I’ve been musing about writing a short horror story grounded in reality.
So often the horror genre makes the object of fear a disfigured man, a man with mental illness, a trans woman, someone living in poverty, someone with an accent, a black or brown person. It echoes the ableism, classism, white supremacy, and exceptionalism of the dominant culture. If it’s not this, then it relies on the made up – ghosts, aliens – or is set in the past.
The agent of horror is never that suburban cishet white person doing the normal things they do in today’s world. It’s a missed opportunity because they can be plenty scary.
One of the nicest things about getting older is seeing queer people in my life shaping their life to their desires. Renting a place and making it cute with plants and art from pals. Camping in the woods or going on hikes. Celebrating milestones with partners and friends. Moving towns and going back to school. There’s a predictability and loving entourage to their lives that was not quite there a decade previous.
This made me think to the queer anger that so many of us have lived through, the onset forming in our teens and twenties. This anger is justified – the result of finally acquiring language that validates years of being made small and suffocating those we love. It is compounded by unrecognized emotional trauma, a lack of housing and financial security, being in toxic relationships, emotionally immature parenting, a constant exposure to injustices, and all the challenges of being in the world that are that much more acute during those years.
I live in a tiny apartment in the village, and my day-to-day involves much coffee, a typewriter, oil lanterns, cheesy movies, and cuties. Or at least that’s the artificial version I distill for Instagram. Nonetheless, I have a comfortable life. If things were different, I’d look to settle down. The reality is that I’m itching to leave.
I’ve made the most of my time here. I go on long drives in my spunky 2014 Fiesta and I’m organizing camping trips for after the pandemic. I’ve been on adventures in the past year; I had two important surgeries; I’m in the middle of getting a sleeve tattoo; and I’ve done a lot of work towards my mental well-being.
Hopefully over the summer I’ll finish wrapping up my life in Ottawa: complete the tattoo, go on a trip to Newfoundland with my partner, and a big road trip with my bestie. Then I’ll apply for jobs in New Zealand.
I’ll give myself six months. If I don’t find anything, then I’ll visit NZ with my pops and apply for jobs in Vancouver. I’ll spend a few years there.
After that I’m not sure. I would love a small home in the woods by the water, a Jeep Wrangler, a wood stove, a vegetable garden, and high-speed Internet for remote work. I want to be close enough to an urban center for social needs, but far enough to enjoy nature daily. I’d like to have a healthy set of books from a progressive library at hand. I’d like to work on projects like shooting a documentary of queer activists over thirty-five talking about their emotional growth or building a solar-powered GPS navigation device for hikes. I’d love to raise a kiddo, and see them grow and flourish – which might mean moving back to an urban center. Who knows.
I’ve never discussed Trump on this blog. My content has always been an exercise in synthesizing my own thoughts, or sharing what might be a novel way to look at things, or documenting events in a way that might not be captured elsewhere. I’ve also had a personal rule that any content eliciting negative emotions had to be actionable in some way. None of these criteria were met.
I’ve changed my mind. Trump is unique among his contemporaries; a demagogue whose unbridled narcissism has created a cult of personality and killed hundreds of thousands. Half of Americans have bought into his vision and a good number of Canadians too. His supporters in Canada can teach us something: that a significant percentage of people don’t find incontrovertible evidence relevant.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on the 11th of March 2020. This precipitated an unprecedented closure of the economy and public life around the world.
Perhaps most notably is how the city has been shut down.
