All my lies are always wishes
I needed a pen. I’ve also been deep in a tiger pit of depression lately, and it seemed like a good idea to pit these two things against each other. Draw a cure from the blood of necessity.
I needed a pen, a red LePen that I had googled twice just to make sure it was real. It feels very Canadian to call it a LePen, like the time my French teacher tried to tell me that the word for vegetable in french was Le Vegetable. I failed French that year, and almost every year after, and I blame her for the most part. I blame many people for plenty of things, and it’s not always fair. It is honestly more often my fault, but that’s less easy to admit. One of many challenging steps.
I needed a pen. I’ve also been deep in a tiger pit of depression lately, and it seemed like a good idea to pit these two things against each other. Draw a cure from the blood of necessity. I could walk to the stationery store, the good one, in the sun and light of the morning. Let the warmth of the day tone the tired skin on my arms, let the wind move my hair so it flies in front of my face to remind me of our shared persistent nature. I needed a pen, a red pen, from the good stationery store. May the ballet of commerce heal me.
Last Thursday evening I hosted a screening of I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: a film about Wilco at the HotDocs theatre in Toronto as part of a series I curate called Jukedocs. The first time I saw this movie it was on a DVD copy lent to me by a friend who said, “watch this, it will change your life.” I remember speaking with him after I watched it, drinking outside in the grass and dirt as the summer started to fall prey to darker skies, he asked what I thought about it. I spoke at length about how I related to the Jeff Tweedy we see in the documentary; tired, and weary, as if the body can haunt itself while still breathing. He seemed almost desperate, trying to solve the equation of himself, all his unknown variables, and I could see how exhausted it seemed to be making him. How easily frustrated he appeared, frayed at the edges like weathered twine, exhausted by the search for self. When my friend asked what I thought about it being in black and white, I realized I hadn’t even noticed.
Watching it on the screen in a theatre for the first time, seeing the texture of film grain pop in the contrast on screen, I was drawn back into the margins of long faded memories. Days when I needed so many answers to questions I had half-formed. It’s a documentary about the frustrating machinations of the music industry, but really it’s a documentary about a man walking the razor wire between what has been and all the unknown days ahead. How making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot changed the band, or maybe they had to change to make it. Maybe it was just Jeff Tweedy who needed to shed old skin. To be new, some kind of new that could finally be real.
The next morning, I put Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on the turntable as Lysh and I drank coffees quietly together. My depression filling the awkward voids in the room not already occupied by noise, leaving little room for air. I sat behind the book shelf that separates the office from the rest of our loft, and cried a little when the line I know I would die if I could come back new hit in “Ashes of American Flags.” I have chased and thought about death my entire life, and often it was because I just didn’t want to be the perception of myself anymore, and death was at least something new. Maybe reincarnation was real, and maybe we could be brought back perfect. Maybe in reconstruction we appear as the visions we chase in the mirror. I needed a red LePen, from the good stationery store, and I wrote a note to myself to remember for the weekend when I could make the trip.
Jeff Tweedy sings like he is praying for answers, often with a softer voice that one used for communion, more pleading than making demands. In “Ashes of American Flags”, he moves through the frustrating mundanities of the world, the fees at the ATM, and how that same money could buy Diet Coke and a pack of cigarettes in the early 2000s. How he worries that he can only be real in his songs, in the subterfuge of poetry, amidst his repeated references to Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer. But there is desire in all of this, and before he sings about death and rebirth, he reveals his plainly hidden truth all my lies are always wishes. Who among us, who have chased self-destruction searching for a body, is not drawn in the world of this line. Every lie a truth wearing a drug store halloween mask. The death he wishes for seconds later a metaphorical desire to see the truths realized on the page. Maybe in dying there is rebirth, as the fallen leaves fill shopping bags at the end of the song.
I needed a red pen, and I gathered myself for the journey. Phone in pocket, “Ashes of American Flags” in my AirPods. Gathered all my little things and headed off with a solemn farewell. Desperate to take the weight of my energy away from the house, and return almost feathered, as if I could weigh in as a ghost. I was lost in the music in my headphones, despite the sirens screaming along down the street next to me, one fire truck, then two, then five moving with urgency. On reddit later, I would see that a garage had caught fire in a laneway, that spread to another. No harm to anyone, just lost memories. On the sidewalk ahead, I could see men drinking on the corner. Not men I recognize in our neighbourhood. Too well dressed, too clean, too much contrast. I could hear them speak in whispers as I paused my music to listen for further sirens. I could hear them discuss my body, how it stood tall in the sun, my legs laid bare by shorts in warm weather, and my shoulders too. One voice louder than the others, who approached me as I stood trapped on the corner and waited for the fire trucks to move.
I won’t repeat verbatim what he yelled at me because it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he did. He yelled about his disgust at seeing me, my bare legs and arms in the sun. He called me a thing, less human, more a beast of the land. He yelled about women’s sports, and how dangerous people like me made women’s lives, this drunken shipwreck of a man who held his hull together with his self-styled feminism. How he armed himself, his drunken rage, with a sword of fire. He yelled at me that it was unfair. “It’s not fair!” He yelled at me, then again when he finally gave up upon receiving no response. “It’s not fair.”
I needed a red LePen from the store. From the good stationery store, or at least the one good to me, that is across the street from the HotDocs theatre where I had stood on stage just days before. “It’s not fair.” He yelled. I walked without music for a few more blocks. I just need this pen. “It’s not fair.” It’s not fair. I just need this pen. I imagined him following me, I imagined him yelling at me more. I remember how it felt the time I was jumped by my apartment in the Yukon, the one down the street from where I had first seen I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: a Film About Wilco. I remember how it felt to be hit when I wasn’t expecting it. Sometimes you know you’ll be punched in the face, and others you don’t, and that’s just the way of things. It’s not fair. My intrusive thoughts got louder now, spurned forward by my pre-existing depression and spiralling desire to be alive at all. The sun could burn the flesh from my bones and I would be okay with it. I would die if I could come back new. Only, I know that I won’t. It’s not fair.
Once I start thinking of some terrible fate, I can’t stop. I keep hearing his voice. I imagine all the places it ends. I imagine my body lying on the ground. I imagine my own destruction over and over. He is yelling “it’s not fair” as my bones fade to dust. It’s not fair. I just needed a pen, and now I am dust. It’s not fair. My intrusive thoughts are so loud. Every car that passes is one I hope will jump the curb and strike me. It’s not fair that they don’t. Maybe one will hit me hard enough that I will be rebuilt, and maybe then I’ll be perfect. It will finally be fair. No one will yell at the disgust of me. My brain allows all of these thoughts to swirl, like a lazy river carrying all the worst parts of me in comforting circles. It’s not fair. I know I am prone to intrusive thoughts, and to paranoia, and spiralling, and I try to stem the tide, but the dam has been broken. I think about what is wrong with my body, my face, my skin, my makeup maybe, that suddenly made me a target. What had I done wrong, I wonder?
I don’t normally have problems in my neighbourhood is the real sore spot of it all. As continued on my walk, I moved past strangers who smile politely, the way neighbours often do. There is no music in my headphones, just a man yelling “it’s not fair” in my ears. When I get to the stationery store, it’s busy. Children are running up and down aisles, and parents help their son buy the right kind of pen. Each one they try isn’t right. It’s not fair. I look for the red LePen, that’s the one I needed after all. There are others, of course, but they aren’t right either. It’s not fair. I buy a new notebook that I doin’t need, and a highlighter, and finally, there on the shelf is a red LePen, which I pull like a thorn from the flesh of a tired paw. I grab a yellow one too because it’s one of my favourite colours, even though I know I will never use it. Who uses yellow pens? Impossible to know, but it’s certainly not me, the woman buying one.
I text Lysh to tell her about the man who yelled at me once I know there’s no chance she will go over and try to make things right. Lysh will always take up arms for any wrong she sees in the world, I love her for it, and I didn’t want her to be yelled at either. It’s not fair. I get to the checkout, and I ask the woman working behind it how she’s doing almost on instinct. She looks at the children running feral in the store and sighs, then says, “okay enough I guess,” and half smiles. It’s not fair. I laugh a little, but I can no longer really tell what’s real and what’s just in my head. She says she likes my tattoos, and I say thank you, and that I need the receipt, as this is a business purchase.
It takes a few more blocks on the walk home before I realize I have not been listening to music since the “it’s not fair” of it all. I hit play and try to forget, but all I can hear is his voice. It’s not fair. I know I would die if I could come back new, Jeff Tweedy pines once more. It’s not fair. When I am home, I let the story emerge from me with righteous fury. I tell Lysh I hope that man, the drunk man who called me a thing and not a person, gets hit by a bus. And this isn’t really true or right, I just needed someone to make a villain of. In truth, it’s my fault. I should not have cared what some drunk man who doesn’t even live here thinks or says of me. It’s not fair, he yelled, and what if it’s just that he sees I have died and come back new, that I have wanted something for myself and was so willing to see it become real that I allowed everything to burn. I am the leaves gathering in shopping bags just as I am the new growth on the branch. What if those of us who desire change so badly we seek destruction can see it in others? It’s not fair, he said, and that’s true. It’s not fair that we hide so much of ourselves in the lies that we tell, desperate to be seen as real. Maybe it’s not fair for him. Maybe all his lies are always wishes.
Once the story has purged itself from me, and I can relax, I feel a little better. As if I needed to get it all out, to clear the anger and idle frustration from me all in one big push. I’m tired, and I sit on the couch with my pens and the notebook I forgot I had purchased. I write some notes for work, a secret project I’ve just taken on and the revisions of my novel Girls of Summer. Things feel almost normal, and I could settle into the couch, and suddenly I could hear music again.
The next film in my Jukedocs series at HotDocs is The Decline of Western Civilization on July 18. You can get tickets here.
