How I'd Kick It In The Head When I Turned Forty-Five

Don’t get me anything for my birthday.

No really. I’m not fishing for gifts.

Please don’t go looking for something ideal that will surprise me and be just what I’ve always wanted.

Don’t buy me a beautiful and fragrant dozen red roses. Their scent will turn rancid. Their smooth petals will dry and wither. Their thorns will get sharper as their stems turn wooden. They will droop and collect dust, until the dry petals flutter to the ground, one by one by one.

Don’t send me on a trip to Fiji or New Zealand or Santa Monica or New York or Galway or Morocco or Sweden or any of those places you know I long to visit. I will only find temporary reprieve and happiness walking the streets and capturing each pixelated memory. It will all fade from my mind when I take that return flight home. As the days, months, and years pass by, I will lose the sights, the smells, the touches, the sounds, and the tastes of all I experienced. It will only leave me wasted and worn and longing to return.

Don’t find me my soulmate. The one who lulls me to sleep with the perfect melody and understands my every whimsy and mood, who will hold me close or give me distance, only needing a glance and a vibe from me to know which to choose. I will just find their one fault that I cannot ignore and it will overshadow all of the good that they provide to me. I will drain their soul of all that is precious and loving, like I have done so many times before with other soulmates. I cannot ruin another life.

Don’t find me a man with the hairless, Adonis body and the arms that could bear me up into the clouds. It may end up being only one night but that night will make me crave more nights until I could no longer bear the thought of being without him. I would ruin other lives just for physical satisfaction.

Don’t give me a 1969 Aston Martin DBS. I couldn’t afford the insurance, the gas, the maintenance, so it would just sit in my driveway and look stunning while it rots.

Don’t build me a 7 bedroom, 2 wing 4500 square foot home on a 30 acre lot with a quiet ravine on the back of the property near a forest. I would have to clean it and pay taxes on it and furnish every room. I don’t have that much patience for shopping.

Don’t give me an NAD direct digital sound system with all the accessories and add-ons. Then I would hear all the imperfections in my favourite pieces of music, and I could never listen to those songs again.

Don’t whisk me off to the finest five-star rated restaurants with the top chefs in the country and their stellar wine cellars. Something would be too sweet, too salty, too bland, too rich; the wine would oxidize while we chatted about some inane, unimportant subject, and the dessert would be finished too soon.

Don’t buy me the perfect emerald pendant laid in 18kt gold with matching earrings, bracelet and ring, or any one of these pieces on its own. Inevitably I will lose part of the set, or I will be too afraid to wear them for fear of losing them, and I will hide them away in a secret drawer that I will forget I use.

Don’t give me a handful of gift cards or the one perfect gift card. Whether you realise it or not, you’ve put a value on me. I fear that you may find me worth more than I find myself.

Don’t throw me a huge surprise party and invite all my friends and make them sing that Mildred and Patty Hill standard and then have them shower me with practical gifts or prank gifts or combinations of both, ending the evening with a large cake with at least one candle for me to blow out while everyone cheers. If all my friends were to gather in one room, I guarantee at least one felony homicide would take place, but at the very least, I would spend all night worrying one would. I would never be able to speak to each person there, and I would want to. I would end up exhausted and despondent.

So please don’t get me anything for my birthday.  

Besides, you’ve just given me the one present that I needed most.

You listened to me. 

Happy Mother's Day. Because we're selfish.

I feel like the most selfish person in the world.

It’s possible that may even be a true statement.

But my selfishness is a direct result of my instincts. You see, when it comes right down to it, the instincts of every living biological creature, animal or plant, protozoa or virus, directs us to one thing.

Reproduction.

As higher-living organisms, we have been able to direct our urges towards other methods of satisfaction – everything from self-satisfaction (practiced by all primates and possibly some cetaceans) to barrier and chemical methods of birth control (practiced primarily by humans, although this may also be practiced by cetaceans) – but the genesis of sexual desire originates in our instinct to reproduce.

As a biological female in this cycle of reproduction, there are certain instincts that humans with this chromosomatic skill set also enact (though some are better at suppressing this instinct than others*). We must care for and protect this little creature who changed our own chemical makeup, leeched nutrients and vitamins and minerals and nearly every single part of its genetic makeup from our bodies during its term inside of us.

Once we have borne this creature unto the planet, we may continue to follow these instincts and reproduce more of these tiny creatures. But once we cease our creation of more creatures, our work is complete. Yes, we have to tend to these beings, nourish them, defend them, guide them through the perils and pleasures of the planet, but in essence, our work is done. We have left a piece of ourselves to remain here long after our journey down long road to our ultimate demise begins.

But we don’t think about it that way. We make this all a wonderful thing – we meet someone, we fall in love, we get pregnant, we have child or children, love them, and make sure that we raise them to be the best human beings they can be.

All we are trying to do is just live forever. We leave a piece of our DNA, just as our parents left theirs through us, and their parents through them. So that someone can know what becomes of the world after we have left it, whether our time ends at the moment we birth our child, a century after, or somewhere in between.

Those of us who choose to have children are often accused of the ultimate selfish act: bringing a baby into a world where there is nothing but discord and strife, hatred and violence. A world that is broken and seemingly irreparable. Those who choose not to have children often wonder why anyone would ever want to bring a child into such a place.

We do because our instincts command us to be selfish. We want those qualities of ours – kindness, generosity, benevolence, love, happiness – to stay on this planet forever. And we are leaving them here the only way we know how, the only way that has seemed to work for millennia.  We put our same qualities into those children that our instincts gave us the desire to create, love, and care for. As humans, we have learned how to easily control our instincts. But sometimes, when we make the world all about ourselves, we just want to indulge those instincts because we know we can make this world a better place.

To those of you who loathe this day because it serves as a painful reminder of what you have lost, remember you are the bearer of history. You are the eyes and ears and thoughts and tastes and smells of your mothers. By living your life, you are communicating all that she is no longer able to experience. You have not lost her; you have rebuilt her within you.

*And to those of you who no longer have any emotional ties to your mothers although she remains alive, you have been given the gift to make the world an even better place. You have halted the cycle of emotional destruction. You have the freedom to create your own cycle, and distance yourself from her malevolence. You are key people in the evolution of humankind. Celebrate this day by welcoming the changes you have brought, and relieve yourself of any guilt or hatred. You are too valuable to allow yourselves to be consumed by the hatred derived from your biological origins.

Hey cancer, please stop taking our friends away, kthxbye

Today is a strange day in and of itself. 

It’s May 7th, the day before May 8^th, which was my best friend and fellow Taurus Klaus’s birthday. It’s been 18 years since he passed away but I always remember him every year on this date, since he was exactly one week older than me. And he never let me forget that!

I also got word today from my good friend Jeanette that her best friend Bridget had passed away earlier this week. I had met Bridget on several occasions through Jeanette, but my favourite memory of her is this:

I was almost five months pregnant at the time. Not quite showing and unable to drink. But my friend Jeanette was getting married. So I went out for her hen night/stagette/doe night – whatever you want to call it when you take the bride-to-be out for her last night of debauchery, instead of sitting around opening up presents with prissy ribbons and wearing hats made out of paper plates and ribbons and bullshit like that.

It was in December, because she was getting married in January. There were six of us. Had to be because we all squished into a boat of a vehicle. One of those Cadillac/Lincoln type deals from the 80s that had bench seats in the front and back. We all had nicknames – I was Preggo, of course. And we met at Bridget’s house.

Bridget was married with two daughters who were extremely close with their mother. Bridget was warm and welcoming and made me feel at ease about going out with a bunch of drinkers and being one of two people who weren’t imbibing (the other being the designated driver). She took the time to make me feel special by getting me to talk about what was going on in my crazy life and how I was doing and would I be ready to travel the following month for Jeanette’s wedding. So we had our drinks, we had our name tags, Bridget gave her daughters one last scolding before bed so they wouldn’t give their dad a hard time, and we went out into the frosty, dark night.

Squished in the back of this massive boat-like vehicle, Bridget was telling us about these wonderful new Cadbury Christmas Elves that had pop rocks in them. So we had to stop at a gas station and find them. They were weird because your tongue would be coated in Dairy Milk richness when all of a sudden, the pop rock would explode and stick to your tongue and the roof of your mouth, sit there, and crackle. Once you got over the weirdness, they were the best damn Christmas candies on earth!

Thanks to pregnancy brain, all I remember about the ride to where we were going was that it was long, and dark, and cold, and full of pop rocks. We got to some building in the East end of Toronto and had to climb a steep flight of stairs; absolutely perfect for a pregnant woman with a fear of heights. We seemed to be the first people who arrived for the 11pm show. Lucky for me, they made virgin vodka crans.

We were laughing and chatting and having a grand old time, watching the club fill up with nothing but women. Not one gay man. Not one man dragged along by his wife. The only men were sound guys and barkeeps.

And then the main attraction men came out to your typical cheesy songs, dressed in chaps and cowboy hats and leather and the like, to hoots and hollers and whistles. You would never hear anything like that in a club featuring female dancers.

Then the strangest thing I have ever seen in a club, strip or not, happened. Women from the audience left their tables and went to stand on stage. I was looking around to see if they had been selected by staff, because of course we would have put our doe on stage with the rest of them. But no, these women seemed to just volunteer and walk up and knew what time to stand on stage.

Then we started to squeal in shock, horror, and hilarity. The male strippers went up to each of these women standing on stage and dirty danced with them, while the women pawed the well-built, washboard-abed, smooth-chested specimens of the male sex writhing against them. Some of them even kissed. It was just nasty!

It was that night when I decided I would never visit another male strip club again. 

Bridget's daughters are a decade older now, and they won’t remember the night that they almost got in big trouble just before their mom went out with a bunch of crazy women.

What Bridget and Klaus had in common is that they were both fighters until their bodies could fight no more. They both wanted to live as long as they could, through the pain and drain and the visits by friends and families, faces unrecognizable behind masks (which we took off when the nurses left the room), capped & gowned to the nines, as if we were at the Center for Disease Control.

Yet sttill, at the very end, each of them would have given you the nightshirts off their backs if they saw that you were shivering at the side of their bed.

Rest In Peace, Klaus. I miss you terribly, my friend, even if we never did do Remingtons together.

Rest in Peace, Bridget. Thank you for your kindness.