Black Tongue Rising

Look! Pretty new icon—Bill and Jenny, from Gangs of New York, in a particularly touching and typically perverse moment. Great thanks to moon_custaferfor her skillz and kindness. And now, on wit’ da rowdy-dow.

This weekend turned out to be long, complicated and emotionally exhausting. I think things had been building for most of the week, since Steve had been unable to spot me yoga on Monday (work considerations, which I respect, but it is the only thing I ask him for on a regular basis, and I'm starting to think it prevents crazy-making enzymes from building up in my system). School was/is okay, aside from a few students; however, I’d had to give out/collect teacher evaluation forms, which is never good for the ego...if anybody tells you they can prevent themselves from ever looking at those things, they're lying.

Since pretty much that Monday on, we'd talked about going to a movie on Friday night--and when I say "talked about", I mean like "struggled to find a babysitter", which makes it fairly concrete in my book. I finally got Mom to agree to take Cal, but it had to be done during a certain time-period--we had to make it out to a late 7:00 or early 8:00 PM Friday show in order to come back in time for her to get a good sleep, because she was going somewhere on Saturday. Okay.

Factor in the equation the further fact that we'd already committed to going to two parties on Saturday (one being the 20th "wedding anniversary" of Michael Rowe and his partner Brian, Michael being one of my best friends and supporters in the writing business) and to going to Mississauga on Sunday, to see the Barringers and watch the DVD Steve Snr. had made from all the various video clips he’s taken since Cal’s birth—"Cal’s First Eleven Months", a Quinn-Marten Production. So that meant the weekend had, effectively, been completely given away long before it ever began. Friday was therefore the only time we/I'd be able to do anything we/I would LIKE to do, as opposed to HAD to do.

So I come home on Friday, and Steve's working on this RPG system he picks away at intermittently, and every time I say: "Um, we really need to be going NOW, if we're going," he says: "Five more minutes!" And the time passes. The window closes. And I am so angry at him that I cannot breathe. And he doesn't even seem to notice.

Oh God, but this was bad. It was bad enough that Wednesday’s little melt-down paled by comparison…a sort of fall-in-a-hole sensation of having thrown my entire life away and been stupidly happy to do so, up to that point. It was so strong that I almsot thought the long-fabled post-partum depression had finally reached me. And again, Steve didn't seem to notice 'til I pointed it out to him, and all he could offer were hugs and platitudes. Which basically made me want to set him on fire when he was asleep.

I stayed angry at Steve for maybe a day and a half, only slowly starting to snap out of it on Sunday evening. I think it was his refusal to admit that he might have had anything to do with what I was feeling that really rankled...like it was something chemical, something I was forcing on myself. And maybe it WAS chemical to a degree, but you know what? He also DID have a lot to do with it. What he hadn't done, more than what he'd done. What he never seems to do.

And Michael’s party was wonderful, and I’m very glad I went. But the upshot is that I can't let myself get like that again. I need to tell Steve very explicitly what I need and expect from him, and if he can't/won't do it, I need to impress on him that there are consequences. I'm juggling a fuck of a lot of stuff right now, and I refuse to be made to feel bad about it. It is what it is, and it has to be done. Cal is a big, big part of my life, but I'd be doing him a disservice to pretend he was the only part of it, or fall down on the rest: Making sure I'm mentally healthy and professionally creative is an investment in his future as much as anything else, not some kind of frigging hobby. And Steve simply has to be made to register this, or things are not going to work out very well at all, for any of us.

At any rate. Meanwhile, here are the other things I’m working on:

A) The Canadian Film History book pitch/far more detailed outline, which has now swelled to include the Introduction and (perhaps) first two chapters. Interesting how much you can just sort of find yourself routinely skipping over, depending on your audience; it wasn't until I was taking another pass over it that I realized—since the people who’d be reading this probably weren’t, say, all from my class—a "So You Think You Know Canada" chapter might be a good thing to open with. So that’s what I’ll do: List and debunk a few of the more popular assumptions, give a run-down of the provinces and their geographical/cultural characteristics, the most representative films and filmmakers from each area. But keep it all reasonably light and entertaining, obviously, without slipping into the hapless whimsy and stuffy self-deprecation that infests most writing on the subject.

B) Arranging for a new professional site, one that’s easier (for ME) to update, and actually tells people that I have written books which can be ordered from somewhere, links to where they can be ordered, etc. I’m probably going to inaugerate it by pulling a Doug Clegg and offering a free .pdf short story to anybody who breezes by, plus excerpts from both collections and the book of poetry. Plus a mailing list, on which I may or may not post…

C) …the bits of The Speed of Pain that I am finally, finally, finally stuck in to writing. Yes!

One of the oddest things about watching the DVD was realizing how smiley Cal used to be, and how dour he is these days by comparison...well, not dour, I suppose, so much as intent and probably in pain. He's always grabbing and staggering, cutting teeth right and left (four at the upper front now, with eye-teeth just breaking through the surface), annoyed and amazed by the limitations of his world. Naturally, this makes him a fair deal harder to monitor.

Yesterday, for example, I woke up with some sort of black stuff all over my tongue—we still don't know what it was--so I went to the doctor to check it out. It was an hour before they could see me, and I spent it walking up and down, up and down, following Cal from pillar to post and making sure he didn't A) lick the floor, B) disturb other patients, C) grab medical waste and shove it in his mouth, D) hurt himself on something, E) etc. And this is pretty much par for the course, under all circumstances. That's why the yoga's such a damn necessity, rather than an indulgence.;)

Okay, I’m off: Babies to wake, ‘mail to send, errands to run. See youse.