Soothing Face Creams, Mushrooms, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Hiatus, Sex Pamphlet, Anemone, New Interview, Baby, Bunion, (Epi)Dermis

Friends and Fans!
Someone is paying money to do things. The things are:

-Translating relatively riveting sentences about soothing face creams. I am learning all about free radicals, atopic dermatitis and Vitamin A.

-Translating relatively riveting sentences about electrostatics, mushrooms, photosynthesis and rocks.

So the blog will be taking a short hiatus.

As long as I don't give myself carpal tunnel syndrome, when I return, you can look forward to:

-A Pamphlet about how even if within the first five minutes of meeting you, I tell you all about my orgasms, threesomes and rolled up duvets, we probably still shouldn't have sex. It is hard to get out of the sexual realm. One way is to write letters. Or spend a week with your mother. Or have an elaborate discussion about people's Ocean Invertebrate Personalities. I did that yesterday on the bus. Just as I predicted, the guy beside me felt like he was very much a Brooding Anemone, but his score made him a Royal Starfish. This happens more often than you might think. The guy was a psychology student and so it was nice of him to give my quiz a chance. 

Brooding Anemone. I've had a thing for you since childhood.
Ocean Invertebrate Personality Quiz



-An Asking People About Your Lives Segment with Shelley Fillipoff. Shelley was my beloved grade six French immersion teacher. On November 28,  2013, her beautiful daughter Emma mysteriously disappeared. I had the privilege of carrying out a heartwrenching and truly riveting interview with Shelley last Wednesday. I can't wait to put it all together.

(UPDATE! It's ready! Here's the first segment: Where is Emma Fillipoff (ONE))

 

In the meantime, you can watch the haunting Fifth Estate episode about the search for Emma Fillipoff. There were a few fact problems that Shelley wanted to clarify, but it is still worth the watch. Please note that contrary to what it says in the video, Emma and Shelley were not at all estranged during the year before Emma went missing.  The details regarding Emma's parents' divorce were also somewhat misleading. 

Emma Fillipoff
Watch the Fifth Estate: Finding Emma
(It's also on Youtube)

Help Find Emma Fillipoff on Facebook
 

Anyways, do check all this out for yourself. Thanks for your help and loyalty.

In Other News:

Baby

In case you were wondering, Matt Wiviott's partner who happens to be my dearest friend gave birth on Thursday. The baby is quite adorable from what I can see on Facebook.

Bunion

My mother's bunion turned out fine.

Epidermis and Dermis, A Draft

Epidermis:

The skin’s surface layer no longer regenerates as quickly. As it thickens, our complexion becomes dull.

Dermis:

Our fibroblasts, which produce our dermal fibers begin to weaken. The dermis’s elastin and collagen levels decrease, resulting in a slight loss of firmness.

The End. 

Selfie with Corn, in Perth Ontario

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

Mother's Bunion
Asking Matt Wiviott About His Life
Yours Til Ekam Inhales

 

Mother's Bunion

I wondered if maybe I should end my whole blog with me on Simon’s roof with the daisies. Now I am in Perth, Ontario. The clouds in the sky seem close to the ground. My mother is waiting to get her bunion chopped off her left foot. I am not certain that chopping is the right word.  If it were my foot, I would not get it done, though if you’ve seen my feet, you might conclude that I am not the best judge of feet. As she prepared for having a foot cast, my mother was even more hyperactive and erratic than usual. One minute she is boiling the corn for dinner and before I know it she is out in the garden, planting a periwinkle.

This morning after I finished yoga, there was wild rice boiling on the stove and my mother was throwing in a load of laundry. Moments later she is up in her bedroom doing yoga. My parents aren’t together, but they both do yoga. If I was their teacher, I would tell them both to soften their breaths. Their exhales sound heavy and strained, as though they have grief around their hearts. Probably they do have grief around their hearts. Who doesn’t.

My mother turns on the French radio to help accentuate her yoga practice. I can still hear her heavy exhale. I walk past her bedroom. Now yoga is over, but the radio still plays. In the bathroom, my mother is frantically brushing her teeth. It is exactly the sound of enamel wearing down. My mother walks out of the bathroom. She is dressed in jeans and a t. shirt. Her socks are white with hot pink toes and heels. She folds forward in one more yoga pose and lets out one more grief-filled exhale.  

Pre-surgery, my mother is forbidden to drink coffee. She feels this is entirely unmanageable. We agree that half an inch is okay. I consume several inches. These days I wake up to a black wall. Coffee is the only way forwards.  

Other things on my mother’s list: plant a peony, run the dogs, don’t burn the rice.

She takes the dogs out for a run behind Perth’s Nursing home near a place called The Garden for the Blind. There the flowers are supposed to smell particularly good. As you pass by certain areas, a voice talks to you about plants. I stay at home and eat granola. Despite my several inches of coffee, I still leave the rice on for too long. It sticks to the pot and smells a bit burnt.

There is no time for the peony. Guiding the two dogs on leashes, I walk my mother halfway to the hospital. Her bunion doesn’t make her limp, but she says it’s impossible to buy shoes.

“This’ll just be an experiment on how I deal with pain.” I am curious to see how the morphine goes.

At noon I drive down to the hospital. To save on parking, I try to find a space on the street I grew up on. Mary Street. My grandmother’s name is also Mary. The only spot is between two cars. I have always been terrible at parallel parking and so instead I drive around some more. I end up parking in front of the funeral home beside my old high school.  

The surgeries are backed up. Two different knees need scoping. Plus the surgeon will have to have lunch at some point. I love how the O.R. is labelled “Operating Theatre.” Very reassuring. Outside a man is sitting and flipping around on his I-pad. The surgeon comes out to show him a picture of his wife’s esophagus. I guess she choked on a fish bone.  The fishbone wasn’t there anymore but it left a little scar. Where is the fishbone now?

I ask the surgeon with the esophagus photo if I could go see my mother. He says he will ask the nurses.

“It’s the nurses who run the show,” says the man with the I-pad. He’s a retired doctor.

“I love doctors,” I tell him. “And nurses. I used to want to be a nurse, but my fine motor skills are not that good.”

“Really?” he asks. He sounds surprised, as though I look like I radiate intricate agility. But I don't. When I lived with the Boatman sometimes, somehow, I would get peanut butter on the walls. Left over from breakfast or washing dishes or who knows. Back when I used to consider becoming a nurse, we used to joke about me being in the operating room. “Who got the peanut butter on the heart?” the Boatman would say.

“But I used to be quite good at bowel routines,” I tell the retired doctor. This is true. I was excellent.

I can hear my mother’s voice from behind the double doors.

“Can I just talk to my daughter?” she asks, almost shouting. I open the double doors. My mother is wearing a blue hospital gown and puffy blue hat. In permanent marker, someone has drawn an arrow pointing to her left foot. That’s a good idea. Remembering your left and right is tricky.

At this point the bunion will probably not be chopped off until three or four p.m.  I receive orders to go home, and turn the air conditioner on for the dog.

“You know how to do that, right?” asks my mother. My mother looks a little bit like Jane Fonda. Tiny, blonde, feisty. She is chatting with all the other patients who are for their turn in the theatre. She’s the only one who’s upright.

“It’s a party in here,” she says. I tell her I know how to turn on the air conditioning, and that the hats are very nice. On my way out, I see a woman with a walker. Her spine is curved permanently forward, so that she stands in an upside down L shape. When I get home, I eat a small handful of burnt crunchy wild rice.

At 3:30 p.m., the chopping is all done. I ring the buzzer to the operating suite. The doors click before they open, both at once. It feels a bit like the Wizard of Oz. For a brief moment, it occurs to me that they might have messed up, and my mother will meet me with only one foot. Well, I have friends with less that two feet. Everything turned out fine. My mother looks fine, but her eyes are a bit puffy.  Her foot is vaguely wrapped in what looks like a white version of one of those fluffy blue hats.

"Hi," says my mother, and hops into the wheelchair.
 "Bye Leslie," she calls out to the nurse. 
"It's Wendy," says the nurse. "You'll have fun tonight."
"Wendy," says my mother. "Hahaha."

We go to the drugstore to get Tylenol threes. My mother is enamoured with all of the vitamins. Centrum for Women 50+ is on sale. She puts a box in her lap. Then she asks me to wheel her around the shelf where there are laxatives, and birthday cards. I take my blood pressure. It is within the optimal range.  The drugs are ready, and we wheel to the car. I put the free parking token into the wrong slot. Instead of forking over the four dollars, my mother recommends I return to the pharmacist for another token.

"Four dollars is half a bottle of wine," she says. Apparently, wine is cheap in Perth Ontario. 

"Way to go," says the pharmacist when I ask for another token. As I fumble with the slots, my mother and I laugh and laugh.

I turn onto Drummond Street. My mother raves about the general anaesthetic. Despite her disdain for excessive alcohol and all things marijuana, it seems she is a fan of medically induced comas. 

"Oh Erica, it's beautiful," she says. "If that's what death is like, I'm all set."


The End.

Now my mother is in bed. With her foot elevated, she chats relentlessly on the phone. The small black dog is curled up in her nook beside the fire place. The big white dog is sprawled across the bathroom floor, next to the toilet.

Small Black Dog





Large White Dog

 

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Follow me on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, by Erica J. Schmidt

 Me on Simon's Roof with Daisies

Locks and Keys
The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two



What a Beautiful Face

Three scars on my body are from dead people. The first one is on my left cheek, the cheek on my face, just outside my first dimple. The scar beside the dimple is a small thin line. It’s from D’Arcy. We were three and four years old, and my mother had let us play with adult sewing scissors. I had the yellow ones, and his were orange. I really wanted the orange scissors. When D’Arcy said no, I snipped the air in front of my face. D’Arcy took his orange scissors and snipped the skin on my face. The doctors taped it together. My mother once said that D’Arcy was a strange child, perhaps because he was a test tube baby. But I started the fight. In his early twenties, D’Arcy died suddenly and mysteriously in his sleep, lying in his girlfriend’s arms. They think he choked.

My second scar blends in almost perfectly with my forehead wrinkles. It’s above my left eyebrow. The dent runs seamlessly into my lines of premature ageing. This scar is from Yarrow Viets’s s goggles. A swimming collision. My fault. I was always so focussed and obsessive that I did a terrible job looking in front of me. We were doing a bunch of 300’s when we crashed. I remember Yarrow covering her eye and weeping so delicately. I have never been a delicate weeper. Yarrow Viets was very beautiful. For the rest of practice, she rested. I plowed through, logging in 5000 or 6000 meters. When I got home, my mother pointed out that my forehead was cracked open. This time, the doctors closed up the wreckage with glue. On June 18, Yarrow Viets died of stage 4 colon cancer.  She had young twin boys and hundreds of friends. It was unbelievably sad.

My last scar is from Simon. A vague, faded red blob on my left thigh. All of my dead people scars are on the left.  This one happened on a Saturday morning. My friends Bobbi and Fern were going to pick me up and drive me to an A.A. meeting. Fern says that all the addictions are kind of the same, and so you can go to A.A. even if you just only have an eating disorder. Well, I love A.A. meetings. And I have put in sincere time trying to be an alcoholic, with minimal success. So I was getting ready. I had just poured boiling water into the French press when someone unlocked my door. It was Simon. Without thinking, I pushed down the plunger. The spout was open and coffee spilled all over my left thigh. Simon gave me ice. He asked if he could come to the A.A. meeting. I said yes, but I was terrified he would say something obnoxious and embarrassing. He did say something, though it wasn’t obnoxious. It made me kind of proud.

“Hi, my name is Simon.”

“Hi Simon.”

Simon was nine hours sober. He told us a story about him and his pop. They’d been going through rough times, not really communicating. Then a couple of days earlier, they’d had a moment.

“We were together, and my pop said something touching. And I knew that I loved him. And I felt at peace. Or close to peace.  And… I’m just glad I was sober.” With that, Simon started sobbing. He went up to the front of the room and took a beginner’s A.A. chip. At the end of the meeting, there was coffee and doughnuts. Everyone went to shake Simon’s hand. His was the share of the meeting. Simon basked in the doughnuts and the handshakes, until Bobbi cut in. “Good share. Let’s go,” said Bobbi, always down to business. For months, Simon said this over and over again. “Good share. Let’s go.”

The burn on my leg looked horrible and purple. I was afraid it would lead to blood poisoning, and that this would lead to amputation. Bobbi and Fern dropped us off at my shitty downtown apartment on Overdale Street. Simon and I fucked on my disgusting futon, on my disgusting floor. It felt like the start of something redeeming.

That afternoon, Simon brought aloe vera to the swimming pool where I was a lifeguard. That evening, he got drunk again. Everyone knows that Simon jumped off his apartment building on January 4^th. Since he was a child, he always wanted to know what it was like to throw himself in the air from way up high. For three to seventeen seconds, I guess he got to know. His building is so high.  I brought daisies to the rooftop last Sunday. It was Simon’s 36^th birthday, so wet and dreary and cold. I couldn’t look over the edge.

Good share. Let’s go.

I once helped get Simon a job, working with a man with cerebral palsy at a day centre. The man’s name is Antoine. (I changed it for the blog) It is nice when men with disabilities get to have male caregivers. So many caregivers are female and they’re lovely, but when you’ve been surrounded by women for much of your life, maybe you appreciate a change. Simon didn’t view Antoine as someone he had to take care of. He wanted to be his friend.

“I feel so ready to give my inconditional love to someone like Antoine,” he wrote.

I just looked up these words in our old emails. In my head, I remember him saying: “I am ready to go crazy and open my heart and give Antoine all of my love.” He was so excited. Right before he got the job, he’d been kicked off welfare. Now he wouldn’t have to do so many drug studies for cash.

Together, Simon and Antoine had a wonderful blast. The teacher gave lessons on pictograms and phonograms. Simon made jokes the whole time, and Antoine burst into one fou rire after another. Fou Rire, crazy laugh. For an entire year, they worked on a text about hot dogs. I never got a chance to read it. Even after Simon left the job at the centre, he and Antoine used to go out for movies and hamburgers. Last fall they went to a safari park. There’s an amazing photo of them in the car. Simon’s feeding a camel a carrot. Antoine has this radiant and exquisite smile all over his face. One day after the movies, they went to McDonald’s. Together, they bought extra hamburgers. Simon led Antoine into the street where some kids were squeegeeing cars. Antoine gave the kids the bag of hamburgers. In this little moment, there must have been something for everyone.

*

On Sunday, June 28, I climbed the stairs of Simon’s apartment building. There were 23 floors, except the 12^th floor skips to the 14^th. Our world doesn’t believe in anything, and still, nobody wants to live on the 13^th floor. Simon’s stairwell was grey and stark, with no windows. Like a prison cell made out of stairs. Layered in heavy clothes, Simon used to climb up and down. He wanted to get sweaty and skinny, without having to see or talk to anyone. Fair enough, I suppose.

My arms full of daisies, I climbed up. I peaked at the eighth floor, where Simon used to live.  As though gazing down the carpeted hallway would bring some sort of closure or revelation. Not really. At the top of the 23^rd flight of stairs, the door was locked. It led to the pool. From there you could climb up onto the roof.  Some guy who was doing his laundry let me in.

“My ex-boyfriend jumped off this building in January.” Right away, the guy dropped his laundry hamper.

“Sorry about that,” he said. I stood on the lookout for a while, staring at Mont-Royal, the financial buildings, the wet streets. During my first year creative writing class, some girl wrote story about a woman with a dead boyfriend. It opened with the girlfriend standing in the rain carrying flowers.

"It is raining. I am wearing my shiny red dress. I am standing at your grave and watching the puddle form in front of it. My shoes are getting muddy."

Simon adored this beginning. Excellent, he called it. But my writing teacher said that its potential for narrative development was limited. “Her shoes can only get so muddy, and her dress can only get so wet.”

On top of Simon's building, there were stairs that led down from the lookout to the rest of the roof. It was covered in medium sized stones. I ducked under the yellow danger tape, and climbed down the stairs. Walking around the periphery, I remembered the rooftops in India. Under the moon or in the hot sun, I would sit there and think about the orphans. I could only stay for so long.

I had meant to throw the daisies off the building, but it was too high. Using a random cement block, I wedged them into the Northeast corner. That might have been where Simon jumped. I’m not sure. I picked one of the daisies off the bouquet, and let it go. I couldn’t see where it went. I was wearing my bright red raincoat. It was totally wet. So were my shoes and pants. I could only stay for so long. Before I left, I took another daisy. This one was for Simon’s front door. As I placed the daisy in the door frame, I listened for noises from inside his apartment. I heard nothing.

That day, I was out in the rain for so long that my teeth started to chatter and my hands went numb.

The End.



Simon Girard (1979-2015)

Title Inspired by all the beautiful faces, and by the Song, "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea." Neutral Milk Hotel. It is the new song of my life.

 "What a beautiful dream that could flash on a screen in a blink of an eye and be gone"

Simon Girard (1979-2015) 

Guillaume, Part Two (Asking People About Their Lives, Episode Two)

(As you know from the blogpost “Too Ugly For Prostitution,” I met Guillaume at a grown-up barbecue where there were cheese curds, mojitos, and opportunities to learn a great deal about life insurance. Guillaume is my second guest for the blog series “Asking People About Their Lives” in which I do just that.)

Guillaume (Not too ugly for prostitution)
Check out Part One: Too Ugly for Prostitution Here
 

Guillaume, Part Two
(Asking People About Their Lives, Episode Two)

Guillaume grew up in Boucherville. His parents were not that rich but not that poor either. When he was eighteen, it was somewhat of a crapshoot that Guillaume ended up with a job at a homeless shelter. He needed a summer job and out of MacDonald’s, the library and the homeless shelter, it was the homeless shelter that got back to him. They hired him as an “intervention worker.” Basically it meant that he was a “social worker with no training.” At one of his first shifts, a resident attacked a senior worker who had been working in the field for more than twenty years.  The resident was extremely drunk, and the scene was extremely violent. In the end, Guillaume’s co-worker broke his back and was never able to resume work. None of this seemed to phase Guillaume, despite being only eighteen at the time. Very quickly he became very comfortable in this milieu where drugs and violence were run of the mill. I asked him why he thought this was so natural for him.

Part of it was because he spent his adolescence “right in the middle of everything.” He was never a junkie himself, but many of his friends were. And though he feels like he was never directly involved in violence, he witnessed it happening all around him.

For most of his teenage years, Guillaume alternated between living with his friends and his parents. “I was not good at school, not good at anything.” When he was younger he was good at hockey, but he stopped that. Then he got into music. He had long hair down to his butt, and a huge beard. Before discovering the homeless shelter, Guillaume tried a whole bunch of different stuff. He built board games, worked in metal factories, and studied human sciences. Then he found the shelter where he “grew a lot very very fast. I got to know myself better in a very short time.”

Guillaume’s attitude towards serving people seems different from that of the folks I meet who have vast ambitions to change and save the world. I got the sense that a great deal of his work was simply about listening to people, and accepting them exactly as they were. He seemed really grounded.

Guillaume: "Need to be present to the idea that it can be different. People can have a very different life, and it’s their own choice. You’re not going to be there to save anyone, you’re just going to be there to be present to them for whatever it is they are going through. Starting there was a good start for me.”

Eventually, Guillaume moved to Montreal, where he got a job at the Salvation Army. There, he was in charge of a floor of 27 men who were dealing with various mental illnesses. Although he continued to maintain positive relationships with the residents, it was harder because the Salvation Army is a church, and Guillaume’s an atheist. When it came to the residents, Armée du Salut had a clear agenda. Often their philosophy conflicted with what Guillaume believed in. I asked Guillaume about the homophobia situation. 

Guillaume: "In Canada, they are going to be negative about it and they are going to try and cure you."

Erica: "Yah, but that’s super violent."

Guillaume: "I know, but (in contrast to the States) they are still accepting you to come in. It’s just that they’re going to be very severe that you don’t come around anyone else because it’s only men who are there.”

Even worse were the priests who were saying that the people who had mental illness were being conjured by demons. After three years, Guillaume could no longer watch this happen and he had to leave. For a while, he applied his intervention and people skills to being a bouncer at night clubs. This was fun, but the scene got old. When he got the chance, he went to work at a syringe exchange site. There he gave out syringes, crackpipes, lubricants and condoms to anyone who needed them: “cocaine addicts, heroine addicts, people who are mixing it up… most of them are into prostitution, male prostitution, female prostitution.” The exchange site focusses less on making people better and more on trying to help them be as safe as possible in the life they’re leading right now. If people are interested in other resources such as housing and rehab centres, the staff has that information. That said, nothing is forced on anyone. 

Guillaume frequently emphasized the simplicity and power of just being present to people. For him, the job was about “being present and open and welcoming them. Nobody welcomes them in the street.  They’re being spit on, ignored …. They’re garbage, they’re garbage in the street.” The centre is “the only place they can be welcomed, where people know their name. Hi Andrew, how are you? Who asks them how are you? It’s a strange world out there for them. It’s a very very harsh world. They’re a nuisance, they’re being thrown around, pushed around.”

We can say we have open hearts, but we all have blind spots, people we choose not to see. It is a harsh world. Guillaume met all sorts of people at the syringe exchange site. Musicians, well-known artists and hockey players, rich people, poor people.

“I’ve seen everyone from every place in the hierarchy,” he said. Some men have lost their families through breakups or accidents. They lose everything and they just can’t deal with it. More common than you might imagine is people who have accidents and become addicted to narcotics during the rehab process. Guillaume knows a man exactly his age who had an accident on a mountain when he was fifteen. Since then, he’s been on the street, in pain, and addicted. “He has no veins to inject anymore,” said Guillaume. Guillaume is very adamant that anybody could end up on the streets. It’s just a matter of circumstances. And we have no idea how brutal it can be.

Guillaume: "So what you do is you inject yourself so you don’t feel the cold anymore, you don’t feel the solitude anymore, you don’t feel...  You get addicted to being paranoid smoking crack. It’s hard to understand but people are actually looking for those sensations because when they’re being paranoid and freaking out, they’re actually not thinking about their own lives. Because their own lives are freaking painful, even more painful than anything."

***

Addiction and the recovery process make up some of my greatest fascinations. I devour any memoir about alcoholism and drug rehab, and I light up whenever I see an A.A. meeting on T.V. For a certain period of my life, I even decided I was an alcoholic just so I could attend A.A. meetings. In truth, I make a pitiful alcoholic. But so far, A.A. meetings have been one of the only places in my life where I haven’t felt compelled to talk my ass off.  I really wanted to hear what Guillaume had to say about Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, and the various options for addictions recovery. Guillaume thinks it’s great that A.A. works for some people. Any amount of abstinence from an addiction constitutes a success, a victory. That said, Guillaume has reservations about the Christian framework that lies at the heart of A.A. philosophy. He “can’t stand the fact that they keep telling them that they’re powerless when they’re not, that they’re telling their stories over and over again. And you’re just looking at the past. You’re not looking at what you’re doing now.”

For those of you who are not A.A. junkies, the first of A.A.’s twelve steps is to “admit that you are powerless over alcohol and that your life has become unmanageable.” I would tend to agree that the lives of most alcoholics or addicts spill over into the unmanageable. And yet, I sometimes question the insistence of uttering this truth aloud day after day, even after thirty-three years of sobriety. To me, part of it says, “I’m a fuck up, I can’t make my own choices. Ever.” Of course, black and white, never-ever-do-this -again sort of thinking can be helpful for some people. One example would be Simon, my ex-boyfriend who jumped off a building this January. Would have been great if he had come to the decision to never ever drink again. Still, I think Guillaume makes a good point in acknowledging that in fact, nobody, regardless of the mess around them, is truly and entirely powerless. 

Guillaume: “They’re the experts of using those drugs, that have been selling their bodies… I’ve never done that… they’re the experts of their own world we’re there to help them to be better experts, to allow them to have a break, a pause, from whatever they’re going through.”

Although the relentless monologues of an A.A. meeting may prove to be excessive, Guilllaume absolutely recognizes the healing potential of giving a voice to your experience. This made me think of being fifteen and in the psych ward for my eating disorder. One morning a bunch of doctors came into my room. They wanted to hear all about what I’d been through. I remember sitting up in bed and realizing, “Oh, I’m allowed to talk about this now. People care about my experience, and it is beyond what I should have to go through.” It was such an immense relief that I’ve been talking about it ever since.

At the syringe exchange site, Guillaume made sure that people had the opportunity to share. And if they wanted his perspective or advice, he would give it to them. He always encouraged people to take everything they’d been through and put it towards the present moment.

He described a pep talk he gave at the centre, years ago. He remembers saying, “You’re gonna do it in the present tense, you’re not gonna do it in the future you’re not gonna do it in the past. You’re gonna use everything, but you’re gonna do it NOW.” Over a year later, some man stopped him on the street, and shook his hand.

“Do you remember me?” he asked. At first, Guillaume didn’t. He had seen so many men, so many stories. The guy who shook his hand had been through a bad divorce, and had gotten into sniffing cocaine. Guillaume hadn’t been talking to him, but he had overheard the Now talk. The next morning, as he left the shelter, he was about to sniff some cocaine he had stored in his locker. But he kept hearing Guillaume’s words.

“I got stuck with the Now,” he said. He threw the cocaine in the sewer, and hasn’t touched drugs ever since. Within a few weeks he had built up his landscaping business and when Guillaume saw him, he had five employees. 

Guillaume: “As of today, it’s one of my first and greatest achievements.”

***
Towards the end of our interview, I brought up suicide. As all of my readers can probably tell, these days, the topic has been pretty prevalent in my head, due to the fact that my ex-boyfriend Simon jumped off a building this past January. During my stints in the psych ward and day treatment program for eating disorders, a number of the teenagers I met were suicidal. At the time, the protocol for suicidal people was to put them in isolation for 72 hours. This practice continues in hospitals across North America. It only recently occurred to me what a terrible idea this is. I just feel like such a huge part of mental illness and suicide is feeling isolated and alone. How is it that we’re treating the problem with more isolation, more seclusion?

Guillaume agrees that isolation is one of the worst things you can do for people who want to kill themselves. At the syringe exchange site, many of the people who came into the centre felt suicidal. 

Guillaume: “Nobody actually wants to die, but everyone wants to stop suffering. .. a huge part of most suffering is that you’re silent and nobody is listening to you and you’re alone in your pain… Just having someone listen usually relieves part of the initial crisis, and they realize that they can come back.”

But I wonder if part of the issue is that some people really do want to die. Or at least, they want part of themselves to be dead. And maybe we need to let people be honest about this part of them.

Erica: "In high school, they present us with power points that say don’t ever do this, you will hurt those you love. What about acknowledging the part of a person who wants to die?"

Guillaume: "Nobody actually wants to die, you want to stop suffering from whatever you are suffering from. You want to stop that pain. We have to look for solutions. It’s not that in talking about it that you are going to find solutions but if you talk about what’s actually going on to the relevant people you might find that you’re not all by yourself. You might find some solutions."

I feel like for Simon, any solution would have been too little too late. The fact that he would always have to endure hard times, maybe this was unacceptable for him after a while. As though he had already put in his time with the misery. He was all done. In my speeches about Simon, I always say, “I just feel like he would have had one more good day.” I said something along these lines to Guillaume.

Erica: “There would have been at least one more thing that he would have enjoyed. He seemed to enjoy sex. Or the exchange with the cashier at the depanneur, something … But I don’t know what it was like to be Simon for that long… he was probably like shit, I’m still me and it’s still this.”

Simon is dead, and I think about him so much more than when he was alive. It’s like by jumping off the building, Simon wrote this piercing and haunting book that I’ll never get out of my head. Fucker. Since Simon was a child, he imagined throwing himself from way up high. Resources or not I suppose it was inevitable. And Simon was pretty adamantly against treatment services, or being labelled with a condition or a problem. Volatile, impulsive, filled with alcohol, Simon wanted to stay Simon, whatever that means.

G: "In public services, you are a number, and you are one out of so many. They’re overencumbered So many requests for so little support that is available. And… people are actually numbered, they’re issues. So you’re schizophrenia, and you’re neurotic and you’re this and you’re that and what I’m saying is that you’re a human being who is just as worthy as I am, who is going through different issues than I am but you’re just as good, you’re just as worthy as any human being. You’re not a case, you’re not an issue, you’re not a problem.”

Hear that, folks. Not a problem. Just as worthy as any human being.

The End.

Guillaume is currently working on broadcasting content on a website called Twitch.
You can find his stuff here.

Follow me on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Like My Facebook Fan Page: Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Read the Book: I Let Go

I am looking for more interview candidates, for Asking People About Their Lives. So far the process has been empowering for everyone involved. I am interested in all kinds of humans. Let me know if you would like me to ask you about your life, or to ask someone else about theirs.

Also, the call-out for the Internet Diagnosis of Every Three to Six Weeks is still on. Thanks! Strange earwax, odours and involuntary twitches are all welcome. Thanks!

 

Guillaume, Again

Related Posts:

 

Guillaume, Part One, Too Ugly For Prostitution

 

Not Separate From All That Is

Twenty-First Century Yoga and an End to Self-Care

Simon Girard (1979-2015)

How I am violent

Cardboard Box 

Guillaume, Part One: Too Ugly For Prostitution

Maybe you have seen this man. He sits on St-Catherine Street in front of Pharma-Prix, close to the Guy-Concordia metro. In front of him there’s a baseball cap where you can leave some money. In his hand he holds a cardboard sign. “Too ugly for prostitution,” it says. As far as ugliness goes, I would say he is not quite the champion. Though undergroomed, he has bleached blonde hair, bright eyes, and conventionally attractive facial features. Of course, my facial differentiation skills are terrible and so I am not an excellent judge. Still, walking down St. Catherine Street, I appreciated the relatively original humour on the cardboard.

“You never know,” I’d say to him, dropping a quarter or two into his hat.

The summer I moved to Halifax, I had to empty my shitty downtown apartment and put a bunch of my stuff in storage. My very tiny mother was coming to help me.

“Erica,” she said to me on the phone. “If you have any guy friends who could help, that would be great. I’ll pay them.” As it turned out, my ex-boyfriend Simon was working on a movie and I couldn’t really think of anyone else. I figured my mom and I were on our own. The morning I was supposed to move, I biked to the storage locker to get the keys. On the corner of Lucien L’Allier and Overdale, I ran into the guy with the cardboard sign.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re the guy with the sign. Too ugly for prostitution. I know you.” As though simply recognizing his sign and his face suddenly made us wonderful friends.

“That’s me,” he replied, looking behind me at the parking lot. I asked him if he was strong and if he wanted a job.

“My mom will pay you,” I promised.

“Yah, maybe,” he said. We introduced ourselves formally and I learned that his name was John. I led him down the street to my shitty apartment. When we got there, I think I offered John a shower. I can’t remember whether or not he took me up on this. I do remember that one of the first things he did was sit on the front porch. With a white out pen and black and red markers, he started to etch a design onto our steps.

“So like, can you help me take this stuff out on the curb?” John required a great deal of direction, but he did help me haul my mildewed fouton, mediocre dresser and a bunch of garbage out to the street. Unless I told him exactly what to do, he would go back to his white-out drawing. My mom arrived from Ontario. Although she was somewhat surprised at my choice of hired help, she was grateful to have some extra hands. With her car, John and I made a couple of trips to the storage place. At one point, after closing up the locker, I got back to the car, and John was gone.

“John?” I called. I wandered around looking for him and calling his name for a couple of minutes. Finally he reappeared.

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“Are you mad?” asked John. Well, I was a bit frazzled and irritated. In my opinion, he was supposed to help. Later on, my boyfriend the Boatman laughed at the fact that I’d been surprised at John’s struggle to remain on task. I guess I just thought he'd be happy to get a job. At the time, I was 25. Four years later, I feel much older than I felt back then. On the way back to my apartment, John told me about panhandling on St. Catherine’s Street. He said that sometimes he made 300 bucks a day. I didn’t think that my mother was going to pay that much. She was thinking fifteen or twenty dollars an hour. We got back to the apartment and John went back to his white-out sketch. There were still piles of stuff to throw out. I got him to help me with a couple more boxes. Then I went to the bathroom. When I returned, John had disappeared again. This time, he didn’t come back. We never paid him. I don't know if John is still around. I don't walk by that Pharmaprix very often.

It has been some time since I thought about John. I was reminded of the story a couple of weeks ago, when I met Guillaume. Guillaume and I met at a barbecue where we were the ninth and tenth wheels. It was a rather grown up barbecue, and almost all of the guests in attendance lived in their own condos. One of the couples was even involved in selling life insurance. Not the kind our friend Patrick bought, but a similar type for which you don’t require a medical exam. When I arrived at the barbecue, everyone was huddled in couples. Nobody seemed to be eating or talking. Immediately, I dove into the vegetable platter, filling ones of my hands with carrots and cauliflower, and slothering the vegetables in hummus. The other hand was filled with cheese curds. Then I took it upon myself to ask people about their lives. Guillaume took it upon himself to make mojitos.

By the time the mojitos were ready, I had learned a great deal about life insurance, and consumed a large quantity of cheese curds. Now I wanted to ask about Guillaume’s life.

When Guillaume was barely eighteen, he got a job working at a men’s homeless shelter in Longueil. Now Guillaume is 31. With minimal breaks, he has spent almost fourteen years working with people who struggle with homelessness and drug addictions. Listening to him, I felt like I’d rarely heard anyone speak of these populations with such wholeheartedness and respect.

In the end, there was so much to say that we met on the Lachine Canal the following day. Everyone who knows me would be amazed at how little I spoke throughout the entire thing. It can be a relief not to talk so much. And I heard a lot of captivating things.

 

To Be Continued

Guillaume had so much to say, that I'm breaking the interview up into various parts. You can read a bunch more on Monday.

I Can't Wait To Send This Email, A Drawing by the Boatman

Follow The Boatman on Tumblr at http://verysatisfied.tumblr.com/

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook and/or Follow Me On Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

If you know someone who you’d like to see interviewed, or if you think you might be a good candidate, do get in touch with me.  Also, I am still waiting for my very first Internet Diagnosis of Every Three to Six Weeks.

Cardboard Box
My Name is Erica. I love coffee
Asking Matt Wiviott About His Life