Light bulbs for the wicker man

My book, the Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, is out in May! Pre-orders help SO MUCH, and I would be forever grateful if you scooped one up. Wherever you get books, or here: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477331484/

Also, I've got a book launch event here in Toronto, that is FREE to attend. I'll be reading a little, and talking with my friend Elmain Abdelmahmoud. Come through! RSVP for space here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/the-dad-rock-that-made-me-a-woman-niko-stratis-with-elamin-adbelmahmoud-tickets-1291549853379?aff=oddtdtcreator

I don’t fully remember what comes next, but it was information I used to believe I knew. I used to know the sequence of songs on a tape, the perfect pacing and exactly where it would cut off the end of a track at the end of side A when the timing wasn’t right. Never perfect, because no one will ever be, but familiar. I knew it, I believed, but it’s faded away in time. Now it’s just the idea of something. Like a discolouration on the wall where a painting once hung. Gone, but lingering.

Six years ago, there was a party. Six years ago, I woke up the morning after the party where we laughed and drank and smoked cigarettes and laughed a little more. The party where I made a drink for an iconic Canadian artist (who will go nameless in this recollection), because she showed up at 3 in the morning and told me I was the most beautiful person at the party. Even though I was tired and wanted to go to bed flattery will get you everywhere at 3 am and so I made a round of last drinks. I woke up a few hours later suicidally depressed, my eyes still bleary from the final round that had transpired only a few hours earlier, and repeated the line that every mournful drinker conjures in the morning. I’m never doing that again.

I think it was maybe a Modest Mouse song that came 2nd. Don’t quote me on that, but in my heart it was “3rd Planet”. It feels like it fits, the energy of the tape was for late at night, not a daytime player. The tape was made in front of me, records and CDs pulled from shelves and left laying on the floor haphazardly, strewn among books lying open at their spine, graveyards for old cigarettes built of amber-tinted glass on a coffee table dusted with the remnants of hastily rolled joints. We talked and laughed, turned out voices quiet when the mood became somber. The record would change as the song was captured, and then it was something new, and so were we.

I abided by my promise. Six years ago I drank my very last drink, woke up suicidal and tired. Swore off all my bad habits. Then I walked down to a tattoo shop, listening to Dwight Yoakam in the shitty headphones paired to my phone. Drank a perfect latte and smoked three (four) cigarettes on the way. I popped into a corner store and bought a bottle of water, a fresh pack of cigarettes because of the fifth and final one in the pack I knew I was bound to start. I bought gum, too, for nerves and breath. Then I walked into the tattoo shop in the pack of a store that is no longer there at all and a trans woman I had never met carved the image of a self-obsessed harpy with a visible surgical scar staring at herself in a hand mirror into my arm, and I felt like I was honouring my Greek heritage alongside my transness and my desire to be remade as someone new all at once. I cried when it was over, and only a little because of the pain.

I know there was a Neko Case song, and I think it was “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.” It might have been a New Pornographers song, but I think it was Neko acting alone. The tape was being pieced together, and we sat out on the patio with the sliding glass door open to let the fresh air of the spring into the house. Her roommate was out for the night, even though it was now the early morning, and so she wasn’t there to complain about the cold and the music, the smell of cigarettes. We talked about big things that don’t matter anymore, and I remember trying to sound tall when I spoke, as if I was a statue or a monolith. A creature of great importance, when in truth I was only ever made of wicker and flammable things.

I always thought drinking would fix me, and I thought the same of transitioning. I thought these simple things we do are switches flipped in the body. As if the lights were always out and that’s why I kept bumping into things. It’s a hard realization when you flip the switch and realize the problem always was that you had forgotten to buy bulbs in the first place. There was never anything in there, just the promise of a purpose.

A few days ago, I woke up the same as I always do. I rolled out of bed, started the coffee, took Bowie for a walk, poured the coffee. Fed the pets in sequence, Bowie then Winona then Ramona. Ramona likes when I lift her up and put her on the counter in front of her food dish. Winona likes when I sit with her while she eats. Bowie just likes to eat, and then he goes back to sleep in our bed where I had been once while Lysh sleeps. It’s early, far too early for anyone but me. I like these hours, because they are nothing and nowhere. They belong just to me, and I don’t think about anything within them. I just sit here, with Winona while she eats. I drink coffee, play a video game. Music in my headphones. Nothing, blissful nothing. I am the truth of the annoying morning person, evangelizing about its beauty.

Eventually Winona is done eating, Ramona too. Bowie is asleep next to Lysh in the bed. I’m alone, coffee in my mug still and music in my headphones and I move around the house. Sit at my desk, write a little. Drink lots of water, I don’t even think about smoking anymore. I do, but it’s nice to say that I don’t. It’s fine to lie to myself. I take a shower, my hair pinned up so it doesn’t get wet. Wash, dry, moisturize. Then I walk into the bedroom, open the drawer to get clean clothes to change into for the day and the pain hits me so hard it’s as if someone has run up behind me and cracked an aluminum bat on my lower back. I can’t move, I can’t stand up and I can’t lower myself down. I barely have the strength to hold myself in place. I panic. Lysh wakes up. She helps me to bed, slowly, as I panic a little about the limitations of my body. I cry, and only a little because of the pain.

Ryan Adam was on there, I know this because when someone is a known terror in the present, the places where he was noticeable in the past become landmarks of apology. “To Be Young” just fit on the kind of mixtape she was making, the kind for late at night, the kind for cheap wine and cigarettes and the spring air as the dark lingered in the sky, still time left before it might threaten to become the dawn. It’s not ideal to have this memory, the song made by a terrible man, but it’s clear in my head and there’s something to be said about being honest about the terrible weight of the past.

Lysh went to the store and got me some back pain meds, and a cane to help my mobility. I have resisted a cane in the times my back pain has come back to haunt me in the past, but as I get older each new round of it becomes harder to live with. It hurts to get off the toilet, and there are few things more demoralizing than crying in pain because it takes 10 minutes to stand up from the toilet. I have chronic pain issues that stem from a severely impacted tailbone, that in the years since the accident where I slipped and fell on my ass at the dump in the Yukon in the dead of winter have only gotten worse. It’s impacted and a little twisted and my hip bone on the left side of my body catches it sometimes. The muscle overgrows to compensate. The pain is indescribable, and I can describe most things. The cane helps, and I’m mad at myself for resisting its assistance for so long. It hurts to sit, it hurts to lie down, it hurts to stand and it hurts to be alive. Every second of the day I am in pain, and I cry a lot more than I normally would. On Friday we watched the Severance season finale, and I cried so many fucking times. I cried even at the parts where you wouldn’t normally cry, just because I am just so tired of the pain sometimes. I am so tired of it, and I am mad at myself for not putting bulbs in the lights when it mattered.

I think the tape had “Maps” on it, towards the end. Every tape had “Maps” on it, or at least the good ones did. “Maps” is just kind of one of those perfect songs, it fits everywhere and everything. Every foot finds its rhythm. Karen O sings wait, they don’t love you like I love you and it feels real. It feels like an extension of your own heart, especially when you are young, and especially when it is dark and there has been wine and poorly rolled joints and cigarettes. When friends who maybe want to be something more to each other are afraid to speak to their immediate desires and instead talk about other people to deflect their feelings. The darkness of the night wavers in its commitment to us and the cigarettes are gone, the cheap wine is gone too and there’s still time to be asleep before the day is new again.

I hurt my back years ago, and then repeatedly. I slipped on the ice and fell, slid under my truck on the ice in minus 40 degree weather and had to crawl out from underneath to save myself. I said to myself that I was fine, because it was important to always be fine. To be a monument to the idea of a man, a body made of wicker cast in plaster in a desperate attempt to appear strong and sturdy. I worked with my hands for a very long time. I lifted heavy things, and learned how to hold and turn my body so I could work alone more than accept the help that would lighten the load. I could lift hundreds of pounds alone, and it felt important when I did. Like I had achieved something, this beautiful nothing kind of something, and once achieved everyone would see the idea of me I was desperate to hide behind. It's only that when they weren’t looking I would lie flat on the floor and drink and feel crushed by the weight of it all, feel the pain coursing through my legs, carried by nerves and pinched in terrible place. I drank until it felt like nothing, a kind of perfect place to be.

When I quit, and when I transitioned, the darkness lingered still. The dawn threatening to arrive but never quite getting there. The first time my back pain came back when I was sober, it was frustrating and demoralizing and now I was short the one tool that always seemed to work — drinking myself into the abyss. The pain just felt like pain, and it didn’t go away. I stretched, and waited, and it eventually subsided. But it would come back, a problem left behind by the previous tenant of this body. Even when the wicker had been burnt to ash, and even when it was all rebuilt of stronger things, the pain was there.

I have been laying in bed, or trying to, for days now. I haven’t slept much, because it’s hard to sleep when you are in pain and raw and there’s nothing to take it away. I try and take Bowie on our usual walk but it’s hard to move at the pace he desires. I can’t lift Ramona up to the counter when we get home, and it’s hard to sit down with Winona when she eats her food. The rhythm of the day is off. I take extra-strength Robaxacet, stretch on my yoga mat when I can get myself down to the floor. I wince and cry out in pain, and I am mad at myself. Mad that there are still lights without bulbs in here, that the darkness still exists despite all the switches flipped. Even though there is light now, in some hallways of a life.

We never finished making the tape that night, years ago now. A few days later, there was a bundle left on the windshield wiper of my work van and in it was a note, and the finished product. I don’t remember what the note said, but I remember the first song on the tape was “Steadier Footing” by Death Cab for Cutie, and it made me think about sitting out in the dark, music spinning in the house, smoke lingering in night. It made me think about pausing for minutes that felt like forever, like making intentional memories. Like being alive, and on the verge of something new. When “Steadier Footing” ended, another song bled in, and I’m sure it was “3rd Planet”, but I can’t be sure. The darkness settles in on this memory, as if it was never fully mine. Made of wicker.

My back hurts still, today, partly because I have not done the things I need to do to strengthen it. I have not put the bulbs in all the lights that need them. I know I have this problem, this chronic pain that might never be healed. It is a scar of an old life, but it will never fade or go away. I know that I can do my stretches, I can do yoga and pilates, I can stretch in the morning as part of my little routine. I don’t, but I could, and I know it would help me. I know that part of the commitment to being alive, to being the person I have chosen to be, means doing the work to keep my body built of stronger things. I tell myself this time will be different, as I get older and grow into ages I never expected to see the pain gets harder to manage, and this time I tell myself I can make changes still for the days ahead.

Six years ago I said I would never drink again, and to date I never have. Today it’s been six years plus a day, tomorrow will be two, and with enough commitment that number will continue to grow. I don’t remember the full details of the past, I don’t remember every song on the tape that opened with “Steadier Footing” because the past is so far away that it mostly belongs to another life. It doesn’t even really matter anymore. The darkness on the wicker days left behind will only grow. Occasionally, they will be set ablaze, triggered by a song or a moment, and then they will flicker there on the horizon. But they will always fade with time, and there is only the light ahead.