at her! She can’t help herself! See? She’s loving the thought of going to the bingo when she gets to Newfoundland! Ha ha ha.”

 

As he goes on and on, those of us in the line up begin to silently commiserate with other. The bickering couple in front of me pause to direct their barbed looks at him instead of at each other. The woman travelling with the baby rolls her eyes at me, as if to say, “Is he effing serious?” Her baby spits out a pacifier, which inexplicably lands on top of the box of lobsters held by the man directly behind me. We all turn to look.

 

The man holding the box of lobsters smiles a luminous smile that takes us all in. He is short, round, and dark haired. His cheeks are flushed and he has a sweet rumpled quality that melts my heart. He has the box of lobsters balanced in one hand, resting on the handle of his wheeled carry on, which he tries to position slightly ahead of him in order to accommodate the cane I hadn’t seen before. He shrugs a little, uncertain, and as the security guard shrills on and on about the bingo it becomes clear that our man with the lobsters speaks only a little English. The baby reaches over, plucks her pacifier in her baby fist and begins to thump it up and down on top of the box of lobsters. We all laugh at the baby, and we laugh at the box of lobsters, and we laugh at the security guard in a companionable not-nice way.

 

Now I’m the one holding the box of lobsters. The woman of the bickering couple is loudly lecturing the young mother on how a little bit of alcohol is good for mommy when travelling because babies are selfish blobs of need, as are husbands. The dark haired man behind me is shouldering one of the diaper bags instead of the box of lobsters. The security guard is turning rather mean and flushed with the lack of response to his comedy routine when the baby gives the pacifier another flick, where it lands, plop, in a sticky glob, on the front of his shirt.

 

Later, I discover that a glass of wine, while more expensive than a five-dollar mass, is still heavenly.

 

Later still, I also discover that the box held only one lobster, which had it’s own seat on the plane.

Keeping an eye out for the four horse-people.