Another Blast From the Past: Introduction

Trumpeter swans, Leslie Street Spit, February 21, 2021

Working on The Hearsay when I was at law school was the closest I ever got to achieving my dream of editing the great Canadian humour magazine.

The Hearsay was a student magazine that was at least supposed to be humorous. Most of the time it published a mishmash of rarely funny offerings by law students, some of them plagiarized. 

Submissions often began "...well, I guess I better write something for The Hearsay..." and then jabbered on for far too long about nothing interesting.

A few of the contributors had some talent. One of them reads this blog. And if I mention his name - Michael Piaskoski - he will send this blog to his friends and spike my page views. 

That's how the world works.

Anyway, The Hearsay. 

In 2nd year I was a junior editor, subject to the will of the two 3rd year students who were also posing as editors. I kept my head down and my mouth shut - or as much as I could reasonably be expected to.

But in 3rd year, I was the senior editor. I had big plans. Under my watch we revamped the dreary Student Orientation Guide (wittily changing the name to "DisOrientation Guide"), and improved The Hearsay's typography and design, transforming it from utterly ghastly to merely awful.

The Hearsay, being what it was where it was, attracted controversy from time to time. Once, on charges of an alleged anti-Semitic statement in an issue, a fellow student seriously threatened he would get a big downtown firm to demand the death of publication (we survived).

Big reactions to small slights is nothing new on a university campus. But The Hearsay under my leadership burst beyond the confines of the University of Toronto and brought a Bay Street law firm to an almost complete standstill. For two days.

Law school was a long time ago. I've forgotten lots of what happened, especially what happened with The Hearsay. But, in December 1992, I wrote my friends the Jewinskis and told them how I made a big splash with the unfunny student humour rag I edited. I'll share the details over the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

 

Demon Weed

Peer pressure got me started smoking cigarettes when I was thirteen years old. For the next twenty-seven years, I was never a heavy but always a habitual smoker.

In September 1997, for my 40th birthday present to myself, I decided to quit.

I wrote to my friends the Jewinskis to tell them what it was like.

I described my desperation when smoking was banned in the workplace:

“I battle with the demon that sometimes lives in my belly, sometimes in my head, sometimes in my hypothalamus and sometimes in all three. There it lurks and pokes and jabs and torments, makes me frustrated with longing, panicked with craving and desperate for that moment when I can flee, seclude myself, light up and drag deeply. When I'm back in the company of my colleagues, I'm still edgy and self-conscious. I reek of cigarette smoke and failure.”

And the comforts of addiction:

“A small voice used to reassure me, when I pulled a cigarette out of the pack and fired it up, that there were “no consequences.” This meant no smoking-related illness would arise from that single cigarette. Smoking that cigarette would not keep me from quitting some day. “No consequences” meant that I existed in a perpetual present as a smoker; there would be no reckoning.”

And past attempts at quitting:

“When I was nineteen, I’d been smoking for six years. I went to London, England, in September 1976. I stayed there a month and did not smoke. I returned home to Trenton in October and did not smoke. In November, I took a three-week job as a cook at a truck stop and was smoking regularly by the time the job was done.

“The second time I almost quit was a six-month-long project where I got myself down to one cigarette a day. From January to June 1995, I sharply reduced my consumption and waited, patiently, for the day to come when the ravening beast within me would be too starved to call for more nicotine.

“My error was leaving it up to my addiction to tell me when to stop.”

And explained the reason for my success:

“Now it’s October 27, 1997. It has been more than four weeks since I bought my first box of nicotine patches, and ten days since I gave up the patch. Since I made the decision to quit, I have smoked eight cigarettes, six within the first 48 hours, the last on October 18. None since then and never again because, lord help me, I never want to go through the agony of quitting again.” 

And I never did.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

My trimmed finger:
Healing nicely

Exit Seeking and Cuts

New York, November 2010 

All I managed to accomplish this week was to cut Bruce's bangs and the end off my left index finger (photos to follow).

Not at the same time. And the former before the latter. The scissors and the knife were both a little dull, but sharp enough to get the job done. 

This post features snips from that letter I wrote in May 1988 about our first trip together to New York City. 

The Museum of Natural History 

"It's a big taxidermy shoppe... and is revolting. Once stuffed, animals have no dignity, are nothing but trophies; the effect is depressing....

"The strange thing about the MNH was we had trouble getting out of it. New York is a city of unexpected closed exits. Just when you figure you're on your way out of a place, you find a guard telling you to go back the way you came. At the MNH at shortly after two in the afternoon, the revolving doors at the main entrance were locked. A guard directed us to a small side entrance. Several hours before closing, this huge museum let people in and out through only one small, obscure, unmanned portal."

Public Restrooms

"We stopped in a little restaurant for a couple of beers while our host finished her classes. These establishments usually have a single toilet and sink hole-in-the-wall type washroom, never roomy, but clean enough. I believed, therefore, as I went in the direction of the little arrow marked "restrooms" that I would end up not too badly shaken. 

"Once through the first door, I was in an industrial-sized hallway full of pipes, with unwholesome-looking puddles on the grey-painted concrete floor. A fellow who followed me through the first door indicated another as the way to the restrooms. I went through that door, down a flight of metal-treaded stairs, across a dank concrete corridor which extended as far as the eye could see in either direction, up another flight of metal stairs, down a long corridor full of steaming pipes, around a corner, up another five steps and into a huge rectangular room. At its far end, on a wooden platform, stood two Port-a-sans. I estimated I was

about a block away from the restaurant."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

NYC Veterans Day Parade, November 11, 2010

The Past Is Never Dead

Vancouver Island, September 2005

Publishing History

Late in December 1987 (yes, that 1987, the one more than thirty years ago) I made a deal with my friends the Jewinskis that I would write them two letters a month during 1988 and, at the end of that year, we would compile, edit and publish the letters. 

This was not to be mere art for art's sake. No. Those letters would become a best-seller and the proceeds would finance the establishment, with me as the founding editor, of a Canadian humour magazine called The Minute.

Certainly sounds plausible.

I wrote one letter a month (half of the promised output) until June. Then I got a new job at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and was so distracted by office politics and drinking with my co-workers, that I forgot the deal. I didn't write again until December.

The reality of a paying job blew away all my publishing ambitions.

But I kept writing to the Jewinskis. And they kept more than fifty of the letters I sent them between 1982 and 2000.

Late last year, they sent the letters back. They were downsizing from their 3,000 sq ft farmhouse in St. Clements to a 485 sq ft condo in downtown Toronto. 

I've gone though all the letters. Reliving the '80s and law school was more embarrassing and painful than I'd have guessed.  But, some parts of some of the letters met the promise of the original deal.

This is from May 1988, describing a trip to New York Bruce and I took to visit a friend:

We sat one night in a bar called Icabod's and drank $100 worth of fancy drinks, smoking incessantly, talking and talking and talking. It was wonderful: that sort of flat-bottomed pleasure that comes when you feel as though you've hit a pocket of timelessness. You keep on drinking but never get too drunk; you keep on talking but there's always more to say; you keep on smoking but the pack never runs out.

What happens first is the cigarettes run out, then the bar closes and you realize you're tired and you want to go home, but in a happy sated state, slightly weary, but still buzzing with the energy from the conversation.

There are others - like the letter from October 1997 describing what it was like to be a smoker in a world increasingly unaccommodating of same - but I'll save those for later posts.  

Hip-Gnosis

I visited my orthopaedic surgeon on Friday, just to get an x-ray and tell him about the strange interlude from the 17th to the 29th of January. He'd never heard of anything like it. The x-ray showed my hip was exactly the same as it was in 2017 and 2016. He said there was nothing wrong that he could see. So I'm good.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

New York, November 2010