My Five AM Blues

Five AM has always been a very worrisome time for me. For instance, there was a time in my life when I avoided the dentist like the plague, and in the wee hours of the morning I would find myself staring at the ceiling – or into the red of my digital alarm clock – worrying about my teeth falling out of my head. Whenever money was tight, I would worry about losing the house. When I drank and smoked regularly, five AM was a good time to worry about becoming a cancer-ridden cautionary tale to the friends who shared my habits. I would worry about the condition most of my organs, brain, kidneys, liver and stomach. I would worry about my memory and whether or not I had a case of early onset Alzheimer’s. If I had a twitchy muscle I would worry that it was Parkinson’s. In other words, saying I’m a little bit anxious is like saying the Niagara Falls boat ride, The Maid of the Mist, is a little bit moist.

Interesting thing about these pesky worries was that they would always evaporate within half hour of getting out of bed. One minute I would making toast, brooding over the inedible loss of my front teeth, and the next I would be as right as a sunny day. I had spent a more than I decade compartmentalizing my bad habits – drinking and smoking once a week, usually Fridays – and somehow I inadvertently managed to do the same for my anxieties.

But thanks to regular visits to the dentist, better money-management skills, and NOT being allowed near Ava (my nine-month old) after having a cigarette, most of these worries, and their causes have since receded.

Except for one that I can’t seem to shake.

It’s about time, and my inability to control it.

More specifically, it’s about having less and less time to achieve what I need to do.

OK, if you must know, it’s about being ever-closer to middle-age and thinking, every morning at – you guessed it – five AM: I’m thirty-eight and only a poet or I’m thirty-eight only a ESL instructor. If I’m feeling particularly cruel that morning, I think to myself I’m thirty-eight and only a daytime supply ESL instructor with a permanent night-time gig, but that one does take a lot of effort at the crack of dawn.

Of course, I do try to defend my career choice by telling myself that I’ve always needed something to pay the bills while allowing me to write, and as luck would have it, I’ve fallen into a career which I find very fulfilling, take pride in, enjoy thoroughly and – if I may toot my own horn – do very well at.

It then comes back to my writing. More specifically, my poetry. How much am I willing to gamble on even a moderate level of success/recognition? If you have a look at the bios in any anthology, quite a large number contain the phrase discovered posthumously. Now, I just want to stop right here and address the people who routinely say: Who cares about recognition? Just enjoy the act of creation!

To those people I would like propose that they burn all of their finished works right now. After all, if it’s just about the agony and ecstasy of artistic creation, then they should have no trouble putting a match to all of their finished artwork. Most would balk at the suggestion, demonstrating that in even the most idealistic of artists, there’s still a part of them that wants a little recognition for their effort, something that says I was here. I just happen to embrace that part more openly than others.

Of course, one of the drawbacks to embracing a demon is that tends to whisper in your ear at five AM. Which you can’t help but respond to. And in the end you have the equivalent of Gollum’s monologue going on in your head and you haven’t even gotten out of bed yet.

Or maybe that’s just me.

When you right down to it, this last remaining anxiety of mine is simply a matter of me not reaching the level of success I thought I would have reached by this time. I guess one way of looking at my predicament is that it’s a good thing to always expect better of yourself. Or at least that is what my online cognitive therapy avatar would tell me. But you know, I never cared much for those Pollyanna types anyways.

I have no choice. It looks as though, despite this last remaining persistent worry, I’ll just have to keep plugging away until my number comes up, or until 100 years from now, some crusty old critic discovers one of my poems in yellowed magazine, and thinks: meh, not bad, but what’s with all the kvetching?

Swimming Lessons

Ava, I hope you will appreciate this when you are older.

I’m sitting in a wading pool, holding you up as you splash and kick around. Next to me is a woman, bent over and picking at her big toe.

You might not think this is a big deal. Who cares?

Please allow me to put this into context for you. To say I don’t like crowded public places is an understatement. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that public services like pools are vitally important to the survival of any community. In fact, in a VERY abstract way, I am happy that this woman can do whatever she is doing to her big toe (not going to look) on this fine Saturday afternoon. However, is it rude of me to say that just don’t want to be here when she – and everyone else in the pool for that matter – is?

From my curmudgeony perspective, the problem with public transit is the public.

Seriously, who wants to sit on s streetcar and listen to someone going off on their cell about what they plan to do to their boyfriend now that he’s been caught cheating? That really happened. Am I being a little selfish? Antisocial?

Fine. But my point is, Ava, that I’m sitting in this crowded wading pool, in my bathing suit (actually I’m not sure it would qualify as a bathing suit. Does a freshly-washed running shorts/white briefs combo pass as a bathing suit?) and I actually WANT to be here, in all my white, pasty, antisocial glory, because it all makes you giggle like that.

March’s Top Five Vids

We have another eclectic mix of videos this month, from middle-aged men prancing in their underwear to Betrand Russell’s advice to the graduating class of the year 3000. Enjoy!
 

Also, atheists, you do not exist!
 

5. I get a sense, from this video, that there are people who actually wear pants in their own homes. Is this really true? Can anyone confirm this?


 

4. Watching this video has been scientifically proven to make you feel awesome for 24 hours.*


 

3. This one goes out to my atheist friends. Consider this a public service announcement that people like Ministry Man do, in fact, exist. Not only that, they also have a large following. Forgive me; while watching this video, there will be much face-palming.


 

2. No doubt you may need a shower after the previous video. I can provide you with the next best thing, an excerpt from a interview with Bertrand Russell, and his answer to the question of what advice he would give to the generation of people a thousand years into the future.


 
 

1. Love him or hate him as a poet, one cannot deny that Irving Layton was one hell of a charismatic speaker. Here he discusses why he moved to Toronto to further his career. The rest of Canada, cover your ears.

 
 
 

*Unfortunately, there have been reports, from some viewers, that immediately twenty-four hours after watching the video, they began to hear the song “Can’t Get You Outta My Head” over and over in their minds, and were unable to remove it for days.

Five New Year’s Resolutions I’ve Already Broken

1. I will cut out the weekend smoking. I tried, really. It lasted about two hours, then I had my first cigarette of the year at around 2:00 AM. About a decade ago, I disciplined myself into drinking only one night a week and smoking only when I drink. At the time, compartmentalizing, and therefore minimizing these vices was a great idea. However, like most people, I tend to deal with and eradicate problems only when they grow to a certain size. You’ve by now heard the expression “too big to fail”, yes? Well there’s a counter-point to that expression: “too small to bother with, even though this tiny little thing will kill me, or so my annoying ex-smoker friends tell me with their judgey eyes and, mind you, who should be more concerned with their own issues thank you very much and who the hell invited you over anyways?”

2. I will cut out the weekend drinking. I had planned on this being a dry New Year’s. But it was all Lisa’s fault. She suggested I go get a bottle of wine just in case. No, wait. She INSISTED I get some, if I recall correctly. Personally, between you and me, I think she likes it when I get tipsy, especially when we go to parties at her friends’ places. I can’t really understand this, because none of her friends really drink or smoke the way I do. The dominant theory I have for this is that in marrying my wife, I found the only person in the world, aside from myself, that thinks I adopt the charming cadence of Peter O’Toole when I’m a few sheets to the wind.

3. I will cut back on the gaming. Sorry. Again, I tried. But I’m the father of a 4-month old with bills to pay. Taking short vacations into the world of Skyrim just makes good economic sense right now.

4. I will eat better. This one went up in smoke the moment my sister offered me meat Samosa the size of a Bearclaw this afternoon. So carby, so oily, so good.

5. I will not swear at other drivers. Ummm, yeah: five minutes into the drive to my sister’s house this afternoon. To be honest, it was the spirit of this resolution that persuaded me to let the TTC bus pull ahead of me. Since I had never done this before, I was shocked to learn just how slow buses are. I mean, hair-pullingly slow. I couldn’t help but think that the bus driver was doing it deliberately because he knew I was late to my sister’s, not to mention the fact that I was starving because of New Year’s Resolution number four. Anyhoo, I swore, and it -as usual- felt mildly satisfying.

Almost as satisfying as rationalizing my way out of a series of unfortunate, and rather boring, new year’s resolutions.

Happy New Year!