The Last 24 Hours

No I'm not being stylistic, I just can't bring myself to write this in "prose" (which requires some sense of meaning, direction, and endings).

* Greyhound bus terminal, standing in the cold, wondering why bus drivers only arrive at the last minute. This route to Toronto is the "molasses" run, which stops at all of Guelph's most picturesque locations along the way. The 130-minute trip should give me lots of time to find an iPod soundtrack but for some reason I can't choose one.

* I have decided at the last minute to bring Thomas Pynchon's novel "Mason & Dixon" with me, because I am so involved with it that I can't picture myself reading anything else. But it weighs at least ten pounds and is huge and unwieldy, and difficult to concentrate on when the guy in the seat behind you is talking about his favourite "keggers." "Dude, Cathy was GREEN, man. I mean GREEN. What? Like, she was SICK, man, Cathy was GREEN."

* At the Toronto Bay Street terminal I pile up all my luggage and begin the trip to Chez J&C. It is very cold, Sunday afternoon, downtown Toronto relatively unpopulated. In the lobby of J&C's apartment, two parents are trying to wrangle a stroller, an infant, and a toddler into the elevator, meanwhile retrieving the mitten that a man had dropped while exiting. Their hands full and their baby-equipment blocking access to all but the smallest person, they send the toddler in to find the mitten, which he is unable to do. The doors keep closing, the parents lunging in to knock the doors open again, the man with one mitten stands with me and we watch the show.

* Jason greets me and we begin the relatively mechanical process of getting into drag. Fortunately the Chez has two bathrooms. Both have been newly renovated in honour of the night, and the hard-working renovator -- Craig -- soon joins us to mix the cocktails. Craig doesn't fool around with cocktails. When Craig makes a cocktail, it is "a glass of vodka with a shot of Diet Pepsi." This explains why, when we leave the apartment, I tell the cab driver to take us to "Queen on Play."

* At Play on Queen -- the venue for the night -- I make myself comfortable in the change room and re-meet both Teran Blake and Fahrenheit. Not only do I not instantly recognize Fahrenheit, but I happily tell her that she "made fun of me once," failing to provide context or explain that I wasn't lodging a complaint with her. This is why my Facebook "agreeableness" score is at 25%. Setting up a sort of Marx Brothers situation, the bar staff begin to pile tables and chairs within the change room. Soon the room contains two small islands, each with a mirror, tenuously connected by a narrow path. When the flock of hispanic queens arrive this becomes particularly surreal.

* Still coming out of a week of insecurity and general "off-ness," I perform two shoe-in numbers that I know I can ALWAYS do well: "Don't Tell Mama" and "Love and Truth." The response is good, as far as I can tell through the blazing spotlight, though the crowd is hardly demonstrative. I make the silly move of trying to pick up tips while wearing well-worn gloves, which results in a spray of coins on stage. Craig cheerfully documents this with his video camera.

* As a whole, we raise a substantial amount of money for the TICOT charities. This is a good feeling indeed. My blood sugar has remained PERFECT all night. Plus, through some accident, I get not one but TWO free drinks. My good feeling knows no bounds.

* After the wonderfully-brief show I begin to understand the bar dynamic a bit more: at 11pm the TICOT performers are followed by a regular show put on by 10,000-volt hispanic queens, a subculture notorious for its crowd loyalty. While watching their show I have my second great bar-stranger conversation of the night, followed finally -- on the way out -- with a nice chat with Michelle DuBarry, who recommends that I improve my diet.

* Back at Chez J&C we review the night's documentary evidence, and Jason informs me that I do a trademarked maneuver with my bum but I'm not sure yet exactly what that is yet. Pizza at 1am. The John Barrowman Experience. A tranquil sleep only once interrupted by the garbage man.

* 8:30am, I assess the situation; Jason has gone to work and Craig is still asleep. I suffer typical morning restlessness and decide I should at least transport my luggage to the Greyhound station, leaving all future possibilities open. As usual when I visit J&C, I exit the apartment with more things than I came with. It's like magic!

* Another cold walk with lots of luggage. A suitcase full of feathers is surprisingly heavy. At the bus station I realize the only "good" breakfast option is an eggs & bacon thing at "Kramden's Kitchen," which I'm sure Michelle DuBarry would berate me for. Nevertheless it is good. My bus will not arrive for ninety minutes.

* I sit and read "Mason & Dixon." This book, along with the constant lifting and pulling of my luggage, is turning my hand into a burning witch's claw. The old lady beside me is very angry about the pigeons, which appear to spend their entire lives inside the terminal. Pigeons are very individualistic. They make coordinated "sweeps" periodically across the floor, and though they look intelligent they keep pecking away at the same specks of indigestible dirt.

* I decide to find a bathroom so I can get some paper towels to wipe my nose with. I take the elevator down to the terminal basement and discover that the bathroom there is a "closed for cleaning." A sign directs me to use the bathrooms in the adjacent Ainsley terminal. I take the elevator back up and pull my luggage across to Ainsley -- which is always deserted, disgusting, and post-apocalyptic -- and discover that the bathrooms there can only be reached by going downstairs. I will not carry my luggage down and then up again. My hand would not survive. Instead, my nose must drip.

* My iPod soundtrack is easier to choose for the ride home: The Fall's "Infotainment Scan." The bus takes a strange and unexplained detour through Mississauga via the mostly-vacant toll roads. The outskirts of Mississauga are surrounded by lakes, barely frozen with patches of rotten ice. These lakes are everywhere and they do not look natural or healthy. Trees are buried within them, their branches poking out. Beyond the lakes, the biggest and most generic suburb of semi-detached houses I have ever seen. I suspect that the lakes are just house foundations waiting to sprout.

* As always when I drive past the Niagara escarpment, I wonder what that huge gouge in the rock is, which you can see going west on the 401 past Halton Hills. Some sort of footpath appears to cross the vast canyon, but it's so far away that you can't see what's really happening. I vow that when I get a car I will investigate this.

* Home. A feeling of goodness, both from the going away and the coming back. My hand will ache for days, burning while I work. The cat is aloof at first, punishing me for leaving her alone for the night, but soon she has come around and we are watching "Constantine." Even she dislikes Keanu Reeves, but she's too polite to complain.

Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday! Happy...err...Hallowe'en!

I'm typing like a gimp because I actually managed to bruise a finger on somebody's can of gray hairspray. I might look like a fearless zombie killer in this picture but I'm actually a pussycat with sensitive skin.

First off, a few pictures from Hallowe'en at Club Abstract. As much fun as it was, I really must relocate MY birthday night because I don't think Hallowe'en is budging. There are too many people out and about and the lines for the bathrooms are too long; I literally left early because I didn't want to cross my legs for half an hour. But the girl dressed as Marie Antoinette was one of my favourites, as was Jodi Brown (above), who actually does my hair.

Besides all that, here's the surprise I've been dropping hints about: an extremely rushed and way-too-sober "mini drag show" recorded just before I left the apartment:



I'm still experimenting with so many elements in this process -- lighting, location, camera settings, frame rates, codecs, conversion, editing -- so I can only say that they'll get better. I hope. In this case the show is DEFINITELY stolen by Zsa Zsa, who decided to sit in and watch me make a fool out of myself.

My birthday present to myself was a new digital camera, a tiny little thing with a million settings. During my experiments I have digitized some old Canadiana off of quarter-century-old videotapes, and I've turned up some real gems (with more to come).

By far the brightest, most sparkly gem is this footage from "As You Like It," a mid-'80s Rogers community cable program starring Wilf and Donna, consummate Mennonites. Every week they'd take telephone requests, and EVERYBODY wanted to hear them do this signature tune. Wilf and Donna are a real treat and I'm proud to bring their brilliance to the world.

Life at the Moment

A quick catch-up:

• Avidly reading John Barth's "LETTERS," trying always to find the most comfortable spot to read it in: porch, balcony, couch, chair, bed, coffee shop, park.
• Meanwhile proofreading a friend's satirical self-help book.
• Also reading a book on composing white papers, since I need to produce one at work.
• And promising, at some point, to read the graphic novels that Ash loaned me last week.
• Editing down certain songs ("Pretend to be Nice," "Terrible Thought," "Heart be Still") for this Thursday's open drag night, and making scattershot plans for the night itself.
• Watching the rain, the wind, and the gradual cooling of each day.
• Tending my hand, which has gotten worse due to all this activity. Acting upon the realization that POSTURE has a lot to do with the pain, and alternating cold-and-hot soaking seems to help it.
• Getting back, eventually, to working on UPhold's "Road to Avondale" project, and writing on Octavia-the-Neo (once my hand has improved and I start reading a lighter book), and taking the next BusWalk Tour.
• Watching the second season of "Twin Peaks" and enjoying it.
• Praying that I don't need to walk in the rain until I can buy new boots on the weekend.
• Pimping for my neighbour's dog. Waiting for the right time to approach the resident squirrels.
• Saving money with a vague hope of buying a car next spring.
• Anticipating next month's Pridetoberfest, BBGG DJ gig, hallowe'en, birthday, and "Mother Mother" live show.
  
• Jus' relaxin'.
  

Languishing

I apologize for not updating the blog much during the last few weeks. Besides a general busy-ness (I'll be in Toronto this weekend staffing the Pridetoberfest booth, and in July I'll be playing a non-speaking role in a webcast film series) and ongoing work on a complicated UPhold track ("The Road to Avondale"), I've mostly been nursing my hand.

As work gets more hectic (and involves more quick fiddling with documents), the strain on my tendonitis gets more extreme, and the less I can do outside of work. This includes typing blogs, cooking, opening windows, picking stuff up, and generally being useful.

I've found that soaking it in icewater makes a world of difference. But it's awfully hard to type when one hand is completely submerged in icewater, believe me.

Hopefully things will get back on track on Monday. And I'm sure I'll have lots of adventures to tell y'all about...

Ouch, My Hand! In Stratford

I've been having an awful time with my right hand and wrist: quite a bit of pain and numbness, which started in March and just hasn't gotten better. A sports doctor put me in a wrist splint, but that hasn't helped. After a while they started whispering "Carpal Tunnel" and on the heels of that, "Diabetic Neuropathy?"

The only way to find out more was to get an EMG (electromyograph) done, and since the people who do them in Kitchener suddenly quit their jobs, and since our hospitals in this region are horribly overbooked, I found myself scheduled for an EMG at Stratford hospital on October 20th.

Stratford Ontario is a 45-minute drive from Kitchener, and it's a pretty little town, the kind of place that would have stayed small if not for a shrewd move by a Stratford native back in the 1950s. He started the "Stratford Festival," a yearly theatrical blowout that has only increased in popularity since. The town of Stratford now has a thriving artistic community. It also has the ubiquitous "rustic knick-knack" shops that small towns get clogged with, presumably because the only people who visit small towns are people who like rustic knick-knacks.

I left all my planning for this excursion until the last minute (yesterday, shame). I have no car so I knew I'd have to take the Greyhound bus...but I figured, heck, Stratford's a popular place -- and what's more it's halfway to the metropolis of London -- so there must be at LEAST six busses a day.

But no. There are two busses. I realized that mine would arrive in Stratford just half an hour before my appointment at the hospital. What's more, Mapquest informed me that the bus station was at one end of the town, and the hospital at the other. And I started to wonder: what if they don't even have CABS? What if my bus is LATE? What if I get lost in the HOSPITAL?

I knew I'd enjoy the actual bus trip, as it goes directly through the towns I grew up in -- Petersburg, Baden, New Hamburg -- and the landscape out there is almost unbearably pretty, all rolling fields, patchy forests, weed-clogged ditches, old curches, farms and grain silos. On the way down I contemplated the girl in the wheelchair who had to go through the ten-minute procedure of being strapped onto an external elevator and hoisted into the bus, and I wondered if it embarassed her.

Stratford DOES have a bus station...barely. It's in a small room in a warehouse, next to a hallway with six chairs in it. It's also in a typically Southern Ontario edge of town: petrochemical company, run-down steel storage buildings from the '70s, railroad tracks, no sidewalks, and a feeling that you could walk forever without getting anywhere.

The women at the station told me that there was no way I could walk to the hospital, so they called me a taxi. The man in the taxi also told me there was no way I could walk to the hospital. It was inconceivable to these people that anybody would want to walk from the bus station to the hospital, but I kept my eyes on the route and started thinking, hey, I could do this. As a side note: all taxis in Stratford charge a flat $7 rate for calls within town. I don't even think the cab had a meter in it. Quaint!

I love hospitals, and the Stratford General Hospital is a nice mix of '40s relic and parasitic steel-and-glass addition. I DID get lost, entirely due to my own stupidity -- I asked for an MRI instead of an EMG -- but finally found myself with electrodes taped to my arm, and a nice lady telling me that bikers and armed-services personnel often can't stand the pain of an EMG.

Let me clarify: in my case, the EMG consisted of the woman placing groups of four electrodes on various parts of my arm, then giving me sets of three progressively more powerful shocks on various nerves. This made me jump and it was all very unpleasant, especially after you've had about fifty of them. According to the woman (who does this all the time and confesses that she's very unpopular) some people just can't stand electric shocks, and they tend to be burly guys, perhaps because they've had awful shocks before. Other people, however, barely notice it at all. I fell somewhere in the middle.

But it was all worthwhile and they made an almost magically occult diagnosis: I have TWO problems. One is tendonitis and is aggravated by typing, and the other is a nerve in my right elbow that I'm messing up by resting it on hard surfaces with my elbow flexed, which I definitely do. The pain is caused by the first problem and the numbness is caused by the second. So it all comes down to ergonomics, no nerve degeneration, nothing that cortisone injections and a change in work furniture won't fix.

But then the real adventure: I had to decide if I wanted to try walking back to the bus station, or if I should hang around the hospital for two hours and then call a cab, or if I wanted to go downtown, sit in a coffee shop for two hours, and THEN call a cab.

As always there are pros and cons. I can certainly afford a $7 cab ride...but I like nothing more than seeing new sights. I LOVE walking through strange neighbourhoods, seeing the houses, getting a taste for the people who live there. I decided to risk it (and it was a bit of a risk, because if I missed my bus...well, there wouldn't be any more busses).

So I started walking. It was chilly and overcast: just grey clouds and dark blue clouds, all pressed together and completely hiding the sun. An autumn day when the light doesn't seem to come from anywhere and you have to keep telling yourself that the sun isn't going down yet. Whirlpools of crackling leaves in the wind, occasional spitting rain.

Most of the houses were pretty '50s red- or yellow-brick middle-class dwellings, with big yards and Hallowe'en decorations. I walked and walked, using the Stratford Visitor's Guide as a map. I saw the biggest, most gorgeous, most easily-accessible abandoned building I've ever seen, an enormous burnt-out warehouse by the railroad tracks with no fences or guardposts.

I passed the huge Via Rail station which looked overdone for the two passenger trains they get every day. Then I found myself alongside the wide, flat switching yards, so many overgrown tracks that nobody uses anymore, so many rotting boxcars covered with graffiti, and nothing on the other side but fields. Unused and abandoned desolation, but beautiful until somebody builds a suburb.

I took a brief detour around the old Krug factory. There's something majestic about an eighty-year-old factory covered with gables and flourishes, dusty windows you can barely see through, redundant rooms and huge ventilation ducts that were probably added when somebody realized that ventilation was important. I also patted a shaggy dog.

After that, the industrial section at the edge of town, pre-fabricated metal buildings thumped down around small, delapidated houses from the 1800s. I passed the Petrochemical plant (and "The Greatest Little Warehouse in Stratford")...and then I was back at the bus station. I felt like Livingstone: everybody told me it was an impossible walk, and I'd done it in 45 minutes.

I think most people just don't walk much anymore.

I sat on one of the six chairs in the hallway and waited for the bus. Soon a woman brought her two daughters into the station; all three had the goat-like look of the born-stupid, people who look at you and stare at you and you can tell that the gears just aren't turning. The mother was enormously fat -- probably the biggest person I've ever seen -- and there was a four-inch gap between where her blouse left off and her track pants started. She could barely breathe. They all had the same unflattering shade of red hair that looks like dying weeds.

Later, outside, the mother lit up a cigarette, and then lit up another for her pre-teen daughter. They coughed horribly. The other daughter, about 10 years old, was taking the bus to stay with her aunt in Kitchener. Part of me wanted to listen to their conversation and another part didn't, but in any case the mother panted and coughed so much in the wind that she was barely audible except when furious, which was much of the time.

Things came to a head when the younger daughter realized she'd forgotten a stuffed animal at home. She wanted the mother to go back and get it. The mother objected to the expense, and instead dug out her wallet and gave something to the daughter, saying "here, sleep with mommy's picture." The daughter started crying, so the mother started yelling "Don't fuckin' do this now! End it now! Why're you doin' this now? Shut the fuck up! END THIS NOW!" in her hoarse, breathless, chain-smoker's voice, complete with that peculiar accent that people recognize as "Canadian Trash." Through it all there was a strange love and respect between the three of them, but they were horrible to be around, and we were all very glad when the bus finally came.

Ouch, My Hand!

Went to the doctor and the doctor said:
"It looks like carpal tunnel syndrome,
and get those damn monkeys off the bed!"

I really, really, really don't want to have carpal tunnel syndrome. REALLY.