I have thought to myself, you should put up a blog for your children to read about that time in history about [those endless years with] that virus. It's as simple as it is complex. Yes, there have been inconveniences: I can't get my vaccine passport QR code to work, for one. Something about how it was entered in the system, is it L or Lynn, a comma after the last name? We tried it all and the lady at the insurance place wouldn't, for the love of God, open up her computer and compare it to my card despite my quiet-yet-assertive method of asking in three different ways. Would a compound-complex sentence help, or is simple always best? So I just have that flimsy little card that you get with the sticker: "I stuck it to COVID!" Like a punch ticket to get a free blizzard. So far it's worked fine. 

What else? Well, I have been sitting at home for a week practicing my fire-starting skills while my workplace passive-aggressively asks if I can find any other childcare options. No, I do not wish to pay a sitter to sit with my sick son while I am already paying for his daycare spot. No, my husband who does not get compensated for taking days at home with sick kids does not wish for this temporary unemployment. Subs are few and far between these days, something about fear in uncertain times. Maybe something to do with having to be vaccinated or show proof of a negative Covid test to come to work. Cue guilt for burdening one's fellow employees to cover one's classes in a time where words like mental health and stress are buzzwords on PD days. Benjamin has a cold and must be 48-hours symptom free prior to returning to daycare, per the regulations. In case you didn't know, the average cold lasts ten days, so you can imagine how often that is actually enforced. Not all professions are as accommodating as mine, passive aggressive or not. Did I shove a q-tip on a diet up his nasal passage until I felt slight resistance and turn it in a full circle for 3-5 seconds (definitely 3) while holding his arms down with my legs to make sure his sister isn't a close contact in order to make a friend feel comfortable having her in her house and taking her to her dance class tonight because Benjamin isn't allowed in such institutions while ill? Maybe. I mean, I didn't mind the science experiment either, the thrill of waiting to see if it's a single or a double line. He only cried a bit. 

In the beginning of things, the grocery shelves were cleared out. It was a bit eerie, but more annoying. It was the start of looking at one's neighbours and family members and thinking, why? My mother-in-law has turned into a food-and-dried-goods hoarder, canning carrots, potatoes, soups, instead of spending time with her grandchildren. Daniel, can you build some more shelving? At the start the kids virtually never went to Grandma's because she works in healthcare (or she's canning), so it could either come or go, but even with the vaccine, the habits have been made. Mom and Dad used to come to every birthday, but then one time they were sick, or maybe it was to try to keep our circle of germs smaller, being they're from a larger metropolis, and then this past birthday they forgot to send the present on time in the mail. It doesn't really matter, does it? 

I mean, it's everything and it's nothing. We stopped going to church. I have been fighting with acne on my face from the Norwex masks, because I was trying to be environmental, but it's just itchy and nasty, so I caved and bought a box of those trendy black disposable ones from Pharmasave, because the ones supplied at school hurt the back of my ears. I have to be a mask-police at work, on top of the sit-in-your-desk and ask-permission-to-use-the-washroom and put-your-cellphone-on-my-desk and no-you-can't-leave-two-minutes-before-the-bell police, but at least I don't have to be a social-distance-enforcer, like last year. Our emergency services have been reduced, gone, reduced. Maybe don't climb that latter, kids. 

In all honesty, I can't really distinguish the negativities that exist between starting full-time work in the fall of 2020 and Covid, because they're connected like a sexual disease, unwelcome warts in tender places-- never seeing family; stress and anxiety; avoiding friends and conversations; busy and tired; running spiritually on E (not making time for reading, yoga, nature, stillness). 

Of course I'm anxious. I haven't wanted to talk about it because it's all that's talked about. Are you getting your kids vaccinated? Have you heard that the world powers have conspired to be a totalitarian government and that you're all a bunch of Nazi Germany sheep? Is the vaccine passport and lack of citizen rights turning us into a communist country? If only those anti-vaxers would have just gotten vaccinated, like every other vaccination out there, maybe we could get rid of the masks with lower rates. I can't even talk to so-and-so anymore. Did you know that *spews a bunch of rancid diseases* will be common in children due to the vaccine? If you don't want to get Covid, stay home! If you don't want to get vaccinated, stay home! And, one of the worst: variant, variant, variant. I find myself seeking escape in books and TV shows: hibernating, pretending, waiting. 

A long time ago I made this sketch of a tattoo with a clock and "THE TIME IS NOW" scrawled where the 1-12 should be. It's been on my mind. Open up, strengthen a few muscles, get rid of the hunch, pet the dog, laugh. Shutting down is easy, human. Pull the blanket in on yourself and cave, gravity at work. But some of the wisest lessons come from young minds. You can view a snotty nose as a curse or a snack. Eating it doesn't make it not snot, but ignoring it only causes its slow descent and hating it doesn't get rid of it. If you don't water the plant it'll die, tick, tick, tick. 

Dreams have a way of waking us. We re-plugged in our 11-year-old iMac, in our once-kids-room-now-office-space, only ever temporarily resurrected for back-ups, that photo or password. It has been cause of long-dead synapses to flow within my mind, the same electrical energy powering the unit. 

We had to take Benjamin to the dentist because he has cavities due to neglectful brushing. The anecdote I like to say is that I brushed my teeth a whole of ten times in my childhood and didn't have one cavity, so it comes from Daniel's side of the family. Blinking screen: laughter. Back to the city of my twenties, the boring familiarity, endless loops of discontent. People as dead as the screen used to be, emotionless memories, pixilated into living beings I touch and play with in my dreams. 

It's like how you think you'd be so different in high school now. The things that might be different if you are the person you are now, then. 

Yeah, right. 

But I've spent most of my life in a dream anyway: what might be, what should be, what isn't, what I will be, what I haven't been. Sprouting life from the deadfall, moss and mushrooms, un-raked grass. Parts of us die--move on. 

Candlesticks un-melted; gentle snow, resting in the curvature of the trees, forever thawing and melting, changing state. The plant looks like it's dying and yet it's flowering, vibrant purple against the white of the snow, as violent as blood itself, reaching always out, from one windowsill to the next. Turn the plant or it will grow lopsided. We'll always cherish what's old and lost, what wasn't or maybe was, but you weren't sure, because you never really touched it. Whatever might have been, dreams can will: the reverie violet pressed against glass.

Sleep Routines

 

 

Beneath the white flannel I face

you facing red light, reflecting 

on the ceiling like water, triangle dips and swirls. Legs that once

stretched to meet my thigh, now splayed 

outgrowing the cocoon, my body 

your cradle. Holding that red dragon 

watch it fly in chubby hands, cheek surrenders

against forehead, arm 

now around my neck and pat pat pat with fingers only

feigning sleep with a sssssss-exhale. Pretend until it happens. Eyelashes 

bow and rise, surviving 

the wake, toes press until the cozy nestle melts

intentions of defiance, swallowing 

now those blurring red tones with black, red, black, still

and I know it's almost time for my escape 

those hues and softness beg my stay 

his perfect form, elongated baby.

Gravity

She sat, on a comfortable couch, papers

stacked in neat piles, clipped and bull-dogged, sticky

notes listing incompletes. She had

to get up, adjust her bones and fight

gravity, pressing her

down

down

down

into the couch, into the flooring, into the joists on

stacks of concrete

on gravel

on sand

and whatever else, right to that core. She just knew

if she didn't move, her pelvis

and all the rest of it

would split

through fatty tissue, veins and skin

all those layers

bursting a skeletal display

of density versus Newton force

for her daughter

watching a show she refers to as Rydan (a mispronunciation)

to see.

The Cabin

That long drive that took us 
to all those spruce trees

so skinny

so tall
just an hour from home that

moss-drenched world, ground might give way 
but I couldn’t explore much then. Excitement was  
quad paths with Grandpa, engine revving high 
we thought we were going so fast. 

We’d squeal 
as the Suburban chugged 
past the boats, that marina or moor closed down now 
till we arrived at that impossible roof slanting 
nothing but aesthetic charm, wood 
among the woods, cement path leading past  
the fire pit Grandpa built

the treehouse my oldest siblings hogged, fizzy candies 
dissolving in our mouths. The game 

was to hop those round blocks 

all the way to the dock. It was always 
too cold to swim, dark-green water, slime on the rocks, all the good 
fish gone but I know Grandma loved to sit there because 

they framed that picture so large. Inside, 

shiny helmets 
and so many coats

the toilet you had to flush with your foot

the pike fish petrified

Simon Says under the couch. We’d pet the black bear 

as we went up the stairs, peer 

into its mouth. Put your hand in. We didn't know
the tongue wasn't real. My sisters

got to sleep on bunk beds in the room

with the dolls I didn’t like, staring 
at the diamond-shaped bits of mattress 

sinking through the wires, feet pushing 
up. I don’t remember where I slept. 

A metaphor given in one of my university classes under the label of "social justice" has remained with me. I've spoken of it before. It was on privilege, stating that those with privilege are people who have their pockets filled. In order to restore the balance between the privileged and those who are not, those who are privileged need to empty their pockets.

I'm rather ashamed to admit that I am baffled by the fact that privilege, namely white privilege is a concept that has long been acknowledged, and yet it's still widely disregarded and ignored. When it has come up in topic, most white folks that I know roll their eyes and act annoyed, or simply haven't heard of it. It's just those First Nations people complaining again. When will an apology ever be enough. Sure, let's throw more money on it. That happened a long time ago. Those people are just lazy. I've worked hard for what I've earned; it wasn't from any ancestors of mine. Privilege? Are you kidding me?

I am reading a book called On Truth, a collection of lengthy quotations by George Orwell in his various works under the theme of "truth." The subject of human beings' ability to brush truth to the side on certain occasions (primary examples being privilege and treatment of other human beings) is thick. That white privilege is fact doesn't matter if people discredit it. If we refuse to empty our pockets, nothing will ever change.

An example of wilful ignorance is seen in Orwell's review of Upton Sinclair's World End, who wrote about deplorable conditions in American slaughterhouses for the people working there. His aim was to draw attention to the foreigners working in these conditions, but all people were concerned about was that it was an unclean workplace for the meat entering their stomachs. The treatment of the human beings or why certain humans were working there while others were not was not deemed valuable enough information by the public to do anything about it. For whatever reason, it was accepted as the way things are. Systemic, if you will. Inequality is the norm; it has always existed and always will continue to exist.

Orwell points out that England as a nation was built on the backs of foreigners, "half-starved Asiatic coolies" (Orwell 71) as he puts it. This is well known, as well known as it is about North America. To possess this information there needs to be two opinions (that Orwell argues could have been expressed in the press, but were not): the first opinion would side with Hitler in that we are the superior race and so we should "live by exploiting inferior races" (72), but that wasn't said, and isn't said today, even though our exploiting other nations in order to maintain our level of comforts, all the while knowing others do not have the same comforts, expresses this ideology in action. On the other end,

The other possible policy was to say something like this: We cannot go on exploiting the world forever, we must do justice to the Indians, the Chinese and all the rest of them, and since our standard of living is artificially high and the process of adjustment is bound to be painful and difficult, we must be ready to lower that standard of living for the time being. Also, since powerful influences will be at work to prevent the underdog from getting his rights, we must arm ourselves against the coming international civil war, instead of simply agitating for higher wages and shorter hours (72-73).

But are we willing to lower our standard of living for the sake of equality? To empty our pockets to balance the scales? Obviously not. We hold onto the possessions and rights we have as tightly as a toddler demanding mine of a possession a parent has given. We teach children to share to make friends and be socially acceptable creatures, all the while denying others the same rights we hold by refusing to acknowledge privilege itself, let alone making any effort to give any of it up. The fact is that truth does not guarantee change. We hear truth and fact and may choose to ignore it. Privilege gives that option. Meanwhile, our pockets remain full with clean water and sound housing, good schooling and credibility in courtrooms and what not, accepted as the way things are, truth be damned.

You knew where he'd been by his toothpicks. He always let his hair grow too long, hiding behind that beard. "That private man," she said. "Won't even tell his own wife his thoughts about God. Never asks for help from nobody." He worked late that day, concerned about debt and time.