Happy As A Clam

Forgive me for overturning my interdiction against writing about contentment so soon after issuing it, but I am excited to finally understand what that cliche means! I had long thought it to be as conceptually impenetrable as so many other dogeared English expressions, until my friend Andrew showed me how to curl up in a loose ball in shallow ocean water and let the waves slowly push me up onto the shore. Luckily there were no lifeguards around to give us shit for acting like dead people.

Two and a half weeks ago Andrew whisked me along for a luxurious car camping trip in Goose Rocks, Maine. Defining quaint, this teeny village lies just north of Kennebunkport (meaning I also got to give the finger live to the Bush summer estate.) It is a place special to Andrew and me because both of us were brought there by our Montreal families for summer vacations when we were children--a remarkable coincidence considering how small the place is (two long streets deep.)

Goose Rocks beach is renowned for its soft fine grey sand and shallow bay hugged by rocky bumps of islands which evoke the town's name. With its plenitude of colourful smartly kept freshly painted Victorian clapboard summer manses and its streetlamps from the 40s, it seems to be successfully holding onto the past. Despite its ample beauty, permits and observance of picky little bylaws about where, when, and how non-residents can park seem to have kept the beach from becoming more crowded than it was when I was last there in 1980. Even though there are no public trash cans, I found not a single empty juicebox or cigarette butt in the sand--that's what a powerful sense of 'our' the place has! This dedicated stewardship is one kind of conservatism I can admire.

Other kinds made me uneasy: the blinding whiteness and social homogeneity of the place. I half-jokingly refer to the place as a.k.a. Cape Cracker. I counted exactly four brown people in three towns over four days. The apparent absence of colour and socioeconomic difference was striking and creepy. Though it's always been an intensely bourgie place, the fame brought to the area by the election of Bush Sr. has pushed the summer rents up to the point where you can forget about staying anywhere in town for less than $3 000 a week. That effectively eliminates anyone who doesn't hang with stockbrokers or isn't tight with someone who does.

I thought of how much more uneasy I would likely feel if I wasn't a WASP and was visiting this place. Then I wondered if one of my non-white friends (or particulary savvy pale friends) were accompanying me if he or she would remark that my discomfort emanates from (pale) privilege itself: that my friend would be only a little more acutely aware than usual of their skin surrounded by that sea of blondes in Lilly Pulitzer dresses, but it would take such extreme privilege and homogeneity for me to feel that level of uncomfortable awareness of the privileges I can effortlessly enjoy merely on account of my birth circumstances while SO many other people cannot.

Needless to say, it was pretty easy to feel badass in Maine. All Andrew and I had to do was dress normally for dinner and drive into town listening to music we liked in order to feel like the band in a Motley Crue video--cruising past grimacing parents and school principals punching the air and choking on our dust.

I am very grateful for what I enjoyed there. This includes my close friendship with Andrew. I have loved him a long time, but this trip deepened my appreciation for him further still. It was neat to spontaneously spend long periods of quiet with him as we drove (140 k all the way down.) He was also his usual dashingly clowny self. He was so handsome in his open-cuffed white shirt and jeans. In the mornings we would sit at the picnic table, drink espresso, eat a gorgeous omelette he had made, and listen to Louis Armstrong on his car stereo. He thought of everything. He brought a tent, a tarp, stove, bedding, snacks, lantern, cutting board, bug repellent, scotch, and a tiny rubber chicken with a plasticized hard-boiled yolk you could squeeze out of its ass.

Oh, but that's not all. In the fireplace he built a 3 foot-tall sketch of a traditional Japanese building out of mill ends and let me see from inside what happens to the main beams of a wooden building when it is consumed by fire. The roof he laid on top made the inferno stretch out above the structure like wings. Later that same night we took a bottle of wine and a votive candle down to the pitch black beach. We watched a sheet lightning storm over the horizon clouds with a Harvest moon glowing off to the side.

On the sunny beach looking at the big sky upside down from between my legs it felt good to catch myself thinking of nothing for stretches of time. That mindless sensuality made me feel like a mollusk.

It's Just Common Sense

Nothing lets me know more quickly that someone and I have next to nothing in common than when s/he harrumphs, "Can you believe he said/ate/asked/did that?...Why, it's just common sense!" This outraged tag phrase separates the dull from the rest of us with lightning speed. I may admire many abilities of people fond of invoking the idea of common sense, but intelligence will not be one of them.

The way I see it, there are two main kinds of people walking around: those who are baffled and awed by the universe most of the time and those who are dead wrong fifty times more often than they'll ever find out. I envy the latter sometimes. How comfy it must be to be able to believe that predictable sense exists in any great supply. I don't know about you, but the more I find out about how things actually work, the more hyper and uncertain I become. How much more soundly I could sleep if I didn't know that chickens match their eggs to their earlobes! (See below.)

When I tried to blow the mind of the one thoroughly sensible person I know by telling her about shrimp being responsible for flamingos' pink she said, "Well, that seems to make sense." "Do blue jays only eat blueberries? Do cardinals only eat tomatoes?" I asked.

It's one thing to accept things as they are presented to you; some good may inadvertently come to you and yours if only by virtue of being this easygoing and agreeable, and hey, we all have to take massive amounts of secondhand information for granted before we can even get out of bed in the morning. I think it's a much more pernicious thing, however, to confidently extrapolate a multitude of unproved implications from a fistful of isolated facts. This seems to me very foolish, but you need only read about any popular crusade to see this approach is favoured all the time.

I wonder about Occam's Razor sometimes. I understand that reducing the number of variables up for consideration may lower the odds of a person being led astray of the truth by irrelevancies, but why should the simplest explanation be favoured on principle when there are so many first principles still to be discovered and when so many phenomena aren't simple or obvious in the least? If you hope to sculpt sound theory with Occam's Razor, you'd better hope you're only one step away from cracking the whole code when you start shaving.

My Summer Vacation

Sorry that I've been remiss about keeping up with this blog the last two months. I've been too hot, too lazy, or have been having too good a time to bother writing. Besides, I didn't want to bore any of us by describing the relative contentment I've felt. This feeling is something we all desire for ourselves and our loved ones, it's wonderful when it comes to roost upon us for a while, but do we ever want to hear about it at any length? Is there anything more tedious than listening to someone go on and on about how pleasurable something is? Dissatisfaction, if not forever arising in the same pattern, is much more interesting to discuss. The more directly experienced and less said about contentment, the better.

I've visited and been visited, I've danced and have been danced around, I've shut some doors and been shut out by some before feeling better, I've loved and been loved, I've been worrying less, I've been camping and been campy, I've taken happy pills and have heard a lot of good...

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZ

See?

I'll try to bring you back to life with some startling zoological facts I learned in Toronto this past weekend (some of which will lay the foundation of my next entry):

Flamingos are pink because they eat so much shrimp. If they ate nothing but fish and chips, their feathers would turn white.

Rabbits excrete two kinds of poo: some little pellets are for sweeping out of the cage; some are meant to be eaten so the tough grass particles can have another chance to be fully digested.

Mick Jagger looks exactly like you'd think: small and scowly. The Stones have been practising for their upcoming tour in a public school gym down the street from my Mum's house. She wanted to flash her tits at them as they drove past her porch one night, but being the classy lady she is, restrained herself. Not a week had gone by since Jesse gave me a heart attack by sneaking the extremely gay (and catchy) 1984 Jagger/Michael Jackson duet "State of Shock" onto his druggie PRIDE weekend CD compilation when I happened to see the sexy senior himself in an awful neon green t-shirt getting into a car fifteen feet away.

Iggy Pop is only five foot one. How can this be? This passenger rides and rides but needs to sit on two telephone books to see out the window. No wonder he and Mick can thrash around on stage the way they do: if they kicked you you'd hardly feel it.

The colour of a chicken's eggs are directly related to the colour of their earlobes.

Yes, chickens have earlobes. I'll leave you to gnaw on that for a while.