DAVID LESTER ART

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 28-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Having made her selection for the upcoming exhibition, Nadine turned toward the door and noticed a painting on the wall. A banjo player seated in a semi-lit room, deep murky blues, very loose. Along the bottom, neatly printed in mustard yellow paint, The Politics Are Not Obvious.

“You can say that again,” Nadine muttered. The banjo player was more of a suggestion than a fully realized portrait. As a rule, Nadine didn’t like words on paintings. Its advent was part of a revolution in the art world that Nadine wasn’t comfortable with. While her knowledge of how and when it had occurred was sufficient, she wanted to know more about what it was like to be in the throes of those emotional interactions, the conversations, the ideas—the small gestures—that became the basis of how historians created a static imprint of that time.

In addition to the lettering across the bottom, the painting had a signature running up the right side. Nadine tipped her head. David Lester. Never heard of him, she thought, wondering if he was a resident on Denman Island that she should, in fact, look up.

It wasn’t that Nadine couldn’t enjoy music of popular interest; she did, she could, she had. Steve Miller, CCR, the Rolling Stones. Bands she liked that played on the radio in her room—when she was eight, nine or 10—but there were times when she put the dial between the stations and lay her acoustic guitar flat on her bed to tap one string with a pair of bamboo chopsticks, bouncing lightly, listening to the pop-and-fizzle on the airwaves with the resonating frequency coming back at her from the wooden hole, after the strike on a tightly wound metal string. It wasn’t a reaction to rock ‘n’ roll or deconstruction per se, but isolating frequencies and assigning them emotional characteristics was something that soothed her in a way that music that already existed could not.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Martin evidently had painted a lot of very good landscapes when he met Catherine.

Dwight, Martin’s psychologist, was obviously concerned about Martin’s mental health. That may have reduced his ability to view the paintings as entirely new pieces of work. He’d implied that Martin had simply tacked in a few dump trucks and front-end loaders to win Catherine’s favor, to make the landscapes into political art in opposition to the Raven coal mine going in on Vancouver Island. But that wasn’t the case. Martin had aimed higher and created something profound. Nadine gently touched the surface of new section of the painting. She inhaled quickly, involuntarily. It was smooth and cool, almost like skin. Martin had sanded the paint off the side of the mountain, scraped it from a section of the beach—right down to raw canvas. Under several layers of atmospheric clear washes, he’d outlined what was meant to be the infrastructure of the coal mine in the newly excavated side of the mountain. Poisons leaked into the sea—what had been the foreground of the painting, was now evidence of an uncontained atrocity.

The new areas had been built up with what must have been encaustic wax poured and left as a sort of raised blobs that had been scratched and carved into with something like a pencil, leaving rounded troughs, lacerations he’d filled with blood-red paint. Where he had hoped to create opposition to a mining venture on the brink of causing catastrophic results to the shellfish industry and untold—and even unknown—environmental fall-out, Martin had created something incredibly beautiful.

What stood in place of the political intention it lacked was the absolute truth of its creation. It was a more than masterful failure. He’d done it to impress a woman for the specific purpose of using her emotions as narcissistic supply. Basically, a form of pure evil. Martin had been completely unsuccessful in, and likely incapable of, empathizing with Catherine’s concerns, her passion or the intensity of her focus on stopping the mine.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Nadine stood in the dark behind the house, in the backyard, looking at her parents in the living room. It was after dinner, a time for them to sit and talk or read the paper. The dishes were done and, ostensibly, the children were doing their homework or watching TV; as long as they did it quietly, it didn’t exactly matter to Arnie and Yvette.

It was a consciously beautiful room in an architecturally designed house that incorporated Japanese elements with the Frank Lloyd Wright sensibility of the times. Clerestory windows, rectangular intonations carried over from the Arts and Craft movement of years gone by, when architects had philosophies about humanity at large and how we placed ourselves into a landscape that had yet to be scarred by progress in the form of sub-divided atrocities of repetition.

In matters of design, her parents were virile and vocal purists. The attention they gave to visual details sometimes left Nadine feeling jealous—not quite jealous, but something like it. How could one be jealous of a chair?

Walking home after enduring a day of complex and ever-compounding emotional residue, Nadine felt lightness returning. Once she got home, to her room, with the door closed, she would change out of the clothes she wore to school, putting on hand-me-downs extricated from her brother’s closet by telling him his jeans were too short and that the plaid shirts she coveted didn’t do him any favors.

The twist of pantyhose, the rub at the heel of platform shoes, the abrasive contact of polka dots, black on red, on the short-sleeved polyester jacket with the white lapel that chaffed against her neck and the uncouth fullness of the matching bias cut skirt—an outfit she alone chose to enter high school wearing—all added up to a discomfort that extended immediately beyond her body, to attack specifically, Nadine’s right to freedom of thought.

At home, Nadine wore cowboy boots instead of bedroom slippers, a hip-length suede caramel-colored jacket with a fringe across the back instead of a quilted housecoat and plaid shirts with decorative yokes and pearl snaps. She wore her brother’s old Levi’s, pretending that her father’s now too-tight leather belt had a holster for her imaginary gun. At home, Nadine was a cowboy. The quicker she could lose the female affectations that made her feel more like an alien than a teenage girl, the happier she was.

Nadine stood in the dark on the patio, observing her parents in the living room. She admired Arnie, sitting by the fireplace blowing smoke from his White Owl up the chimney while her mother sat on the couch, wearing her very foolish-looking reading glasses. Nadine snorted quietly as she confirmed to herself that her mother, Yvette, was really only looking at the fashion advertisements in the newspaper spread on the coffee table in front of her. Arnie would, no doubt, be contemplating something too important to share with Yvette, blissfully unable to comprehend the world around her, beyond their indivisibly beautiful, singularly dictatorial home. The house was the vessel that they all floated face down in, unable to measure up, as a population of four, unworthy of living there, sullying its intention to reflect and magnify a quality of occupant that they fell universally short of.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Here’s the way I see it. This pre-adult, emerging-adult thing. Where the kids stay at home until they’re about 30, not to say they will actually go and not return after 30. I guess we have to wait and see how that pans out. Maybe they will regard the parents as a resource for the life of the parents. Seems more likely, as this new pattern becomes acceptable.

In constructing the new family unit, it appears that the child does not partner with someone their own age with whom they venture forth in terms of accommodation, finances and domestic duties. The child, both sexes, now takes a wife and a husband in the form of its parents. The adult child’s wife (its mother) does the cooking, cleaning and general coddling. The adult child’s husband (its father) pays the bills.

In Italy, where the sons stay with mama until they marry, they are called “big babies,” and it is socially acceptable to hang out with your mom and let her cook and clean and do your laundry without making a contribution to the household expenses because the big baby would like to buy really nice things for himself with the money he earns at his high-paying job.

The big baby in the doc was seen window shopping for sunglasses (very handsome guy, late 20s) and he said he liked having someone around who cared about him, that it was nice for him to live with his mother. No father in the doc (perhaps he was too ashamed to appear).

A magazine editor, also a young guy (who left home at 18 or 19), spoke about how this situation contributes to Italy’s problems.

“Italy is going down, down, down.”

He said that young people aren’t motivated to do anything, that if you phone a household at 9 a.m. where the mother and father have the adult children living with them, no one will answer the phone because the mother and father have gone to work and it was 100 percent for sure that the adult children would be asleep.

People who were planning to retire are now re-mortgaging their homes and staying at work longer to continue supporting their children into their 30s.

When kids reach 19, parents may have spent about $200,000 raising them. They can expect to pay at least another $60,000 from 20 to 30. We don’t yet know what happens beyond that. Maybe the children simply won’t allow their parents to retire. The children won’t be able to cope on their own. They won’t know how. What if they prefer to remain in the emerging adult stage? I mean, why cut the apron strings at 50 if you don’t have to?

One “kid” had taken stagecraft, got a degree in that, but then decided to switch to filmmaking, and so he stayed with his parents while he made connections that he hoped would turn out to be a career, but he wasn’t sure what he “really wanted to do yet” so he was going to stay “at home” until he decided what he really, really, really wanted to do. He was 27. His father decided it was time for the kid to leave, and he gave him three months to get it all together. The “kid” (a 27-year-old used to be a man, had been a man for 10 years, but now, a 27-year-old is a child) said he wasn’t scared or too concerned. He was going to “go with the flow.” When the three months was up, he was laughing, heading off to couch surf with friends. Rent was too much and he didn’t want to pay rent, so off he went into the world to use other people. What a noble plan for a man fast-approaching middle-age.

The kids don’t want to stoop to do work that is deemed unpleasant, and the parents don’t want their kids to stoop. The parents prefer to support them. The kids expect to have a certain type of life, and they’d prefer to have it without exerting much effort. They are entitled to have what they want, and the parents are complicit in preventing the kids from having to experience a different reality.

A universal shrug as a generation shoves anything difficult in front of their parents. Got bills? Give them to dad. Out of Cap’n Crunch? Add it to the shopping list. Mom will get it. Can’t figure out what to do? Getting advice from people, their mothers and fathers, who have such poor judgment doesn’t seem too promising.

Don’t do anything. Stay home with us and we will pay your way.

Doesn’t that mean that the child is being robbed of their actual life while the older generation is guided by what? Guilt?

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

When Martin returned from the truck, the main lights in the Black Dot Museum of Political Art were out and Nadine was setting up the projector. A young man and woman were sitting on one of the storage benches that had been pulled out from the wall. The bench, with its simple hinged lid, reminded Martin of his childhood toy box. It was probably the time he took inspecting how the lid was made, how it functioned, that got him interested in building things, functional things. Storage units. When his mother told him to tidy up his room, all Martin needed to do was flip open his toy box, pile everything inside and close the lid. Done. That was the theory, anyway. More often than not, Martin used the toy box as a ship to sail across an ocean infested with stuffed animals, Lego, puzzles and board games strewn across his bedroom floor, and when his mother intruded with her vision of reversing the grand scheme of activities enacted, to put everything back in the toy box where it belonged, Martin screamed that he would sail away and never come back if she ever set foot in his ocean again. This threat, and others like it, did in fact stem the tide of her enthusiasm for him to tidy his room, eat his vegetables or go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Martin, as a small boy, was, to a large extent, in control.

Martin returned to the reception desk and positioned the task light over his open, spiral-bound notebook. Nadine, wondering what had happened to the light, looked over at Martin, who appeared oblivious to the idea that she might have been using the light to set up the projector.

This was only her third run through of the current exhibition, A Faded Place. More of an installation piece than a screening, it was something she’d put together when she worked at the commercial gallery, but never had a chance to properly exhibit. Her autodidactic background in art made her self-conscious about her own work, especially in the commercial context. Installations appealed to her precisely because they weren’t viable. No one bought installations. They were usually site-specific within a museum and mostly regarded as self-indulgent. Commercial galleries didn’t usually represent installation artists, which was why Nadine gravitated to the idea of transforming the gallery space into an experience. It wasn’t in the viewers mind to consider the work as a commodity that they could take home for some amount of money.

Nadine hadn’t revealed her interest in installations while employed at the Bau-Xi. It wasn’t any kind of secret, but it wasn’t something that ever came up. The Bau-Xi was one of the few galleries in Vancouver that had been designed and built from the ground up to exhibit art, mostly paintings, prints and photographs. Any time they included sculpture in the space, it required hours of deliberation. The lights had to be changed, the generally obtrusive nature of the sculpture was seen as problematic, the catalogue photographer became stressed out at the responsibility of representing the work in a two-dimensional form. More often that not, sculptors themselves were pretty relaxed about all these variables, having dealt with the issue of not being able to grasp the entirety of the work in one glance from a static position. That was what they, as the artist, liked about it, the very thing that made gallery staff uncomfortable. Gallery patrons had to navigate the piece within the space and space at the Bau-Xi was really just what was physically left over from building walls on which to hang paintings.

Never having had an opportunity to create an installation for a space other than her own overly cramped apartment, Nadine took the opportunity at the museum. When A Call To Action, the anarchist art exhibit, ended and the board members disappeared, Nadine set up submission guidelines for Stickin’ It To The Man, but until the show was ready to hang, the museum’s walls were empty.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

On Halloween, I wore a costume to my shift at Curves. My agnès b blue jumpsuit that I got in NYC 30 years ago, an aviator’s hat with a tiny clip-on bird and plastic grapes attached to it and then, sewn to the jumpsuit, several fishing lures we got in Anacortes at Shipwreck Days.

When people had looked at me strangely long enough, I told them there was, of course, a story to go with my outfit.

“I’m a World War I fighter pilot shot down over northern France,” I said. “When I plummeted from my single-seater, I landed in the aviary of a vineyard owned by a French fisherman.”

I gestured at each associated object as I told my story, and some people really laughed.

And then the toilet overflowed in the middle of the Latin dance class. I did not know a toilet could keep gushing upward like a fountain until you took off the back and jiggled stuff around. There was fecal matter in the bowl, and the water was flowing out behind the washroom into a tile hallway. Like, gushing out. It was as if I was having a nightmare. It all happened so fast.

A Curves member discovered it when she opened the washroom door. She stood there, holding open the door, calling my name with a horrified look on her face. She ran off while I jiggled the toilet to make the water stop. Then I heard her calling me from the other side. “Jean! It’s going out onto the carpet.” Way out onto the carpet, heading quickly toward the women doing Latin dance. There were about a dozen mainly middle-aged, mostly overweight women dancing with the music totally cranked, looking over there shoulders, inching away from the tsunami of sewage heading their way.

I moved the yoga mats, the scale, and in picking up the stereo speaker sitting on the floor, I managed to rip the wires out. I stood there, wondering where to put a wet, disconnected speaker. Should I get it going or deal with the water? We were down to one speaker on the other side of the room and then, weirdly, it stopped, too. No music.

I ran to get the mop and bucket, but it was too slow a process. I ran to get the dustpan and started shoveling the water (sewage). Must have been several gallons, maybe more. The women were still dancing, doing the moves, humming and muttering their own version of the music, and I kept shoveling toilet water with plastic grapes and a tiny bird on my head. It was totally surreal.

When the water was basically under control, I went to try and get the music going. I tried everything I could think of. No music. I went back to the disaster area, and the next time I went to empty the bucket, several of the women were on the computer getting the music going. They finished the class, tunes cranked, and I finished mopping up.

Later, a woman working out said I was calm in a crisis, and I said, “It wasn’t that big of a crisis.” I thought about Mecca Normal adventures. Changing a tire on a dark and rainy night on the New Jersey Turnpike or driving around New York in the days of 9/11 or that dog that terrorized us in Boston.

The next day, “my boss” (a.k.a. Julie) brought me a rose. A red rose with a spray of something like baby’s breath, wrapped in heavy cellophane, with pink ribbon tied in a bow. I was really touched by that. I felt like someone who had been given a rose. It was a thank-you rose for dealing with the toilet crisis.

“Well, what else would I have done?” I asked.

“You could have sat here and cried,” she said.

Oh no. It was an opportunity for a performance. I’ve always enjoyed emergency response mode in Mecca Normal. One night in Germany, Dave’s guitar strap ripped and he kept playing, supporting the guitar however he could, giving me the “what the hell am I going to do now?” look, the “I do not have another guitar strap” look. He kept playing, and I went into his guitar case to find the duct tape and while he played I built a strap out of duct tape, more or less duct taping his guitar to him, which sort of turned into the performance.

I guess it must have looked pretty strange, and evidently, Curves members had been telling the tale of my actions whilst in costume. I think they thought I would have taken off the hat, which kept sliding over my eyes on the grape-heavy side. No, it wouldn’t have done to take off the hat. The hat was what made it a good story, people, and so they got to tell that story and laugh about it, me mopping feverishly, making it slightly less of a catastrophe by leaving the hat on, you see.

I’m a fiction writer, people. We think about such things. Hat off? There’s barely a story worth telling. Hat on? Legend in the making.

And so the members had been coming in and telling “my boss” (a.k.a. Julie) of my quick action. One minute at the desk creating the club newsletter, the next, almost as if it was right on schedule, I was in there with rubber gloves, mop and bucket. The grapes with the tiny bird to illustrate, to give it some colour.

The rose is symbolic of something else, of course, and so, it was somewhat inappropriate, and I vaguely wondered how Julie came to select a rose or how she happened to have a rose, but, regardless, I felt its intention along with a complication. An accentuation of alienation. I felt slightly more alone in my abstract situation. That anyone could mistake me for a woman who would respond to a rose as a gesture of appreciation for dealing with an overflowing toilet was something to wonder about. For me. Let’s face it; of course I over-analyze things. Over-thinking is what I do. I am aware that some people do not like to be around over-thinkers. Fine with me. In men, let’s say famous male authors, do other men tell them, “Stop over-thinking everything, Salman.”

“Lighten up, Crichton, and stop making everything into a such a big deal.” [Note: Crichton was 6' 9".]

A single rose is what a man gives a woman to show her that he loves her. Its symbolism is uniquely solitary, non-transferable to plumbing issues. Anyway, the rose was a nice thing. Through it I felt appreciated.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

I was flown out to Boston from Vancouver on very short notice, put in a very fancy hotel, limo-ed to and from the TV studio. Sam went in a separate limo. They wanted to keep us apart, to get a cat fight going during the show. Sam phoned my room the night before, pleading with me not to make mince meat of her, assuring me that she was a feminist. Cripes. I had no idea who she was or what she was talking about. I still have no idea who she is/was.

As makeup artists dabbed our noses between segments, producers encouraged us to interrupt each other. Evidently, the audience was given a lot of sugar and caffeine prior to entering the studio and told we were in some way spewers of profanity. I had no idea the show was going to be focused on profanity. I think this is why all three of us seem caught off guard at the beginning.

The best bit is Sam’s grandmother, at the end, standing up to say that everything Sam has done, she’s done for herself (really? no kidding) … she’s never done anything for anyone else in her entire life … or whatever she says … sorry, Sam’s granny. All-in-all, totally surreal.

I’m sure I was way down the list of possible radical women guests, but since riot grrrls weren’t talking and I’d been talking for years, they put me on their show.

For the next five years, every time I saw Calvin, he said, “I’m on Def Jam” in the same annoying voice that the woman from Bytches With Problems used when she interrupted me. Or maybe it was the annoying voice that I used to imitate her interrupting me. And maybe it wasn’t every time. Or five years.

Boy, I sure wish I still had that snazzy outfit. Matching top and wide-leg pants. It was really soft.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Hi Tobi,

I don’t think we have an actual one sheet for the K seven-inch, but yes, it came out in November, 2010.

Calvin said “Malachi” is the best song Mecca Normal has ever written. He saw us play it when we opened for Kimya Dawson. So I asked him, some time later, if he would record it. We went into Dub Narcotic Studios when we were in Olympia in May 2010, to launch the Black Dot Museum of Political Art at Northern.

Most recently, we’ve been playing “Malachi” within an adaptation of David’s graphic novel, The Listener, which we’ve been presenting in classrooms, libraries and bookstores. We were rehearsing “Malachi” for the Mecca Normal segment of our presentation when I realized that David’s protagonist Louise is a political artist and activist whose work was taken out of context, resulting in a tragedy that she was blamed for. This is a similar story to Malachi’s. He was a war protester, an activist, who self-immolated on a freeway outside Chicago. He videoed his death, intending for it to be aired on mainstream media, to make a statement about the war in Iraq. His family didn’t want the video to air, so his action, his death, the impact he intended, were very much diluted. David and I talked about this in rehearsal as we were writing the song, but it was much later that I realized our song was a viable way to let more people know about Malachi’s action.

This was all years before the street vendor in Tunisia self-immolated to protest harassment and the confiscation of his wares. He was a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution: demonstrations in protest of social and political issues in the country. The success of the Tunisian actions sparked protest in other Arab countries. This was pre-Egypt, which is when I tuned-in, so I hadn’t actually heard about the street vendor in Tunisia. It was after the classroom event at the University of British Columbia, when one of the students came up and handed me a very small piece of paper with tiny printing on it: self-immolation in Tunisia. He told me to google it. This was great, because up until then, I didn’t really have a reference point to use to explain self-immolation, other than monks during the war in Vietnam. Dave and I knew through questions asked at a high school that some students had no idea what lynching was, let alone self-immolation.

The interaction with that student, after talking about the song and having the feeling that I wasn’t well-enough informed about the issue, reminded me that I don’t have to be perfect in order to write a song or give a presentation. I think perfectionism stops people from taking action; they feel they might make a mistake. Yes, we probably will. In this instance, it resulted in a student sharing information, a short discussion and a new awareness of facts. Being under-informed is a great way to start a discussion.

This was a sort of unintentional progression of events that affirmed the usefulness of political songwriting in the same way that David’s Inspired Agitators poster series focuses on individuals who are not necessarily well-known or successful in their endeavors, but through their own personal conviction and tenacity, they attempted to make progressive social change.

Yours, Jean

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

I must have missed this episode. April 13, 1973. Actually, I may have seen it. This would not have been of any interest to me. Maybe I was in the kitchen pouring Cheerios. These guys were not cute. This was not my kind of music. Not the way it’s played here. Too sing-songy. Lacks passion.

I’d been 13 for a while. Since the summer before, at Hornby Island. Driving back down Vancouver Island after being on Hornby, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” came on the car radio. Hunched in the back seat of the Ford Fairlane, looking out the window so no one could see I was crying. I forget if I had Bill’s number. I doubt it. Over the years, I’ve forgotten which was Bill and which was Andy, the trail horse I rode on the beach. I have a black-and-white photo of the horse, on the back, in my 12-year-old handwriting, “Andy.” That’s how I know Bill was the stable hand. He was 16.

The song induced pain, a pain related to Bill and leaving Hornby, leaving Bill, my first period starting and the confusion of lust. I would never see Bill again. I’d stupidly jumped out of the hay loft onto the cement floor of the barn to run back to our cabin. I was showing off, getting away. I could have leaned back in the straw and allowed Bill to scale the blocks of hay, to get to me. I’d climbed up there to get away from him. I don’t remember, but even then, as soon as I’d done it, I knew my tom-boy leap was a mistake. I had intended to impress him. Like how I impressed the guys on my street by throwing a perfect spiral.

It would have been my first kiss. I guess I kind of scared myself; I turned and ran. I thought a little wild time had just begun. If I had his number, I might use it if I felt better when I got home. We could stay inside and play games, I don’t know. We could go out driving on Slow Hand Row, wherever that was. In the back of the car, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” on the radio, thinking about Bill, crying. A throbbing ache in my lower abdomen. Hurting. Pain. This was the beginning of never seeing Bill again.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Another example of a person doing whatever they want while pretending to do something for me arrived as I was about to be wheeled off, flat on my back, to surgery. It was a Catholic hospital. I was alone. Waiting peacefully, thinking my thoughts, when a woman came along and started talking to me, like right up close, leaning on my bedside table. I saw the cross around her neck. Oh boy, here we go.

“I’m Sister Maria,” she said, flashing her PlayLand ride pass at me.

“So I see,” said I.

She wanted to know what I was in for, and as she muddled along, I assure you it was less than helpful, less than soothing. I wished very much that she hadn’t stopped by to talk, to ask me rhetorically, “Why do so many women get breast cancer?”

“I don’t have breast cancer,” I said.

Christ, her lack of tact was epic. What you might call bedside manner—literally non-existent. Filipina missionary, mid-50s.

She asked me quite a few questions, and as I talked about what I do for a living, I noticed that I was trying to make myself sound like a good person, while she was busy judging me. The East Indian guy who arrived to wheel me to the operating room came and left a couple of times, glancing at the sister, wondering how long she was going to hold things up. I tried to meet his eyes above his green mask, to say that I was ready, to please interrupt, to please notice that I was being held hostage by the sister and her selfish need to prattle at this juncture, when I was trying to stay calm and get through a bit of surgery. I wished the East Indian guy would say, “OK, Sister, we should get rolling along now.” Or something like that.

The sister told me again that she was Sister Maria, as if I wasn’t reacting properly enough to her presence.

“Did I mention that I am Sister Maria and this is a Catholic hospital?”

“Yes, I know,” I said pleasantly.

She asked me if I believed in the after life, and I told her no, I wasn’t that sort of person. She winced, and I said, “I wasn’t raised that way.”

Regretting that I’d just blamed my parents for something I was extremely thankful for. An abject lack of being subjected to religious dogma.

Sister Maria said, “Oh, so you don’t have anything at all going on in that head of yours?” Or something similarly condescending.

I said, “I have a philosophy about life that involves compassion, tolerance and treating people with kindness. In fact, it’s probably quite similar to what the bible teaches, but I don’t believe in life after death.”

The East Indian guy was kind enough to take the brakes off the gurney at this point, and the sister flipped her ride pass at me one more time, tangled up as it was with her cross on its silver chain. And as I was rolled out of the curtained room, she did something I consider cowardly, reprehensible and just plain rude.

When I could no longer see her, she put the palm of her hand on my forehead and held it there. Give me a fucking break, lady. I just told you, I am not one of you. I was very clear about that, and I even tolerated the insult about not having anything in my head. I told you I have a philosophy, something different to what you have, and yet you cannot respect that; you have the fucking nerve to weasel your hand onto my body to get your fucking thrills. Christ. Plus, I think it’s beyond rude to seek out people who are alone, without protectors, to get going on your trip. Talk about finding and exploiting the vulnerable. Trapped there, as I was. And she’s asking people going in for surgery whether or not they believed in life after death. Excuse me? Christ. All so she can get her superiority kick, after I already told her, very nicely, that I wasn’t a member of her cult, one based on fear, shame and guilt with its illogical indoctrination of people they seek to isolate, scare and intimidate, to save them from burning in a hell that even the Pope admits does not exist.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Broke Like Me
Chapter 1

Fran shakes the sticky jar of garlic powder over the steaming pan of frying onions. Nothing comes out.

“That’s how come it’s stuck,” says Celia. “From the steam.”

Fran goes at the immovable yellowy lump of garlic powder with a knife.

“Celia, why don’t you go and watch TV?”

“When will Syd be home?” Celia asks.

“Don’t call your father Syd,” her mother says, hips wiggling as she mashes the potatoes for shepherd’s pie. From behind, it looks like she’s dancing, but really, Fran doesn’t dance. Celia knows that mashing potatoes is the father’s job. That’s how the Hilroys do it and they’re the most normal family on the street, which is why Celia’s brother wishes he’d been adopted by them. Celia wishes he had been, too.

“I accidentally kicked Miss Whitely today,” Celia says.

“I thought you liked Miss Whitely,” says Fran.

“Accidentally,” Celia says, raising her voice above the sizzling onions. There’s nothing worse than the smell of onions cooking, Celia thinks. She watches her mother add one drop of brown Tabasco sauce to the onions.

“You do know that Tabasco sauce is supposed to be red, right mom?” Celia says. “Bright red. Not brown.”

Fran puts the tiny bottle back in the cupboard with the other rarely used herbs and spices. Oregano, cloves, imitation vanilla.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I kicked Miss Whitely?”

“You said it was an accident.”

Celia wants to tell her mother how it happened, how Miss Whitely had called her over to her desk to show her the A+ on her essay about the Hottentots of Africa. How Celia was so happy that she spun around on one foot to return triumphantly to her desk and kicked Miss Whitely in the shin. How Miss Whitely hopped around holding her leg, but didn’t yell or swear or anything. It was terrible. Celia felt horrible.

Celia quietly flips through the channels on the TV. Her mother hates the sound of the dial turning. On The Dick Van Dyke Show, Laura is upset because Rob is working late with a beautiful actress.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

The personality is political. I want to believe that a man understands himself, knows what he’s doing and why. I want to believe a man knows that his words and actions impact others and, ideally, I want the man to understand how his words and actions impact others. Empathy.

In terms of a relationship, I would probably settle for him knowing that his words and actions impact others (me) if he was open to the idea of thinking about the how and even why. A big ask. I know.

I enter into romances with trust and respect; not blindly, but yet with a sense of fairness that I hope I never lose through the bitter twistings of the process. This is why I insist on thinking as long as it takes to understand situations that have transpired, believing that knowing what went on will be useful to me when I next go toward intimacy.

Strangely unsettling to the process comes a sense that the more I learn, the more difficult the task of finding or inventing intimacy becomes. This isn’t through karma/cosmic structuring, but the fact that if I apply what I have learned, I will stumble on matters that are more advanced, more difficult, than what presented itself before. If the problems seem to be monumentally more ridiculous, it is because I am able to solve simpler problems.

I recall an occasion at Curves with a member who didn’t like me. I was skinny, she was fat. Sometimes that is enough. I found out she was studying to be a counselor. I decided to give her the opportunity to help me, hoping that this would alter the relationship. I wanted to take myself out of the position of authority (on body size) and place her in authority, to instruct me. This was an attempt to end her suffering. Her hatred of me. Not taking these things personally, I didn’t really care if she hated me. It isn’t essentially my ambition to be liked. I told her my problem. It had to do with a man I had been involved with who I believed was a narcissist. Months after it ended, I was excited to be getting somewhere as I saw how his personality had interacted with mine. She interrupted to say something like, “You mean you can’t move on until you understand what was going on with him?”

Um, yes. That’s right. Isn’t that sort of the idea? Isn’t that what people are doing? Maybe not. I venture the opinion that a person entering counseling as a profession might see the value in understanding what happened.

Yesterday at Curves I weighed and measured a Muslim woman who attempted to explain Ramadan fasting to me. “It is so that we can feel what poor people feel, we can feel what it is like to go without food and water.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

What I learned on my summer vacation. Nice is manipulation.

The other night, I went down to the PetroCan to get Smartfood. There was a big fat guy sitting bug-eyed at the bus stop, bike leaning against the bench.

I ignored him as I walked by, but I could tell he was assessing me. I was on a commercial break from some TV show or another. I was in a hurry.

On my way back, passing the bus shelter, the bug-eyed guy with the bike said something, and I stopped. It was dusk: a cool and cloudy evening. He was maybe 30, 35. I didn’t hear what he said, so I took a step toward him, saying, “Pardon me?”

“I hope the next bus driver will help me. The last one wouldn’t call an ambulance for me.”

“Oh?” I said. “What’s the problem?”

“Low blood sugar. I feel dizzy.”

“The guy in the PetroCan will probably call for you,” I say.

“No, he won’t call.”

“Do you want me to go and ask him to call an ambulance for you? He knows me.”

“No,” he says. “He won’t call. The cops won’t call, either. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m diabetic.”

“How far do you live from here?” I ask.

“Just down the street,” he says.

“Do you think you could walk your bike there?” I ask, noticing that there is something wrong with the guy. Something other than low blood sugar.

“No,” he says. “I’m too dizzy.”

“I don’t know much about diabetes,” I say. “Do you want me to get you something to eat at the PetroCan?”

“No,” he says. “I just hope the next bus driver will call an ambulance for me. The cops in Richmond helped me last week, but Vancouver cops won’t help me.”

It’s starting to sound less about diabetes and more about who will and won’t help him.

“Maybe you should make a start for home before it gets dark,” I suggest. He reaches over to his bike and flips on a light mounted on the handlebars. If this guy stood up, he’d be over six feet tall, more than 300 pounds. I want to go. I want him to say, “Thanks for stopping. I’ll be OK.” If he’d let me help, then I could go, but really, he doesn’t want me to do anything. He wants attention, not a solution. I’ve offered several ways to deal with his problem. None of them is acceptable.

“Maybe the next bus driver will be more helpful than the last,” I say.

“I doubt it,” he says.

“Well, I hope it all works out for you,” I say, taking a step toward my building. He grunts and turns away. I’m just another asshole who will not help him. Yup, that’s me all right. Add me to the list of jerks. Offering to help a stranger in the street. Such a fucking jerk.

Walking back to my building I was thinking about the guys I’ve gone out with. The last guy wanted everything his way. I tried to comply. I thought if I did everything how he wanted it, he would appreciate me, maybe even love me. It doesn’t work that way. Not at all. The bug-eyed guy at the bus stop is how it works. I could have stood there for six months trying to help him, being nice, suggesting ways to solve his problem, empathizing, listening, but those aren’t the things he wanted. He wanted attention, and he wanted someone to blame. I wanted to solve his problem so I could feel good about myself for helping and so that things would be better. Better used to be a good thing until it became part of the problem. There’s a whole lot of disappointment involved in trying to make things better.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

“Raise your hand in the studio audience if you’ve ever been blamed for causing the problem in a relationship because you don’t always trust your partner?” the blonde, overly made-up TV host says from the stage. ”OK, now, of you ladies with your hands up, how many of you have partners who you know have lied to you? OK, very good. Now, of the six of you with your hands still up, how many of you have partners who admit to cheating on their previous partners? Very interesting, still two hands raised. So both of you know your partner has cheated before and that he has lied to you, correct?”

The two women nod silently. They look like they want to sit back down, but the host hasn’t finished with them.

“Have either of you been accused of not trusting a partner who had unprotected sex with the drug-addicted hooker he lived with before he got together with you?”

Audience members laugh inappropriately and turn in their seats. All eyes are on a smallish woman with glasses, wearing a navy blue blazer and … why is she wearing a ball cap? … standing in the middle of the audience, her hand raised.

“She’s not for real,” a woman near the front calls out. “She’s a plant, right?”

“Yes,” the host says. “But her story is true. Sarah M is here today, in disguise, to help us understand why women have difficulty trusting men who lie to them.”

Close-up on the host’s face. “Stay tuned,” she says. “When we come back we’ll talk to Sarah’s husband, a Classic Liar. He claims Sarah is the problem because she doesn’t trust him. We’ll be right back.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

The Oystercatcher
I took in the Vancouver International Jazz Festival this weekend. For about 17 minutes. Solo piano. Noon. Ten blocks from my home.

I left the house in a transparent dress with a slip that rode up too high. This was happening as I strode in sandals, flat, under a snug pink corduroy coat, mid-calf, that soon would be too hot. I decided to return to the house to change into something I felt better about myself in. Square-toed boots, jeans, studded black belt, citron tank top with a very short, wooly double-breasted grey jacket. Yes.

I was early. The waitress seated me at a table for two near the back. No one of interest (to me) was there. I switched glasses to read The Oystercatcher, an anarcho-surrealist zine I’d been given. The menu was boring. Brunch. Bagel and cream cheese $3? Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck you, you stupid fucking bagel. I hate you and your stupid boiled chewiness greased with white muck meant to be understood as acceptable. Cream cheese my ass. A fucking Kraft product in a king-sized tub sitting out open on the counter beyond those swinging galley doors, no doubt.

I was sure the coffee would be bad. The musician arrived with coffee from elsewhere to confirm this near-fact. I ordered water. Two women in their late 50s sat directly in front of me. The only attribute of this arrangement was that they blocked my view of a young husband, new mother, baby and one set of grandparents. The baby was new. New? Young? Small? It would have been the couple’s first. The mother looked to be rather unused to pushing her face into something like a smile, but she knew she was supposed to make this face, a facsimile of a smile, for the baby to see, for the grandparents to see, to complete some strange part of a ritual that seemed very far from anyone’s actual truth.

The woman directly in front of me—grey hair, blunt bangs, overly-big glasses—was very confident in her indelicate dealings with a pleasant-enough waitress, suggesting to me that she had never been regarded favorably. By anyone. I was trying to imagine how, unless through some form of forgetfulness (which is possible), a woman her age could go forth into a restaurant with such a large quotient of insensitivity. She didn’t appear to be wealthy. Maybe she grew up on a farm without mirrors more miles from men than were possible to travel for the purpose of courtship. Perhaps all the other girls of the region were somehow more desirable, and while not loathsome in any exact way, she just didn’t measure up in the field. These were my thoughts as I watched her face and listened to her voice as she explained, head tilted, bangs now hanging at new angles to the waitress, that she was gluten-intolerant and her breakfast had arrived splayed uselessly across soggy toast.

“I’ll get very, very, very sick if I eat anything that has come into contact with gluten,” she is saying, her knife and fork motionless above her plate in mock horror at the discovery of the killer toast, elbows up and out, and it really does seem like she believes the waitress should care about this more than anything happening in her own life. The waitress herself might be about to get very, very, very sick of people telling her things she really doesn’t want to know, and then there’s the pretending to care that must follow. Mostly it’s the pretending. That’s what gets to her, the waitress, most.

The music started. I moved to the bar and waited to feel inspired. I had a good view of her hands on the keys, but I wasn’t convinced of anything other than her extremely good posture. Were they her songs? Did she love jazz? I couldn’t tell. The second song seemed very T. Monk to me, but I wasn’t with her in the playing—her playing and my listening.

A man wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat came in, sat at the end of the bar and ordered food authoritatively. I heard him say “the wings,” and when they arrived, they were very shiny with lots of goopy sauce. I continued trying to get into the music. I sipped my water. The 55-year-old farm girl was up out of her chair taking photos of the grandmother at the next table holding the baby. The look on the grandmother’s face: This is very inappropriate because we don’t know this woman.

I looked at the pianist’s posture, her lovely legs below her capri-length slacks, her long-fingered hands, the keys. From the end of the bar, to my right, I heard sucking. Fingers, one after another, rhythmically. One hand, then the other. The wings. The sauce. Suck, suck, suck. I didn’t look. I put $2 beside my water glass, swiveled off my stool and gathered my things to leave.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

In Olympia, David and I were welcomed into the hearts and homes of an entirely different sector, one populated by a gang of pie-baking, marshmallow-roasting, lake-swimming, lunchbox-toting, stuffed-animal-collecting, berry-picking, picnic-packing non-politicos. Here I was, a hardcore punk with an anti-authoritarian attitude who ran-off at the mouth about “people” and “society.” I just didn’t see the connection. No one mentioned a connection; they just slid the pie across the table, asking if we’d like a slice. This is the deeply subversive side of Olympia. I never heard anyone talk about grassroots organizing; they just set up all-ages shows in crazy places and went ahead as if … as if that was normal. They behaved their way into what could be called utopia, rife with naturally occurring forms of reciprocity. I was exposed to a functioning model of community that I returned to many times to participate within, to reap the benefits and to use in re-configuring my own social philosophies.