We Don't Need Another Hero

Allan Gardens chrysanthemums

Some of my readers know that I'm writing more than just the mini-memoirs that make their way onto this blog every week. There's a book in the works, some short stories and maybe a play.

To help me with these projects, I've been reading something called My Story Can Beat Up Your Story, a book better than its title that provides a by-the-numbers breakdown of screenplay writing. The formula goes in part like this: your sympathetic hero works her way through a series of increasingly difficult obstacles as she progresses through four stages of character type: the orphan, the wanderer, the warrior, the martyr.

You may be thinking now about the Harry Potter books, or The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The movie exemplum of this structure is the first Star Wars movie. Luke Skywalker is orphaned, joins up with Obi Wan to wander, fights the Empire, and willingly risks his life to destroy the Death Star. 

There. Now you don't have to buy the book.

I found an ad in the back of My Story Can Beat Up Your Story for Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey, a venerable standard textbook in screenplay writing classes that does the same thing as the other book, but also cribs from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I'm reading it now.

Both these books are good guides for thinking about what drives a story (hint: it's the characters), what happens next (hint: it needs to be more challenging than what's happened before) and what are all the other characters doing (no hint; I haven't read that far in Vogler).

So even though I'm not writing a screenplay ... screenplays are old hat by the way; now everyone's doing one hour pilots for Netflix ... it's useful to have these concepts in my head as I write the book and the short stories.

After these are done, I'll try the one hour pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Let's Get to the News

Coltsfoot Lane, Cabbagetown

For the first time since the townhouse condos at 280 Sherbourne Street were built almost fifty years ago, children have been born to families living here: Masie on October 1 and Charlie on October 9.  

Babies born in October 2020 were conceived in the month when the pandemic was among us but humanity wasn't fully aware.

 
For that first month of 2020, there were other things going on besides COVID-19, such as:

- the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani and 

- the shooting down by Iran of 176 civilians on an Ukrainian Airlines flight and

- Meg and Harry stepping back as senior members of the Royal Family and 

- Millions of hectares of Australia burning as koalas approached the brink of extinction and

- Donald Trump's impeachment and

- Harvey Weinstein's trial and

- Brexit.

Of course, January's events were nothing compared to the past week, when the fading-reality-television-star-in-chief was literally on steroids and taking crazy to new heights.

Among the ceaseless cymbal crashes of the news, every once in a while a voice breaks through with crystalline clarity. For example, this, from Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine:

The [Republicans'] premise is that liberty is a higher value than democracy, and they define liberty to mean a right to property that precludes redistribution. That is to say, the right views progressive taxation, regulation and the welfare state not as mere impediments to growth, but as oppression. A political system that truly secured freedom would not allow the majority to gang up on the minority and redistribute their income for themselves.

And

Republicans believe that the political system must retain, and ideally expand, its counter-majoritarian features: ballot-access rules that restrict the franchise to “worthy” citizens, gerrymandered maps that allow the white rural minority to exercise control, a Senate that disproportionately represents white and Republican voters, and a Supreme Court that believes the Republican economic program is written into the Constitution.

I don't know about you, but that sure clears up a lot for me.

With the pandemic, people newly isolated and unemployed turned online for their news, where Facebook lay in wait to radicalize them. Within no time, anti-lockdown rallies popped up. And Q-Anon had a line of merchandise and a candidate running for the House of Representatives.

I get that Facebook's algorithm is not a force for good in the world, feeding as it does people's preference for opposition. But that can't be all it feeds. My Facebook account swarms with puppy videos, animal rescues and the travel photography of a friend who sends this greeting every morning: "hello my lovelies." 

Congratulations to my neighbours for their impressive act of love and optimism in these batshit loonball times.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen

No more line ups at Ontario COVID-19
Assessment Centres,
just a record level of new cases.

October Surprise

Little fires everywhere: honey locust gold dust in the back patio

Before Friday morning, I thought this blog would be about how I bought a new pair of glasses online. 

But, the world doesn't need one more person speaking up about Trump's case of COVID-19. So I'll just cut and paste a few things already out there:

Italian right-wing opposition leader Matteo Salvini tweeted: "In Italy and in the world, whoever celebrates the illness of a man or of a woman ... confirms what he is: An idiot without a soul...." CBC

And ...

In 2016, Donald Trump celebrated the illness of his rival Hilary Clinton when she fainted from pneumonia: 'She's supposed to fight all of these things, and she can't make it 15 feet to her car'. YouTube

And ... 

A senior Trump official responded to criticism of the maskless crowd at the RNC by celebrating COVID: "Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually." CommonDreams

In our corner of the world's ending, we continue to be surprised by raccoons in the darnedest places ...

Raccoon Santa testing how much weight he needs to lose by Christmas

 ... and keeping our fingers crossed that further restrictions in care homes won't mean that Bruce has to go back to not being able to visit his dad. For most of April, May and June, Bruce could not see him at all. Since the restrictions were lifted, Bruce's daily visits have brought his dad out of the fog that descended during the months of his isolation. 

Thanks for reading! Pop that bubble!

Karen

Best / Worst Times ... IMO

Eye chart on Church Street

It was my 63rd birthday this past week. To celebrate, Bruce and I decided to push our luck and eat indoors at Richmond Station. There weren't more than six other customers in the place the whole time we were there.

Richmond Station has weathered the pandemic by providing take out orders and selling make-it-yourself burgers (you get the patties, the buns and the condiments to cook and assemble at home). They've staked out a car-lane-wide patio space on Richmond Street, so patrons can sit outdoors and enjoy diesel fumes and vibration with their food. We weighed the comparative risks of the virus vs vehicle exhaust when we chose to eat indoors.

Richmond Station has adopted a "no tips" policy and increased its prices accordingly. It has always been a pricey restaurant (especially the drinks) so we really didn't notice the change, and liked not having to add 20% to the bill.

Getting Along

It hit the news this past week that an Etobicoke woman who had just had a mural painted on her garage door received an anonymous note complaining that the painting made the street look like a ghetto and would reduce everyone's property values. 

She shared her outrage at the obnoxious treatment on Facebook. Soon local artists rallied around her and volunteered to paint the garage door of every willing property owner in the neighbourhood for free. By October 5, the anonymous crank will have maybe a dozen or more garage murals to complain about. 

Garage door murals, by the way, are common in Toronto. I photographed this one in Leslieville in 2012.

The plague year has really wrung a lot of people out. So much so that something as innocuous as a garage mural in a city full of them has sparked a massive reaction to an ignorant and ill-considered note. 

The dispute has gone viral, with multiple ways to show one's support. Says Blog T.O.:

There is also a poster promoting the cause [to]... "let everyone know that hateful attacks will not go unanswered in our city — let's make our love heard!"

It could be the pandemic's effect on me, but I think the neighbourhood's over-the-top reaction has more to do with revenge than love.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen  

 

Next Chapter

Lop-eared raccoon in the Honey Locust tree in our backyard.
He was afraid of me and tried to climb up higher, but he was too fat.

Back With a Vengeance

COVID case numbers are up all over the world, except where they never actually went down. Israel has resorted to another lockdown, but Ontario, for the time being, is taking a more risk-based approach. 

As for the risk, everything that has happened since the lockdown lifted affirms the piece by the immunologist that circulated on Facebook in May: exposure equals concentrations of virus over length of time. In other words: the longer you are in the presence of the virus, the likelier you are to get enough of it in your system to make you sick. When you're around humans (and maybe cats) you don't see every day, it's safer to be outdoors than in because there is less virus in the air. If you are indoors with strangers, wear a mask. Outdoors or in, keep your distance and don't hang around for hours and hours.

This is evidently hard to translate into enforceable policy, so public health talks about "bubbles" and sets limits for the size of gatherings. These measures are potentially a reasonable proxy for common sense - and far preferable, to my mind, to further lockdowns - but regulating common sense is tricky, as the picture below demonstrates.

In April, days went by without a single person lining up for a COVID test at Women's College Hospital on Grenville Street. Now, at every time of the day, the line up goes down to the corner and around the block ... and they're all young people.

Quiet Toronto 

The Eaton Centre and Nathan Phillips Square remain bereft of tourists. The snack trucks lined up on Queen Street in front of City Hall still desperately seek customers. I, on the other hand, would like it if someone could just explain this photo to me. 

Why is this woman in curlers and full makeup? And what is she wearing?

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

The big old tree that was a big old stump is now just a patch of dirt in the Allan Gardens.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

This is Not a Walking Blog

Belt Line landmark: Pedestrian bridge at Heath Street

The Belt Line - a former rail line now a recreational trail - includes Fangorn-like tangles of ancient trees but also Rust-Belt-like piers and abutments of massive, crumbling infrastructure. 

If I've ever walked along that part of the Belt Line before, it was so long ago I have forgotten. I was amazed at every prospect as I followed it to the end of Moore Park from Milkman's Lane. 

One More Paycheque, But No Pension

I jumped the gun last week saying I was off the payroll, as I discovered when I received one last pay stub in the mail on Thursday. I will not, however, receive a pension cheque this month even though my retirement officially commenced September 1.

Bureaucracy being what it is, my former employer noticed at the end of August that it made a mistake with my 1 October retirement date, which should have been 1 September. I'm glad they caught their error before they paid me money they shouldn't have, but this change has thrown a spanner in the works for my pension.

I've called the cheerful, helpful people at the Ontario Pension Board a couple of times to a) confirm that they know the date of my retirement's been changed and b) obtain their assurances that they are going to send me a new "election package", which I had formerly filled out (with the wrong retirement date) in May, five full months ahead of when I would start collecting my pension. They said they would expedite my file, but couldn't say when, exactly, they could send my new paperwork, nor how long it would take after that to start to pay me.

The Necropolis and That Other Pandemic

It was just a matter of time before my shade-searching pandemic walks took me to the Necropolis. Established in 1850, after the Potter's Field at Yonge and Bloor burst its seams, the Necropolis hugs a hillside spilling into the Don Valley. 

Enormous tombstones balance on precarious inclines. Those untroubled by heights or broken steps can explore the most isolated zones and find markers for young men - children really - who died of influenza at the end of the first World War. The Canadian Air Force had started up two years before and never saw battle.

This Pandemic

Children played in the yard of Winchester Street School when Bruce and I walked past on Friday afternoon. We hadn't seen anything like that in months. Tenet doesn't sound worth the risk of sitting in a movie theatre. I'm re-watching The Wire (for the fourth time) because I've watched everything else.  

One More Cousin

I joined in the DNA data sharing craze to find out about my mother's father. A couple of weeks ago, I found out something else. A person I did not know emailed me through Ancestry.ca to ask if I knew how I was connected to her birth mother. I did know. Her birth mother was my father's youngest sister, whom I'd always thought had had no children. The person who emailed me is my long-lost cousin - a daughter given to adoption. After a couple of days of excitement and exchanging information, I've settled back to having little to do with most of my cousins. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen 

 

Off the Payroll

Pretty heritage porch, corner of Sackville and Amelia Streets

As of 1 September, 2020, I am officially no longer employed by the province of Ontario. It feels better than I imagined - especially as I thought that I would never feel better than I did on December 21, 2019 when I left the office never to return.

As For The Pandemic

Numbers are creeping up - both cases and government deficits. Back to school is chaos. 20-minute tests are on their way. Flights are very high risk. And, everyone's going to catch this thing eventually. Feels like we have everything under control.

And the US Election

Biden's leading. But it's tight in battleground states. Trump can still win, but if he loses there will be months of uncertainty, or worse. It's like watching your neighbours fight over whether to blow their house up or burn it down. 

And the Treadmill

It's actually something called a tread climber, because there are two separate treads that go up and down while you step. It's guaranteed to burst a sweat out of you in about five minutes. And, yes, we're both using it, Bruce in the morning before he goes to visit his dad, me in the afternoon after sitting on my ass writing all morning. 

First Official Act as a Free Person

Now that I am no longer paid by the government, I am free to do some volunteer work I originally signed up for last year. It's research into climate change and government actions to address same. I'm a little rusty, so this is going to take longer than it used to. I am despairing about properly formatting the footnotes, and - God help me - putting together a bibliography. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen