The Hag

The only time I remember meeting The Hag was when I was around twenty years old. The Hag is another name for what we call sleep paralysis, an event that is often reported as being accompanied by the feeling that something malevolent is sitting on your chest preventing you from moving. A frightening dream is the main meat of this event, a dream not recognized as one because the sufferer thinks they are perfectly awake and for some inexplicable reason not able to move. The body is frozen in place and the eyes are seemingly open, witnessing any number of grotesqueries. Cold sweat is probably also present.
    Now I'm unsure if The Hag is an unfair name. I have spent some small time in my life worshipping The Crone, one of three aspects of The Goddess in the western neopagan tradition of Wicca. The Goddess, we learn quickly, ain't all fun and games, light and love and prancing through the forest. Nor is she all black nail polish and fishnet sleeves. She is all manner of things, big and small and one of her aspects is The Crone. This is an archetype of mature human womanhood, old lady who has seen it all, passed through the myriad stages of life and has accrued wisdom. I guess The Hag would be the shadow side of this aspect, an embittered old being hellbent on poking young-uns with misery sticks.
    My meeting with The Hag is memorable. No old evil creature is remembered as sitting on my chest. What I do remember is waking up in the middle of the night and being frozen in place. Immediately the fear starts coursing through me. My eyes are snapped open and glued to the window of my bedroom. Outside my window, horribly backlit and casting spidery shadows throughout the room, is the tall knotted tree that by day just stands there. Well, this night its branches are creaking down across the window pane with total evil intent. The limbs of this tree want in, they want to breach the bubble of my bedroom and devour me. I am sweating pure fear, unable to do anything but witness the reality that everything I thought I knew is wrong. Monsters are real. Reality as we know it is total BS. Monsters are real and there is one outside my window trying to get in.
    This is where my 'dream' ends. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I notice is that I am facing away from the window. I chuckle a sigh of relief. It couldn't have happened, I rationalize, I was frozen in place staring at the window and here I am waking up in another direction. It was a dream, only a dream. Another detail, there has never been a tree outside my window. In that moment of horror I assumed the tree was always there, suddenly having turned mobile and monstrous. No tree, I wasn't facing the window equals I was dreaming.
    I have had cosmic abstract night terrors rife with symbolism from age 5 to 7, I have had muttering, gibbering fever dream deliriums as a kid and a teenagers. I have had nightmare after nightmare, weirdnesses too many to recount. But this was the only time I remember The Hag. She showed up as a tree turned bad, a force of nature usually associated with green growth and clean air, now knotted with ill intent and out to kill any promise of rest.

Night Bus

Like many good Greek boys in North America I lived with my parents way longer than my barbarian friends. This meant that by the time I got home from a road trip to the west coast as an eighteen year old, the home I got back to was new. My family moved to a deeper suburb, further away from downtown. Now, if I needed to go out or attend class I'd have to give myself an hour and a half for the bus and metro ride. I started crashing over at friends a lot.
    Buses came every half hour. Pacing at bus stops became normal. I always carried a folded piece of paper in my jacket pocket to scribble down cool band names I though of or some lyric I made up. I also would find things on the dusty streets and collect the ground scores in my jacket pockets. Right pocket for wood and metal, left for plastics. On the bus I entertained myself with a pocket book and often, with markers. I'd crouch low and decorate the back of the seat in front of me with vivid symbols. I got to carrying more than one colour and often drew elaborate doodles on the 215. None of this was ever documented of course, documentation was to become de rigueur with street art later on.
    Eyes in triangles, the word EVOLVE underneath, random Discordian in-jokes, prophetic mutterings. My first 'tag' was an eight fold path and the word, again in all caps, REPENT. I mostly stuck to discrete spaces for these communiques. Bathroom stalls, buses and metros, campus. I even scratched some triangles around town and left the occasional sticker. Some surfaces acted as message boards where other freaks would leave their ravings. This was just before the ubiquitous name tag came and covered Montreal. With that particular street style I feel that lone and unique voices were crowded out from public spaces. Signal to noise ratio went in favour of noise. It was the era of the copy cat.
    I was able to cover a bit of ground because of my heavy and constant commute and because of the floors and couches I would crash on instead of making it home after a party. I would find myself in different hoods, ill rested hung over and with a marker in my pocket.
    Quiet suburban streets at four in the morning were perfect for practising walking with eyes closed, for singing and chanting.
    I moved out at twenty seven, having spent too long in the West Island and too long catching night buses and too long waiting and pacing and nodding off on my ride. Finally another late bloomer and curiously not a Greek became my room-mate. We would often head home together back to the burbs, him a driver and me a willing, begging passenger. On these drives we would plan what would become our eventual escape. We made it out, together, to a decent apartment on Ave. du Parc in 1995, just a few doors down where his relations used to live a generation ago. "There? You moved there? We worked so hard to get out of that neighbourhood!"

Altering Iconography

I found a sea shell on Long Beach and my uncle helped me make a small hole in it to pass a string through. It was my first piece of jewellery outside the traditional gold baptismal cross and the ubiquitous blue eye of the sea / evil eye talisman of the Levant. These two symbols, eye and cross, co-exist around many a Hellenic neck, orthodoxy and paganism intertwined.
    I like a cross large, and swinging like medallions should. I've had metal ones, woven leather ones, wooden ones. I'm ok with the cross, not so okay when they have a tortured man affixed to them but I can live with that. I've collected religious iconography since adolescence. I kept an alter of my own design in my bedroom since then. It has moved around, now living semi-neglected over my fully neglected work table. My altars always held Christian, Pagan, Buddhist, Hindu, SF & F icons as well as assorted found items that resonate with me. My painted lead Ral Partha figurines, meant to enhance role playing games, live on my altar today. So does my collection of Magi. The best parts of any nativity scene are the three wise men of the east. Zoroastrian Wizards come to say hey to baby human potential. Magi, magician. My plastic baby Jesus in his manger is surrounded by plastic allies. A witch doctor rattling his shrunken head wand, a great ape standing in for the one true king, Kong. A unicorn has come into the circle. This magic beast has come into it's own in recent years as a true archetype, leading the kids to achieve their dreams no matter what society says about which way they need to swing, medallion or not. There's also a black panther & red fox - guardians for the left and right. Caveman bearing his club stands tall and makes sure no one comes tumbling in neglectful of the ancestors.
    Today, if I was to pray, I'd pray to a triumvirate of powers. The Animals, The Ancestors, The Angels. I think whatever can be cobbled together today of my fractured spirituality can be somehow symbolized by one of these 3 powers. Us humans are part all of that. We would be remiss to neglect one or two or three of these aspects of ourselves and of the living world. Animals & Ancestors are self evident to most people, even the faithless rationalists. Angels, though, tend to be discarded as remnants of some prior world view. I view them as they are, intelligences of planetary, solar or cosmic scale.
    I hung the shell around my neck but the string twisted and the shell edges were sharp and prone to snapping. The shell was retired. I adopted a black string a few short years later, with 3 wooden beads, 1 plastic one and a small metal spring. I wore this day in day out for a decade. I always appreciated the natural side by side with the artificial, a New York Dolls of urban decay decor. It must be somewhere in one of my leather pouches filled with the magic of my youth. The ultimate fate of these collections remains unknown. Part of me wants to trot them out as capital A Art. Not some contrived object but the real deal, the stuff I put together long before I knew someone somewhere could rationalize it as contemporary art. I may bury them in the woods along with other ritual objects no longer in use. Blades, chalices, shadowy books, robes, cords, discs, rings. Buried deep, bundled strong. Sure some stoner may stumble on them, all the better. I'll make sure they've been properly cleansed, rendered inert. If someone needs to use the tools of the ancestors they can do so in good conscience. Only a fool would do so rashly.
    Maybe I'll combine all these details into the body of a statue, left to gather moss on some lawn of future home, greeting all the curious visitors, winking a blind eye to those who see. Come visit, drape a home-made necklace around the satyrs' neck.
   

Day 23

That awkward stage when you know you wanna be freaky but you still don't know how to be freaky so you end up looking like a kid set to random. Shoulder length hair, lime green tuxedo jacket, tie-dyed jeans you had the nerve to wear twice, an assortment of shirts, home decorated. Baubles around the neck and wrists. Sashes, for gods' sake. These growing pains can eventually lead to some balancing act, less high visibility shrieking and more jeans and t-shirts.
    My first foray into fashion statements was a sweatshirt initially light blue but faded into white that I painted a question mark onto. Large and in the front of course. This was the initial spark that would set me off. It was followed by a tourist t-shirt from Kalamata that I'd scrunch up on the garage floor and spray paint with red and blue. Toxic tie-dye. The real tie dye started shortly thereafter and yielded great results. I still balk at that 'fake' hyper swirled dead-head stuff you can get at head shops. Real, detail oriented organic hippie home-made jobs are the best. They went well with my array of hand crafted macrame bracelets I'd learn to make.
    It may be ironic that my first hippie-ish clothes and accessories came from Greece. The first was a blue and white pullover cotton shirt that a classmate, Roger Palewandrem, laughed at and called a rice sack the first time I wore it at school. I was not to be deterred. The rice sack was worn well and I can only thank the gods that I didn't go into full luxurious ethnic circus pattern stylings as I grew. I almost did. Indian cotton shirts can easily lead to billowy button downs decorated like gauche temples. I also dodged a bullet by not being able to find or afford when I did full-length capes. My courage was also limited. The poncho I did wear once or twice was just too big and I felt odd so my mom stitched up the neck hole and it became a throw. Other Greek details were the leather string one could get at any souvenir shop in Kalamata. I bought the stuff by the metre and also picked up ready made macrame bracelets. I say ironic because Greek hippie kids in Montreal don't come by the dozen. My high school was almost 80 % Greek. The kids at school in the mid 80s were predominantly Lumber-Bums, greasy haired, lumber jacket, Ozzie t-shirt, Kodiak boot wearing rockers. Much to my dismay, the summer between grades 10 and 11, they seemed to all turn into Aldo shopping, Azzaro cologne wearing Madonna fans. Their girlfriend shaped them up, the poor saps.
    My gang were budding punks and new wavers, a metal head or two. I was welcome to try things out. I went to the punk matinees in my love beads and I started slam dancing in my desert boots. Though punk shows came and went, that scene wasn't fully mine. Neither were the Tam-tams, the weekly drum circle that was gaining ground. I bought my incense, studied the sixties which eventually led me to appreciate random un-moored freakiness as opposed to the patchouli historical revisionism of the 80s. I met some other freaks, got introduced to Discordianism, zines, the international global mail-art network and that original question mark sweat shirt came to signify exactly what I was to become.

The Fields

The park next door was huge. It had a field that sported an ice rink in the winter, a basketball court, a sandbox skirted by a lovely stone wall, swings, a slide and a chalet that was a modernist dream. Literally next door. We lived on the end of a road, park to the side, train tracks out back. We moved away when our family friends moved to a deeper suburb. We moved with them and never saw them again. Don't do what your friends do.
    The train tracks separated our park from an even larger park, the one with the swimming pools. We would make the trek in the summer, cross the tracks, pick berries along side them and go hang out in the pool. Not running, swimming and splashing. Take a shower before you get in, another after you get out. Chlorine tang. Warm puddles on the sun hot concrete surrounding the pool. Teenagers being jerks with their Speedos and blurry tattoos. I never once dove off the diving board. I'd jump off it but belly flopped too often to get the hang of it. The occasional cannonball but I was a small kid. No great effect. I only dove properly last year. Off a dock into a lake. It took all my nerve.
    Next to the park on the other side of the tracks was a very large swath of park land. Forest. We'd go rarely, weeds and trees and the remains of forts and parties. We thought we found a leg bone once but were unsure. Caribou bones in Ville St-Laurent ? We could easily get lost there in those woods. We were too young to make a habit of going in.
    The park right next door had an adjacent field to it as well. Not as big as the forest. We called it 'the fields'. There, in the fields, we'd go often. It was a semi wild land, undeveloped, trees and reeds. There was a shallow ravine ideal for bike tricks. It would fill with water and freeze over in the winter. I tried crossing once only to break through the ice and go waist deep in cold water. My jeans frozen rigid when I was helped out.
    Scraps of Playboy magazines were found in the fields. The detritus of bigger kids. We would collect these water logged scraps and treasure them into illegibility. Multiple creases hiding any skin. The fields eventually became part of the park, cleaned up, manicured, a simple green land to cross on the way to the bus stop. If we were teens when we lived next to the fields we easily would have went bad. The wilderness, no matter how small, calls you over to the untamed life of bonfires and bicycle jumps, broken bottles and shredded magazines.
    We missed out on the full potential the fields had to offer.

First House

Our first house was a tiny war-time stand alone bungalow. I was four when we moved away from it so my memories of that house are early and substantiated. The piano we found in the house had to stay there as we couldn't get it out for some reason. The neighbours kids, two robust and crude Italian children turned over our toy box and started stepping on our toys. The vague muddy area under the back balcony. The wooden steps leading to the basement where there lived giant rats. I fell down those steps. The floor there was damp. I associate the basement with our wooden blocks but I can't see how we were playing down there. Don't grind your plasticine into the tiny teeth of your multi-fix blocks. You ruin them both that way. Sitting on the floor of the kitchen with a bowl of cut up meat and saying chi-chi, the word for cut-up meat.
    My parents lived with friends. The house was full of people. One winter the snow was so high it almost touched the roof and our family friend Kostaki played with us outside, pushing us around in a wooden barrel.
    Our uncle Iraklis lived with us and plastered his bedroom with our drawings. Up to the ceiling. My brother is a year and four months older so they were mostly his drawings. We drew everywhere. On our parents wedding album, on the backs of coasters, on the bottom of the decorative sea-shell encrusted matchbox and matching cigarette holder.
    We drew monsters. Essentially any kind of creature festooned with claws and horns and fangs. Wide open mouths. Spikes just everywhere. It was here in this house that I remember explaining a drawing for the first time. It must have been my uncle who asked what it was. I clearly remember answering without any hesitation, 'a hippopotamus that lives in quicksand'.
    Our next house was the site of my F-word dance and we only stayed there for a year. Duko the dog put my hand in his slobbery friendly mouth and I cried on the lawn out front. The house after that was our house for the rest of the time we were kids and teenagers. Next to the park with the train tracks off the backyard. Red and white. It wasn't our first first house but it was the only one we ever really knew.

Taking Pictures

We hosted a small art opening in the shop today. Friends and friends of friends came to celebrate. We drank some wine and beer and ate some party mix. At some points I feared that the turn-out would be low. I always want to want what the artist wants. If the artist is cool with a low key event then so am I. If the artist wants a blow-out chances are they bring the blow-out with them.
    I have to get up early tomorrow morning. I'll take a bus and metro across town for a check up. Blood test, regular medical stuff for a man in his mid to late forties. If I don't tackle my issues now then I know my fifties will be hell. If it's difficult to stretch every morning now why would it get easier as I grow older. It won't. It will get harder. I won't get stronger by virtue of maturity. I'll get calcified, creakier and crankier.
    These are issues that I now have to face. I avoided adulthood into my late thirties and then I crammed. Crash course on what's good for me. I know what's good for me. I think everyone knows. Whether they have the sufficient avoidance and justification techniques to defer facing that knowledge is another thing altogether. I am not married to beer. Beer is one of those mundanities that takes over peoples lives and asserts its dominance. Potato chips is another. Both great things but not things I will die for. The people who would die for beer or chips are either ascended masters or dumb as shit. The jury is out. I won't buy their album in any case. Nor will I listen if they offer relationship advice.
    I've stopped making faces when people take my picture. I don't need to hang my tongue out any more and make a rock sign with my hands. My t-shirts are not representative of my core values. My friends don't dress like I do. We don't pose by pretending to not pose.
    I have to get up early in the morning to get tested so I can live longer and better. I am not worried because I know what's good for me. Sometimes I tell myself to fuck off and I drink beer and eat chips. I had some tonight. Not too much but enough to notice. Sometimes another I says whoa jackass, that other guy was pulling a fast one, this shit will kill you. Who am I telling to fuck off anyway ? Which me gets to throttle dead which other me ?
    There must be other ways to celebrate. Good things shouldn't turn into bad things over night. Low key events might be the way to go. Steady now, so we can make this party last. And be in fine form for breakfast tomorrow.

Leo M. & The Piece Of Chicken

When I stashed the piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken behind the bed of Leo M. I knew it wasn't the best course of action. It was his birthday party, we were in his room enjoying birthday lunch. I had a drumstick which was fine but the second piece I grabbed was one of those plump on one side and gristly bones on the other. I got grossed out and I snuck it away from me behind the furniture, embarrassed for not being able to eat it.
    When was it discovered ? I have no way of knowing. Did it get the chance to go green and fuzzy ? Is that what neglected KFC does ? Maybe it just dries out. Did Leo 'get the beats' because of it ? He probably got them anyway. It may have explained his general behaviour. We were friends and classmates but he was kinda no-good. Friendly one day and just a jerk another day. He could have easily blamed his shitty little friends. The house was full of kids. I think his family had some problems. The rumours surrounding his sister later on were disturbing too. A good student who either committed suicide or got pregnant or turned to prostitution. Or all three. The grape vine was tangled.
    In grade seven we were both running for the bus in the morning on our way to school, getting off the 163 and running to make our connection. The 17 ? I forget. In any case, while we were running across a very busy street to catch the second bus which was about to leave the stop, Leo thought it would be funny if he tripped me. I went down, broke my fall with my hands and fractured my left wrist. Little gravel bits stuck in my palms. I wore a cast for a few weeks. All my friends signed it and drew pictures. My father cut it off me in the garage instead of going to the doctor to have it removed. I remember it smelled bad. I can't remember if I let Leo sign it. That would have been dumb. I know I didn't smash his teeth in with it. I was way too nice. I didn't start becoming an occasional jerk until university I think. Leo started drugs pretty early.
    He lived a few houses down from us for a while. He came over to my house a couple of times. It was just before the chicken episode, that same afternoon, when I noticed in his room a little Matchbox chopper motorcycle painted sloppily black. It was confusing. It made me realize that it had been a while since I saw my little yellow Matchbox chopper. I couldn't really process it. This is years before he tripped me. Did I hide the chicken as an act of revenge for the stolen toy ? Did he trip me years later for my chicken slip ? Man, who knows ?

Calling Names

I wouldn't identify myself as having been bullied as a kid, though bullies did tease me. I was at risk of being taunted by some of the tougher kids because I was there. There are no reasons. You don't have to be the quietest, smartest, dumbest, smallest, fattest kid in the yard to be bullied. If you were, you were bullied, guaranteed. But you were also bullied because you were there, close-by, near the tough kid that needs to bully someone.
    You were standing in front of the bully in line. Pure chance. Some one had to be there. You shove me and I'll shove you back, albeit it with tears forming. You threaten me with an afterschool fight, I'll show up but you won't. Call me names, if part of me likes you and the name is clever, I'll remember. Ricky Sparrow was a bigger, tougher kid but not all bad. He was more of an occasional jerk than a bully. He even had some artistic talent. His design for school crest was chosen, miffing the true artists amongst us. He didn't call me fag or gay or sissy like the run-of-the-mill bullies did. One time he whipped out a riff on my name, ballet, and though it stung a bit, I had to admit it was pretty good.
    It's like my peers in CEGEP making Greek jokes. If you mention sheep, goats, crowbars, anything to do with ass you can go fuck yourself. Not because you're offensive but because you can't take it to the next level. Don't parrot clichés, come up with something good. I'm game in the right context. And decide whether that accent you're doing is Mexican or Greek. Stick to repeating Monty Python gags or pretending to be a Rastafarian. The subtleties inherent in a good ethnic slur escape you.
    A foreman at the warehouse I worked summers at had that cleverness. He was a powerfully built squat brick of a man and as much as he was no nonsense about work, his tongue was sharp and fast and he had good humour. It was from him that I heard for the first time fine manipulations of my full Greek name, Vasilios. Here I was twenty years old and I'm hearing original slander. It was a springtime breeze of fresh ideas. On one occasion he cracked out Vaselineos and my gratitude soared. Another time he croaked Vasectomos and I was thrilled. That's how to do it, people, if you're going to make fun of someone, hit them with something no one else has ever thought of. And try to do it with a little bit of love or I may take a swing at you even if you're way bigger than me.

Fulltime Daydream

The sabre toothed tiger would follow me everywhere. We were allies. I never determined the sex or name of the creature. For an imaginary friend it was both rock solid and elusive. It emerged in grade four when I devoted a considerable time every evening and morning for full on daydreaming. This would happen before and after sleep. I would continue the adventures and the adventures became complex as I aged. My sleeping patterns changed at twenty-three and with them my fantasy life.
    Vehicle design, prehistoric allies, damsels in distress, monsters to be fought, devils to be avoided, God to fight alongside of, schoolyards bursting into fantastic drama, walls sliding open in classrooms to reveal rocknroll shows, bodycounts justified with cloning, motorcycle races, undersea laboratories, magic staves, awesome displays of telekinetic prowess, loss of control, sympathy parties, illness leading to super powers, superpowers, earth spanning adventure. A head soaked in fantasy, fuelled by cartoons, movies and comic books. And sugar. And drawing, drawing so much since age three. Monsters and monsters. And monsters.
    My blue pajama bottoms cut into shorts, decayed with time into shreds, worn as a loincloth, better to fight the lava pillows with a letter opener. The loincloth stretched out, worn over one shoulder. Ka-Zar. Later Tarzan. Later still Conan.
Scrawny boy jumping from couch to chair, snapping his head at the slightest sound of enemy approach. Blood curdling screams as monsters were faced and wrestled with. Sweat, twisted ankles, giddy exhaustion. Tangle of blue fabric folded as best it can be, stored with tiny t-shirts, Rocky, King Kong, Star Wars.
    I grew up. The fantasies had more to do with classroom hierarchies and girls, rock bands and age appropriate showing off. The tiger faded. I kept the tiger as a cherished memory. The memory faded. I hung out in the park. I read Hesse. I worked in warehouses. I jerked awake one day in my early thirties and I wept for my long gone friend, frozen again in some glacier of childish things. I penned some sincere cloying poem about my forgotten ally. I felt more shame for leaving that friendship dwindle than I felt for not keeping in touch with my over seas cousins, for not sending countless thank you cards, for not buying a pack of smokes this time instead of just mooching.

Custom Cars & Power Animals

All I did on a good day was dream up cars. Air cars, one person buggies, customized vans, dragsters, hot rods, choppers. I'd drive these around in my head, I'd memorize the makes of the day, banalities like Saabs or Pontiacs. The occasional Triumph or Jaguar would set me tingling. I would draw their logos, collect their brochures. An uncle was a mechanic so there was an inside line to some of this stuff.
    I wanted to customize cars as a job, cut them down, jack them up, mag wheels, pinstripes and flames, chrome engine, crushed velvet interiors, wall to wall carpeting, white wall tires, gull wing doors, teardrop bubble windows, side exhaust pipes, severe blowers ripping through the hood, spoilers, and on it goes.
    I drew the dream car from the musical Grease for a bunch of classmates. Pencil on manila paper, lightning bolts on the side. I got several requests. I wonder if any of these drawings made it past another grade.
    Cars gave way to speeders and airships. Let these things fly around the school yard, impressing my friends. Surely now I could win the affections of the brown haired girl with the Brooke Shields eyebrows. One air car even got carved in wood. An errant seat from a model kit fit perfectly inside. An old plastic spool from a roll of paper was the perfect engine out back. It was never finished, an elegant design but my scratch building chops weren't as good as my imagination. I still have the model. I'm still quite impressed with it. It won't take much to finish it. Maybe I'll wait until I'm sixty or submit it as is to some group show, a suitably obscure text to accompany it. The unassembled components of memory.
    Airships needed to dock somewhere so a mothership was designed. It hovered high up in the sky between my house and the park next door. It had a lush jungle room, a library and several other vehicles that flew out of it, one for every occasion. I'd bring friends up there. My sabre toothed tiger companion lived there. I rescued it from a glacier as a kitten. It always walked by my side, from grade four everyday until I was nearing twenty years old. It's always a good idea to have a powerful ally at your side.
    I'm almost 46 now. The tiger is a shadow of its former self but I have a plastic smilodon on my dresser to remind me of the powerful friends I used to have as a kid. That power animals shadow me if I recognize them.
    I still don't have my drivers licence.

Fever dreams

Emerging out from night terrors, I would shiver and shake, not really fully awake. I'd jabber away deliriously. Fever dreams came and went. The last one in my late teens. One such episode resulted in quite a severe misunderstanding. It came early in my life.
    My folks did their best to comfort me as I writhed and squawked. A bear hug from my dad would usually do the trick. I could release into the hold, allow any tension to melt away, letting my head flop and any fear dissolve. Of course, there were moments when they may not have known what would ease the keyed up boy fresh out of oblique and abstracted nightmares. Our family doctor was Doctor Gordon. He was a kindly old man we loved dearly. He had a home practice and visiting him was never an ordeal of any type. When mom called though, he was away and another doctor took his calls. My mom in her broken English described her son as waking up shaking. Well, Doctor Y (His name sounds like "yeah sure'n") didn't know me but felt it was imperative to bring me right in and I, it turns out, was wrongly diagnosed with some form of epilepsy. I started taking medication. The visit to the hospital included many pointy wires stuck into my scalp as I laid on a table. Hooked up to machines. I took it in stride.
    When Doctor Gordon returned my mother filled him in regarding the news about my condition. He howled that there was nothing wrong with me and that I should stop the medication at once. He was livid, having followed me since birth.
I learned that I would have the occasional night terror, that my shakes were from fear and confusion and I could be calmed with a strong hold. I'd wake up numerous times in my youth, haunted by dreams so bizarre and rife with symbols they remain integral to my identity.

Lying - Day 14

Lying surfaces in many ways. The feeling that you are lying is unmistakable. It is a feeling I could describe as acute and as something of a freefall. The moorings have been pulled. The ground isn't steady. This can go in any direction. Any thought of the future is distant, the present moment is all there is.
    The first time I had this feeling was when I wasn't lying directly. In fact, I rarely lie. I may not offer the truth, I may hoard secrets but when asked directly I am better at oblique evasion than at straight out lying. I don't have the nerve. I'm afraid to lie, afraid to get caught. Life is simpler without having to remember what you said to whom. I forget what truths I have spoken and to whom but the most that that can lead to is a slight embarrassment. My kiss and tell days are long over. You can never trust if the best friend you are telling your secrets too in college will be even someone you still know ten years after. Tell it all to the stranger on the bus. The guys at work.
    My tactic once was to blab indiscriminately to the person who happened to be in front of me, close or not. About any gory personal detail. Not necessarily about other peoples gory details, mind you, but shamelessly about my own. My life is scattered among the many ears I have filled. And I have filled ears, I have talked and talked. With mounting passion, with humour, with snippy cynicism. People still come up to me and say something like, 'you once said something to me that I've never forgotten….'. Well I have. Fifteen minutes after I said it. Happy to be an inspiration nonetheless.
    The feeling of lying I recall as being so distinct was because I wasn't lying directly, in fact I wasn't lying with words. I was prolonging my crying way beyond my need to cry. I did this as a small child to get attention. I didn't get the attention I sought but I got the unmistakable feeling that I was lying. I was faking out my cry. Can't they hear me ? Why aren't they coming ? Maybe just a little more and they'll come. My real heartfelt hurt was extended beyond its lifespan, into the realm of hollow sounds, any meaning in it dwindled away. How much longer should I keep this charade up ? No one is coming.

Free range kids

We would have to cross the park, a schoolyard, a couple of streets to get to the corner store. We would go for candy, comics, mini-sips, just to go and also for the occasionally pack of cigarettes for the adults. I always remembered the confusion I had when trying to memorize the right format of smokes. 20 or 25, kingsize or regular, etc. Sometimes the clerk would wonder why a couple of kids wanted smokes, most often there was no problem. We were there for the candy and the kid junk, it was clear.
    There were two options of shop. One was Perrette, a local dépanneur chain. This is where we would get mini-sips, small see-through plastic bladders of coloured sugar water that we would drink by piercing with the short pointy straw it came with. As was customary upon completing the drink we would blow through the straw and inflate the empty bag. By then pushing the pointy straw right through the other side, the plastic pillow speared, the air would be trapped and we'd have a little balloon to toss around. We wouldn't toss it around. We'd place it on the sidewalk in front of the shop and stomp as hard as we could on it. A satisfyingly loud pop later and we'd continue with our junk.
    One time and one time only we lived our dream of full scale maxi-sips. We each bought a litre bag of sugar water meant for the milk-bag pitcher, thinking this was the champion of sip sacs. How those unfinished bags languished in the fridge, a tiny straw jutting out like a mast on a leaking rubber raft.
    The other shop was Johnny's, a general store full of all kinds of things, kites and other toys, candy, magazines, and of course a thousand products invisible to children. It was unlike Perrette in that it was darker and messier. Johnny's wife was 'mean' whereas the man himself was happy to have us. I believe she accused us once of stealing which brought one of the more pro-active aunts to champion our cause and cuss the lady out. We were sugar addicts and comic book readers but we weren't shoplifters. And the cigarettes, Belmont Milds, Rothmans or Medallion, were not for us.

Bubble Gum

Mini Chiclets were so saturated with flavour that one could be forgiven for swallowing them. The desire to completely absorb them was overwhelming to me. Other gums I could chew until any last vestige of flavour was gone. Not so with the Mini Chiclet. They had to be swallowed. In such small instalments so no damage done, right ? Wads of bubble gum clogging up my guts wasn't an issue. It wasn't going to happen.
    I chewed bubble gum like a man possessed, like a boy addicted to sugar and chewing. Strawberry snowballs, RainBlo, Ton-O-Gum, the dusty pink sticks from packs of hockey cards, Happy Days cards, Star Wars cards, Charlie's Angels cards, Creature Feature cards, Wacky Packages. Every pack of cards opened with surgical precision, the wax paper carefully flattened and put aside, the cards joined with fellow cards, ordered numerically, any sticker double stuck to the head board of the bed. There was one set of stickers, name long forgotten, of monster heads. Small shaped stickers, round ones, ovals, trapezoids, odd little things. One stickers had a monster with a gooey eyeball hanging out of its socket. It was stuck on my brothers head board but it freaked me out. I raised hell. It must be gotten rid of, it was too disturbing. It would give me nightmares. Mom was brought in. Brother John would have none of it, it was his bed, besides, the sticker couldn't be removed without tearing it and I was able to see the logic there. One doesn't remove a sticker if one thinks it will tear. That would be madness. We were collectors after all. Finally a solution was found. John would tape a small curtain made of Kleenex over the sticker. I would be spared the offending sight and he could lift up the little drape and enjoy his gross sticker whenever he wanted to. It was probably in my tenth straight year of drawing almost exclusively oozing eyeballs and intestines as a teenager and young adult that I remembered maybe that little sticker should take the credit.
    My gum habit did not continue into adulthood. I had switched to gummy candies. Now I could chew and swallow as much as I liked.

Potty Mouth

My best friend in grade three used the F word all the time. Nine year olds swearing may seem ridiculous to anyone over the age of ten but when you're there, in the trenches of the schoolyard, it's pretty badass. This swearing business, I'm convinced, is related to the dubious activity of tossing a 7UP can between yourselves, or throwing it against the wall, waiting for that moment of truth when the integrity gives and sticky syrup sprays chaotically everywhere. These cans, it must be noted, were hardy beasts unlike the paper foil used today.
    I couldn't do the F word. It was wrong. For a short time I threw an L in there but fluck doesn't have the same bite and people look at you funnier than if you just swore. A few years before, kindergarten age, I was doing a primal dance of my own design while staring out the back screen door. It was in the house we lived in for only a year. My only other memory of that house was of me gouging the black rubber substance surrounding the back screen door with a small plastic giraffe. This primal dance consisted of me gazing into the yard, my arms held out and up making ninety degree angles, my knees bopping upwards in rhythm almost touching elbows as I chanted fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck musically. I was letting all the bad word mojo out. My mother busted me, of course and I cried with embarrassment. I ran to my room crying sorrys and flung myself on the bed.
    When I was ten the Canadian band Trooper had a hit song "Raise A Little Hell". To continue with the L motif I sang along to it with a robust childish 'Raise A Little Ell' since hell was a bad word too. This is me singing along under my breath at nightie when the radio was on. This is secret self censored singing. Hell had to be reigned in because though ours was not a particularly religious family we did observe the ubiquitous Greek custom of hanging crosses over kids beds and devoting a corner of the kitchen to Byzantine style iconography. I didn't want to evoke or invoke or in any way attract hell so I cut the H.
    It took me a long while to start swearing, maybe grade eight or nine even though all the men in the family cursed magnificently, calling each other malaka (wanker, essentially) and never hiding the word gamoto (fuck it, essentially) from the kids. I now have a problem with swearing, often resorting to an easy F word instead of thinking up something better.

Stage Fright in the Old Country

Try as I may, I just could never pee without sufficient walls around me. On a day hike through the severe Greek scrubland  with so many of my cousins, midsummer sun blaring and sporting my ever present Expos baseball cap, I found out the hard way what happens to boys that can't pee in front of others.
    Visiting relations is grueling work at any age. Marching through the hard hillside of the Peloponnese with a troop of them is harder still. We would leave the comforts of town life with its stacks of stick souvlakis and its close-by beaches to visit some half abandoned compound surrounded by haunted olive groves and ancient aqueducts overgrown with reeds and crabs. One boisterous well fed cousin once stuck his hand in the water of these long stone troughs to pull out a crab to show us. He unceremoniously wrenched it's top shell off to show us the innards. Oh, it was full of eggs. No matter, toss it away. I wretched at his barbarity.
    We took turns stomping on grapes, bunches of little purple ones stuffed into sacks and piled in a large circular bin. The children played unaware of the labour they were saving the adults. Juice trickled out and was caught by another receptacle. Our feet purple and otherworldly.
    We were taken for a walk in the hot beating sun, away from the orchards. Arid stoney soil peppered with hardy shrubs. Not a tree to speak of. It was in such terrain that we were invited to pee if we had to. I had to. Off we went together. For some reason I didn't venture out further than I did, seeking some semblance of privacy in this hostile land. Cousins surrounded me, talking, at ease with their bathroom habits. I tried to pee. I couldn't. And here is my error. I pretended I did, zipping up and joining the group. It was in no time at all that my ruse failed me. I let go in my cut off jean shorts and did my prideful best to hide the obvious slip. I proceeded, cap in hand, to continue our walk as if nothing at all was the matter.
    Of course they knew. But no one said anything, bless them. When I mentioned this tale to my partner a few weeks ago, she said she knows, my father told her.

Rubber Monsters

I used to collect rubber insects and monsters from the 25 cent gum ball machines. I kept them in a shoebox and I called them Hermans as in 'these are my Hermans'. It would make sense that I got the name from Jim Unger. Herman, as a name, would crack us up. So did Horace and Morris. We found these names hysterical for some reason. Fred too but to a lesser extent. Fred came more into prominence as a fascinating name in my early teens. I gave it to our second canary after our first, Tweety, went to the big birdcage over the kitchen sink in the sky. Fred the canary was ok. He probably felt that we liked his predecessor more. We were a bit older too by then and not as attentive to the poor little guy. Both birds never left their cage, which is a regret of mine. Let the songbirds out of the cage would be my MO if I dared live with birds today.
    Now the rubber monsters and bugs were fanciful creatures that I would piecemeal harvest from the machines at Les Galeries Saint-Laurent, a small shopping centre in Ville St-Laurent, our neck of the woods. My brother and I would do the rounds while our folks shopped at Dominion for the groceries. We would check out the pet store, the toy store and the head shop. The head shop in this smallish suburban mall (we didn't know this American word yet) was festooned with black light posters we would flip through, psychedelic velvety masterpieces. We gawked at Zappa sitting on the can, zodiac figures dancing their cosmic dance, rock goddesses wearing nothing but day-glo skin and tangles of red hair. The middle of the shop had glass shelving containing what I much later discovered were water pipes. As kids we would marvel at these bongs of skulls, globes and tubing. What were they? Just recently I recalled a vague impression that we thought they were candy dishes. If it wasn't our idea, I applaud the teenage head working the shop for his ingenuity in describing them thusly to a couple of kids.
    The bank of machines was right outside the grocery store. We would feast on gum balls and hard little pucks that looked as if they were composed of tiny bits of recycled gum. They were sour and multicoloured and I miss them sorely. I miss Jelly Tots more but candy and it's allure will have to wait for another time. We would get the occasional superball or tiny joke book from the surprise machine but mostly I went for the bugs and creatures. Tentacled beasties, finger puppets, gooey spiders, worms, a total alien menagerie that lived in a shoebox.
    It is a testament to my childish naiveté that I lent my entire box of Hermans to a kid I hardly knew a few scant days before summer break. I never saw them again.

Basement Potatoes

Aside from the master jukebox, there were many other things in the basement of New Victory Hot Dog. Freezers, of course, and canisters of syrupy soda waiting to be pumped through the fountain. The stairs leading down were wooden and old. I felt insecure upon them, as they led to a cold, unfinished basement, half obscured and most possibly the home of nameless things.
    One of our small tasks when we would visit was to chop french fries. We would toss whole unreeled potatoes into a small rough metal pot with a rotating floor and bumpy walls. A hose led some water into it, and as the potatoes tumbled about, their impact with the rough interior would scrap the peels off. We would open a door in the side of the pot and these freshly peeled wet potatoes would fall into a bucket of water, where they would await the guillotine. Each spud would be placed on bladed criss-cross mesh and a long metal arm would be pulled, pushing the potato through the mesh blade. Fingers of fries would splay apart and drop into another bucket underneath. It was a wet affair.
     We would haul these buckets with some difficulty up the rickety stairs and place them right behind the counter where they would be led to the corner for frying. Our task complete, we would sit on the spinning stools and either have some Dad's Oatmeal Cookies or a May West and flip through the songs offered on the small jukeboxes placed at intervals along the counter.

Nouvelle Victoire

Quebecois career waitresses in their sixties will always have a spot in my heart. When we - by we I generally mean my older brother and I - visited my dad's restaurant, the waitresses there doted on us. At New Victory Hot Dog they would speak French to our little Greek English ears and we would nod and smile. Paul-Emile, the weathered fifty something delivery man from the pharmacy next door loved us too and with smiling eyes and a creased toothlessness spoke such a deep Quebecois that it would take me years after warehouse work to manage to hear what was being said in accents like his. As a kid, we would pantomime and smile. I tried to visit him a few years ago by dropping by the restaurant, long out of my father's hands, now that I could finally speak with him, but he was gone to the place dead people go. I missed him by a year.
    One waitress, I never knew her name, subscribed to Lundi magazine, a French language celebrity gossip rag full of stars local and international. Without any prompt from us she started saving the pin-ups from the magazine. Every month or so a new stack was given to us. Andy Gibb, Erik Estrada, Mork From Ork, Cheryl Tiegs, some folks we didn't know at all, some local singers. We took these mini posters home and some were hung in our room and some just kept in their stack. They might be somewhere still, in some tattered folder along with choice pages from TV Guide or a page of Star Wars toys from a department store catalog.
    Those pin-ups weren't the only pop culture nuggets we got from the restaurant. My father managed a deal with the juke box man. We would get any 45s that had to be swapped out. So every so often, from the master machine in the basement, 7 inch records would come to us. This bounty along with hamburgers and hot dogs made us thankful little guys, we had it made.
     I love going into diners and greasy spoons. I want to go often enough so the waitress knows my order but I can't eat like that too often nowadays.

The Dignity of Small Children

I was a sensitive kid. I cried almost every day. As a teen it continued sporadically until I was fifteen. Fifteen was when I cut the habit. Crying in geography class in grade ten, tears of injustice, because you felt the teacher was unfair to a friend was the warning bell. At twelve it occurred to me that maybe this was all too much and I asked my mom, "Mom, am I over-sensitive ?" I have no idea where I got that line. It may have been from reading the Ann Landers letters along with the comic strips in the newspaper. In any case, a sensitive kid will perceive affronts to his dignity everywhere. The red face streaming with tears and snot, contorted into masks of high drama notwithstanding.
    Two such affronts come to mind. One involves fashion and the other, obliquely, food.
    Receiving gifts as a child can be a complicated affair, especially when it comes to clothing. I didn't especially like getting gifts of clothes in the first place. Clothing is mandatory, I should get clothes anyway. Don't waste a gift opportunity on it, unless it's related to something I love. That was my thinking. An aunt, a kind lady, gave me a shirt that was a total affront to my dignity. It was a white sweatshirt of sorts, made out of a horrible scratchy synthetic. Of course I tried it on, 'try it on, at least,' was Moms mantra. She knew this wouldn't end well. It was rigid, it was uncomfortable. Comfort wouldn't have saved it anyway. The print on the front was of a skunk holding his nose with the tag line 'I'm a little stinker'. Tears, shrieks, gulping sobs, the whole bit. I was emphatically not a little stinker. Who does this to a kid ? I'm a little caveman, ok. I'm a little allosaurus, fine. I'm a little flying saucer, you get the idea.
    The second affront to my dignity was a new lunchbox my mom picked out and, shudder to think, thought I would like. Raggedy Ann and Andy. I had no relation to those dolls before this event came crashing into my life. Internet says this came out in 1973. If so I must have been about 5, maybe 6 if mom picked out last years model on sale. I don't care if it can fetch 65 bucks on Ebay now. Of course it would be the height of cool if I cracked it out at some potluck full of banana bread. But at 5 I could not bring this to school. I howled with despair, unable to articulate how this was so wrong. At 5 I had already seen King Kong. I was having night terrors for gods sake. Step it up, rag dolls were not it. I don't recall how this was resolved. Taped paper on the sides ? A brown paper bag ? I made it to school with some lunch that day, my pride tested but still mostly intact.
    I still cry every so often, to keep my heart well oiled. Affronts to my dignity are now mostly self-directed too.
   

Get Off The Ground

The house next to the park, white brick with red trim, where I spent my childhood had train tracks right beyond the backyard. Our yard, our fence, overgrown weeds and brambles and lastly gravel leading to tracks. A commuter train would whiz past every so often. We would wave occasionally to no avail. The train would pass night and day and became part of the ambient noise, soon completely blended in with the rest of the scenery.
    The back yard was big enough to run around in. My father planted a fruit tree centrally and adorned the land around it with flowers, bricks at an angle making a zigzag little wall of protection, red brick, white brick and so on. Vegetables grew to the side. The house next to ours hadn't yet erected a fence dividing the two yards so if we needed to go fetch a ball or frisbee we would though I am still struck by how respectful we were of the land next to ours. A mirror image of our yard hardly ever treaded by us or the folks who lived there.
    As our yard and garden were kept nicely with plants the no-mans-land on the other side of the fence before the tracks was overgrown and sinister. Rarely did a ball go over to that side of things and if one did then an adult was dispatched to retrieve it for us. They were not about to let the kids start exploring the thorny terrain that led to the train tracks. An added buffer zone was the cuttings and garden debris my family would routinely toss over the fence.
    Our play time was bound to be punctuated by passing trains. We couldn't let them go by as if nothing was happening. These events had to be worked in. It was somehow decided that when a train passes by the ground becomes electrified. There was some discussion as to when exactly this happened, how far away or close by the train had to be, etc. Whatever the final details were, the result was that with the rumbling of the coming train all the kids playing would scream  "get off the ground ! get off the ground !" We would madly scramble towards the stairs, laughing and jostling each other, running up to the balcony, hanging off it, hanging off the spiral stairs leading upwards, climbing over each other and at worst balancing on the small cement slab at the bottom of the stairs. Any poor soul still on the lawn at that point would be shocked to death. We never pushed anyone to their death. We would remain 'off the ground', hanging from the stairs, oblivious to the conductivity of metal, until the train passed. With the train gone we would resume our normal play until the next distant rumble brought with it the returning threat of electric shock.

Rock School

George and Jimmy were a few years older than us, already in their early teens when my brother and I were nine and eight. Because they were older they took it upon themselves to elaborate exactly which Deep Purple album was the best one. We would pore over the covers of In Rock, Fireball, Machine Head and Burn. I remember a kind and sympathetic Jimmy pointing to a long haired young man wearing oval glasses on the back cover of one of the albums and saying, gently so I'd never forget, "That's Ian Paice, he's the greatest drummer in the world".
    I don't know what our folks were doing, probably smoking cigarettes in the kitchen, the men talking loudly and drinking wine, the ladies loudly making fun of the men and preparing food. Whatever it was they were doing, somehow they didn't seem to notice that Highway Star was on much louder than they could talk. On so loud in fact that the good china was rattling in the china cabinet a few feet away from the stereo. We were scandalized. Our little ears were blown away. Happy to have such skilled tutors in the way of hard rock. The softer rock we were already little fans of. We knew the fifties stuff and the sixties and the pop music of our day. AM radio was on every night as we went to bed, my brother John acting as DJ, deciding the station, deciding the volume and deciding I suppose when it would get turned off. I fell asleep way before I ever noticed either way. Of course I would whine if it was too loud. And I whined like hell when the inevitable happened and John wanted to finally switch to CKGMs sister station on the FM dial, CHOM 98. CHOM was all about the hard rock and I wasn't ready, despite my training at the hands of George and Jimmy. FM rock radio at nighttime in the late seventies was not the milquetoast affair it is today. Those disc jockeys would put on entire sides of Yes while they presumably smoked another joint or worked on some macrame.
    My whining was futile as John made the switch. He had been ready for the next level awhile now. I was afraid of the unknown, happy with England Dan & John Ford Coley. I never told my brother but it took me maybe ten minutes to be totally on board with the switch to FM though I probably complained for half an hour.

Up North

Occasionally in the spring and summer months my family would go 'Up North'. Up North was up north a bit, maybe an hour and some from the city. It was a cabin my uncle and aunt bought and the extended family would make weekends of it. Imagine a bunch of Greeks and their kids in a ramshackle chipboard cabin in the wilds of Quebec in the mid 1970s. Cupboards filled with vintage tupperware containers or 'tuppers', a toilet that needed a bucket of lake water next to it and children to fetch it, mosquitoes and black flies, slugs in the lake, a rowboat that weighed a ton, treacherous front steps and other rustic details. The countryside will always be 'up north' in my head.
    Riding in the car on the way to the cabin I was astonished once to see dozens, if not hundreds, of dried flattened frogs papering the gravel road. They must have been involved in some annual mad dash to or from the lake and met a horrible death under the wheels of country traffic. Left to bake there, poor amphibious flapjacks. We were a few corners away from the cabin.
    We'd dash out of the car through long grass and run towards the lake, playing on it's border. Swimming wasn't encouraged due to the slugs so we'd have to drive to a sandy beach a few minutes away. The ladies packed bread and tomatoes. A vacation within the vacation. But that wasn't everyday. Our lake was primarily for rowing in, filling toilet buckets and for fishing.
    It was the men who would fish of course, keeping these small little guys and tossing back the catfish. I would insist on watching them gut the fish. I didn't eat fish already due, I suppose, to my mothers habit of filling the house with their thick fried aroma coupled with their dead eyes on the head left on the body on the plate. Me running around shrieking when fish was served makes for fond memories. So I didn't eat fish. It was one of the very few foods that I so steadfastly refused that my parents lost that battle, and early. Chicken liver I would tearfully choke down a bite of. Fish, no. Sorry.
    Of course I was still fascinated enough to want to watch the frightfully sharp blades enter fish bellies and spill fish guts. I liked animals and this was confusing stuff but I still watched. The little fish swimming around the bucket were all doomed. I'm sure there were times I protested and cried and made a scene. The ladies said I shouldn't watch but I couldn't help it. I'm sure I must have puked later on or developed a convenient fever. If the adults were going to kill and eat fish, this seven year old will make sure to wake up in the middle of the night with delirium and put on a little show for everybody. Gut fish ? Ok, here's some pure kid half asleep freak out.
    By far the best part of Up North was the man who did the rounds with a hatchback full of large cardboard flats full of giant chocolate glazed doughnuts. No one got hurt with the doughnuts.

The Neighbours Bookcase

Our neighbours growing up had a big bookcase in their hallway. Encyclopaedias mostly it seemed to me but that's what was on the lower levels. I couldn't reach much higher and who puts encyclopaedia sets anywhere but the bottom shelf ? That stuff is heavy and you might as well sit on the floor to get them out and leaf through them.
    The back doors between our houses were unlocked during the day. We shared a back balcony and yard and it seemed we were always over there or they over at our place. The moms had coffee together, Maxwell House, and the dads worked together in a shared business downtown. I liked hanging out with the ladies as a kid. They take an interest in you or simply pull you close and continue talking. The men always like to say that you'll learn something if you listen to them argue about politics or whatever they are talking about, usually anything that is alien or boring to a child. The men are wrong. A kid will not learn anything listening to them get heated up. A kid will learn to just hang out with the ladies and be a part of it all, no strings attached. They'll even offer you something to eat or drink.
    It was something to have another set of adults to consult about homework. Our neighbours were more educated than my folks. They had a bookcase. We had books here and there and of course puzzle and gossip magazines but nothing much else before I was a teenager and started bringing them home on my own. Beat up second hand copies of Call It Sleep or precious poetry chapbooks long forgotten by everyone else.
    Even as a kid I would order books from Scholastic or check them out from our school library. Ramona The Brave.
    I loved sitting on the carpet in front of the neighbours bookcase and just stare at the spines. I wish I could remember what other books they had beside the encyclopaedia sets. I wish I could see it now.
    I don't get tired of staring at bookcases.

Peanut Butter & Honey Sandwiches

    I was twelve when I peaked with my peanut butter and honey sandwich habit. The family was bringing home Kraft smooth peanut butter, Billy Bee liquid honey and Weston sliced white bread. Weston sliced white bread is called toast whether or not it's toasted. It's called toast to distinguish it from bread which comes in rustic loaves from the bakery. Toast comes spongy, sliced and in see-through plastic bags.
    Two pieces of untoasted toast, one liberally coated with Kraft smooth and then liberally topped with golden honey spouted through a yellow nozzle from a clear plastic bee-hive shaped bottle. If my current collectors eye was as keen when I was twelve as it is today I may have started keeping those yellow nozzle caps, conical trophies to my sweet tooth and 'husky' sized blue jeans. Thankfully I have no way of knowing how many bee-hives I went through. Some things are better left to death bed visions than conscious knowledge.
    The second piece of untoasted toast completed the sugar stack. Kraft smooth peanut butter, I was to later find out, included icing sugar in its ingredient list. Back then it seemed I was eating good stuff. The sandwich was now ready to flip, allowing the top toast to act as bottom, catching the honey in its spongy pores and with any luck becoming a crystalline playground. Why not just squirt the honey directly on the second piece of toast and let gravity do the work right from the start ? Good question. I believe that the honey squirted upon the creamy swirls of PB was simply more pleasing than it cascading onto plain white toast.
    In any case, the sandwich complete, I was now ready to cram it into my face in any number of ways. Occasionally I would break it apart in my hands and see what rugged landscapes would emerge from the fault line. Other times I would take teeth to it first, enjoying what little resistance they met. Sometimes I made a second sandwich.
    My aunt Christina, the 'cool' aunt who was probably only ten or so years older than me, would watch me making and eating these sandwiches with such relish that she requested I make one for her. "Just like you make it for yourself," she'd say. She admitted not liking the sandwiches but thought there must be something she's missing as I engaged with them as if they were the best things ever. I'd be confused as I made her a sandwich she wouldn't really enjoy. What a waste, I thought.

Boring Me

In grade seven, in science class of all places, our teacher Monsieur LaPlante, before he settled into his habit of spending the entire class writing out paragraph after paragraph of biology lessons on the blackboard for us to copy down, would encourage the students to take five minutes and write down our thoughts in a journal. He would not read this journal. It was for us, to express ourselves. We had five minutes at the start of every class to write our thoughts in our journals. Every class I would spend the five minutes expounding on how boring school was, how bored I was, how boring M. LaPlante was, how boring writing in the journal was. It is surprising to see, many years later, that it took me almost a whole year of writing virtually the same boringness every day before I started getting fanciful with my typography. Boring in Superman letters. Boring in KISS letters. Boring in bubble letters. Boring melting or Boring in flames. Boring getting smaller and smaller or bigger and bigger. Every letter of Boring punctuated with boring periods. It is surprising to me, upon finding and reading this journal many years later, to reveal to myself how utterly incapable of verbal expression or even thought I seemed to be as a twelve year old. No mention of Stacey Katsampas. No mention of Monsieur Mardikian saying the f-word in class. No mention a wasp crawling down my shirt in Mme. Assoulin's homeroom. No mention of any of the one hundred distinct memories I have of grade seven. The food fight. The Jimmies getting expelled. The fact that Robyn smoked. Her supremely tight Sergio Valente jeans. Or how I swung and missed Anthony Pio's face by one centimetre. Only boring entries of how bored I was. Only variations of Boring.

Mile-End, Always Beginning

I wrote this piece last April for Hyperlocal
It's about my neighbourhood.

I've lived in Mile-End since 1995. When a friend and I first struck out on our own to find an apartment we told ourselves we wouldn't go north of Mont-Royal. That wasn't where the action was. Our friends were all to the south, huddled around a few seedy bars on The Main.

We couldn't find anything so we ended up on Parc Avenue below Van Horne, blocks away north of our stated borderline. Since then I've happily endured the nicknames 'Chief', 'Sheriff', 'Mayor', 'The King of Kensington'  & 'Mile-End Billy'. I've walked around a lot and insisted on eye contact. I know the place. Not all of it and not everyone. This village, for all its tinyness is quite large.

Saint-Viateur, or Sesame Street as I like to call it, was my domain. Too many coffees at Olimpico, co-funding the vehicular lifestyles of its barristas via tip money. Too many hand waving, smiling, bisou laden walks up and down that strip. I awoke into a new role when, in 2000, I took over the family business on St-Laurent. I wasn't just another coffee hippie now, I was a local merchant. I couldn't recklessly add to the street art anymore, I had to step up, go adult.

As a shopkeeper, I've had to represent the hood, acting as gatekeeper to all the tourists looking for Little Italy to the north. I'd tell them, and still do, to hang a left at the corner and get a coffee and a bagel, do some people watching, that this is the 'hood you need to see. Recently a student called me up and asked me if I'd like to speak on the gentrification issue for an article she was writing on Mile-End. I spieled into the phone for a good half hour, mentioning Anglo artists and musicians who flock here for cheap rent and creative vibrancy. I was rewarded with some garbled misquotes. Maybe my Franglais was to blame…or the caffeine  in me, jumping from one detail to the next about the neighbourhood I love. I've been interviewed a lot, for my art, for our shop. I've never been misquoted, or at least never cared if I was. This time it was different. I prided myself on knowing my 'hood and now it seemed like I didn't.

It's a theme that never gets old. How much the neighbourhood has changed. It's always changing. How could it not ? We long ago lamented the loss of the second laundromat, we witnessed expansions and chi-chi makeovers of local grocery marts and the coming of newer upscale niche businesses. The old places I remember from my youth - Greek owned deps full of toys and nights out with my family at the Travailleurs Grecs du Québec social club - are gone or atrophied. My dusty junk crammed brocante has also transformed into an uptown gallery-boutique. My partner Emilie walked into a hoarded mess and we, very slowly, transformed the shop into something that isn't just a weirdo art project but maybe, just maybe, a livelihood. The neighbourhood changes, we change. Or is it vice versa ?

Recently some of the newer businesses on St-V were hit with hate posters wheat pasted on their windows, screaming "die yuppie scum!". I scoffed that the vandals were at least ten years late in their misdirected gestures. These new shops, like all shops, are simply making a go in what is hopefully a suitable environment. St-Viateur has evolved to be able to harbour such intentional, well designed spaces. But there have been Ferraris up and down that stretch before the new slew of college kids knew how much tattoos actually cost, before any of us used the H-word constantly.

Not everything can or should reflect the charming decay of neglected architecture. This was all pristine forest once. Retail chains do look out of place, but to who ? A few crusty locals bitterly cursing 'change' and 'gentrification' ? Locals like me ? Jerz, A friend from out west visited last summer. We walked around and visited all the new shops. We spoke of the changes. He said, 'It's a drawbridge situation, as soon as you get into the castle, you yell "Raise the drawbridge !" and everyone who follows yells the same thing.'

Sure, deke the sandwich brigade swarming the sidewalks looking for lunch, wait 20 minutes for your coffee (2nd or 3rd wave ?), dodge the strollers and mousey dogs and rock stars piled atop of each other. I'll do all that gladly. I love my hood, I complain night and day about it and always have. Somethings never change.

Our Hippie Fence in the Asphalt Jungle

 I wrote this short piece for Hyperlocal, a Canada WRITES project, in april 2013.
 You can also read it here


We live in a building with no balconies and no yard to speak of, just a 3 foot wide stripe of earth running along the back alley. For years it was the place to piss or for all the good people next door to stack their discarded mattresses. Next door is a legendary 50 unit flop house with a thousand short stories that should be left for another time, a time when you bring over the drinks and I can relax and really get into it.  

My partner Emilie built a charming hippie fence made with found woods and the odds and ends we’ve collected over the years. We reclaimed our little corner away from the trash piles and pee boys. We tried to sit in our 'back yard' with a drink and a snack one hopeful summer night but an over friendly drunk ambled over and draped himself around our rickety fence, sharing our space and kinda spoiling the mood.  

This alley is the hottest alley in the neighbourhood. It opens to a popular cafe and a new bar tailor made for young loud professionals. The café doesn’t have a liquor license so the kids gather in the alley under our window to drink dep beer and smoke joints and laugh in loud undergrad voices. Often. I’ve become the old man who sticks his head out the window and asks them politely to move along. Why politely ? Even at 2 in the morning ? Because we’re sitting ducks.  

One late winter night some stoned young man was railing against the back fence, wrenching a part this way and that. His friend was skating blissfully in the yard across the way. I'd guess acid but who knows. Our neighbour across the alley (the good neighbours) had made an ice rink for their kids. I poked my head out of our window and calmly asked the fence beater what we was doing. He said, "fucking shit up". From some weird place of deeper calm, I gently asked him why. He retorted "uuuh..fuck you. Good night" and left.  

The large red plywood letter 'B' I salvaged years ago from a now defunct local resto, and making up a nice part of the fence, was recently unscrewed from its casings and hauled off by some careful bastard with an eye for the finer things. The fence has been abused and broken by the many denizens of the alley. The cats use our garden beds as litter boxes. The vines we planted are wildly overtaking the spindly wood. The good-time charlies lean on it, idly pick at it, sometimes tend to the vines. The tulips are often disappeared by zealous garden ladies of another generation.  

Our tiny zone is an uphill battle. Until we finally split for some greener pasture, it'll have to do. It’s charming and awkward and broken. But we must have it, we must stake our little claim and try to pretty up the alley, almost against all odds.

everything from this point & earlier is experimental

Billy mavreas were drawn obama bunch or animal. Nov no comments have problems. Weeks to urban art drawings that i had a cigarette comments.  Images and sell for calling fake. Recent drawings, above, are designed so that has a weird. Animal fur in graphite pencil lovely lady. As a lot of the look like. Happiest when banging out this. And face had to make portrait allows you contrast them with pencil. Mouth, ear mavreas-inside the-pencil method approaches drawing sketching an interesting. Straight on, of choose your picture of drawings. Create your drawing mastery loaded with photorealistic pencil face quality drawings. Step by independent artists wanting to. De tus dibujos, y el brillo de. Paper paper paper x inches, graphite pencil sketch pencil. Thanks but may by independent artists. Drawing children sketching faces every. Following the lessons- drawing canvas print, matted prints for each. T-shirts, art, photography, drawing, design, writing, illustration and pencil.

save me your old ideas i make art out of them

another tamed
another pulled from the cream

hullo hullo hullo hullo

diameteor showere

(allowing the flake)
offering sternum

staright
888

........

ponderous thought forms
dill array

quadranter
succulinare

aim to dish

feelephant

copy that

.......

if i could dubble you
squintartar

___________________________
___________________________

the language is missahped

accounting for all human possibilities seems tohave met a wall.

we can sprint finely, write sonnets, build bridges
there are some of us who can memorize the night sky at a blink
compose masterpieces as gestures

in carefully guarded quarters
setting ring upn ring
trailed luxurious forests
twin aged and akin

Embedded In A Rock

this contentious group
anomalous artefacts

discoveries found
formed before humans

at present existed
all following fakes

just one verified would
force process or theory

Called Plasma Cosmology

Today,
we are in space seeing
things

that were never
imagined. We detect
fields everywhere,
currents.

The naked force
so much stronger.

visible
active

century pioneers inspire
anew investigation
primary force
organizing astonishing
clusters now seen

things that were never imagined.

We have achieved
surprising success
predicting

this new perspective.

not requiring
inventions
like matter

Or stars

The Scholarship Of Insects

the scholarship of insects
present facts as art

what with warring planets
plasmic plumes
& rock

novel as technical
manual
thorn hill thanks

stacks of marbles
holding story
show
night time

creating water
at earths center
up and at them

sial & sima
747 BC

we rewrite history

a swum vex

a swum vex

zircon
acorn ex
amen

crux sow viz
answer
cox

mu oxen
arc arum
sex vow sewn

zinc as women
aver rum awn

serum some

-

ax crone
muse
muon
screw crown
over rove

corn axe sum
scum worn axes
car carne

mourn
censor
coax con wax
waxen cos

cow max nurse
rumen sax

earn maw
saw rune near

wan was cozen

crane craw
craze mix sun
crew crewman us

crow exam
sue user

discreeti

billy_mavreas ‏@billy_mavreas

"i'd play a different game, " was the reply. the solitaire addict went to the track. the end.

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2m billy_mavreas ‏@billy_mavreas

"it's been years since i played," the game addict admitted. "what if you played now and lost ?," the jerk asked

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6m billy_mavreas ‏@billy_mavreas

"i couldn't explain it to myself and i couldn't do it with any other game," the unnamed solitaire addict said, "so i clammed up."

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8m billy_mavreas ‏@billy_mavreas

the story of a solitaire addict who has been quietly winning every game played for 25 years.

we argue over the meaning of suffering
just to ensure hell is met

we watched, M. and I, as this thing grew and was copied

grooving on social mind, dragged to refocus
kids don't want to learn they're busy feeding into and taking from a mass global popular culture
that withstands any and every comment, any and every gesture
collaged in every direction
and they are learning. and they don't have to read books even though it's good for them
and they don't and they don't the kids
they are busy writing
with costumes and rites, codes and plaza politic

the thing is the thing

dug three feet deep for stability, timbers soaked in earth
lord once again

you want to to do this thing
this thing you say that's an old chevrolet this thing dismayed not a soul
approves
groovin in your trucker hat, called apollo

'my wrist tattooes herald a new dawn for me' , he said showing me his arms,
'this one is the oldest one. It started with a cross.'

'we can only watch' is something that when said
i can only repeat words, the story hums on it's own, a steady transmission since day one
not a change in the message it stays true and unedited

written on liquid paper
written on liquid paper
written on liquid paper
written on liquid paper
written on liquid paper
written on liquid paper

i've written several teen anthems that i think should be able to grab if you will, the heart of any persons experience, a cry that can only quick to the very pulse the soul of one receptive to it's call.

ok, well. what does that entail ? what are these traits that define reception ?

it's all reception man, it's all in the groove. there isn't something it isn't, dig ? how much more plain do you want it ? it's all an illusion man and it's all the realest thing their is.

yeah ok yeah i see that that. that's not the problem, all is one is all.  how does one leak out into the public the switch that activates a larger self awareness.
i'm sorry to say popular music isn't turning everybody on. what will is my question ?

man. man, you are not the guy that does that. i do that. i touch the people, i touch the crowds in ways that leave me shuddering. it's a fire that spreads, it's lightening. any thing you want is right there.
 . you taste the girls. you taste the drugs. the party. the food. the food. it's royalty man but you better be careful. you better watch which flame is burning to burn you. that full on access to any desire, miracles of miracles and i kiss the sweet earth, never left me in a deep grip for long

i try to fly right. it's hard. the temptation is always there, peeping around seeing if you'll take. you'll take too, make no mistake about it. the thing is the thing. you gotta ride it.

i thanked him profusely, knowing my zine hanging around his pad might have a chance at not being completely ignored.

i wasn't that guy, i thought to myself on the way out. i had met a rockstar a little burnt but not much. what he said made me think. i wasn't the guy to light the world on fire with my songs, jumping around from spa to spa between shows. rockstars party is going to go on and i'll write up this piece and call it a day.

the thing is the thing. he said that. the thing is the thing. it was ridiculous. it was all mine.

over night there were four hundred repetitions, all over town. a card stapled to a pole - the thing is the thing - scrawled around the bottom of a fire hydrant - the thing is the thing - stenciled on the sidewalk - the thing is the thing - scratched out in grime - the thing is the thing - wiped clean on windows - the thing is the thing.

M. was a great buddy watching out and writing too. she pulled off some massive ones. she made total mayhem all the while saying how deep i've gotten myself because of my 'art project'.

my 'art project' was just beginning.

i always thought the writing on the wall should be showstopping. not in terms of beautiful artwork. that was great but i don't mean that.
i always thought, wasn't there just one simple thing you can write down that would get people to nod yeah. that the word would spread and everybody would get it. it didn't have to be all of a sudden, it could take a while like plants growing. and it was just something that made every one ok with life, not afraid of death but not calling it either, just mellow i guess. forgiven. self forgiven. and with the neighbours too. just all the bullshit called off.

yeah, everybody knowing and i mean everybody, that life is sweet and precious and short. i'm a kid and i know that. and i'm a kid to think it could ever happen.

the thing is the thing.

a couple of days later there were pictures of it on the net. i didn't put any up. M. would have told me but she also could have forgotten she did. in any case, there you go. somebody, within the week, had taken pictures of as many of the phrases we wrote. of course i found their postal address and sent them a letter.

dear blogger of note
the thing is the thing
and
the thing is also the thing
i offer you this thing

and here i stopped. how do i sign this ? do i sign this ? is signing this cheezy ? should i use a secret name ? isn't that getting fancy ? and so on. my mind raced as i scrambled whether to use my real name, my zine name (which would lead back to me of course) or just leave another thing is the thing at the bottom of the letter.
i decided to just send the thing i made. it was a short plank of wood that i painted the slogan in brown and black on. i cut up pieces of pictures from a magazine over my letter and glued all that to the other side of the plank. i scraped at the glued paper revealing scraps of text, a 'th', an 'als', a 'you'.

i've been mailing for a while. one of those things that some friends think is neat or cute or just don't know about. you often don't tell people you don't mail to, that you mail. but this started something else. i called M. and we sat down to collage, cut-out and rubber stamp a batch of letters filled with bits of paper, the slogan once maybe twice written different ways.

i sent an anonymous card to rockstar. i put in an obscure reference to the zine i had left him some weeks before. no one would ever get it but it was fun. it led to a streak of puzzle making that left M. tired and my so-called art project swell into something a little bigger.

i had vinyl stickers printed up, 2 inches long, 1 cm high, black border black letters. i put them up in
out of the way places, just out of casual reach. it was fun. i always carried them on me.

it is with awed
attention now waiting
florid ors
nothing doth stretch towards

lord once more
(lady out not waiting)

carapace
finger rattling on board
stick to see it

fountain realm
not a bad place

forest over pound keys
numbers lost in fold

back to the board
harping wise knots

surfs up wavy ears

thank you

R. lines up the objects on the counter according to size. this is done absently, an exercise not in establishing order but in wasting time, in busying idle hands.
the hands of R. have things to do, things requiring attention and intention. moving baubles in a row and standing bobs of plastic at attention are distractions away from a series of deeds, that just the night before, excited R. with commitment.

R. retreats away from the sounds of tonight into the chamber.
The sounds of distance turn on themselves and leave only pale and muffled impressions, and only when listened for. otherwise things are still.
the chamber offers solace and thus, reward.

R. waits for the capsule to enlarge enough so he can climb in. the duties of the day will be offset by this movement. the dishes will wait. the fabric to be folded forgotten. thankfully there is no mammal or bird or fish companion that needs attending, no bowl to refresh or box to clean.
the capsule takes longer than usual. it sputters at half size and stalls.

neglected exercises leave us plump and yearning
the feeling of things cresting right below the surface
i feel that right below the surface of my consciousness there is a world waiting to crest
competing worlds attempting to crest forth into consciousness

coils and fleeting sinew
dorsal fins and hint of scale
cryptic fish or mammal all

ideas push against the bottom of the top, sniffs and hints