Oh goodness, you guys, I can't stop watching this:
I wasn't a Prince fan, by any stretch of the imagination. He was just another musician I was aware was really talented in a way that I didn't have the time or inclination to appreciate. Seriously, there's about five bands or acts I actually listen to over any given year. But this is just so perfect and naughty. You can even imagine him getting dressed before the show: "Hmm, what would a Travelling Wilbury wear . . . this . . . bright red cowboy hat. Perfect." And that little fella son of Harrison's - I bet he's the one who actually wanted Prince there. "Make me stand in the background and mime, will they? Fine. I'll get Prince in and make everyone look like an aging bar band."
So, I'm still pregnant and a little terrified. This is all pretty strange. I doubt it would have been less strange if we decided to wait a few more months after the miscarriage to try again. Maybe even more strange. Anyways, this is where we are. I calm myself down by reminding myself I'm doing what I can, and the baby will do what it has to. That mostly works.
What do women do when this happens and they don't have an explanation? How would I be coping now if the last one had just suddenly come out, instead of showing up dead on an ultrasound while my body merrily went on being pregnant around it?
Because to be honest, before the miscarriage happened, I didn't understand how miscarriages or stillbirths worked. For some reason, I assumed that the mother's body shut it down and the baby got ejected. I didn't understand that most of the time the baby gets ejected because it shuts itself down and the mother's body can only tolerate the dead tissue for so long. Of course once I took that on board, it makes a lot more sense. It's a much more complicated process for a mother's body to recognize a catastrophic problem with a fetus and shut down being pregnant than it is for a fetus to have catastrophic problems that it can't survive. I question why I held that first belief now, and I think it has something to do with over-buying into some sort of Freudian hyper-powerful motherhood concept.
Anyways, it's all still weird and terrifying, but I am as sick as a fucking dog and choosing to be reassured by that. Last time I wasn't that sick. With Godzilla I was sick. You take reassurance where you can find it - even riding the porcelain bus every morning.
martedì, aprile 05, 2016
Back in Aspromonte, and this time more or less in the thick of it as we've decided to stay in Gambarie. Gambarie is a whole other species of depressing from the rest of Calabria. It's as beautiful as anywhere in the world, I daresay, and the fact it isn't crawling with German tourists - I can see them eating this place up with a spoon, with its hiking and history and "off the beaten track" qualities and what have you - is a real testament to the awful, retarded power of local organized crime and corrupt officials to shit their guts out where they live.
We're in a national park, in fact in the area most of the scouts are based, and the town square is still crawling with wild dogs that the restauranteurs keep fed so they won't threaten the few tourists who actually make it here, up the horrifically bad road that was meant to be replaced with a highway about thirty years ago. . . the picnic areas closest to the town are festooned with years of garbage and the maintenance of the paths looks close to nil; they're only still visible because of the number of people who tramp them to score mushrooms in the autumn.
Villas and hotels crumbling not just from neglect but from the seismic qualities of the area; it's as trembly as Japan here, but things are not Japanese quality. One day everything will just collapse again, like it does every hundred years or so. Abandoned houses, I guess held on to in the speculative hope that someday the highway will be built - it's not even halfway up the mountain yet, thirty years on - and that in any case tourists will be able to get to Reggio, which is a massive pain in the ass to fly into from anywhere else in Europe.
There's an airport there, with daily flights to Rome and Milan, but just Alitalia - none of the cheap European charters that are the lifeblood of tourism in Southern Europe now, which means that if I had flown here from a hub like Frankfurt, it would have cost more than a flight to Canada. And considering the awesomeness of the local beaches, the potential tourists attractions and historical sites stretching from the Neolithic to the Baroque, and the number of people from Reggio and this part of Calabria living elsewhere in Europe who come back often, there's no good reason for that lack of service relative to a place like Bari or Lamezia besides somebody not wanting it to happen; my guess is the families who control the ferries to Sicily.
But Gambarie is a little different from my father's hometown and from Reggio not only because it's exquisitely, almost painfully beautiful, with its mountains and old forests and views over the Straits of Messina to Sicily, but also because people are fucking trying here. They are trying to make things really nice. Italian culture being what it is, that doesn't extend to trash pickups or general community efforts - fuck, do I detest this macho insouciance bred into the culture that makes you coolly pretend nothing is a problem until it's suddenly punching you in the face - but people here are doing what they can to build businesses, and restaurants, and to find a way to share their beautiful home.
So I'm enjoying it, in my bitchy way, and enjoying the time with my parents - after three and a half weeks together, I've moved from the joy of reunion through being so frigging annoyed with them in some sort of adolescent throwback to coming to some sort of loving equilbirum again - and enjoying Godzilla, who is enjoying the beaches and the forest playground, and enjoying the rest of my extended family here, although they will never not drive me nuts.
Also I'm pregnant again and happy about it, in a pukey way. After the loss last time I wasn't too sure about sharing here so early (about a month in, I reckon), but then my parents started blabbing to everyone even after I fucking told them not to, which was part of the earlier annoyance I was feeling with them (I might not have even done the test so early if they weren't such frequent tipplers and I wasn't concerned about whether or not I should join in; in the course of a normal week, I might have three beers, and around my family, that consumption tends to increase exponentially just because they're always at it). So no matter what, if things go wrong again there will be no choice except some sort of public-dealing-with-it.
I feel hopeful. I'm incredibly fucking sick, which is much more remniscent of the pregnancy that worked, with Godzilla, than the pregnancy that didn't, which was just sort of generalized discomfort. And I'm also a little encouraged to hope by how fast it happened after we decided to try again, like maybe this kid really wants to be born. But we'll see. I keep reminding myself: I'm not bulletproof, and my love won't make anything bulletproof. The universe isn't making any plans to do things to or for me; I'm a part of the universe and the events of my life are a drop of water in its flow. This new child has its own destiny, like Godzilla and like the one who only lived 11 weeks. I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, I should be so lucky in love. Que sera, sera. Et cetera.
Went into the old town for dinner with parents (who are visiting), man and boy this evening, and the boy wanted to try on some merino wrist warmers I bought myself in New Zealand with dear friend who was living there a few years back.
"Don't lose them," I said, "it's not like I can go to New Zealand and buy more."
"Yes you can," said the F-word.
"But I won't," I said.
And I realized, for the first time, I guess, that there's a place I love - I can safely say I really loved New Zealand - that I will almost certainly never see again. My dear friend who was living there is safely back in Canada again. And now that Elvis is no longer living in Vancouver, 14 hour diagonal-Pacific flights - thank heaven! - are something necessity is unlikely to compel me to do again. And diagonal-Pacific is pretty much where New Zealand is. Any future visits to Australia will be grudging and probably brief as they can be, and then New Zealand is in the wrong direction to get back home. Unless home becomes Ontario again some day, but if that happens I'm going to assume it would be because of some global or personal cataclysm that would leave little time, money or airspace security for visits to Australia, let alone side-jaunts to New Zealand.
For the first time that the two things happened at the same time, the world felt too big for me and my life felt too short.
I'm not very worried about the cancer itself (except OF COURSE I'm fucking worried) because it was caught very early, and it's a very common, treatable, slow-growing one in men his age. I am worried about where he is - in Canada, and in a rural part of Canada. On both counts, medical care is not all it could or should be. Public universal health care on the Australian, British, or Canadian model looks good on paper - looks best on paper - but my experience is definitely that when it comes to anything even a little complicated or in terms to access to specialists, outcomes and doctor quality are better in European countries with mandatory insurance schemes. Maybe less political footballing. I don't know why.
So I wish he was here, or in France - I would feel a lot more confident in whatever treatment plan gets came up with for him. Anyways. He's not. So, no use fretting about it. By the end of the month we'll have a clearer idea of how serious it is, and how it will be treated.
But the big takeaway, so far, as we wait, is this sort of slap across the face that there's not so much time left. He's probably fine - this carcinoma is probably just a symptom of his being in his late 70s - just a symptom of him being of an age where, if we're lucky, we have ten really good years and then - fuck, just fuck, fuck, fuck.
And yes, I know, I'm lucky to still have him, and my mother, still in such good health, as so many people lose their parents so much earlier. But that doesn't make me feel better, frankly. Just worse for those other people who lost their parents so early. I won't be ready when he goes - when they go. I will not be ready at all. The idea of being ready is absurd. How could people who lose their parents young bear it? Surely something in them must just die out of sheer self-protection? I don't know.
Well . . . how are you doing this week? I'm in the middle of some questions of myself, and creativity, and mortality, and things . . . but they are not bad. I know it doesn't sound frightfully cheerful. But I've always been a pretty gloomy person and I see no reason to panic or worry over or try to change being a little gloomy now that I've actually got some things to be gloomy about from time to time.
Just to add to the cacophony of mourning voices out there - David Bowie - he's one of my favourite pop musicians, and about 15 of his songs occupy my top 30, if I have one. But his talent wasn't boundless, and he knew it. And he decided to be David Bowie anyways. I can say and acknowledge until the cows stumble home trying to mask their rummy breath that the work is more important than the result, but somehow it took David Bowie dying a couple of days after his millionth album came out, with this massive body of occasionally brilliant work behind him, for me to understand it. That is a profound gift to give people. Almost as good a gift as the music itself. Maybe better. It's quite a thing to get a Buddhist levelling-up handed to you like that from a man you've never met.
And I feel like a slightly better mother these days because I bought Godzilla a new tyrannosaurus that he can cuddle in bed, and he fell asleep with it as soon as he opened the package.
People who are smarter and more emotionally experienced than me have warned me that I need to be ready, after losing the baby, to pick up on signs of PTSD. I wanted to scoff, but choked back those scoffs, because of that whole "smarter and more emotionally experienced" thing, and decided - okay. Let's see how things go. Let's look for help if I need it.
I still don't think I need it - I think the points where I'm not doing okay are not running away with me. But the points where I'm not doing okay are surprising me a little. At first it was just a generalized anxiety - that something would happen to Godzilla, or me, or the F-word, or all sorts of other things, but that passed - partly from the distractions of going on holiday, and partly from coming to terms - to a point - with life being out of my fucking control.
Last night, I realized the point at which I had and have not accepted that.
During a side trip to Padova during the vacation, the boy's favourite stuffed animal got lost, which I internalized like assuming accountability was the fucking Olympic sport I was the fucking Serena Williams of. I'm still super-pissed at myself for it, and sorry for the boy, who still misses it. So that's one thing. And then getting back into the work world yesterday, the F-word had a meltdown over an appointment he'd forgotten and nearly missed, and then I heard David Bowie died, and then while I was parking the boy in front of the television, cooking and washing dishes in the afternoon, I glanced over at him, saw he'd got his little pocket flashlight open, was chewing on the pieces, and OH FUCK THE BATTERIES WEREN'T ANYWHERE.
Cue our first family trip to the emergency room - two of them, actually, as the first hospital we went to didn't handle children - and an X-ray that drove a hitherto unplussed but quite tired Godzilla into hysterics, and showed he had not swallowed any batteries. Okay. All so far so good. I think potential battery swallowing warrants the physical response we gave it. So far my actions are all making sense.
But my brain is fucking clobbering me, man.
There's the accountability for accidents thing, making me feel like a really shitty mother, and you know what, I think that might just be a sort of core condition of motherhood, particularly in its early years, so I'm not too worried about it; I'll just feel it and let it pass. But it's just shocking me the way the bad things that happen are stacking up like an almightily huge and sticky pile of ratshit that is blocking my view of the motherfucking sun.
Last night waiting in the first emergency room (no waiting at the second, thank goodness and thank Germany) I wasn't particularly worried - nobody dies or even gets particularly hurt from swallowing a battery as long as something is done about it in good time. But I just felt so fucking victimized. No - not even victimized. That would suggest that I felt like the universe had some sort of plan for me, and I didn't feel like that.
I just felt fucking clobbered. By my own incompetence as a caregiver, by human mortality, by the fucking inexorable and cruel logic of the miscarriage clobbering us as a family leading to me weaning Godzilla all of a sudden, leading to him re-entering an oral fixation that hadn't been active for the last two years, leading to us sitting in a fucking emergency room where the best-case scenario would be exposing my little boy to fucking radioactivity the day after the man who first made me interested in music and genitalia, two rather fucking important things, died of fucking cancer.
The past month just swept the fuck over me like a stinking tidal wave of sewage while I thought a bunch of other shitty things - big things like about how my parents are older than David Bowie was and I'm living so far away, and little things like some bills I'd meant to pay that evening - and fuck me. I felt old. And suddenly - after finding out there were no batteries in Godzilla and all my tension could shrivel up - I felt myself feeling old. And started questioning.
Why are bad things so accumulative? Why do they stack up like that? And in a life as full of blessings as mine is, why the fuck aren't the good things accumulative like that? Why aren't I occasionally overwhelmed with the feeling of "wow, I have a partner I love who I'm still sexually interested in, a wonderful son, a great kitchen, a loving and pretty healthy and reasonably happy extended family who I get to see a lot, a good job, enough money for sensible purposes - life is pretty fucking awesome"?
And I think it's back to those twin Buddhist bugbears of fear and hope. The fear, as I deal with one shitty thing after another, that more shitty things are coming. The fear all my blessings will be taken from me. And the hope that these blessings will last, and last, and last beyond a point where I intellectually know they can't last anymore - and that knowing breaks my heart and fills me with fear and makes the blessings taste bitter.
Fuck, that is a stupid way to live. I've been acutely conscious of it since the miscarriage. But not because the miscarriage did it to me - but because I've been living that way all my life.
I'm not sure what to do about this. I'm hoping realizing it is doing something about it, somehow. I guess we'll see.
We spent the last two weeks in Venice. I guess on several levels I'm glad to be back (electric toothbrush! Lovely kitchen! Dirt, trees, grass and birds besides pigeons!) but on a few others, I think I left my heart there. Got back yesterday and been dreaming about it all night. Funny how much cleaner the water was in my dreams.
Post-miscarriage there are all sorts of mental and emotional things this trip meant to me. But the way I'm feeling now is, for me and I think for most people, the mark of a successful vacation. The really, really good trips I go on make my brain race ahead to a parallel universe where I set up shop permanently wherever I'm visiting - don't you? There are theoretical Spliffes living out their lives in Shanghai, Barcelona, Vancouver, Pori, Berlin, etc. etc. . . . and now there's one in Venice too.
Which is odd, because besides one in Rome and one in Padova that's pretty much the only theoretical Italian Spliffe despite me having spent a lot of pleasant time in the country. (Besides a few nightmare visions of what would have happened to me if I had somehow been born and/or raised in my father's home province, or if that really hot construction worker I used to have unsettlingly wonderful sex with had knocked me up when I was young and stupid.)
But Venice isn't really Italy. Even less so than Calabria and Sicily aren't really Italy, to me, anyways, as a non-Italian; Southern Italian identity is so key to how the world sees Italy in terms of food, customs, look, etc., that weird as the South is in general Italian terms it's inescapably Italian - the way New York is so weird relative to the rest of the States but, if you aren't American, is an inescapable vision of the States.
I know that's a weird thought to Northern Italians. But let's face it: for the last 100 years, all the North has exported is fascism, smog, and cars that are really hard to repair. Versus the South: pizza, semolina pasta, the least retarded fashion houses, three of the best New Hollywood directors in the 1970s, Bruce Springsteen's maternal ancestors, three seperate and extremely powerful organized crime communities, about a kabillion people, etc. . . .
Anyways, Venice isn't Italy. Venice is an island of about 50,000 permanent residents, who all know each other, I think, and most of whom are pretty old, and all of whom speak a language whose relationship with Italian, as far as I could tell, is about as close as Spanish, and their intonation makes them sound like Peter Lorre, which is fucking adorable.
Venice is a ranch whose cash crop is tourists, where the vastly outnumbered locals herd them onto a few main corrals and then enjoy the serenity and much greater beauty of the rest of the place, generally ignoring the few cattle who wander off course; it is an island, after all, or a bunch of islands; it's not like they're going to run away. They ignore the Italian tourists in exactly the same way they ignore everybody else - they just do it in Italian instead of in English. They were nice to us; I think because they liked Godzilla.
Much to the annoyance of Venetians, Anglophone and German authors have leaned heavily on Venice as some sort of death metaphor for the past century or two, and it works pretty well in that sense. Venice started dying when the patrician class decided that all the other snotty aristocratic pieces of shit in Europe were right and trade was beneath them as patricians, despite that trade having built their own and their city's fortunes (maybe they had a point though, considering what enthusiastic slave traders they'd been).
Infected with an invasive snobbery virus, they locked 80% of their daughters up in convents, retired to estates in the Veneto to exploit their tenants, and got so feeble and etoliated Napoleon hardly had to push to invade and fire a bolt into the city's forehead; the place was already slipping back into the lagoon then.
In 1570 the population was 190,000. Considering there are not 140,000 tourists there on a busy day, an emotional resentment of their tourist cash crop is obvious when they blame them for being so numerous they're helping the city sink (the main culprit, besides rising sea levels, seems to have been the nearby industrial town of Marghera, where apparently my grandfather had an awesome time in his 20s, drawing groundwater from beneath Venice).
And I sympathize. A big fight now among the locals is against massive cruise ships going between the main islands and Giudecca to dock near the tourist centre. On a good day they stink and tear the hell out of the lagoon's ecosytem, and inevitably there will be a bad day when they seriously leak something, or hit something, or - something - and that will be a fucking catastrophe.
Still, at a certain point I say humph. Venice is dying. But it has had the longest funeral in the history of funerals. The most mourners filing in to pay their respects, even if shatteringly clumsily at times (Dude. What is with Americans abroad? Some of them are just so fucking . . . ugh.) And it's certainly been the most lucrative funeral that has ever been held, even if the effect of the influx of mourners has ended up seeing Venetians head elsewhere in the Veneto in droves to make room for hotels and AirBNB apartments.
If I sound cynical I don't mean to. Or maybe I do, but I still love Venice. Love it to the point where the only things standing between me making Theoretical Spliffe in Venice into Actual Spliffe in Venice is that I don't think the conditions are good enough for Godzilla and for any other sprogs I may be able to whelp in the future (see comment above re. dirt, trees, grass and birds besides pigeons) and that considering people in my family habitually see triple digits I'm not confident the city will outlast me.
Directly after the curettage on Friday, I had a massive energy boost, from some sort of hormonal realignment, I guess, and from no longer being pregnant. It was very welcome but one side effect was sleeplessness - not usually something I suffer from. For awhile the sleeplessness was welcome as a way to process what had and was happening but eventually it just got silly. So, I got the ebook to read in the dark on the phone. And the chord this has been striking with me is enormous.
The big deal about malambo is who does it, how they train, where they do it, and how they stop. Unlike so much professional sport and dance, it isn't a middle-class activity. It's a traditional dance normal people suffer to do professionally; a herculean training regime has to be combined with some sort of working-class lifestyle. The top competition for malambo is in Laborde, and the winner of the solo event at Laborde has to retire; if he competed and lost at another competition somewhere, he would be tarnishing the reputation of the Laborde competition.
The author of Dancing For His Life was fascinated - as was I - at the idea that winning the competition ended a career. Within the small world of malambo, you are covered in glory, and assured of a professional future as a teacher able to charge three figures for an hour of class, and since your retirement from dancing is enforced, suddenly you get four hours of your day back that you had to spend training before. But that's it. You put in a herculean effort for years, and then you are done. It's fascinating altogether, and as the Economist review highlighted, the book is a really engaging exploration of what authenticity is. But it took me a few days to figure out why it was ringing in my head as a subject so much.
The morning I went into hospital was the last time I breastfed Godzilla. I didn't want to stop even though breastfeeding had become fucking penitential. We had got to a point where we were intermittently trading a candida infection back and forth. Between that and pregnancy sensitivity, it was starting to hurt - more than it ever had since the beginning of breastfeeding. It was making me cross, and extra tired.
But I didn't want to stop. I stopped because I needed to get my estrogen levels back up after the curettage to get back on a normal cycle and help avoid scarring. Otherwise the plan had been to keep going until he stopped asking. I cried when I realized we were at the end of the line. And my body has been protesting too. After a whole week, my left boob was still sore and leaking. Godzilla caught a cold on Friday and listening to him snuffling and snoring and not being able to breastfeed him through it - which I was sure always accelerated him getting over colds and sicknesses in the past - was like a fucking knife in the heart.
But you know who hasn't been protesting? Godzilla. He is fine. He is finished. He still wants to cuddle and touch them, but he isn't asking to nurse anymore. Today he actually explained to me why he couldn't nurse anymore: "you went to the hospital, and now we can't nurse anymore to help you not get sick again." He is sleeping well. He is falling asleep faster and without fussing. He is done. Those three years got us past the finish line. We have won at nursing. And winning at nursing means never doing it again - with that kid, at least. That is fucking bittersweet. And I think that is why the whole malambo-winning-retiring thing is striking this crazy chord with me right now.
It's not just breastfeeding, of course. It's so many important things in life: winning, if it means anything, means finishing. Backing off, letting go. If we are good enough parents to Godzilla, someday he won't need us anymore: first he won't need us to take care of him, and then he won't even need us to be alive; he will be able to bury us, or feed us to birds, or whatever, and then continue to have a happy life. Writing a good book means that once it's finished, it isn't mine anymore. It belongs to the people who read it. If I have an intractable problem with someone (cough-inlaw-cough) I don't win by being better than them at fighting or being better at being a shitty person; I win by resolving my own problems with the relationship and leaving the conflict in the past.
This experience - the miscarriage and its aftermath - is teaching me something - I'm not sure what - about control, and specifically about not actually having it.
I think it is this: I cannot control the most fundamental aspects of my or anyone else's existence. No one can. If they try, they either become destructive - since choosing to be destructive is something we can control - or they close themselves in to a tiny and highly regulated world, and it still doesn't work. I can prepare for what my best guesses are for what the future will hold, and I'd be insane not to. But even the best case scenarios in a good life, in the right kind of life, involve so much surrender of control. So much acknowledging that complete control is not the best outcome. It's not even a possible outcome.
Like a malambo champion: winning doesn't mean you're the best forever. It means you're the best at one moment, and then the rest of your career, at best, is helping other people be the best. Being a good parent doesn't mean that you are the centre of your child's world forever - the person who permits them, or a lodestar whose disappearance would throw an expedition into chaos. It means loving someone enough to give them the equipment they need for their own expeditions. After awhile you're not even the base camp anymore. You're the person who taught them how to build a base camp.
And I'm starting to feel like this - thing - this lie that we tell ourselves over how possible and how desirable control is - is at the heart of the worst aspects of human society. You can find it all through history but we're at some sort of apogee now. This is how we got sold rugged individualism as an ideal life - this big fucking lie that the great truth of life is that our fate is in our own hands; that misfortune is a result of some sort of failure of will - of people not controlling their own destinies properly. That control is happiness.
The baby is gone. It died last week, without me having any idea, with no change at all for me, except me suddenly feeling less shitty and first trimestery. This is - would be? - the tail end of the first trimester, so I didn't really feel suspicious. Just relieved that the glory days of the second trimester seemed to be dawning. Oh, fuck me.
Today and tomorrow its body is being removed at the hospital. At the moment, that's what I'm fixed on, as a goal and as an idea - the removal, and not being pregnant anymore. My body still feels pregnant. Spending the day and the night crying and mourning after finding out at the gyno's yesterday morning hasn't brought my body up to speed with what's happening. I'm still ravenously hungry, still sick in the mornings, still exhausted. It's a very distressing contradiction and I need that to be over.
Otherwise, it's hard to quantify what I'm feeling. Relieved for the baby. A missed abortion and the odoema on the ultrasound indicated it probably had terrible chromosomal problems. This way it was never in distress, never alone, never in pain; just in a warm safe place and then it wasn't alive anymore, because it was a baby that just couldn't be, anymore than what it was over those 11 weeks that it was; that was all it could have and I hope it was enough for the little soul. I guess it was. My body has struggled to keep this baby. But this baby was not to be kept.
The terrible sense of loss I feel is seperate from that "this is the best thing for the baby" feeling; it's the loss of a possibility of a person that has been taken away from me. A timeline that was meant to last from next June until my own death, just gone.
I don't know what happens from here emotionally. I'm trying to be on my guard about falling into anxiety over getting pregnant again, anxiety during any future pregnancies, some sort of magnified anxiety over Godzilla's safety and well-being now that he is again for the moment an only child. Anxious over anxiety. For fuck's sake.
I have an urge to get extremely, extremely high, which I'm not going to do. I also have an urge to take a big trip somewhere - just do that running-away thing - with my family, though, which is nice; no urge to scarper. I want to go to one of the temples in Japan that allows mothers to honour their dead babies because as fucking culturally foreign as Japan and Buddhism is to me, there is NOTHING - nothing - a big fucking fat terrible cultural void - that addresses this sort of tragedy in Europe and North America, and that makes me furious.
I don't want to deal with this by myself. I resent any suggestion I should. I need help.
Well, the first day we visited Paris, on our way to the apartment we'd rented, a young fella in the RER who was getting out at the same stop as us opened the door and then waited for me - encumbered with backpack and boy-in-stroller - to exit. "Do I know him? Does he want something?" I asked myself, and quickly corrected myself enough to muster a merci, and get a je vous en prie, or some such, before we both continued our days.
This is what living in Oz and then Germany for years has done to me - made it totally baffling when people are polite. When people have a fucking modicum, a bare goddamn minimum, of superfluous social grace. In a sense I'm not complaining because I know what chivalry is tied to in Latin culture, and I have a very intimate acquaintance with the chauvinistic flip side of courtliness, and the excellent gender relations devoid of all that in Germany is part of what made me decide to live here. But it was like a fucking holiday to go back to France, even to its rudest, nastiest, smelliest city, and have people have some fucking manners.
It was pretty awesome to be back in Paris - just straightforwardly awesome this time. It made me feel old, in a good way - that city doesn't change, I have changed a lot since my time living there, and I approve of the respective not-changes and changes. Magically the weather was good, and the food on offer fit in beautifully with my end-of-first-trimester urges - mostly avocado, steak and salmon. The food was soooooo good. And I did it justice.
I didn't notice any real change of habits or paranoia in people's behaviour after what happened three weeks ago - just more security, more cops and more guns. The local people who brought up the attacks with us asked us if we were scared, as tourists, but only seemed sad themselves. The bars and restaurants were all crowded. I don't know about the tourist destinations; the weather was too good to go inside anywhere and that wasn't what our visiting friend from Australia wanted to see. We did take her to see the crazy glass ceiling at Printemps, and the shopping district was absolutely crawling with people, as you'd expect at this time of year.
Paris to France is like New York to the US, since Muslims became the white man's boogeyman. People in Paris aren't the ones who are going to go extra paranoid about foreigners and Muslims now that this has happened, and Charlie Hebdo has happened, and more things will happen because France is a fucked up place with a fucked up, filthy history (did you notice how many of the killers were of Algerian descent? So let's go bomb Syria obvs, that's the problem here) and with a ghettoized present. Even though all those things happened and will happen in Paris.
It's the yokels, the dummies, the poor people without prospects or much to threaten in the provinces. They'll bring the FN in, while people in Paris go on having to suffer both through living in Paris - a lovely place to visit but, let's face it, a bit of a shithole - and the violence attendant on living in Paris and the ever-increasing conflict attendant on living in a place like Paris while the fascist side of French culture is becoming wholly ascendant.
We had a fucking top notch weekend, is my point, but I'm sad.
Oh FUCK ME, am I sick of pre-natal yoga. First of all, I fucking hate yoga. HATE IT. It is a bullshit industry, a naive person's Pilates, monetized cultural appropriation and appropriated from one of the most viciously colonial, racist, misogynistic cultures in human history at that, and what's more FUCK DO I HATE YOGA.
It was tedious enough when I was pregnant with Godzilla but at least then I had the time and emotional energy to burn, not already having a kid running around to take care of and to not accidentally throttle when my upitty hormones got the better of me and he was messing up some sheets, or something. But now it just feels like this fucking stupid, terrible drain on my time at a time when I have no time, and energy when I have no energy. And the fucking stupid music! Oh FUCK ME do I hate it.
But if I don't do it, my back spasms to the degree that I can't do anything. The general physical and joint discomfort becomes unbearable. Because the first trimester of pregnancy is basically cancer.
Well, now, everybody has turned tricolour on Facebook and gives all sorts of fucks about dead people because they're in Paris, and not Lebanon, or Iraq, or Myanmar, or under a fuckton of mud in Brazil. But it's not just about racism (though it is about racism) and not just about identifying more with the French because they have a developed economy that's familiar to us and so we understand a little better this could happen to us elsewhere in the developed world too (though it is about that) and not because we only recognize terror when it's wearing a balaclava and explosives and not a suit or uniform (though it's also about that).
Paris has a special meaning to a lot of North Americans and Europeans. I'm guessing about half the people I know have been there, and most of the other half would like to go there. Personally, I was there for three years, and they were, you know, fucking formative sorts of years, that have left me with a love hate relationship with that place that has only really swung back toward love since I entered the middle class, because that is a shitty town to be poor in.
But even when I wasn't middle class I went to shows at the Bataclan and got falling down drunk around the Bastille and had an apartment I shared with a bunch of fucking mice a few blocks from where those restaurants got shot up and sometimes I had a really fucking good time, and I know I feel this attack differently than I feel others around the world because it happened in places I know and love, in my fashion.
Nonetheless, there are a lot of arguments for open borders and travelling as much as you can, to as many places as you can, meeting as many people as you can, and one of them - far from the most important thing but still so important - is that more places have more emotional meaning to you, more people are REAL to you, and your heart is a little more open to understanding that tragedy always deserves a response.
So I bet you ten bucks that if you watch your conversations in the coming days, there will be a split in people's thinking about refugees coming into Europe or North America from the Middle East. The split will be between people who have never moved out of their socio-economic/cultural comfort zone, and people who have. One will react to the atrocity in Paris by calling for a shutdown in refugee intake, and the other will react by understanding that the fear and sadness they feel over what happened in Paris is the same fear and sadness that are driving millions of people to leave their homes against their will and look for a safe haven elsewhere, and that those people should be welcomed, because there is not all that much separating us.
So last time I got pregnant was pretty easy to localize in time because we had just started trying to get me pregnant, like, the day before my mum had a sudden medical emergency and I had to go from Buttfuck Nowhere Australia to Canada. However, it's a mystery to me which sexual encounter was responsible, because Godzilla is our first child so life was one big fuckfest back then, and my stress response, even to "oh god my parent may die on the other side of the planet before I can even get to Sydney airport, living in the backwoods of this fucking Antipodean infrastructureless mess blows", was to fuckfest even harder. In 36 hours there would have been a good 10 opportunities. (I know, right? Go F-word go!)
It's interesting to me that based on the last pregnancy test I did besides this morning*, which was negative, and on October 1 - assuming that wasn't a false negative - there were probably fewer opportunities for this egg to decide to try to hatch eventually. Maybe three? Three in two weeks? Lots of stress these days, fortunately nothing on par with a punctured mother, but the stress response now is to fall asleep at the same time as Godzilla and eat lots of poppyseed cake. Wow, does life ever change. And I guess it's about to change again. I can imagine a life with two children as well as I could imagine a life with one when I had none, which is - the mind boggles, and I think of my nonna who raised 11 of her own and a couple of the neighbours', and I figure we'll work something out.
Yes, I know, I'm confiding early. But I need to talk about this and think about this, and as I believe I mentioned last time, I'll need to talk and think about this even harder if it doesn't work. Especially since this time there is a new aspect of isolation - linguistic and cultural this time, instead of living in Podunk Nowhere, population A Bunch of Aussie Hippies - so even though I think my readership is down to about four, I need to write and think about it, you four guys. At least I'm closer to people who can help. At least I kind of know what I'm doing, a little, I guess.
* I wrote this post when I found out I was pregnant, like, a month ago. Life hasn't got quite that dry.
So the citizenship ceremony was happily in Berlin, and not back in Australia; I wouldn't have been looking forward to making that trip in the five days or so I would have been able to spare for it (that is, four days travelling and one becoming a citizen - Jeebus - the world is fucking big). Much more exciting to go to Berlin. And fucking eye-opening too.
When we were deciding where to live a couple of years back, Berlin was an obvious candidate, because of course Berlin was a fucking candidate. It's Berlin, and the F-word is an artist, and I'm a sensible human being, so of course I wanted to live in fucking Berlin. And one of the things Berlin had going for it is that it was cheap. When I started price-comparisoning that couple of years ago, there was no real comparison; getting a place in Berlin would have been a vastly cheaper prospect than getting one here.
Berlin got to the final three, but we decided to bank on the F-word being able to make more money in NRW as a teacher, decided that the higher rent here would get made up for by it being a lot cheaper to travel to the other parts of Europe we're most interested in travelling to (as well as out of Europe), and decided that it'd probably be better to live in a city that wasn't perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy considering we'd be sending a kid to school in it. And as much as I like it here, I wasn't sure we'd made the right decision until this weekend just past.
The thing is, we were having a lovely weekend. And though I was a little disconcerted by how it looked like the whole of Berlin was going through the final stages of a complete facelift, and at how it was impossible to find a home hardware store anywhere even sort of downtown-ish, and how the doner had gotten all crappy but there were schmancy restaurants everywhere and three organic groceries to the block, we were having such a lovely weekend that I started wondering if we had made the right decision.
After all, I reasoned, the place had gentrified, but you know what? So had I. Look at my income, look at my possessions, look at my nice new induction cooktop. My toddler wears New Balance running shoes and I have four pairs of Birkenstocks. Maybe it is time to just drop any lingering vestiges of pretence that I'm not viciously and typically middle class. Because Berlin has three or four opera companies and the Pergamon museum and, well, I like having organic groceries everywhere I go. Maybe this is the right city for me, at the right time.
And it being stuffed to the gills with other expatriates - expatriates are a nocive weed, but they're my kind of weed. Their proliferation in Berlin actually seemed attractive to me, disgusting as it was to see fresh generations of American expatriates unselfconsciously and brusquely conducting their business in English (where do you think you are, people, Amsterdam?). I had realized when we were living in Australia that there are a lot of important things I don't have in common with anyone except other migrants anymore, and a lot of other important things I only have in common with other expatriates, that absurdly privileged and bizarrely rarified subset of migrants . . . it is a strange existential trip to be an upper-income white Anglophone migrant in Europe these days with the "migrant crisis" on everyone's lips, boy . . . Anyways. I digress, badly. All that "expat" claptrap is best served another day.
To sum up, I wondered if we had made a mistake, started imagining scenarios that would see us move to Berlin, and then . . . then I looked up rental prices.
Sweet mother of fuck.
For what we are paying for a lovely, comfortable, big place in a very pleasant suburb 20 minutes by tram to the center of our city, putatively the sixth-most expensive in the country and ahead of Berlin (which is putatively the seventh), we would be living in a fucking tiny firetrap in a shitty suburb full of skinheads who'd want to kill us for our lack of Aryanitude. I'm not exagerrating. Fucking Spandau would be more expensive than where we are.
Look, I've seen this sort of shit before, sort of. I screwed myself when we moved to Australia in 2010 by negotiating my salary on 2007 cost of living figures after three of the most heated years of inflation in ages. But this was FAST. I mean, in the space of the year, all of the available rentals seem to have shot up by 50% or more. And localized to one city! None of the press coverage I've read about Berlin inflation have really captured the scale of the problem. It has been a migrant and, if you like, expat city for ages - stuffed with them - but, now? What can happen to it? With all the high-rolling economic refugees pouring in from London or wherever and spoiling the market so fast?
To sum up, summier: we dodged a bullet and I feel like the Berlin I first saw 16 years ago and even the Berlin I saw five years ago are gone for good. I don't know and can't guess what will come next. For overpriced cultural meccas, Europe has already got Paris and Amsterdam. Berlin was Berlin, and now I don't know what it is.
I''m officially Australian now. I think I may have written before about my mixed emotions over becoming one, but the longer I'm out of Australia and the more my exposure to Australians is limited to expatriates, the less weird I feel about it. And on the darkest moral level of the subject, I realize I had already fully sold myself to a genocidal state structure by buying a house and earning a shitload of money there. The ceremony was just an admission.
Anyways, it was a fascinating experience. There were two other women swearing in, who I liked, whose income and age bracket were similar to mine; I assume their motivations were at least a little similar to mine too, based on the chats during the coffee-and-cookies (pardon me very fucking much, biscuits) after the ceremony. None of us had real plans to go back to Australia. One of them had also made the decision to leave God out of the proceedings and the other was annoyed that she hadn't realized that was an option.
Neither I nor the other two ladies citizening had practiced or even, apparently, heard the national anthem - "Advance Australia Fair" - ahead of time, which was rough as we had to sing it. And the established Australian guests weren't much help either. I think I have never admired a civil servant quite as much as I admired the ambassadorial staffer (a man about a decade younger than me) who had conducted the ceremony - he manfully (I rarely use that adjective in a complimentary fashion, but today I do) led the singing at a discreetly loud volume a note or two ahead of the rest of us to cover up for our complete incompetence.
Nevertheless I had a really hard time not bursting into laughter, both because being part of a room full of people pretending you know a song is one of the funniest things in the fucking universe, and because I was picturing the ambassadorial staffer at ambassador school, learning how to lead the national anthem a note or two ahead to cover up for all the Australians, fresh and established, who didn't know their own national anthem and were pretending they did. If it was "Waltzing Matilda" I - and I expect all of us - could have done better.
Godzilla was the only child there but it was a family friendly event; he was allowed to sit on my knee in the front row while I waited to pledge and he behaved himself. Mostly.
I'm quite hard-boiled about these nationalistic things but I found the ceremony a moving experience. I was partly set up to be moved this particular week, of course, by Tony Abbott being removed from government by his own party. The Coalition is the Coalition, and Malcolm Turnbull, for all his charm, is just another right-wing profiteer. (Pretty much.) But years ago - like, 2008 or something - when we decided to move to Australia, I was pleased about moving to a country whose major parties featured leaders who could express real policy decisions outside of monosyllables. Malcolm Turnbull was one of those leaders. So I can't help but be glad that he's back, especially since Tony Abbott as my national leader would have been personally embarassing.
Anyways, the F-word took pictures of the ceremony, and one of them is of me, framed by a big empty space on the wall where Tony Abbott's photo used to be, and where his replacement hasn't been put up yet. Sometimes it is schadenfreudelicious to be part of history.
After five weeks back in Canada it's almost obscenely nice to be back home, and to feel like I have come back home. It's a first, actually. Going back to Australia from Canada always felt like eating a big plate of ratshit, and going back to Belgium not much better. And my peregrinations before that to Italy and France and the UK, though years long in some cases, never felt and were never planned to be permanent. Back to the F-word and to our lovely new kitchen full of fully functional appliances and excellent knives. Back to milky European air, forests, and bakeries all over the place. Back to mattresses we spent a lot of money on. Back to a place where all the problems on offer are my own, and are modest.
Some of my close family members aren't in terrific places at the moment. One is living out the end of the chapter of what could have been with his estranged child, who is suddenly grown up and leaving town; it hasn't been loud or messy, but I think the way things have turned out over the last three years has made this the great tragedy of his life - let alone the child's. It's something I used to be angry about, but now that it's resolved as a tragedy it's just unutterably sad. You can be mad at a drunk driver for causing an accident, but seeing them living with a missing limb afterwards is pretty pitiable no matter how it happened. Another close family member is going through a gruelling decision-making about where to be living, and another is dealing with the deep and fairly crippling depression of his spouse.
It could all be much worse and I'm very grateful it's not. And I'm very grateful that I was there for a good long stretch to share in these problems. But when you're out of your own element and fully in someone else's, the immersion is quite complete. It's the only way for me to do it, of course. And it's not a bad way to do it. I think I probably get more quality time with my brothers and parents than most people my age, because of these long visits. And because it's vacation time, it's fun, and doesn't feel like dragging myself dutifully to holiday get-togethers I'd rather not be at - God knows we got enough of that shit in Australia. But it is so nice, physically and emotionally, to be back in my own space, without caring any less about what's going on with my people.
mercoledì, agosto 12, 2015
If I could torture other people half as well as I torture myself I could make a really good fucking career out of it.
I was wondering how the flies would get in my ointment. As a basically dissatisfied person, I wondered, what will I find to be dissatisfied about here? The weather is actually enjoyable after four years of cancerous sunshine, the social protections are great and inexpensive, awesome conditions for the boy, good cost of living relative to income, forests, parks, outdoor swimming, strangers are nice to each other, etc. etc.. Everything's awesome. What am I going to find to bitch about? Anything?
There was obviously criminal wrongdoing leading up to this situation - obviously years of Greek books being fudged, Greek businesses dodging taxes, and French and other European banks making criminally irresponsible commitments. I don't suggest it's a good thing that northern European taxpayers be on the hook to the tune of billions of euros to paper over these criminal acts and incompetencies. I do suggest it's a fucking terrible thing that Greek people suffer conditions that look like total defeat after total war in a way that will be of immense profit to private investors.
And I suggest it's utter and complete bullshit to suggest Greeks brought this on themselves, and that there is some sort of moral reason why they can't be allowed to cancel their debt. They can't cancel their debt because they're not allowed to cancel their debt. Not like Germans were allowed to cancel their debts, over and over, because who was going to stop them? Last time anyone tried to, they turned into the fucking Nazis and fucking massacred everybody. If Greeks swing to the extreme and violent right, as I am sure they will if present proposed conditions are enforced, there's just not enough of them for anyone to care.
There's no positive-looking scenario for Greece right now but what is being levered through the EU and the Greek parliament at the moment is terrible. I hope it's a joke - something nobody expects will be accepted - an unspoken way of kicking Greece out of the euro without anybody that anyone takes seriously having to explicitly say "we're kicking Greece out of the euro". Otherwise - if these machinations are meant to succeed - I think for the first time I can confidently say fuck this place. It's a semi-socialist paradise to a pinko like me, but at the same time, it exports the most virulent and predatory aspects of its capitalists the way Saudi Arabia exports violent religious fundamentalism.
I'm still not ever leaving, though. And frankly, after four years in an actively genocidal country, it's still a moral relief.
When we bought our house in L_____, back in Aussieland, it was in a very sweet neighbourhood. A sort of oasis of old-fashion Australianness, where neighbours still made eye contact and chit-chat - preserved by virtue of the fact that the people living there were fucking old and had been living there for decades and decades.
The inevitable happened and they started dying. One next door neighbour, who was so sweet I'm pretty sure she turned into some sort of fairy godmother on her mortal demise, died in her late 80s, while we were there. Her family, also a bunch of fairy godpeople, and reasonably well-off and harmonious, screened the buyers of her house - not for cash but for niceness. They had all these emotional connections with the house, and the neighbourhood, and didn't want it to get suckier. I thought that was remarkably nice - and lucky for us.
And when we moved and rented our place out, we did something similar - not to the same extent and I suspect the Fairy Godpeople family took more of a financial hit than we did - we chose tenants who seemed like they wouldn't be a fucking burden on the neighbourhood. Of course as a landlord you do that for your own sake as well. But we're happy with the way things have been going with them.
And then the other next door neighbour - a sharp-tongued lady in her mid-90s who I was quite close to - also died. Her family sold of her house ultra-fast to investors, who rented it out ultra-fast to a bunch of fucking loud, violent, harassing pigs, and who don't want to be bothered with what fucking pigs their tenants are, despite also not wanting to be bothered to pay the 8% interest a month to get a management agency to be bothered for them - it's a private rental.
Pigs will be pigs - whatever. I get that.
What is sticking in my craw is that these cunt landlords, who live and have "artistic" white-collar jobs in an exponentially more expensive "hippy" city on the coast, are the fucking scourge of the modern economy - fucking moron middle-class jerkoffs who think investment properties are a license to print money and who settle whichever sort of tenant in those properties with zero regard for the neighbourhood or even the fundamentals of their own investment. People who seriously don't give a shit to the point of not wanting to pay someone a small amount of money to give a shit for them, and who, when confronted with the issue of their pig tenants, want to address the situation by not being contacted by the neighbours who are actually having to deal with the anti-social behaviour and instead by outsourcing their responsibilities as owners to the government - city council and the police - despite them not even living in that city.
Fucking parasites. Fucking middle-class, WASP, yoga-twisting granola-munching hypocritical self-obsessed devoted individualists who a fucking fascist would be justified in spitting on in disgust.
