April 30 2023

Last year on April 30th I went to the opening of the new Skull Skates store in Qualicum Beach and then left a few days later for Victoria. I wasn’t expecting to stay here and it still doesn’t feel like home, though I know I’ll feel more and more rooted here as time goes on.

I stopped forcing myself to eat and my body thanked me for it. I didn’t feel any hunger pangs through the night and slept a lot with the help of some gentle herbal sleepytime tea. This morning I woke up soaked in sweat and had a bath and made my way to the grocery store to pick up some fruits and vegetables for making smoothies. I’ll slowly start giving myself nutrients again. I’m also adding some lemon and local sea salt to my drinks to replace the electrolytes I lost from sweating so much.

I used to get terrible earaches all throughout my childhood and have had my ear drum burst on multiple occasions. I came to realize over the years that the simple solution to my narrow Eustachian tubes is to sleep upright when I’m congested so they can drain, and this seems to be saving me.

I’m pretty sure I have bronchitis right now. Yet having the change in perspective and seeing this as a powerful time of cellular regeneration and solitude is helping me feel better about how sick I am. I haven’t been honouring my needs for sensory deprivation lately and now I’m making up for lost time.

My sinuses cleared up somewhat and I decided to watch the Last Unicorn:

It’s a very rare person who’s taken for what he truly is.

You have all the power you need if you dare to look for it

The sea is always good. There’s nothing I can look at for very long, except the sea

No cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who seem to enjoy it.

But I’m always dreaming, even when I’m awake.

There are no happy ending because nothing ends.

Of all the unicorns, she is the only one that knows was regret is. And love.

I cried and cried and cried some more and there are still more tears to come.

What do cigarettes and alcohol represent for me and why has it been so hard for me to let go of my occasional use when it always causes me so much suffering afterwards? I think part of it is that they represent a former version of myself that I still cling to and I feel scared to let that go completely, and like I’ll be seen as uncool or people won’t want to hang out with me at all. All of the people who I’ve dated over the past few years have led me into further alcohol use and cigarette smoking that mirrored the unhealthy nature of those relationships.

I look to cigarettes for stress relief even though they make me more anxious and I look to alcohol to feel more comfortable in social situations even though I become a distorted version of myself. I’m pretty good at going out without alcohol these days, I just got swept up in the moment with others who were drinking. I have to stay true to myself.

Also, just because someone else is smoking doesn’t mean that I have to. I have a really hard time seeing others smoking cigarettes and not craving one really badly. I’m not sure how to get over this. I stopped smoking once for a year before I went to Shanghai. I kind of knew I would start smoking again if I went to Asia. It’s time to quit again for good.

On this day when the veil is thin I ask for guidance in staying healthy and staying on my own path.

I reflected more on the Last Unicorn story and I came to a place that I often come to these days in having a recognition of how Eurocentric the story is, and that although it's based in lands in America, it hearkens back to romanticized aspects of Old Europe and leaves out Indigenous and other BIPOC people.

This kind of baked in white supremacy does have a certain amount of ignorance and innocence attached to it, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there.

The Last Unicorn is a beautiful story and I loved the book, though I also recognize now that so much of what gets created on colonial lands erases the history that was here before by assuming it never even existed.

After watching the Last Unicorn I started reading Ursula Le Guin’s Buffalo Gals and other Animal Presences. This is the third book I’ve read by Le Guin, the other two being The Tombs of Atuan and The Beginning Place. Her stories are unique in that they include many different cultures and races and she also has a story written about gender fluidity (The Left Hand of Darkness).

From Buffalo Gals:

Why do animals’ in kid’s books talk? Why do animals in myths talk? How come the prince eats a burned fish-scale and all of the sudden understands what the mice in the wall are saying about the kingdom? How come on Christmas night the beasts in the stables speak to one another in human voices? Why does tortoise say ‘I’ll race you,’ to the hare and how does Coyote tell Death, ‘I’ll do exactly what you tell me!’ Animals don’t talk – everybody knows that. Everybody, including quite small children, and the men and women who told and tell talking animal stories knows that animals are dumb: have no words of their own. So why do we keep putting words into their mouths?

We who? We the dumb: the others.

In the dreadful self-isolation of the Church, that soul-fortress towering over the dark abysms of the bestial/mortal/World/Hell, for St. Francis to cry out ‘Sister sparrow, brother wolf!’ was a great thing. But for the Buddha to be a jackal or a monkey was no big deal. And for the people Civilization calls 'primitive,' 'savage,' or 'undeveloped,' including young children, the continuity, interdependence, and community of all life, all forms of being on earth, is a lived fact, made conscious in narrative (myth, ritual, fiction). This continuity of existence, neither benevolent nor cruel itself, is fundamental to whatever morality may be built upon it. Only Civilization builds its morality by denying it’s foundation.

By climbing into his head and shutting out every voice but his own, 'Civilized Man' has gone deaf. He can’t hear the wolf calling him brother- not master, but brother. He can’t hear the earth calling him child – not Father, but son. He hears only his own words making up the world. He can’t hear the animals, they have nothing to say. Children babble, and have to be taught how to climb up into their heads and block out the doors of perception. No use teaching women at all, they talk all of the time, of course, but never say anything. This is the myth of Civilization, embodied in the monotheisms which assign soul to man alone.

I enjoy the works of Ursula Le Guin a lot and she’s an incredible writer yet I found myself hitting another wall when reading an interview with her done not too long before she passed away. In it she talks about how she came to write about anarchy, yet she stops at wholly identifying with anarchy and calls herself a “bourgeoisie housewife”. I couldn’t help reflecting on my recent reevaluation of the works of Patti Smith who on one of her albums recorded a sacred Hopi dance that was never meant for non-Indigenous people to practice, and her own roots as a White American middle class person.

When I look at the world that I’m in right now and the reality of the problems that we’re facing globally I feel a bit betrayed by both of these women, and so many others who lived their lives very much for themselves and left behind beautiful art and writing and music, but not much in the way of hope for a real future. And no groundwork for how to go about making real changes. At no point in the lives of so many people from the beatnik, hippie and punk generations did they really break free from the corporate world. Artists continue to use Ticketmaster and print their works on paper made from fresh cut trees and live lifestyles that are reliant upon the exploitation of the third world.

Everything needs to change.