I experimented with printing with florescent inks today and discovered that it’s impossible to do justice to the result in a photograph, so you’ll have to trust me that there’s more to these than meets the digital eye. The “It Was Nothing,” in particular, printed in florescent yellow in reversed type, makes my iPhone’s brain explode when trying to focus.

Regardless, the psychotherapeutic result was achieved, as, for that, it’s only my hands and eyes that were important, and I’m standing right here in the analog world.

It’s my brother Mike’s birthday today. Here are the two of us, slightly younger (Mike on the left, me on the right), eating breakfast at 1471 Augustine Drive in Burlington, where we lived from 1968 to 1972. Clearly sugar was a bigger part of our diet then. And television, at the breakfast table!

The great and glorious positive development of autumn 2021 is that my mother, Mike, and Mike’s partner Karen have relocated from Ontario to Charlottetown and live a short walk up the street. None of us have lived in the same city since the mid-1980s, and it’s been a delight for both Olivia and I to have them handy-by.

Mike and I are going out to birthday lunch today, which might seem like the most regular and normal thing in the world but, in our case, is a new and special superpower.

Shortly after Catherine was diagnosed with cancer she was matched with an anonymous volunteer peer, someone who knew more of the drill, for emotional and logistical support.

The lasting effect of their very first phone call was the recommendation that, to prepare for times when Catherine would be immune-compromised, we switch to using individual hand towels in the washroom. In a sea of “there’s nothing to be done” this was a thing to do.

A so a trip to Sears was made, a case of hand towels purchased, and the upstairs and downstairs washrooms stocked.

The weekly gathering, laundering, and folding of these towels continues to this day, outliving Catherine and the reasons that begat it.

But I continue, both because at this point the notion of sharing a single towel for drying the household hands seems a violation of good public health guidance, and more so because it’s a comforting ritual, folding warm towels while Olivia gets ready for bed on Sunday nights.

Kudos to Green MLA Lynne Lund for highlighting the cost and complexity of officially changing name and gender designation on PEI.

When government removes these fees, streamlines the paperwork, and removes the requirement for a doctor sign-off, it will be a small but significant step toward embracing trans and non-binary Islanders.

There’s no better time to get this done than right now, during Transgender Awareness Week.

I’m happy to report that—touch wood—the unseasonably late November fruit fly season appears to have come to an end.

I wish I could claim credit for this by way of my multi-pronged—bleach-in-drains, apple cider vinegar and beer traps, vigorous vacuuming—mitigation strategy, but I suspect it was simply the turn in the weather that did it.

Some books are worth acquiring simply for the title; It’s OK That You’re Not OK, by Megan Devine, is one: being released from the pressure to be OK is a great gift.

Devine’s central thesis regarding grief boils down to “you’re fucked up, get used to it” or, more gently, “grief isn’t something you recover from, get over, or move through, it’s something you learn to carry.” Despite how depressing that seems on first reading, it’s liberating metaphysics for someone in my position.

Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible. As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like. We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support. Even our clinicians are trained to see grief as a disorder rather than a natural response to deep loss. When the professionals don’t know how to handle grief, the rest of us can hardly be expected to respond with skill and grace.

Reading the book unlocked a realization of just how much I’ve been trying to shape an “I’m OK” narrative, with deep hope that it would be true (or might become true on repeated telling).

On a personal level, repressing pain and hardship creates an internally unsustainable condition, wherein we must medicate and manage our true sadness and grief in order to maintain an outer semblance of “happiness.” We don’t lie to ourselves well. Unaddressed and unacknowledged pain doesn’t go away. It attempts to be heard in any way it can, often manifesting in substance addiction, anxiety and depression, and social isolation. Unheard pain helps perpetuate cycles of abuse by trapping victims in a pattern of living out or displacing their trauma onto others.

Writing I am not OK makes me feel like such a failure.

But it’s also such a relief.

I think I found the best hole on the Island.

It was an unseasonable 14ºC today, sunny with just a little wind, and so I took the opportunity to cycle my canoe out to Andrews Pond for one last paddle before winter.

It turned out to be a lovely day for it: just the right temperature for a more-grueling-than-everyday bicycle ride that’s mostly-uphill on the way there, calm enough on the water that I didn’t get blown around a lot.

I’m not a strong cyclist, and towing the canoe out to East Royalty remains at the edge of what I feel physically capable of; it’s good training for the mind, however: the last push uphill from Kensington Road to St. Peters Road is hard and the only way I can do it is to avoid thinking of the destination and, instead, just focusing a few metres ahead of me.

Autumn on Andrews Pond has a whole different feel than summer: the leaves are falling, the ducklings of summer are now full-fledged ducks, the sun hangs lower in the sky.

My gift to the pond today was to fish an Island Coastal traffic cone from the bank and load it into the canoe. I left it at the dock for them to pick up.

I’m still finessing the canoe-wrangling part of the process: it’s relatively easy to get the canoe into the water and out of the water; getting it back on its trailer is still something that takes a lot of fussing and cursing.

Beyond the joy of the cycle and the paddle, cycling along Riverside Drive towing a canoe continues to bring joy simply from the reaction of others: some are blasé, some do a double-take, some honk their horns in solidarity, and one person stopped their car on the side of the road and shot video.

Feeling confident paddling a canoe solo has been one of my great personal accomplishments of 2021, both on the metaphorical and practical levels. I look forward to getting back on the water next summer.

Fifty years after Canada moved to adopt the Metric System I’m still buying butter by the pound.

In the fall of 1989 my brother Steve and I found ourselves in the lineup for the premiere of Roger & Me standing in front of Steven Page and Ed Robertson from Barenaked Ladies. The band was less than a year old at the time, and hadn’t yet broken, but somehow we knew who they were; as a result, I’ve always felt kind of like I went to high school with them. Even though I didn’t. 

The band’s Odds Are escaped my attention when it was released in 2013, and so I’ve had the chance this week to treat it as the gift of a brand new song.

Struck by lightning, sounds pretty frightening
But you know the chances are so small
Stuck by a bee sting, nothing but a B-thing
Better chance you’re gonna buy it at the mall
But it’s a twenty-three-or-four-to-one
That you can fall in love by the end of this song
So get up, get up
Tell the bookie put a bet on “not a damn thing will go wrong”

It has all the hallmarks of a great BNL song: witty (but not too witty), tightly written, catchy hook. The kind of song it’s hard to get tired of.

Meanwhile, the great May Erlewine released a new concert video this week, recorded in September in Traverse City, Michigan. She opened the concert with these words:

It’s so nice to be here together, and I know that we’re different than before, and I’m happy to meet this one of you.

And it’s by some great hand, or by will, and by heart, that we made it here.

And I don’t know how we can talk about time, because it falls away with each word, and then it’s already gone.

And so the story it begins.

It belongs, and it lives in us.

Here we are.

I don’t know why I find those words so affecting, but I do; they bring tears to my eyes on each listening.

One of the highlights of the concert–and it’s not everyone who could pull this off–is a cover of Dolly Parton’s Here You Come Again, which Erlewine introduced like this:

So I also made a record, and some T-shirts to go with it, with my friend Woody, and we got together and we wrote a bunch of songs, and the album was released during the pandemic, which was unfortunate but it was a nice lovely, album to put out there.

And when we were writing the songs I was very intentionally not in love, and you know, as a hopeless romantic, that’s a feat, and so I fall in love every day, all the time, but I was feeling like I needed a break, and so what better way to take a break, than to write a bunch of love songs, and so I kind of feel like with me and love it’s like I’ll be doing good, just minding my own business, doing my own thing, and then love shows up, and it’s just like that Dolly Parton song, you know that Dolly Parton song, it’s like this…

Being a hopeless romantic, and being “very intentionally not in love,” both are things I can identify with.

Listen to the concert: you will not regret it.

I don’t feel like I went to high school with the members of The Wailin’ Jennys, partly because they seem like they’re all a generation younger than me, and partly because they seem one of those rare bands that organically sprang out of nowhere, a band that I seem to have always been vaguely aware of, yet know nothing about. (As an example of this lack of knowledge: when we saw The Small Glories play in Victoria in 2018 I had no idea that one half of that duo, Cara Luft, is also one third of The Wailin’ Jennys).

Which is to say: also on repeat this week has been their Beautiful Dawn.

Teach me how to see when I close my eyes
Teach me to forgive and to apologize
Show me how to love in the darkest dark
There’s only one way to mend a broken heart

That’s a good song for a hopeless romantic.