It was a Canadian long weekend — I think the States had one too — and turkey was had by all. Happy belated Thanksgiving, my fellow Canucks.

The holidays tend to depress me. I’ve got one parent dead and six feet other, and every holiday reminds me how, sooner or later, that number’s changing to two. It’s looking sooner than later by the looks of my dad, so I’m feeling a little sad and scared, really. I feel like his counter’s officially counting down now as his diabetes looks like it’s winning the battle they’ve been fighting. Suffice to say, I’m in the right mood to have found this website.

I don’t really have a lot to write about today, though, as it’s been a busy weekend.

I’ve thinking a lot of my dad and taking the chance that he doesn’t read this blog at all, by posting here, but if he was to read it, that’d be fine too. I love my dad, even though we’re cut from very different cloths. I’m much more into culture and I’m more worldly than he his. He’s more of a bingo player than anything, really. But I still love him, even though we’ve got nothing in common.

I tell him I love him and have tried to make him see that I’d like to ensure he’s around down the road for me. If I do marry, I’d like him to see it happen. If I do become the success I’d like to be, I’d like to have a shoulder squeeze and giddy smile from my pop.

But he eats horribly. He will eat any and all things, and he’ll even have wine, though he’s been told his heart can’t handle it. He’s diabetic, and he has weeping ulcers on his leg, and worse. And, me, I remember I’m not that far off from being a little girl after all. I saw him yesterday, and I would be surprised if I was very wrong about how long he might be around. I’m scared, I’m sad, I’m feeling a little alone.

Worse is, I remember the day I looked at my mom and knew she wouldn’t be around for another year — long before a doctor’s diagnosis ever confirmed anything.

I’ve gone through some phases with some anger in the last week, moments when I feel terribly guilty, as if my mother’s death was my fault as a result of my inaction after my suspicions began. My father, though, has long known of my concern and chooses to ignore it. I now avoid him a bit, but mostly because it breaks my heart every time I go over and see how much he’s not doing to improve his health. I can’t sit idly by as someone so obviously decides not to choose life in front of me, you know?

All things considered, I’d rather have a hug. What can I say? Holidays suck when it means you’re constantly realizing that parents won’t be around much longer. Yeesh. It’s hard to watch someone slowly lose a battle to a disease. The five-minute cancer death of my mother’s was easier, in some respects. Sigh. Well, one major holiday down, one to go.

(I wasn’t meaning to write two posts today, so, hey. Lucky you. Seeya on the weekend.)

The greatest gift the internet provides us with is universality. Through it, we have become Hillary Clinton’s Global Village. Through a series of microchips and fibre-optic wires, a person in Nantucket can wake up and realize they’re having the exact same kinda day as their favourite blogger in Guayana. Suddenly the human condition isn’t caught in only brief snippets in plays and movies. Now, it’s all over the world wide web.

It’s with great irony that blogging has become such a public way of revealing the private self. Anonymity allows for nearly anyone to open up the wellsprings and let it flow for the world at large to be a part of. The anonymouses of the world, aware of just how little voice they have in day to day life, are speaking pretty loud and clear these days.

Every now and then, someone comes along who’s able to tap into the darker currents that course through their innerselves. Every now and then, someone captures that elusive truth of what makes the human condition such a mesh of experiences — the highs, the lows, the sub-terranean depths of it all. And it’s all free. With an ISP, you can log into the wired world and tap into someone feeling, experiencing, being everything you relate to. And that’s a good thing.

It’s an even better thing when we realize just how much some people need to find that commonality. I’ve been through some pretty dark times, and that does not make me exceptional. It makes me pretty plugged into that universality I mentioned earlier, the proverbial Matrix. Of course our pains and loves and triumphs and losses are things we understand only up until a certain point. It’s so mysterious. Such a muddled mess to wade through. When others can express what we feel, well, suddenly it’s like we’ve had a light shine onto us. Wow, that’s my sentiment exactly. And there you are, in your own skin, feeling just like I do. Why, we’re not so very different after all. Thank God, it’s true: I’m not alone.

Loneliness is quite possibly one of the worst feelings I’ve ever endured. Hopelessness is hard, too. So’s plain old fear. I’ve been there, done that, didn’t want the ugly ass t-shirt.

I got to spend just under three years with my mother before she died. I’d left town, moved to the Yukon, fell in love with Northern Lights and wide-open spaces and that silence that bludgeons you dumb (as Robert Service once said), but the expense of living in the great white north just about crippled me. Too dumb to live within my means, I came home to Vancouver at 22, my tail between my legs, and some $35,000 in debt, sans job. I moved back home and stayed there, at first because I had no choice, and then because I realized something was wrong with my mother (though it would be some time before the cancer was diagnosed; take it from me — if you suspect something’s seriously wrong with a loved one, do not follow the complacent course I took — get them to a doctor. Get involved. I wish I had).

But when I arrived home, late one night my mother had had a couple glasses of wine and said to me, “Don’t ever leave me like that again. I couldn’t bear the quiet.” And I never left her again. I would have, but she beat me to the punch.

Being alone is hard. There is nothing I feel more empathy and understanding towards than people who fear aloneness. And while it would seem to be an easy fix — it’s a big world, getting bigger every day, billions of others walk this terrain, just like you, and all you seemingly need to do is step outside your four walls — nothing seems harder when you’re on the other side of it.

The walls seem thicker, others seem happier, things just keep happening, and all the while, you’re experiencing none of it. An outsider peering in. It’s like some puppetmaster is holding strings and keeping you back from it all.

Unfortunately, that’s often your choice.

I write from time to time about all the injuries I experienced over the last few years. In one year, I was on crutches for more than 20 weeks. I’ve never felt as alone as I did then. There were a lot of long, quiet nights, and I felt pretty abandoned by the world at large. It was during all that that I first turned to blogging. A lot’s gone down since then, and while I’m often playing the solitary game, it’s pretty much by choice these days. I’m single now, but I’ve had a couple recent chances to change that status and have passed on ’em. Partly because I wasn’t ready, and partly because I really don’t mind being a party of one. It works well with the writing gig.

But being injured did force me to learn that others were there when I wanted them, and, more importantly, when I needed them. All I had to do was speak. Out of all the lessons I’ve learned in my life, learning to ask for help has been the one I’m most proud of. Learning how to admit that I need someone or something has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I’m a proud, proud woman, and I have been reduced to fucking dust at times in the last few years. I’ve realized something, though, that it’s in that dust that something new in me began to grow. I realized that reaching out, asking for help, allowed others to give. It allowed them to be there when I needed it, and allowed them to feel like they were really contributing to me and my life. It profoundly changed my closest relationships, and the friends who stood by me then, I know they’ll always be there.

So many of us never really let our friends and family be there for us. We let our pride fuck with us and we tell ourselves our loved ones are too busy. We fail to realize that most people hang around the peripheral, waiting on us to speak up and tell them what we need — because they know we’d be there for them if the tables were turned.

So, if you’re among the lonely and you feel you’ve been abandoned, well. You might just be surprised. It’s more that people are busy, they get involved in their lives, but somewhere in the back of their minds, they’re waiting for you to speak up, to tell them they’re wanted around, or that you just plain need’em. What are you waiting for?

Every now and then, I get reminded of how dumb corporate America really is. This is the tab on the Always Slim Maxi with Wings. You pull this off, and you adhere it to your panties. I’ve mentioned this before, but now I’ve photographed it for proof. Dumbasses.

Have a Happy period? And what part of it is supposed to be the happiest — the cramping, the irritability that has successfully been used as a defense in murder, the occasional staining of sheets and underwear, the fact that it costs $10 a month in products, the inability to play/do certain sports, like swimming? Which part is supposed to make me happy, huh?

Here’s a memo, Corporate America: I bleed because I have to. I bleed only because biology deems it necessary. I’ve tried to suppress the bastard through drugs, but when I became a murderous, depressed bitch, I decided that bleeding was an only slightly better option, because then my murderous depression would at least be on the clock.

And you fucking know this slogan was written by some mama’s boy who’s always the first to show up on holidays and who tries to constantly please every woman in his life.

Happy ain’t part of the gig, man. I’d be more loyal to a product that called it like it is. How’s this:

Your period sucks, and we know it. That’s why we’ve made the best product we can. Here’s hoping it makes things just a little better for you today. Oh. And don’t kill anyone. Here’s 50 cents off your next bottle of Midol.

As a little girlie, I was as tomboy as they come.

In my ‘hood, back in the day, the girls (there were three of us) were outnumbered by the boys at a 3:1 ratio. One of the girls, my mother told me quite certainly, was “beneath” me, and I was encouraged to either play with the boys or the other girl.

To me, “play” meant getting pretty physical and doing whatever the boys were doing. We fancied ourselves “police kids” and made ourselves uniforms and badges and ran down the street yelling at and feebly trying to throw Nerf footballs at cars driving too fast for our domesticated side street. We climbed into the ditches and crawled through the huge pipes. We painted our faces for no reason at all. We dug through our parents’ shit and played “dress-up” for the sheer hell of it.

Sometimes “play” involved projectiles and violence – since I’m from that generation born on the cusp of actually having cool shit to play with before people figured out things were dangerous; lawn darts, for instance, became illegal in my 15th year, back in 1988. We played with slingshots and broke windows in abandoned buildings. We tied each other up and left each other for “dead” in the middle of the “enchanted” forest. We nailed apple crates onto skateboards and rode down the steepest hill in the ‘hood. We’d climb (and fall down) cliffs by the beach. We dared each other to venture into the rat-a-tat “haunted” house around the corner.

Getting hurt was par for the course, and most of the time we barely noticed the pain.

Out there in the world, a number of you readers are nodding and grinning, remembering summers spent pitching lemonade stands and jumping fences, throwing stones and jumping off piers into water too cold yet for swimming, and winters spent hurtling iceballs at each other and crying out in pain. We took our chances and we lived with the consequences, because, for us, it was fun. Fun at any and all costs.

Somewhere along the way, we learned about pragmatism and all the things adults do to lessen risks of danger and lost limbs. We toned it down, we learned the rules, and we played safe. In adulthood, “play” means sports and board games, and little else.

Unless, of course, you belong to the BDSM community.

One could argue that, in ways, BDSMers are just children at heart. They want to play, be told what to do, often dress up in silly things, and need to have rules to follow or else things come apart at the seams.

Suggest this to the religious right and anyone else who gets creeped out at the thought of grownups in leather and ball-gags with whips at the ready, and you’ll be unceremoniously turfed faster than you can shout your stop word of choice.

Not too long ago, a big kerfuffle was raised and I have yet to really comment on it. A fuckwit by the name of Jason Fortuny took a very, very sexually explicit posting of a slave woman seeking a very aggressive male master through Craigslist and he reposted it in Seattle, using his email address as the letter through which any masters would be responding.

He then took all the responses from the males and posted them publically in an attempt to mock, humiliate, and out them. I haven’t really followed the whole mess, but I think he’s an asshole who deserves a little of the treatment the original woman was begging for. I think this for about a million and ten reasons that I’m not going to bother getting into, save for one –

What pisses me off most about the whole debacle, I think, is what the woman who originally posted that email must have felt when she discovered that she had unwittingly become the eye of this cyberstorm.

Sadly, we live in a society that deems fit to judge others for what they do in the privacy of their own homes. Only now are gays starting to really own who they are, but every now and then one gets beaten to death for no good reason. BDSMers have a fucking long ways to go before they get accepted by the mainstream.

It’s happening, in bits, but if a woman was to walk out into regular society and announce that she wished to be urinated on, called names, slapped around, and forced into submission regarding everything from doing the dirty deed right on down to doing the dirty dishes on demand, then she’d be besieged by women telling her she deserved better.

The point that they’re missing is, she doesn’t want better. She wants to be treated that way. I have no right to judge her, and neither do you.

Yet here’s this Craigslist woman, who probably debated for a good long time about taking her desires semi-public (because just admitting shit on paper’s hard enough to do some days). Now she’s being used by this post-collegiate fuckwit, who thinks he’s God’s gift to bloggers, who then goes and bastardizes everything she’s gone through to get to this point where she feels safe asking to be abused.

Funny thing is, she’s asking to be used and abused, but the number one rule in BDSM, basically, is that the submissive has all the power. They stop the play. They control what happens, because if they’re not a willing participant, it ends then and there. But she never asked Jason Fortuny to use her or abuse her. She never got to say stop. And that’s wrong six ways to Sunday, man.

If you don’t GET BDSM, then so be it. It’s not for you to appreciate or understand. Their rights, though, to do as they like, as two (or more) consenting parties, behind closed doors, ought to be protected in the constitution. Here in Canada, it is. (More or less.)

I own no dog collars, nor paddles, and I don’t know if I’ll ever go that way. But I own an open mind, and as a tax-paying member of a supposedly free society, I want the fucking right to explore whatever crosses my dirty, filthy little mind. After all, playing keeps the heart and soul young.

(Speaking of playfulness [in general] and Craigslist, allow me to introduce you to my brother. Seriously. He’s single, cute, and a little weird, but in mostly good ways.)

[Photo courtsey of Wikipedia.]