It’s when I stand up on a plane and see every head fixed on a personal television that I realize we’re all just meat reacting to stimuli. Peculiar, when you look at something normal long enough. And if you take away the meat? The stranger it gets. A few years ago, on the first day of the Second Lockdown, I was one of a dozen passengers on a 400-seat flight out of Toronto. My section, about a third of the plane, was completely empty. But still the screens were aglow with moving images, all in sync.
Seeing this brought to mind what Baudrillard said about a TV set running in an empty room, stimulating nothing. “It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is; a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its own message.”
I got a message from Eva while writing the paragraph above. Earlier, I’d told her I was eating some fruits. She wrote back asking, “real fruits or those 4th stage evolved away from fruits word that i can’t remember right now?” Simulacra, I told her, the word is simulacra, and it just happened to be Baudrillard who developed an entire philosophy around it.
Meat&
Screens&
Stimuli&
Coincidence.
In Vietnam, I saw proof that you can put anything on a shirt and someone will buy it.
I’m home now, which is to say I’m sitting on the front porch of my parents’ house in Tiny Township, Ontario. I was finally approved for the special piece of governmental plastic that would allow me to enter the country. It was waiting for me in an envelope at an immigration office on the outskirts of Toronto. “Everyone has been here,” my taxi driver said as I stepped out of the car. “Sometimes good outcome, sometimes not.” He wished me good luck and I wished him the same. Then I felt weird for doing that. It was noon, a hot day, the mid-sky sun intensifying the building’s bureaucratic sheen. It looked like a place you go to donate blood: sterile, clinical, full of people categorized by a fact of birth. Getting here took nine months of paperwork, two applications, three federal agencies, and now a 6,500-kilometre trip. I was handed my envelope without further questions or fuss. This could have been mail, I thought.
It’s easy to come up with romantic notions of home—how it’s a feeling, where the heart is, etc. But sometimes it’s also just a rigid administrative construct, gatekept by a faceless force and auto-reply. Soon I’ll write a longer piece about this but for now, I’m happy to bask in the cliches.
On the porch, I’m reading about “stone-skipping’s greatest living legend,” Kurt Steiner. I’m enamoured by the man. We both grew up on a Great Lake (him Erie, me Huron), spent our teenage years “lurching from hyperfocus to apathy,” and can “fashion a can of Monster energy drink into a makeshift bong.” Like him, I once “struggled to eat, hobbled by a compulsion never to mix the items on [my] plate.” And while I haven’t yet discovered stone-skipping as “a legitimate path to an essential inner balance,” there’s only one thing on my mind when I see some dead flat water. Really, though, it’s this: At some point, Kurt grew tired of a society “hell-bent on detaching itself from the natural world” and went neck-to-neck with himself on his own terms. It’s one of the best profiles I’ve read in years.
The first thing I noticed was the wildfire smoke. Most of Quebec and Ontario, as seen from the plane, were sepia. I landed in a haze, and drove home in it, and swam in it at the beach. I heard air pollution makes the evening sky nice and blood red, a beautiful horror like the rainbow slick of an oil spill. The effect never materialized but I was happy to be back in the best water on earth. “This is not great water. This is not excellent water. This water is absolutely unique. This is a miracle of nature,” a geochemist said about it recently. On the news, a reporter was asking people in Montreal why they were outside despite the health warnings. “It ain’t gettin’ any better so we might as well get used to it,” one woman said. Some of us have already accepted that things will get worse before they get worse. We were supposed to have another 50 years.
On my second day at home, Environment Canada warned of an upcoming “heat event,” as if we’re meant to bring a folding chair to the hot weather and lay out a game of cornhole. They say the winds are coming from the south now and pushing the smoke toward the Arctic. I imagine some of the Inuit up there, out of reach from the world, looking to the sky and wondering what the fuck we’re doing down here.
Awesome is all that can be said.
Your writing. Is great. Thank you.