Things That Happened in 2023

 

January: Oh man, 2023 started off with a bang! I got my G2 driving license and basically spent the next few weeks with the goofiest grin on my face—like, so proud of myself—and THEN I had a fibroid surgery that I'd been sort of on the fence about/dreading for the better part of a year, and it went....totally fine! It was totally fine. Starting the year with two things I'd been dreading and then aced was a huge boost! Noah turned seven and I finished my zine about knitting, so those were also pretty great things! 

February: Former Toronto Mayor and Noted Old Person John Tory resigned in a sex scandal! Responses ranged from Yuck to LOL, which is correct. We started watching Bluey on Disney+ and everyone fell in love with the Heelers. Nothing much happened, really: there was some weather and we went out with friends, but overall, it was February so we were all just trying to survive. 

March: March break, again, which was another trip to Toronto. In 2022, we went to a hotel and it was very Covid-fraught; this time, we went to my in-law's place and bummed around with friend and rock-climbed and it was much more chill. I did March Madness on the theme of theme of Strong Female Leads and it was sort of...meh? Like, there are definitely a lot of movies that I love with strong female characters, but it felt kind of flat to focus on them exclusively. Anyhoo! Noah also joined the garden club at school, so that was pretty cute!

April: Halfway through the month, I woke up with the fastest heartbeat I'd ever had in my entire life. I went and sat on the toilet—still half-asleep—and by the time I sort of realized what was happening, it was probably topping 200 beats a minute. To this day, and I write this in December, I don't know what that was or why it happened. Was it POTS? Menopause? High blood pressure? Allergic reaction? Stress? Anemia? Dehydration? Panic attacks? Sleep apnea? I don't know. I never found out. It kept happening for weeks. It was so stressful. I helped organize an Earth Day party and I went to Trashion Week for the first time ever, and both were just really nice moments of affirming community and my place in it. I've now lived in Stratford for five years and it's been exactly the right place to participate in civic life on a scale that feels meaningful—I sit on boards and volunteer and know my kid's principal and many of my neighbours. It's so nice to be embedded somewhere; technically, I know this feeling is possible anywhere, but it has manifested the most in co-op, in my 20s, and here in Stratford, in my 30s. 

May: I long-term borrowed my parent's very very old Prius and started driving for real this month. We started with a trip to the Beaver Valley in which the car broke down and it was very annoying (but ultimately totally fine). There was also Mother's Day and organizing Mike's 40th birthday party; I spent his actual birthday evening in the hospital because my heart rate would not calm down, and it turns out I was pretty dehydrated! Mostly it was just so nice to welcome the sun back in a meaningful way, to get some independence, and to gear up for the summer.

June: Mike's 40th birthday party, which was a backyard shindig and well-attended by many people who love him. Then: The Smoke. Remember when the air was absolutely disgusting with wildfire smoke from coast to coast? And the kids were encouraged to stay indoors during recess, and New York looked like Blade Runner 2049? It's moments like this when it's like, oh, man, right: we are living on a planet in great crisis, and it's so hard to navigate the grief of feeling like our Earth Mother is dying of a disease we gave her ourselves, and that we could do something about it (only the "we" in that sentence is concentrated to a few dozen members of the human race, and I'm not in that club). On the summer solstice, I walked a labyrinth and meditated on all the ways my body felt connected to the earth. 

July: Summer holidays! Trips to Toronto! Weddings! Landlord troubles! Grandma health concerns! Multi-day internet outages! Neighbour issues! Man, this was a month of high highs and very low lows. For a minute, I was convinced we were going to be evicted because we hadn't mulched our garden beds. It was stressful as hell, y'all. On the plus side, the Barbie movie came out and that was a fantastic moment for feminist memes and the Indigo Girls.

August: We spent two weeks at the cottage and that was really nice. Noah went to the hippie Christian day camp of my own youth; Mike and I went out on a date and ate Mexican food. I continued my months-long stretch of waking up in the middle of the night. When we got back home, Noah and I spent two weeks going to the library every day and helped build a city of recycled materials. August sort of felt like a hangover from the mayhem of July, to be honest. 

September: September is the dividing line in the "before" and "after" of 2023. In September, I got some explosive news about my relationship. And that was the end of it. It was the end of nine years of marriage, of five years of trying since the last explosion, it was the end of wanting to keep trying. I was shocked and appalled and anxious and sick about it. And I was also relieved, because now, finally, I could stop holding on to something that wasn't working. In the first few weeks, I would rage out or cry my eyes out—a remix of "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" had me sobbing for an hour—but my anxiety damped down and my heart stopped racing so much. I started sleeping through the night again. Marriage is hard work, but I think we made it harder than it had to be. I'm being deliberately vague because I don't want to ruin his life, or mine, but I'm not ashamed of what happened here. I hope we both get to move on from this. This was survivable. I am surviving. 

October: Okay, all that being said, Mike didn't move out until nearly the end of November, and the next couple months were not easy. I slept in my office, or he slept in the attic. I took a whirlwind trip to Toronto and told many friends about what had happened. Noah's anxiety started ramping up, as if mine was being transferred to him, and it was absolutely terrible to watch. October was a holding month, a month where I just counted the days until something would be different. My grandma passed away and it felt sad to say goodbye to the last of her generation. She was such a beautiful, complicated, interesting woman—just like my mom, just like me, although we each have totally different versions of beautiful and complicated.

November: Mike finally moved out after nine weeks of post-explosion co-habitation and I was sort of dreading being on my own, but I came to neutrality on it in fairly short order: I watched a lot of old Whose Line Is It Anyways? and ate at weird times, and my heart didn't explode and I even found myself enjoying it sometimes. Then I turned 40! I planned a birthday party, but two days before, I tested positive for Covid (!!), so I had to call it off. What a freaking bummer. Anyway, I had been sort of mildly convincing myself that I would die before my 40th birthday (#darkthoughts) so the fact that I didn't was GREAT.

December: Noah's separation/general anxiety was pretty debilitating and it was a ton of work to get him to school every morning. I got kind of bogged down in work things and will have to get caught up before everybody comes back online in early January. I hosted a Solstice party and I spent my first Christmas away from my kiddo. The intensity of single parenting means I need to find a way to savour our breaks, because I need them—I need them, and I enjoy them—and I also miss my kid when we're apart. I had a 24-hour trip to Toronto to see old co-op friends and fall in love with the city again. I tried some dating apps and quickly found out that that scene is wild—like, are the men okay?—and 2024 will probably bring some romantic mishaps, or maybe total radio silence on that front, or maybe new love?? Who even knows, because the idea of going on a date with someone right now makes me want to barf.

In a nutshell, 2023 had a lot going on! Like, a lot. Friends showed up in a lot of amazing ways, from couches to crash on to weddings and weekend hangs to just letting me cry in their backyards while our kids played together. I loved being in Stratford and the roots that I've been slowing growing here seem real and true. I got to see Toronto friends many times, and that was nice. I read books and magazines, I walked on the beach, I worried about things that didn't happen and things that did. 2023 felt like a watershed year—the end of my marriage, milestone birthday, important deaths, important friendships—but it also felt like a compilation of moments where I felt really proud of myself, or like I was growing in a direction I liked. I have no idea what 2024 will bring. I hope it's good!

My Thirties: A Recap Post

 

1: marriage
1: child
1: eviction
1: global pandemic
1: death of my brother-in-law
1: separation
1: drivers license acquired
1: decade of a whole life

2: house fires (one serious, one not-very-serious)
2: boards served on
2: people in my immediate family who survived cancer
2: surgeries
2: original songs composed for my sweet baby
2: bouts of COVID

3: grandparents passing
3: friendship implosions

4: main work clients, whom I like all very much

5: moves
5: parent-teacher meetings 

6: attempts to change my diet, to ever-less-meaningful results

7: amazing new friendships launched or previous friendships deepened
7: Baby Dance Parties planned, playlisted, and executed

10: sweaters knit (two for my kiddo, eight for me)
10: seasons of Drag Race watched

30+: times listening through the Harry Potter audiobooks as I try to go back to sleep in the night

45+: Dungeons and Dragons games

500+: dollars spent annually thrifting 

several: hobbies that were considered/provided for and then abandoned (I will do a punch-needle craft...one day), mental health crises, cherished babies made by other people, game nights with people I love

many: hours spent in the bathtub, nighttime wake-ups, viewings of Back to the Future, fights with my spouse, laughs shared with a barista, hours spent volunteering, issues of the New Yorker that remain partially read, times to put my toes in the water at the beach, house parties, dance breaks, hours on the phone with my mom and sister, visits with my dad

uncounted: hours spent scrolling on my phone, hours spent snuggling with my child in the dark, memes exchanged with friends, Coke Zeros consumed, trips to the grocery store, hours spent worrying, hours spent laughing

unknowable: deep breaths taken in moments of agonizing anxiety, cockroaches killed in our worst home, recitations of Where the Wild Things Are, tidbits of gossip shared (both with and about me), pints of raspberries purchased, ways I have changed for good and for not-so-good, stabs of worry about some bodily ailment, teas purchased in lovely coffee shops and drank in the company of friendly strangers

some: regrets

more: truths uncovered, moments of joy, accomplishments I'm proud of, relationships I cherish, family time I wouldn't trade for the world, things I look back on with fondness because I knew that even though they didn't work out forever, they were good in the moment and the moment is all we really get, hopes for the future, interest to see where the next decade will go.

Fall Horrorspokes

Image by Maggie Carr

Aries: I love marigolds. I love anemones. I love flowers that don't really get into the swing of things until the equinox, at least. The flowers that are still showing off when the first snow flies. I love the crocuses and the lilac bushes and the forsythia, of course: the harbingers of spring. Everyone loves those gals, the first ones to the show. But I love the ones that linger, the flowers that are keeping the party alive as the candles burn low. 

Taurus: I'm not very good at writing short stories. I want to be—it's a literary form I admire—but they typically turn out to be glorified character studies, and/or meandering, plotless little adventures. When I was in high school, a well-written short story was the ne plus ultra, proof that you were one of the writerly types, but even then, I turned in character sketches and poetry and free-form dialog and essays. And listen, babes: I can write. But what does it say about me that the things I'm good at are never quite as appealing as the things I don't do perfectly?

Gemini: Grief is weird. My grandma died and I'm trying to figure out how to mourn her. I want to put on nice lipstick and wander around Walmart, like she would have. I want to go to bed for three days. I want to scream into a mattress. It's not just my grandma. I didn't grow a garden this summer. I didn't knit a shawl this fall. I don't know what my life will be like in a year—does anyone?—and I grieve the things and people I will lose along the way.

Cancer: You know what I'm curious about? What it would like to be rooted. I'm talking ninth-generation whatever-whatever, the family farm of a dozen generations, the family business, the town with the streets named after my ancestors. Do you think that would be stifling? Would there be pressure to stay, to remain in that place? Or do you think it would be sweet, to have your roots networked so deeply into the soil? Would your memories be your own, or would it be like dreaming?

Leo: Doesn't there seem like there's something kind of wrong with Justin Timberlake? I feel like former boy band members should be forcibly retired at the age of 25; just put those dudes on a horse ranch in Oaxaca and make them do therapy, you know? And I know in early post-NSYNC days, he was hailed as the second coming of blue-eyed soul, a spiritual successor to MJ but without the ick factor. But now! As outlined in Britney Spears's new memoir! We have confirmed ick factor! Anyway, I am looking forward to JT's display of contrition and/or non-apology; either way, he'll continue to act like a dillhole. File this guy under "ugh, men."

Virgo: You are a corgi in the sunshine, an illustration of a frog wearing a hat, a mouse wearing figure skates. You are a platter of cheese and meat and handmade (slightly lumpy) crackers. You are grapes on the vine, sun on the water, the smell of campfire at sundown. You are handmade socks and homemade stew. You are little kids burying their feet at the beach. You and I are both Billy Collins poems. You are quilts and cotton sheets. You are a lovely gift to the world.

Libra: I recently set an app timed on Instagram, because I was spending hours—literal hours—every day, scrolling and seeking that sweet dopamine hit. On the first day, I hit the time by dinner time, and it was like, "Oop, see you tomorrow!" The next day, I was much more judicious with my time, and I did get it under two hours, my daily maximum limit. I still check it a dozen times a day; it is my favourite app for messaging, because I am old and weird. But I no longer habitually settle in for a nice long trawl, which feels like a victory. Managing my own brain chemistry can be weird and hard; I'm grateful for the posts that make me laugh and cry, and I'm grateful for the timer that means I don't do it all day.

Scorpio: It's nine PM, it feels like midnight, and I'm ready to crawl into bed. Autumn is hard, buddies. It's not all Halloween dance parties and pumpkin spice lattés: we have to accept that we are seasonal creature and we are slowing down. On average, we get 30 more minutes of REM sleep each of these dark nights: a dreamer's paradise. And even in this short days, we rise with the sunrise and stand under the October sun, a glorious golden gift that is one last hurrah before winter's cold light. Enjoy these short days; sleep the long nights; revive yourself when the time is right.

Sagittarius: We Sags have a reputation for being flighty monsters who don't care about anyone's feelings, but in reality, each of my Sagittarian friends (with the exception of, ahem, myself) is the hardest-working bitch I know. They're constantly producing 'zines and scuba diving, making radio shows and taking dance lessons. They are the definition of life-long learners. Sit down, Archers! I am of your number and I'm tired just watching your Instagram stories. In reality, I think it's less that we don't care about anyone's feelings, and more that we are comfortable being weird in a world that doesn't like that. So, you know: carry on!

Capricorn: I love a low-capacity meal. The first 18 months of my son's life, we ate bagged salad with chicken strips and oven fries about once a week, and I think of that meal with great fondness. Sometimes I feel guilty for how much I love boxed mac and cheese and frozen dumplings, but I think God gave us those things because she wants us to be happy. As we go into a low-capacity season, please remember that we have tools like bagged salad and freezer lasagna that lighten the load; eat them with abandon, my loves.

Aquarius: My favourite colour is a dusky red, a brown-coral that a friend once told me was called "Nantucket Red," and isn't that just the most evocative colour name you can imagine? My kiddo's favourite colour is blue, just blue: not a fancy sky-blue or aquamarine or teal or navy, but the blue of school binders and the eight-pack of Crayola crayons. My mom's favourite colour is teal, or maybe cyan, but the colour of a robin's egg, especially when she can match it with red. When I walk into a room she's decorated, I look for the teal, and I usually find it. We leave ourselves everywhere, don't we?

Pisces: If you could design a ritual, what would it be? I think you'd plan something Druidic, an event fit for Stonehenge. But I also suspect that you might be the kind of person who would secretly baptize your sister in the river when you were both kids. Where do you find your sacraments—in the holy water, or in the edges with the cattail, every part of which is edible? In the church, or in the light streaming through the windows on a February day? In a wedding ceremony, or in falling asleep to the sound of your lover's breath? Nothing can keep us from the holiness of everyday life. We don't need Stonehenge to make mystery and wonder.

It's Called Fashion, Look It Up

Okay, it's time for our semi-annual fashion round-up! Did you know that all the Copenhagen Fashion Week girlies were wearing flip-flops this summer? And tiny neckerchiefs? And that Pharrel Williams succeeded Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, and his 2024 collection seemed pick up both ska and cigarette packaging as reference points? And Elle has declared fall 2023 the season of the sweater, if you can imagine a trend so bold? And also the colour red? And the romantic goth? And that our tops will be both off the shoulder and feature a plunging neckline? Somehow??

Phew, okay, sorry, I had to get that all out of my system. It's not that I no longer care about fashion—I do, very much—it's just that the concept of "fashion" has become so nebulous and theoretical as to be basically meaningless. 

For context, I grew up in a time when there were maybe a dozen ascendant fashion houses—Chanel, YSL, Ralph Lauren, Versace, and Calvin Klein come to mind—and each year, the major fashion magazines would get together and proclaim plaid to be in and menswear to be out, or hemlines were up, or down, or some other variation on some other theme. But you could pick up a handful of September issues and be like, "ah, a trend." The boutiques and department stores would then offer some passable facsimile of the runway version, and you would buy it and be fashionable. It was simple!

But all of this took place well before fast fashion like H&M or TopShop; before the rise of streetstyle blogs; before the diversification (and appropriation) of fashion houses to allow hip-hop influences; before the global fashion markets exploded; before the accelerating fashion cycle made seasonality defunct, and before the pandemic and normcore and Acting Basic.

Now, what we're left with, is a fuzzy squint of fashion. Everyone wears everything, all the time. There seems to still be trends—skinny jeans are out, wide-leg pants are back, and flares are in limbo, cowboy boots are everywhere—but the fashion trend and/or designer has been dethroned. And we are left to sort through the pieces, going, maybe a red boot? Could that be a thing?

The 90s is our fashion nostalgia moment right now, but I truly believe everyone is getting it wrong. Sure, some of us were wearing flannels and ripped jeans and were cool; when I was twelve, I literally wore a navy-blue blazer to the first day of grade six, and I do not see that being replicated anywhere (thank god) (this summer, all the cool teens wore sweatshorts with crop-tops and crocs; everyone looked like a tall sexy toddler and it was fucking weird). I remember when highwaisted straight-leg midwash jeans and an oversized Bart Simpson t-shirt were the only option for either gender, and I do not remember it fondly. 

The best I ever looked was probably 2003-2012, which is when the Marc Jacobs version of the 1980s was everywhere—the era of the scene kid, the hipster for which this very blog is named! I remember a lot of denim miniskirts and Converse shoes, little sundresses, and a lot of American Apparel. Am I conflating this fashion cycle with the hotness of my 20s in general? Maybe, yeah! But it was also a time before leggings were a going-out pant. The standards were different!

Now I'm in my last year of my 30s, and I've spent most of the last decade in a post-partum body: chubbier, fatigued, a bit paunchy. It's a body type that might have been fashionable in 17th century; today, when we're steeped in wellness culture and the legging is, indeed, a going-out pant, it's less so. I find myself bobbing between not wanting to ever be perceived, and wanting to be the hottest bitch at the school pick-up. When my body isn't willowy or cute, I still give it a go through fashion. 

And look, I am not one of those innately stylish people.  I own some truly spectacular garments, including a sequinned bomber jacket and a refrigeration suit. I keep wearing blue blouses and black tank tops and navy shorts. Yawn. I have friends of all ages, sizes, and income levels who can assemble A Lewk without breaking a sweat. They can pop on a bracelet, shrug on a cardigan, slip into the right shoes, and they look great! I am missing some key styling component, like bravery or a sense of adventure, and so I need inspiration. I need trends, stories, personas. I need to be able to look at someone else and be like, "I'm going to steal that for me." I know that is basic fashion, in all senses of the word, but I'm just being honest. 

Here is my very short list of things I'm turning to for fashion inspiration: solarpunk; Appalachian hellbillies (male variant); my friends Emily and Kat, who always look fucking cool;  Ojai visual artists; my Patagonia fleece, which I describe as "spendy ski bum." The vibe I want to cultivate is "the chillest exchange student at IKEA" or "someone who has read the Dr Bronner's bottle" or "the aging Canadian equivalent of the skateboarding Bolivian girls" or "could conceivably do some light homesteading, on a whim" or "Arconia resident (non-murdered variant)" or "can do a downward dog, no problem." 

The current vibe I give off with most of my clothes is "This person is a mom," and that is so BORING. If nothing matters and there is no trend cycle, then theoretically, anything I wear could be perfect. Why doesn't it feel like that? I'm a try-hard (see: that navy blazer), and fashion is supposed to be effortless and personal. 

Am I telling on myself when I say it's hard right now? That I don't feel cool? I feel like I missed the memo about which windbreaker jackets are okay and which ones are actually frumpy. I wear puffy vests. I don't look good in a boilersuit. I am not the hottest bitch at school pick-up. But I want to be! I want to be.

Blop Smulture

Image by Pedro Dimitriou

I feel like I've stepped out of the pop culture loop lately, and as a result, I have a weird form of writer's block. When I started this blog, I was tuned in across a lot of different channels—TV shows and movies, municipal politics in a major city, cycling, fashion,  trendy books, and just the culture cycle in general. And I would write about them! Early blog posts were often critiquing other people's creative work (my very first post was about Chuck Klosterman, which, I mean, okay). If they weren't critiques, they were response pieces—also known as a Hot Take—and then, at the bottom of the pile, musings. Later, when real things started to happen in my life, I added actual emotions to the mix, but I still write a lot about things like the perfect magazine and Wes Anderson movies.

But, as I've gotten older, mom-ier, and just sort of less cool in general (and less invested in being cool overall), I'm paying very little attention to things like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and the gotta-see-it TV shows; unwillingly, I give more to the ever-more depressing news cycle that comes from living on a burning planet and with an actual doofus as our provincial premier. I look at a lot of memes about cartoon toads living under illustrated mushrooms, and I feel like many of my friends do, too.

As a result, I feel very uncool when media topics arise. No, I have not heard that album—my latest "new" album is Portugal. The Man's Woodstock CD, which is from 2018 and which played on a loop in my car for three months. My binge-y shows are wholesome to the point of parody; I love the try-hard teachers of Abbott Elementary and the cartoon dogs from Bluey. I saw Barbie, of course, and I loved it, of course, but prior to that, I hadn't seen a grown-up non-Marvel movie in theatres since 2021's C'mon C'mon....which was about kids. I don't listen to podcasts unless they're about Harry Potter. I don't subscribe to any Substacks. I don't watch YouTube like it's TV; I barely watch TV, period. 

This is not a humblebrag or a weird flex. When people ask "What are you watching?" these days, we generally all start with Bluey, but then we're expected to be able to talk about Succession or The Idol or Wednesday or The Last of Us. And I just...cannot? I watch bake shows and gay-teen shows, and that's about it. Part of it is that TV is so fractured anyway—I don't have some of the key platforms, and the buzz that surrounds each individual show is often just as tailored to its viewing audience as any algorithm. I don't think there's been a truly culture-wide show since Game of Thrones wrapped up, and even then, not everybody watched it. And I'm just as likely to fall into a one-hour phone-scroll as I am to turn on a show; why watch one episode when I can watch sixty little reels, as a snack?

I am reading a lot these days, which is nice. I'm not on BookTok, but I suspect most of the discourse over there is about erotica starring various supernatural creatures, so, you know: pass. I did a monster Michael Chabon reading project, and then read a bunch of female authors to balance the scales; right now, I'm very into Becky Chambers, who writes affirming sci-fi and generally gives me something to think about. But unless someone picks it for book club, I'm just not reading the big blockbuster books of the day either. 

So there's 600 words about the things I'm not following, the stuff I'm not watching or reading. And I don't know—I'm not 23 any more, which is how old I was when I started writing in this little internet corner, all full of opinions and ready share. My priorities, my sense of self, have shifted dramatically. I just have less time; I have more real life to live (and recover from). I feel less voracious in my consumption.

When I was young, it felt essential to be so tuned in to the world. It was a process of creating myself: I like this, I don't like that. I found that my besties were similarly minded. We didn't have to love the same stuff, but the overall patterns were key—readers finding readers, concert-goers hanging out with other concert-goers.

Now, maybe that work is done, or less vital or urgent. Maybe I'm just more tired, or overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options to keep up with. Maybe I am, despite everything, just really boring. 

When I do consume, I want it to be stuff that reflects my needs and values. I gravitate towards wholesome TV—no murders (okay, Only Murders In the Building is an important exception), not a lot of violence, and preferably, the characters seem to like each other. I dislike reality shows that hinge on betrayal or that are platforms for billionaires (paging the Kardashians); I love the ones where people get to show off their cool art. I like a queer media experience, especially when it doesn't treat being gay as leading to inevitable punishment; I love that the gay-teen stories of today often choose joy, not fear, as their central theme. I have a long list of "kid's TV" that I find, not only palatable, but look forward to watching. So much of the last few years has been unpredictable, strange, unsettling and bad; is it so weird that I want my media to, you know, not be that?

But pity me at cocktail parties, because I literally have no fun fan theories, no undiscovered gems, no recommendations, no secret treasures. I'm not an expert on any genre, I don't have a password to a streaming site that I can share, I routinely quit shows that are boring or turn me off, and I am physically incapable of taking a recommendation, even if I know I will love it. 

So what am I going to write about now?

The Michael Chabon Re-Read Project

Image via Alex-quisite

This winter, I decided, for reasons not entirely clear to me, to go back and re-read Michael Chabon. 

Chabon, an American writer who won the Pulitzer in 2001, has written nine novels since 1988, as well as a number of other short-story collections, comic books, and essay collections. As I declined to spend any money on this endeavour, I read the books held by my local library and my own personal bookshelf, which means I did not—and have never—read his first two novels, Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys. Since his novels skew either very short or very long, and are often challenging (for reasons to be discussed below), I felt that skipping the non-fiction and comics was a fine omission. Seven of these books were re-reads; two were newly encountered.

I suffer, often, from a reluctance to revisit the important texts in my life. The movies I watched multiple times in high school have not been viewed since graduation; the books that opened by eyes in university were dutifully shelved, longstandingly admired, but not reopened. Fear underlies this disinclination to revisit: what if the books have become less compelling? What if I, as a reader and as a person, have changed so much that stories that were once spellbinding have become trite? What if the world itself has moved on, leaving these books as time capsules rather than vital works of art? What if I thought something was good, and I was wrong?

Anyway, there was only one way to find out. I re-read them in the order I thought would be most enjoyable, or in the order they were available at the library, or the order that my whims dictated. They are presented in that order below. 

Summerland (2002): Far and away my favourite of the early Chabon. A high-concept novel about the youthful saving of a cosmic world, it involves brave girls, baseball, the history of Washington State, Norse cosmology, giants, and the price we pay when good people become involved in terrible projects. Aimed at younger readers, it remains one of Chabon's best-plotted books, and his most diverse worlds. After re-reading this on a whim, I felt generous and inspired to read the others. Chabon does best with a firm editor and an large set of themes, both of which seem to be on full display here. I suspect he actually wrote this prior to Kavalier & Clay, but it was published after; maybe this accounts for the relatively out-of-scope subject matter and style. In any case, I enjoy it every time I read it.
Read again: absolutely, probably aloud to my kiddo.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000): This is the one that started it all. I first read it sometime in the early 2000s, after I had enrolled in university and was meeting Judaism in the real world for the first time. I was swept up in the story, the details of the writing: the early days of comic books, and the damaged young men who created them. By turns thrilling and tedious, the central relationship between cousins doesn't leave much space for any female characters—justice for Luna Moth, of course—but the sprawl was a hoot to get lost in. Going back to it, I was struck by how little I had retained of the story, but how much the feeling it evoked had remained. Michael Chabon is firmly established as a man's writer (that is, one who struggles to remember that women exist, and could be characters in books), and it started here. Still, there is magic in the amazing adventures, even if it's just the nostalgia for the person I had been when I first read it.
Read again: maybe in another 20 years?

The Final Solution (2004) and Gentlemen of the Road (2007): I read these back to back, two shorter novels—at least in theory—and a palate-cleanser before The Yiddish Policeman's Union. TFS was fine, a trim little mystery that centres on a parrot (an unlikely but real motif in Chabon's work), a mute boy, and the atrocities of war. It's fine! It's...fine. This was clearly a little amuse-bouche between longer novels, and it feels light and relatively unserious. 

GotR was an absolutely slog, a sub-150 page novella that nonetheless wandered, lost and obscure in the desert, knee-deep in period jargon and technical language, through characterizations that never told me who anyone actually was, through telegraphed details that I, a person reading in 2023, did not understand whatsoever. Originally published as a serial in the New York Times Magazine, I was first flummoxed, then enraged, then ultimately bored as the story unspooled and I found no place where I could get swept along. It took me weeks to read and I resented it the entire time.
Read again: neither appeals, frankly. And I would rather impale myself on a lancet that interact with those infernal gentlemen again.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007): This, finally, was the proper successor to Kavalier & Clay: a big, meaty, alternate history that supposed what might happen if, instead of Israel, the post-WWII Jews had been installed in Alaska. Things kick off with a murder and wrap up with a terrorist attack; in the middle is some fine alternate world-building (things like dialog happening "in American" and a minyan's worth of Orthodox thugs were great); however, Chabon has never really been able to steer a plot from A to C, and this is a critical failure in a mystery novel. This may feel ungenerous, to force a master of American letters into a little genre-specific box, but he is the one who chose the genre, friends. In any case, I remember being most disappointed by this book when it first came out; re-reading it, I found myself surprised to enjoy it more, but the still-unsatisfying third act is still a drag.
Read again: probably not!

Telegraph Avenue (2012): Man....okay, look, I want to like this book. I want to enjoy the California landscape, the dipped-in-honey feeling of Oakland in what feels like 1975, or 1995, but turns out to be 2008. I want to get into Brokeland Records with Archy and Nat and their midwife wives, I want to roam the streets with Julius and Titus, and in small doses, with the prose flowing like funk across a golden August afternoon, I can dig it. But as a text? A story? A book? This is a mess. As pointed out elsewhere, Chabon has never been able to hold a plot, but this is egregious. His prose is sticky, including one absolutely self-indulgent eleven-page sentence that made me mad. I wish we had spent more time with the wives, rather than these silly men. The casual homophobia reeks of trying to get away with something through a character. And yet: and yet. I actually went out and bought a thrift-store copy of this book, because I feel like it might be one I come back to one day. In small doses—like when I'm trying to fall asleep—the vibe of it all might overpower the mess. It will always be a mess, but sometimes, when your muse is Calliope in a fur coat and disco shorts, it's a mess worth rolling around in bed with.
Read again: yeah! I'm not sure why! But there's something about it that feels fertile.

Moonglow (2016): I'd soured on Chabon after the one-two punch of The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Telegraph Avenue, and while I still admired his earlier work, I was less inclined to seek him out. But this was the capstone of the project, and I'm glad I read it for the first time now. A faux-memoir (or is it?) of "Mike Chabon"'s grandparents, both Jews who survived WWII, and their subsequent mental health woes, incarcerations, and rocketry obsessions. The prose is infinitely tighter than anything he's produced before: snappier sentences, more comprehensible action, and even some jokes! We love a joke. I sense that this is Chabon as he's trying to craft a narrative, not a vibe, and he's still a bit amateurish (especially for someone who has written nine novels), but, despite the nesting and sometimes confusing timelines, the story itself is relatively straightforward in a way that feels downright refreshing. I loved the grandfather—a muscular, take-no-shit fightin' Jew who was streaked with romance and sadness—and I shuddered along with the grandmother as she rode out her hallucinations and trauma. There are sections that feel more well-drafted than others, but this is forgivable, as it's true of any book. And overall, this is a good place to end.
Read again: maybe. But I do recommend it.

This re-read project has led to some interesting places. I am not quite a fan of Chabon's—what is good is very good, but what is bad is appalling—but I will always respect his imagination. Even missteps like Telegraph Avenue and Gentlemen of the Road are interesting failures. I feel like a piratical editor could have salvaged many things, if not for the fact that authors of this level are rarely taken in hand in the ways they ought to be. And his resistance to contemporary stories is an interesting throughline (along with those damnable parrots): what does it say when an author reflects nearly everything through the lens of the past, especially one as calamitous as that of 20th century European Jewry? Is that just authors being authors, or is there some deep discomfort with a level gaze on this new millennia? As we get farther from the horrors of World War Two, we rely more on authors like Chabon to transport us back there in ways that feel meaningful; at the same time, his writing often grapples with what it means to storytell about the black hole that is the Holocaust, and how often writing will come up short. (Telegraph Avenue doesn't bother at all with this topic; is it coincidence that it is his most formless and least serious book?)

Will there be a sequel to this project? I may indulge in some of his essays; I may counterbalance this by reading all of, say, Ann Patchett or Virginia Woolf or Margaret Atwood or Elena Ferrante or Toni Morrison or Nnedi Okorafor or Becky Chambers. I may come back to these books at a time when I feel less nostalgic for my early 20s and the person I had been once; I may leave them on the shelf forever. But I do love the ways this project shined a light on me and my strange little soul. I loved the parts that made me mad, and the parts that made me wonder, and the parts that made me feel like my heart was hurtling through time and space. That, in those brief moments, is possible with this writer; that is not nothing.

For Real Estate

If you really want to hate yourself, here's the way to do it: I suggest having a really tough time in your 20s—like, going-to-rehab tough, taking-eight-years-for-an-undergrad tough—and then having a weird stop-start approach to work for many years, working at places that were short-term contract or, frankly, abusive, until you finally become self-employed at the age of 32 (the same year you have your baby), diligently setting aside 25% of what you earn (and lord, you don't make much) so you can pay your taxes, and then slowly build up a client roster, despite a global pandemic during which you were routinely billing a cool $400 a month because the work dried up and also you were taking care of the aforementioned baby, now a school-aged child, and slowly bringing clients back despite the rumping-frumping pandora, now to a level where you can now afford luxuries like "new shoes," all of which is happening against the backdrop of one of the most runaway-locomotive housing markets in the world, and then think, one day, optimistically, that maybe we should think about buying a house, and arranging a meeting with a really nice guy at the bank who tells you that you and your husband can carry a mortgage that is worth, basically, a shitty shoebox on the busiest street in town, and that your shoebox will bring you a 6% ROI, so it's "a good idea," and also, have you considered having a job with a pay stub? And then walking out into the brilliant June afternoon, blue skies above and self-loathing in your heart, because you suspect—strongly—that you are an utter and total loser who is not keeping pace with the other adults of her generation, people who have things like pensions and RRSPs and deeds to the houses in which they live, while you have a collection of thrift-store shoes and a seven-year-old who knows what a landlord is.

Do I sound defensive? I am. I'm defensive, I'm angry, and I'm tired. I'm tired of worrying about when my landlord is going to want his house back. I'm tired of looking at 1000-square-foot houses that sell for $650,000. I'm tired of worrying about where I'm supposed to come up with money for this, what I'm supposed to trade in on my life—the flexibility I have with my clients and my child? my mental health? the town I live in and love?—so that I can get a good-on-paper job to impress the bank man. I'm tired of being jealous of the people who bought ten years ago, or whose families could give them money. I'm just tired.

Real estate has been a conversation topic for years, even among us supposedly feckless millennials. In 2017-2018, I knew more than a dozen people who were evicted: greedy landlords, take-backs, houses for sale, and renovictions set so many people adrift. I've been evicted, once, through no fault of ours. We were good tenants. We paid our rent on time, kept the backyard clean, hushed our newborn to keep our neighbours happy. And then one day, the woman who owned our house moved to Toronto to be closer to her family, and we didn't have anywhere to live. I know what it is to have a house and then, you know, not. I don't want to feel that again, so it seems wise to work towards owning a home.

But the other side of that coin is that houses are fucking expensive! Much more than they should be, honestly. It's borderline criminal that things like housing and food have been turned into market assets, because at the end of the day, if you live in Canada, you cannot sleep on the beach like Jack Kerouac or a surf girlie. You need a roof over your head. You still need to eat. There's that meme that says "Housing, but 'everyone gets a first plate before anyone gets seconds,'" and I tend to agree with that. I'm not talking about a summer cottage and a place in town: I know people who own three or four or five houses, and complain about their tenants as they sit on five million dollars of assets. More than half of MPs own multiple properties. Like, please, I am ready for the cake?

And I'm not throwing shade at anyone who owns their house—they bought young, or lived with their families while their condos were built, or had an inheritance instead of a beloved family member. I'm just pissed at the system that has let us down. The affordable housing stock in Stratford is dingy and on the edge of town, creating a ghetto-ish micro-neighbourhood that is underserviced and a little scary. The affordable housing stock in Toronto is dingy and dilapidated, with a decades-long wait list to boot. The government has not invested in alternative housing models, like co-operatives, in many years. They've made it cheaper for developers, sure, but that comes at the cost of things like urban intensification (read: walkability, access to services), developer fees that pay for vital municipal services (your library, schools, and transit system), and even diversity of housing stock (there's a reason new builds tend to be megamansions in the small towns and one-bedroom condos in the cities: it's because developers like it that way). The system is broken, and all my liberal meme shitposting isn't going to solve squat.

Writing about it helps, because I know I'm a bit alone (most people own their houses in Stratford), but I'm not totally alone. We have people everywhere who are grappling with this question. There are people who have built their life, which includes being a chronically-ill artist, around their current rent and can't save up for a house. There are the people who moved towns in order to afford a house. There are the folks who are generally very successful on paper, but who want to buy where they live and that market is bananas. We have people who have thousands of dollars in the bank but no income; where do they go? We have people selling two properties to buy one, and crossing their fingers that they can afford a house that will contain both their family and their stuff. We're all facing our own special personalized bullshit, but the container is all this stupid fucking decade-long moment in the market. 

The physical sensation I associate with my real-estate thoughts is suffocation. It feels like my chest is being squeezed, like a firm boot on my sternum, like I can swim towards the surface and never make it. It is prelude to a panic attack; it is also rage, pure and simple. It feels like there's no easy solution: we can't beg or borrow enough money to make this good, and meanwhile, the housing market turns as plasmatic as a microwaved grape. I'm not rooting for a market crash; I'm rooting for benevolent aliens to crash-land on earth and start developing laneway houses, because honestly, that seems more likely. 

I'm ready for my NDP socialist hellscape, please. I want good, high-quality affordable housing. I want a cap on the number of properties a landlord can own, or the amount of rental income a landlord can receive. (Landlords hate this idea, but tra la la, I don't really care.) I want the banks and the government to work together to make housing accessible to people nation-wise, because I don't want to move to Thunder Bay to buy a house. I want developers to build three-bedroom condos. I want a better tenant-to-homeowner pipeline. I want co-op development to be funded. I want subsidies for tenants. I want it all, and while I'm full of good ideas (again, unless you're a landlord, then all these ideas are very bad), I have zero ability to pull it off. The system is rigged. I'm stuck. And all the blue skies and bank meetings don't take the boot off my chest.