draw things, paint things, write things, make things ... number 325 … Victoria Day edition

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) I’ve reached an age where high adventure is represented by getting groceries at No Frills. Why are extremely old and very tiny, sleepy people careening through the parking lot like some shaky, 8-bit computer game? Why do they all drive giant SUVs? How do they even get into them? Why is there no auto company making tiny cars marketed directly at old people?

TINY CARS
TINY CARS
TINY CARS

Are you old? Are you the size of a puppet? When you’re out in public, do people look for strings over your head? Is the world a frightening and increasingly blurry place? Why are the brake and accelerator so fiendishly close together? Why are people yelling at you and waving their hands to stop? Why does your bumper have so much fur on it? Because you need a TINY CAR! Drive a car that is appropriate to your size! Get in and out without dislocating your hips! Kill fewer people! All the controls in your TINY CAR are buttons the size of potatoes! Your TINY CAR cannot exceed fifty miles per hour!

DRIVE A TINY CAR TODAY!

As a psychic break I go to the Metro, which is just as bad but with higher prices, where I see a woman in a trench coat, and this immediately makes me think of Cloris Leachman in Kiss Me Deadly, the 1955 film noir and black-and-white showcase of leering, disturbing behaviour. Cloris plays Christina, an escapee from a psychiatric hospital, who of course is running barefoot along the highway in the middle of the night wearing nothing but a trench coat. Out on the road that evening is a private detective named Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, who is forced to stop his sports car and give her a ride. Christina asks him, whatever happens, to “remember me,” alluding to a poem by Christina Rossetti. Unseen bad guys immediately waylay them, and Hammer hears Christina screaming as she is tortured with a pair of pliers. The bad guys then try to put a neat bow on the episode by pushing the sports car off a cliff with Christina’s body and an unconscious Hammer inside. Somehow he survives, and from that point on he is less a detective than a missile with a deeply flawed guidance system.

Anyway, I think the trench coat is a good look, although it speaks to a time when people were thinner, lived on coffee and cigarettes and a cheese sandwich at lunch. But in 2026, if you have the bones, go for it.

One detail that will jump out of that movie synopsis is the pliers, and this is because normal pain is boring. Being afflicted is one thing, but being tortured with a pair of pliers gets the readers attention. People with chronic pain understand this on a fundamental level (and learn to become inured to it) because it’s difficult to tell the same unresolved (and probably insoluble) story over and over again to the people around you. It would be like if it rained every day — eventually people would stop talking about the rain. Unless it rained nails. And if you continued to talk about the rain, the rain of water and not nails, then the reactions of people around you would get smaller and smaller. This is the isolating and ultimately lonely part of chronic pain that only the afflicted can understand.

So try to be nicer to that cousin with the bad back or migraines.

Still, the news is always a consolation. Anyone who remains in doubt as to our slow, senseless decline need look no further than the insufferable spectacle that was Kash Patel testifying before the Senate last Tuesday. It brought to mind an episode from roughly a million years ago when I watched an obviously intoxicated man spend the better part of ten minutes berating a liquor store cashier with the accusation that, as a Guinness drinker, he was being discriminated against because various unseen powers did not allow (at that time) for the sale of his favourite beer in single cans, only six-packs. There is an undeniable artistry at work with those who believe in their own bullshit, and defend it to the end, right up to when the police arrive.

Just the previous evening Patel’s boss (and, incidentally, holder of the nuclear codes) sent 45 tweets in a three-hour window between 10 pm and almost two in the morning, wherein he accused Barack Obama of being a traitor and a demon, working with the CIA to attempt a coup, stealing 120 million dollars from Obamacare, and conspiring with Bill Clinton to commit undisclosed crimes. He also had a go at Senator Mark Kelly (should resign), assistant attorney Jack Smith (should be arrested), Hillary Clinton (should be deported to Haiti), Adam Schiff (leaked classified files), Dominion Voting Systems and the New York Times. And the next day he was as sharp and alert and trim as ever.

And then I ran three marathons, and got voted the most handsome man on the planet.

Always always I am fascinated by the alternate galaxies inhabited by delusional people. Maybe this is from growing up in a small town full of eccentrics, I don’t know. These days I think it’s more connected to the multi-dimensional universe of endless puffery that is represented by social media and more ‘professional’ sites like LinkedIn, where no achievement or certificate is too small or boring to promote and self-celebrate. I’d also shovel the lumpen underworlds of writers and artists in this direction, where everyone is honoured and blessed about everything.

Another million years ago I used to know a poet who often talked about her ‘career’. The first few times she made this characterization — as if constructing blocks of words in a mysterious but (hopefully) compelling manner could be described in terms of a professional trajectory (where the ultimate corner office is, I can only imagine) — I truly struggled to imagine writing as an exercise of self-advancement. I didn’t really understand the game at that point. In many ways I still don’t, because it smells so badly of bullshit.

I had a similar reaction recently when I came across a visual artist with a bragging reel. I regularly reset my Instagram feed to show me more creative work, with a focus on process and how-to’s. This reel was not that. All to raucous, upbeat music, she describes graduating from “one of the best” art schools, getting a job as an artist’s assistant (“where I learned so much!”), applying for and getting into her “dream” postgraduate course, which “exceeded all expectations”, having loads of group and solo shows, selling tons of work, getting represented by a “big” gallery in London, lecturing at the university level, being interviewed, getting collected, and now being basically amazing. Watching this I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, for some setback or life event to humble or otherwise ground her. Nope! I guess when mom and dad have money, the sky is the limit.

It reminds me of how my Gen Z kid talks about how she is going to ‘turn it on’ when she leaves home, how she is going to just suddenly practice all the best habits she declines to do now. Why waste your time when you can just flick that switch later? You just lock in, dad. Like all those people who say they’re going to write a book or get in shape in retirement. Do you write or move now? No, aren’t you listening, I said I’ll start writing and running when I retire. Oh, so just for enjoyment then. No, I’ll probably publish a couple of books about winning marathons. How hard can it be?

Have a good Victoria Day, everyone. (For my American friends, Queen Victoria was the reigning monarch when Canada became a country).

Take care,
djb

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Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness.
— Emile M. Cioran

p.s. That first quote in the subhead is from Benjamin Franklin.