soundtracks

I think that Ani DiFranco’s “Reprieve” record will always transport me to Pass Creek fire lookout, squeezing devil’s club thorns out of my thighs and calves between bites of scrambled eggs & mayo salsa after an unplanned afternoon and evening spent stumbling through an overgrown cutblock.

Here’s another correlation, similarly burned into my brain: I was nineteen, just back from one of my late-night springtime rambles, alone and happily stoned as usual, Tori Amos on the headphones, when I thoroughly surprised myself, and from that night on, “From the Choirgirl Hotel” is forever the soundtrack to my first self-serve orgasm.

But my favourite? Def Leppard’s “Hysteria,” one-half of my tape collection, the cassette I listened to nonstop on my walkman while reading and rereading The Dragonriders of Pern series. When I was nine I wanted to be a dragonrider more than anything, and Joe Elliot’s vocals still ignite those neural pathways. Pour some sugar on me, in the name of love, I’m mouthing the words from the back of my dragon, soaring above the clouds.

Token (written for the CFSW open mic)

I had a cynical response to the festival schedule and then checked myself. There is nothing inherently wrong with a Queer/Transgender Showcase.

The potential problem lies in if a showcase is a token. And yesterday afternoon, I found maps to the traps of tokenism in the online dictionary definition. Listen.

 Definition #1:

Something serving to represent a fact, feeling, or event. Like the fact that we’ve done all the work of deconstructing our privilege, like feeling satisfied that we’re good enough allies, like the event of patting ourselves on the collective well-intentioned back and getting on with having a good time.

Token definition #2: A mark of something, evidence or proof, indication of authenticity. Boxes to be ticked in applications for arts council funding.

Token definition #3: An item, idea, or person, representing the group, representing the whole. A trap we can avoid by remembering, for example, that the talented and charismatic Aboriginal man who tells us that he’s managed to not let prejudice affect him does not speak for all Aboriginal people, anymore than I speak for all white middle class queers cause I know there’s at least one here wondering why I can’t just lighten up.

 Finally, token definition #4: Of nominal value, of lesser worth. And here’s where I risk pissing people off, by suggesting that a Pan African showcase could possibly be seen as a little bit tokenistic if the team piece about getting Shell the fuck outta the Niger Delta gets slightly lower scores than the loud and very silly team piece shortly afterwards (which I did enjoy, no disrespect meant to Team Vancouver.) And yeah, we all love to hate the judges but I hope you get my point here.

 So, on the topic of not allowing this afternoon to be a token, I have a few suggestions. We could think about the reasons we’re here, about how recent it is that a queer can safely get on a mic and be honest about their life. Let’s think about why the witty white straight guy who makes us laugh still gets higher scores than the folks in those afternoon showcases making us squirm about all the work we need to do in our communities. And let’s consider what makes for a crowd-pleasing poem, and why, and what kind of crowds we could be.

LACE in Enderby

I was on the Security Crew at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in ’98 and ‘99. My second year there coincided with Son of Camp Trans, the second generation of a protest camp across from the front gates of the festival, taking issue with the “women-born-women-who-have-lived-their-whole-lives-as-women-ONLY” policy.

I was pretty rattled that year, partially by the bitterness of the conflict, but more so by the realisation that I just didn’t know enough to have an informed opinion. I resolved to learn more about trans issues, very soon. Figured I’d read some Leslie Feinberg. HAH! Prime example of the need to watch what you ask for…

I never went back to Michigyn, but I won’t forget the profound impression that gathering made on my 19 and 20 year old self. Today I was remembering the women on the LACE Crew. I think that LACE stood for Lots of Amazons Carrying Everything. They were one of the crews setting up and taking down a small village every summer. Vividly I recall shirtless and glistening women wielding mighty sledge hammers to pound thick stakes into the earth. The easy swing of their arms, the sureness of their aim, the weight of their tools.

Of course it was hot, but I still don’t know what I wanted more – to fuck them, or to be them.

Last week the PB and I split and stacked a cord of wood, out on the front stoop in the sun. I discovered a coupla things:

1) Splitting wood is a lot more satisfying with a properly heavy and sharp wood splitter than with the dull and flimsy kindling axes I have tried to use before at my firetower.

2) I am not bad at splitting wood. I could swing a sledge hammer. I could be a kick ass member of the LACE Crew. If I wanted to be.

unrapeable.

she says

A few isolated cases get exaggerated I know how to talk to men I’ve worked in the oil fields before You just have to know how to carry yourself I demand respect

I nod neutrally, don’t say much, hope she grows out of it.

Just not the hard way.

the latent biologist

I don’t see our friends L + L often enough. I enjoy their company. They are generous, engaged, open-minded, and good cooks, with a lively sense of fun. They’ve just moved to a warden station in Jasper National Park, at the end of a dirt road partway up a hill pungent with pine, juniper, sage. There are lavish views of mountain ranges and lakes from their backyard. But that’s not the best part.

They are biologists. And so are many of their friends.

In this lifetime, I did not do an environmental science degree at one of the two Canadian universities that would have accepted me into a BSc. program without the dreaded grade 13 Calculus. I am not currently working to save the kelp forests or whipping the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources into shape (as a 17-year-old Ontario Ranger in summer of ‘96 I was still innocent enough to be shocked at the wastefulness of the MNR.) I went to acupuncture school instead, with intentions every bit as idealistic, just with a slightly different focus.

But that doesn’t mean that I won’t leap at the chance to sit round a dinner table with committed parks employees who love their jobs because they care about the wilderness they’re paid to work in.

Tell me about the reseeding of 80 different plant species along the gas pipeline that was allowed in the national park in the 50s. Comment on living in a town with zero urban sprawl due to its location within the park. Describe Riding Mountain National Park on the Manitoba Escarpment, and discuss the links between caribou and wolf populations as the latent biologist in me shivers in delight, and the outdoor sauna afterwards followed by a plunge into the creek under a million million stars will tip me over into bliss.

postcard from the fire lookout

a crunch-crack from the woods grabs your entire attention. too loud a sound, too big a branch to be a deer. somewhere over there is a much heavier creature, concealed by lodgepole pine and poplar. you watch, silently willing whatever it is to emerge – and then, a gust of air through massive nostrils, the unmistakable exhale of a moose, fifty feet away at the edge of the clearing, before it moves off further into the forest, leaving you grinning at the window, absurdly pleased to be included, to be in on the secret: something significant is afoot.

places like this make you feel dirty.

there are different kinds of dirty. there’s dirty like how you feel inside on 4 hours of sleep, after hours and hours and hours of driving, dirty like going past tired into wired and still remaining vertical late into the evening. there’s dirty like the late winter/early spring grey-brown dust coating the road, the grass, your hair, your mucus membranes and your lunch. there’s dirty like the view of miles and miles of chain stores along miles of highway littered with failed rolluptherimtowin takeout coffee cups and cigarette butts. dirty like those massive trucks jacked up high above their already-huge wheels, sucking back fuel and roaring down the road with one passenger inside at a time, trucks that say I Deserve To Drive This Big, Fast and Loud. dirty like a province fueled by the tar sands, an ecological nightmare scary enough to make Stephen King envious. dirty like oil and gas companies decorating their websites with images of wind turbines and solar panels and that hideously over-and-misused word, Sustainability, while poisoning native communities in the north with toxic tailings in the rivers. dirty like working for big business in this province – oh no, not directly, you work for Resource Management, but scratch the surface and governmental management ain’t that different from corporation exploitation, even if you do save a few trees from burning down each summer. (remember, you’re saving a crop, not a forest. that out there is a plantation.) dirty like eating at those takeout places for a few days on your way out of town and then pitching the plastic into the bin ‘cause you know they don’t recycle that stuff here and anyways recycling probably takes too much fossil fuel energy to be truly comforting if we really knew the exact facts on that.

but some dirt makes you feel clean. like the dirt on your jeans from rolling on the ground with the dog, from cuddling the dog in your lap while you both peer out the mud spattered windshield, or the dust on your arms from carrying the dog upstairs to bed when she’s too tuckered to open her eyes let alone climb the steps with wobbly puppy legs. there’s dirt in the north with some trees left, dirt by the side of the waskahigan river, dirt with your seedlings coming up in early may, dirt smelling like earth like soil like the finest freshest thing in the world making you get down on your knees and praise with both nostrils and your open inhaling lungs. some dirt you can still find here, which is why you keep coming back here even as sometimes it make your whole body cringe. i’ve rubbed that dirt on my face more than once, just to get back to clean.

a home i never left

last weekend i went to a dance with some friends. a member of our party was nervous about attending, about whether he’d feel welcomed and comfortable. during the nervous laughter about what possible hostilities might look like, these words fell out of my mouth: “watch, they’ll all be really blasé and accepting and you’ll be disappointed.”

that threw some cold water on the conversation and we left shortly after that.

why’d i say that? why did i imply that my friend was creating some needless drama with his defensiveness? that’s complicated. he’s trans, and going through female-to-male transition. we were going to a womens’ dance. (not, however, a women-only dance.)

there were mostly women there, as well as some men and transfolk, and a refreshingly wide range of ages. i don’t intend to idealize queer women’s communities, especially white ones. we have got some problems. racism, ableism, classism, alcoholism and transphobia spring to mind. but still, i enjoy dyke-focussed space, and it’s a rare thing in my life. i like seeing reflections of myself and my subculture, i like the increased feeling of safety when i’m surrounded by mostly women (enough to change out of my sweaty longjohns in a corner of a very crowded venue when the washroom lineup is dauntingly long) and l like the sense of celebration and collaborative mischief.

as a white, slim, and attractive able-bodied queer, my trans friend probably valued women-and-dyke-focussed space for similar reasons at one time. now much of that has shifted. he does not want to be read as female and has taken deliberate steps to irrevocably change his body. this complicates his navigation of dyke space in many ways, more ways than i can address in one post. with his new, growing male privilege he loses his automatic passport to womens’ spaces. he might be read as a dyke, as a tranny, as biologically male. he could be misread, invisible, welcomed as one of many genderqueers, cruised by a fag. he could be viewed as a threat. i had a friend who was beaten by transphobic dykes in a canadian city a few years ago. it happens. i’m not surprised that guys sometimes get a bit defensive at the prospect of entering women-focussed space – even with their dyke friends, at a mixed event, where gender fluidity and trans bodies are loudly celebrated onstage during the amateurish-but-earnest opening drag king show.

so why did i interject my snarky remark? maybe i’m tired of the way they say “LLLLesbian dance” with the derisively drawn-out L (and you know why they say lesbian, not dyke.) maybe it’s that familiar thing of generating negativity about a place when it’s no longer home. when it’s time to leave, all the flaws are highlighted. how shallow, how petty, how small-minded and trite LLLLesbianville was. how boring and stale. i couldn’t have coped with one more Indigo Girls song, could you?

…me? not only am i a dyke, i was also presenting femme that night, and i guess i developed some defensiveness all my own.

it is too easy for a transman’s legitimate frustrations with the shortcomings of dyke communities to morph into good old-fashioned sexism and bigotry. i have witnessed this, been silenced by this, been a target of this, in various ways for the last decade since my first girlfriend came out as a guy. i kind of understand this. but it’s a shit way to keep allies.

i will accompany you to the washroom, happily dance with you all night, remember your pronoun preference, help to educate others, share my knowledge of acupuncture and herbalism to smooth your transition and recovery from surgeries, and let you know that i think you’re just as hot with facial hair and a flat chest as you were when you passed as female full time. my affection for my friends, and my level of pain and anger about the violence done to trans bodies i’ve loved is such that i will fight alongside you on the street if necessary. i am open to ongoing conversations with you about what you might want or need from an ally. but i want these conversations to be two-way. just to point out the obvious – LLLLesbianville, with all its flaws, remains one of my homes. fractal truth: i need allies and respect too.

a story from Hornepayne, ON

Hornepayne, ON is the only regular stop for the 20 hours of train tracks between Sudbury and Sioux Lookout. i didn’t comprehend how vast the northwestern reaches of Ontario are until i rolled through them on a frequently stopping, occasionally breaking VIA rail train a few times in midwinter.

Todd got on in Hornepayne. his dad’s the engineer running the train, so Todd had a real bed in Silver & Blue (aka first class) on his way to Edmonton to work for his brother. we’re on the way to Saskatoon so we’re travelling along the same 1000 km of track, swapping stories over the table in the dining car. he was quite taken by the pb’s coffee-fueled (read: lots of evocative hand gestures) descriptions of the Moorish acequias in the Alpujarras, so he told us the moose story.

a pack of wolves had been living off a moose carcass for days. the immediate area reeked of wet dog. the carcass was picked clean, only 3 ribs and the hide were left. T and his buddy went for a look – “he had a gun, and i had my axe.” the most impressive detail? “…and there was blood everywhere – up the tree next to it, like, this high, and soaked into the snow – we shoveled down and it was red for like four feet down.”

“a lotta blood in a moose,” i nodded. Veronica, the fourth at our table, went quietly green and excused herself at this point. but i could have leaned over the table and kissed him. thanks, Todd, for the hundredth reminder of how much it’s fun being back in canada.

Now That I Am Unemployed, I Have So Much Time To Think.

1.      thoughts on frostbite: even when the wind blows so cold and sharp it hurts your face and spins you round to walk backwards utnil you find an alleyway more sheltered than the street, the dog walk is still about the dog, and certain things must be investigated, sniffed at, and possibly urinated on.

2.      thoughts on gold paint: at its best when flaking slowly off squat & sturdy radiators in a café in the hipster/Hasidic Jewish neighbourhood of Mile End.

3.      thoughts on feeling safe in Quebec & Ontario after 4 years away: this is a vast country. it was lonely needing to stay on the western edge when pieces of my heart beat in the east.

4.      thoughts on having the it’s-so-good-to-be-back cry after a really ace massage: bodyworkers need attention too. i’ve given a lot of acupuncture treatments since leaving Manchester. maybe, for every dozen treatments i give, i should make a point of getting some work done on me.

5.      thoughts on impulsive, impractical purchases: asymmetrical zippers are hot.

6.      thoughts on traveling with a photographer: a video is worth a thousand words.