Chapter 24: The Astrologer and me. I am a shaman. You have been warned!

So, it’s been a while since my last update. Well, forgive me; I’ve been busy not working. I went to Gay Pride in San Francisco; ho hum. I have never been so cold. Four seasons in a day they say. One day after I got back I went with Mum and her boyfriend, Hugh, to Hornby Island, a tiny speck of land with 1000 or so residents off the coast of Vancouver Island. Hugh has a cabin up here. Every summer when I was a boy we spent several weeks on Hornby Island, and the place is precious to me because of the happy memories. But it was strange – do, do, do, do Twilight Zone – to be back after some 20 years away. When we firs arrived on Hornby Island it was raining heavily, and the lot surrounding Hugh’s A-frame cabin was covered with dozens and dozens of the most disgusting slugs – olive green and black and about the size of a small banana! Mum and I spent 45 minutes scooping them up with a shovel and pitching them into the surrounding bushes. We had to do this repeatedly for the first few days until the slugs got the hint. The rest of the week was OK, slugwise. Hornby Island has the best beach in British Columbia, called Tribune Bay with its miles of sheltered golden sand. And the island is covered with tall firs, cedars and arbutus trees, and salal bushes, but the forest here doesn’t have the same dark, brooding feeling of the forest around Vancouver. In fact, Helliwell Park on the island has one of the last standing first growth (ie never logged) Douglas Fir forests in British Columbia. It was a very peaceful and serene feeling, to be standing amongst these huge ancient trees. The circumference of their trunks at ground level was more than three arm spans! I felt like I was standing amongst some very old, wise spirits.

Readers must time travel here: skip forward, by imagining my routine of writing, daily gym, play with cats, movies, see friends, and each day catch my mother rooting through my stuff in my room looking for evidence of God-knows-what. My days seem impossibly full. And, then, I did a writers course out at UBC - a marvelous experience. It was a toss up for me between the fiction or the poetry course. But I opted for the former because I figured: (a) it’s much harder to get constructive criticism to improve one’s poetry; and (b) I had terrible fears about the type of person who would sign up for the poetry section. And, my, my, my – were those fears ever well founded! On the mike night (readings by students from their works in progress) middle-aged woman after middle-aged woman fought with yellowed tooth and laquered nail to get to the mike to read their poems about menopause. Poems that ran such as “Clotted friend, like any blood relative, I miss you when you are gone…”. UGH! I was going spastic in my chair at the back of the room. But the workshop was great, the weather was lovely, and it was fun to cycle around the campus of my old alma mater, which I haven’t visited in more than 15 years! I even visited Wreck Beach, a world famous nudist beach on the university campus, where the nudist hippies sell health sandwiches, blended drinks, and drugs openly with complete impunity, because the city police don’t patrol the area. The fiction writers’ course was a revelation because while my stories were well received, and while I realized that I can make it as a writer, I also concluded that I still have far to go before I produce anything commercially publishable. And moreover, even when you do get published, the money you get is negligible, unless you are Steven King. Eg, $60,000 – and that’s Canadian – for a novel which sells well, and which probably took you two years to write? So I think I’m going to go back to banking for a few more years now, and continue writing on the side. I have just finished a short story about an infidelity in a marriage, but told from the point of view of the family dog. And I am currently writing a comedic story about a woman who locks her children in the refrigerator. Kind of like the movie Serial Mom. The ideas are flowing faster than I can get them down on paper. It’s very disturbing.

Yesterday I went to a very renowned astrologer in Vancouver who did my natal chart. Wow! Spooky stuff. She got my personality down to the tiniest dot over the smallest little letter i, though some of the past lives stuff I had difficulty accepting. But I chose to interpret it metaphorically, rather than literally. So, here’s the interesting stuff. My signs are clustered in fire and earth. I am hugely Leo in personality, with Capricorn rising. Pros: strong leader, courageous, thoughtful, careful. Cons: guarded, difficulty connecting with emotion, hard and defensive, need to learn how to exercise an innate, but underutilized compassion. (Hmmmm, interesting, I thought.) I also have a tendency to go full guns and throw myself into something, and I am a perfectionist so I usually make a success of what I put my mind to, but it is very costly for me in terms of balance in other parts of my life. (Now I’m really starting to pick up and listen!) She also pointed out that the worst thing for me is to be insulted, or humiliated. It is an absolute show-stopper for me; I just don’t know how to deal with it. (How truly she has skewered me here, I thought!) And, in a past life, I was very creative/spiritual, but my work was cut off, destroyed, wiped out by a war or natural catastrophe, and my job in this current life is to finish it. I died a violent death in a previous life; she said she had strong visions of disembowelment. And I would relive this over an over again in each life – at this point, my face must have looked stricken, because she hurridly added “in a much milder fashion of course” – until I overcame the creative/spiritual block. (Lovely. My stomach is somersaulting already!). Jupiter is transient in my life starting very soon, which indicates that I will “almost certainly” fall in love over the next year. (Yay!) But the relationship will be marked by intense power struggles, which are meant to be a learning process for me. (Oh no! NOT AGAIN!) And now the coup de grace: Madame Astrologer told me that it was very clear that in a past life – “perhaps the one in which I was sacrificed and disemboweled” – I had strong shamanic powers, and they are latent in me life now. It will apparently be healing for me to get in touch with those shamanic powers – see above my spiritual connectedness to trees etc – and become a compassionate healer! But, hey, I thought. Shamanic powers! How cool. So, folks, don’t humiliate me or insult me. Don’t piss me off! You have been warned!

Idiot alert: Do NOT, I repeat do NOT go see the movie AI. Cloying Speilbergian sweetness starting at the very point about 1/3 through the movie when he took over from Stanley Kubrick. Totally puerile. And virtually unintelligible at the end. (You know when the director is forced to introduce a voice-over right at the end of the film to explain its conclusion, that he has totally lost his way.) I have decided I will never see another Speilberg ever again. They make me into an emotional bulimic.

Oh, the results of the Canada poll? Inconclusive, though most respondents reported receiving an earful when they have mistaken Canadians for Americans. But one Spaniard said I was too hard on Canadians. (You are such a nice boy, Jose!) And most readers simply did not respond at all. They, like me, are probably bored of the subject of Canada, or perhaps they don’t read my e-mails. (But they should. I am, after all, a powerful shaman!)

Chapter 23: All about my mother

I can’t help it. I’m going to tell you all about my mother, who is 73 this year. This dispatch will be in the form of lists. Forgive me, but it’s the best way.

Things my mother and I disagree on:

1. What constitutes a sunny day. She says when the mist is more than 20cm from your nose, and the moisture only speckles your skin. I say you need to be able to see your shadow.
2. What constitutes food. She says anything, save for sushi and the mineral category of the Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral game. I say sushi counts, but half of the things in her refrigerator don’t. Yesterday I removed something from her refrigerator whose use by date was November 19, 1999! My friend Roger came into her kitchen, idly cast his eyes over her spice rack and shouted in alarmed tones “My God! I remember this particular brand of spices, Woodwards, from when I was a child in the 70s!” I looked more closely. She had little bottles of 1 and 3/4 oz of fennel and cinnamon – clearly purchased before Canada went metric! These spices have been sitting on her shelf for nearly 30 years. (Roger later told me that his mother buys masses of tinned foods, especially soups, every time that she finds them on sale. Consequently, there are hundreds and hundreds of tins of food in their basement, and the stockpile grows every year. Roger says to me, in fearful tones, “I’m gonna have to deal with that food when they die!”
3. What constitutes a person. She’s never said anything outright, but I can see she counts her poodle, Frankie. Well, I love animals, but…
4. What constitutes such a level of human stupidity that one is entitled to remark, “That person is so unbelievably stupid!”. Maybe I’m intolerant. I dunno. But if she had to attend my photography class and listen to the dimwit questions posed by the other students, I’m sure she’d see things my way on this one.
5. What constitutes an attractive level of muscular development on a male. She doesn’t like my gym, or my muscles. She wants me to look like a starving refugee, I think. I don’t know why. She also doesn’t like the “gunk” I put in my hair, and says it would be nicer if it was “wispy”.
6. The appropriate disposal of one’s ashes after cremation. To scatter them on a beach or in one’s garden is, to my way of thinking, a beautiful thing. Mum, on the other hand argues with surprising vehemence and regular frequency – she brings it up all the time! – that my brother and I should divide her ashes into two little portions, so that we can each have a little box of her burned bones sitting on the mantle pieces. I dunno, but this rather morbid idea seems more suited to Third World political figures (ie the refrigerated glass coffins of Chairman Mao, Evita Peron, or Ferdinand Marcos). And what if I don’t have a fireplace? Mum is worried that without the visible reminder of her ashes, my brother and I will forget her. I tell her that I think of her every day, and that she will live inside of me forever, but she isn’t really convinced.

Things my mother and I agree on:

1. We love each other. And we love my brother.
2. Survivor is the MOST FANTASTIC AND COMPELLING television ever, and we are glad that Tina won.
3. Mum is a more inventive cook than me.
4. We love her garden. (She’s got a very green thumb!)
5. It’s better to have the TV on LOUD so that you can hear it properly.
6. Her boyfriend Hugh – whom she met on a blind date – is a very nice man. However, she did say to my friend Roger, “As for boyfriends, I think I want a younger one.”
7. Smoking is disgusting. (We both used to smoke.)
8. The best Thai curry is green, not red or yellow.

Strange things about my mother:

1. She drinks her tea out of a cup with a straw, and saves the straw. I find these little lipstick-encrusted tubes everywhere around the house.
2. She saves her used teabags on a plate, where they collect in a little pile. (I threw the pile out this morning.)
3. She loves science fiction movies, but is not so into the chick flicks. She’s been begging me to take her to see Return of the Mummy with Brendan Fraser. I refused, but offered my escort services to Planet of the Apes as a consolation prize, which she seemed to accept. She keeps asking when it debuts.
4. She can’t remember names, even mine, her first-born son who has been a major part of her live for 36 years. When she addresses me, I am splattered with a stream of names: “Martin….Roger…Frankie, Hugh…Martin…..uh, honey, would you…..”. Roger is my father’s name, Frankie is the dog’s name, Martin is my brother’s name, and Hugh is her boyfriend’s name. It’s weird.
5. My mother does aerobics to psyche herself up for her biweekly bridge game. The song she plays is Madonna’s Material Girl, but I don’t think she knows who Madonna is. I keep telling her she needs to breathe while she’s doing the aerobics, but she says she can’t. So she doesn’t keep at it for very long.
6. My mother may be a bisexual. She told me at lunch today that she could “swing both ways”. I narrowly escaped choking to death on my grilled chicken breast. She said she sometimes wonders what attractive young women look like with their clothes off. I have never wondered that.
7. My mother makes it a point of principle to transgress against the Native American Indians who live on the reservation lands near her house. (The fact is, we are certain to be living on a native burial ground or land of some other such spiritual significance.) I call her squaw, telling her she practically lives on the reservation.) She drives on their streets, despite signs saying “Reservation Lands, Residents Only Please.” “They drive on my streets, so I should be able to drive on theirs!” I think she’s getting bolshy in her golden years.
8. The ice cream truck drives up our quiet off road crescent frequently, and stops to linger on the street right outside our house. And only once it’s right outside our house does the truck driver start to play that super creepy dingly bell song. Despite my mother’s claim to have conquered her ice cream addiction, I think the ice cream truck has been here before.
9. She has a rather sinister-sounding coffee group meeting of older ladies every other week. I was evicted from the house for the duration of this meeting. I asked what the meeting was for. Mum said, rather cryptically, that “they discuss the things in the newspapers”.

Wonderful things about my mother:

1. She’s so open-minded. She came into the office room the other day when Roger and I are looking at personal profiles of gay men on the internet. “Go to the next one!” she commands. “He’s too ugly for you!”
2. She’s taken up painting and is very talented. Her watercolors are beautiful.
3. She agreed to look after my cats while I’m trying to figure out where to live and what to do with my life.
4. She likes all my friends, and boyfriends, who all think she is wonderful.
5. She makes lunch for me if I beg.