As regular readers will know, I seldom write about sex in this space¹.

And I’m not going to start now.

But the tale I will tell, while not sexual at all, certainly involves vulnerability in the same neighbourhood. And also nudity.

I drove up to Summerside today to visit The Recovery Studio, to spend an hour floating in their “sensory deprived isolation tank.”

I do not know exactly why I decided to do this; I really don’t. There was an aspect of 7% more risk to the plan. And curiosity. A need to travel somewhere, even if it was only to Summerside, and inside myself. Perhaps the most honest reason I can give you is that I’ve been wading through some tectonic shifts recently that feel, in a way, like a rebirth²; I needed a way to stop and look at that outside of the daily flow, and removing my senses from the game seemed like it might afford an opportunity to do that.

This is what a sensory deprived isolation tank looks like:

Think “space pod filled with enough super-saturated salt solution to replicate the Dead Sea.” There’s a video walk through of the entire experience; watch that and you’ll have a good idea of the practicalities.

It’s harder to communicate something of the actual experience, because so much of the experience involves absence. Which is the point, but still came as a surprise.

Absence in the sense that after 5 or 10 minutes of acclimation, parts of me simply disappeared. And by “parts,” I mean both my sense of where I was in physical space, but also insidey parts.

It took me some time to get comfortable: I had a kink in my neck, a neck unused to being able to just be, that I needed to find my way through. The position I ended up in was not unlike one you’ll be familiar from the innumerable long-term-voyage-to-Mars where the crew goes into stasis, with my arms folded over my chest.

I didn’t experience any claustrophobia; indeed if I experienced anything it was whatever the opposite of claustrophobia is.

And then everything just kind of drifted away. I wasn’t asleep. But I wasn’t exactly awake either. And for a time–10 minutes? 20 minutes?–I’m not sure where I was. But I do recall, with palpable clarity, a feeling of warmth and confidence and safety that was profound.

I thought, in the back of my mind, that who I might meet on the inside was other people; but I met me³.

When the music faded back up to signal that 5 minutes were left, I was caught unawares. But I was okay. I lifted the lid, had a shower, and emerged into the daylight.

I don’t wish to oversell the experience: I’m still Pete. The parts of me, inside and out, that were sore, are still sore. But I did get somewhere new, and I’m carrying that little bit of new around with me still; it seems to have staying power. 

1. I never write about sex in this space.
2. I have used the word rebirth in this space three times in 22 years: modern-day rebirth of the Star Trek franchise, rebirth of the Brackley Drive-in once again, and implies a rebirth of the nuclear power industry. I have never used it to describe myself, and doing so feels deeply weird.
3. Yup, this.

I can literally not conceive of what pattern of search behaviour led Google to conclude that I’m in the market for a Saskatchewan tryst.

Early last week I had a request from Abby Hyndman, daughter of my friends Nicky and Dave: she’s a student in the Holland College videography program, and wondered if I’d entertain being the subject of a short documentary about letterpress printing, her final course assignment. I happily agreed, and met Abby and her trusty assistant in the letterpress shop last Thursday afternoon for a few hours.

I needed something to print.

I’d been thinking a lot about the word “nuzzle” of late, and so it became my subject: I wanted to see if I could represent, in cold hard type, a sense of “nuzzlieness.”

I started off on the bench with various ink colours and improvised: red-over-yellow, yellow-over-red, upside down over rightsize up, backward and forward. Midway through my improv I tweaked things to dip the U below the baseline, thinking, perhaps, it could act as a sort of nuzzled-nose.

Once Abby was in the shop, the improvisation continued, and where I ended up was rather magical in the way that sometimes happens when you don’t plan and just let the type dance:

Abby documented the process, and so you can watch a slice of the making of the Nuzzle in the video she sent along today, kindly giving me permission to share:

If you’d like to hire Abby for her video or graphic design talents, you can find her here.

You might want to take the afternoon off to read These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett.

One of the fun new aspects that being a single parent has revealed is that my birthday celebration falls to me to help facilitate.

So while propriety would normally prevent me from calling attention to it, in this case I’m both the ringmaster and the elephant, so drop over to Oliver’s blog and check out what he’s up to.

From the SPACE10 newsletter:

Last yeast has made us painfully aware of the limitations of systems that underpin our everyday life: from supply chains and healthcare, to the design of our schools, offices, and neighbourhoods. Now is the time to start overhauling these systems.

While last yeast was, I presume, a typo, it’s a cracking one, as it brought my mind to the notion of a yeastless dystopian future, the run up to which, in the spirit of peak oil, might be nicknamed just that.

“Have you thought much about how you’re going to mark last yeast?”, Niamh asked Jamali.

“Probably with pizza,I reckon,” he replied with moribund resignation, “or perhaps a hot cross bun.”

Contemplating an unleavened future is almost inconceivable. But with bees under threat, the coffee supply threatened by a shipping container shortage and, well, climate change, it is safe to assume that in my lifetime many things that I have taken for granted all my life will simply disappear forever. Probably not yeast. Probably something we least expect, like hyacinths or red paint or merino wool or robins.

In the meantime, enjoy your toast while you can.

I cycled out to the almost-middle of the Hillsborough Bridge using the new not-quite-open-yet-and-strewn-with-large-gravel active transportation pathway. My arrival happened to coincide with the sun setting directly over downtown Charlottetown, so I set my iPhone up on a wooden post, set the camera in time lapse mode, and waited an increasingly-chilling 20 or 30 minutes for the sun to set. The time lapse allows you to see it all in 37 seconds.

Opposition Social Development and Housing critic Hannah Bell has tabled Motion 30 – Social assistance vision care in the Legislative Assembly of PEI, and it bears paying attention to, as it addresses both a specific deficiency in the Island’s Social Assistance policies, and the larger issue of why they are so seldom updated.

The specific issue: Social Assistance will provide $54 for an eye exam and $115 for eyeglass frames and lenses, rates that have not been updated since 2007.

As anyone who’s ever gone for an eye exam knows, eye exams don’t actually cost $54 (the last one I had cost $125).

And as anyone who’s ever gone shopping for eyeglasses knows, eyeglasses don’t actually cost $115.

This makes no sense.

High-quality, properly corrected vision, reviewed regularly, is a necessary precondition for employment and education, to say nothing of simply being able to exist day to day with confidence and comfort.

My eyeglasses–progressive bifocals with prisms that cost several multiples of $115–are basic to my ability to exist; without them I could not work, drive, read a book, watch television, or make out the ingredients on a pill bottle. All Islanders deserve the right to these things.

Motion 30 is a modest, targeted motion with three asks:

• Urge government to review this policy and increase the fee paid for visual assessment to align with the current average fee.
• Urge government to increase the coverage for basic frames and lenses or contact lenses to reflect current average cost.
• That these increases be done in consultation with the PEI College of Optometrists. 

I encourage you to contact your MLA to encourage them to understand this issue, and to support Motion 30.

While I remain steadfast in my belief that books are meant to be made of paper, I also know now, firsthand, how much energy it takes to schlep printed books around when they’re ordered. 

As such, I have, at long last, created an ebook version of Using Her Marbles, the book that I published in print in the fall that chronicles the five years that our family spent living with Catherine’s incurable cancer.

If you need a quick way to share that, UsingHerMarbles.com will get you there. Delivered as a PDF.

I took my bicycle off the road for winter 101 days ago, on December 12, 2020.

Today, with the roads dry, the temperature 11ºC, the weather sunny and windless, and the prospect of bánh mì to be had out the Avenue, I grappled the bike out of the basement, topped up the tires, donned my helmet and safety vest, and started cycling season earlier than I ever have, 26 days earlier than I did last year.

Oh how I missed it.

Credit due to Brother Steve in Montreal for the inspiration: he was out for his first cycle on the weekend, and jealousy and competitiveness were all the extra push I needed.