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My Hands Are A City!: 2008 in Review

After five weeks of being a full-time dad, I gotta go back to work. I don't mind my job that much, but damn, it's hard to not be at home. On that note, if there's anybody out there who wants to pay me for this nonsense, get in touch.

In the meantime, if you're hungry, check out Vancouver Coastal Health's Food Inspection website. It's more useful than Zagat.

I caught the last five minutes of a particularly gross episode of Kenny vs Spenny last night that featured music from the Hylozoists. Which reminded me that Toronto's FemBots (who have been known to play with the Hylozoists) put out a really excellent album last year called Calling Out. "My Hands Are A City", heard below, is ten kinds of awesome and is a song on my shortlist of tunes I'll probably singalong to with Lillian in a year or so.

mp3: "My Hands Are A City" by FemBots

The new lady in my life

Lillian Simone Matheson, born 6:07 a.m., Sunday, Dec.7/08 at BC Womens' Hospital in Vancouver. Birthweight: 7 lbs, 14 oz

Everyone's healthy, no one's sleeping enough.

mp3: "Sweet Child of Mine" by Luna

Make Mine Midwives!

November seems to be Midwives Awareness Month or something here in BC, and let me tell you, midwives are pretty awesome. I don't know what it's like to go through this with an OB-GYN, and the real moment of truth (birthing) is yet to come, but based on our experiences so far, I have no reservation about recommending midwives to any expecting parent. Well, not any. Obviously, if your pregnancy is complicated and you need a medical practitioner, that's your best choice.
But if your pregnancy is healthy and problem-free? You owe it to yourself and your community to go with a midwife, or more likely, a group of midwives.
Midwifery has been legal and regulated in BC since 1998, and as such it's covered by the BC Medical Services Plan, which reduces the costs and other strains on the provincial healthcare system. Our team at Westside Midwives has been awesome at providing care and information in a very relaxed and calming way. I've been known to be high strung and super-cynical, especially about so-called alternative healthcare*, but the midwives we've dealt with have allayed all my anxieties and not once caused me to roll my eyes. Admittedly, I'm not the patient in this situation, but they've never treated me as though I shouldn't be there or as if I'm not part of the pregnancy (which some of the So-You've-Decided-To-Become-A-Father books have warned against--Question for discussion at another time: Why do 60-to-80% of all fathering books/websites/resources/etc come across as being created by unbalanced men who own more than three firearms?).

mp3: "Rock the Cradle Alone" by Nimrod Workman


* Don't get me started.

Belly Full of Fire

There is perhaps no other time in a man's life that he is so plainly shown what a cakeride it is to have a Y chromasome than when he is expecting a child.

Oh sure, payday is a good time to be a man, so's when you have to use the bathroom in a nightclub, or if you'd like to be a Member of Parliament. But skipping out on the rigours of pregancy, well, it kinda makes me want to belch a sigh of manly relief. We get to be a part of Life's Greatest MiracleTM without gaining 30 lbs, suffering wild mood swings, peeing every twenty minutes or losing our taste for green beans (though I suspect Nicole never really liked my green beans and is just using pregnancy as an excuse to put the kibosh on them without hurting my feelings). We're never kicked in the bladder from within, never have to take a break to catch our breath going up the front stairs. All we have to do is raise our game a little bit, be a little quicker to offer foot rubs, pick up a few more household chores, eat two servings of green beans, whatever. Oh yeah, and not brag or complain about how we're a larger portion of the daily things that make life go by--especially when we're doing a terrible job at keeping up with the larger projects like clearing out the clutter (ie, 25 yrs of comics) from the eventual baby room.

Where you run into trouble, though, as an expectant father, is when you're out in public alone. When you're out with your baby mama, at least, people know. Things are going on in your life and you're afforded certain niceties. You can smile at young children with impunity. You can marvel at the souped up Peg Perego travel system and no one bats an eye. Other couples out and about with infants make eye contact and transmit warnings of fatigue--joyous fatigue, but fatigue, don't kid yourself, man. And a pregnant woman alone...forget about it. Nicole has regaled me with stories of walking home (a whole four blocks) with two bags of groceries. Everyone who passed her by looked on with concern and pity. If I'm walking down the street weighed down by cans of refried beans and split pea soup, I better not show any strain or I'll get shanked passing by the D&D store.

It's a sunny afternoon in early September and I'm sitting in the park, alone, reading Dan Fesperman's first novel and drinking a pretty lousy Americano, because Beans is closed on Monday. Despite the sun, I've got a Sarajevo funk on from spending all day with Lie In The Dark. I'm identifying more with Vlado Petric this time around (he's also the lead in Fesperman's second novel, Small Boat of Great Sorrows), because I'm starting to see myself as a father. Like Vlado, I've been separated from my wife and child. He, because they've fled Sarajevo for an indifferent Berlin; me, because I work the nightshift and miss too much time with my growing family. Okay, so it's not really the the same. Not even close. But, y'know, on a metaphoric level... And there's the whole business of how the parts of my family that are not are still contained within a single unit, like a Vancouver Special.

So there's me, Vlado, and hell, why not Rebus? Sitting alone in the park with our inadequate coffee, spending a rare nice day with a book full of gray. Quietly, shamefully, more at home in our morose solitude, in our weird otherness. In my fifth-dimensional imagination, writing is the same as sleuthing, and so my brow is always furrowed with the waves of mystery.

But now it's October, and I'm not on the nightshift anymore. Now the days are gray and wet, though my nights are clear. It's a tradeoff, but it's worth it. Now I'm home when it matters to be home, when home is home and not a bunch of rooms full of books and comics that I can't figure out what to do with.

And I've got next week off, which means I'll be out of the country when the election results come in. With any luck, I'll be somewhere without access to the election results. I'll be in some cabin by the ocean, reading by the shine of a lighthouse.

But first, I'll be in Seattle, watching Giant Sand (and Chad Van Gaalen) with my wife and fetus. I think I've already mentioned how my life is nearly perfect.

mp3: "Belly Full of Fire" by Giant Sand
mp3: "Well Enough Alone" by Giant Sand

It's Strange How I Admire Old Men

There is perhaps no other time in a man's life when he so scrutinizes the stuff his idols are made of than when he's making a list of potential names for his firstborn child. We've come to an informal agreement that I'm in charge of coming up with male names, and Nicole's handling female names. It might seem a little sexist on the surface, but, y'know, Nicole didn't spend the better part of her pre-adolescence thinking up names she'd rather be called than Emmet*. Well, I hope she didn't. That would be kinda disturbing if she did.

It's become painfully obvious to me that my heroes have always been either shitheels or schmucks--and occasionally a little of both. My favourite writers are generally the worst of the lot, a trainwreck of drunks, creeps, and the odd anti-semite. My favourite fictional characters don't fare much better, from crypto-fascists to workaholic louts. As always, the literary world has let me down.

Jazzbos shine a little brighter in the character department, but their names tend towards being so common their significance would be lost. So scratch Ken, Diz, or Albert. There's a certain amount of cachet in using jazzers' last names as first names, but that's problematic too. Mingus is a great name for a cat, but a kid? Dolphy, meanwhile has two knocks against it. A) I'd really hate for someone to think it's short for Adolph. B) Who the hell wants to go through third grade named Dolphy?

Names is hard. Hard like math. But the Theater Fire is easy. Last we heard from the Fort Worth, TX octet, they were travelling undercover as the Howling Hex on You Can't Beat Tomorrow, both the album and the variety show. They've got a new album, Matter and Light, not coming out until December (lotsa fun stuff happening this December! Can't wait!), but were kind enough to send a teaser, which is absolutely the best thing I've heard all year (sorry, everyone else). "Swashbuckler Blues", heard below, recalls Muswell Hillbillies + I dunno, Calexico x just about everything I like in music right now. Watch this space for more on the
Theatre Fire in coming weeks.

mp3: "Swashbuckler Blues" by The Theater Fire

* I have long ago made peace with my first name and come to not only like, but to revel in it.

EDIT: for about 45 minutes, I accidentally had the wrong song linked above. Just long enough for the Hype Machine to pick up on it. Oops. The above song is now corrected, and if you're looking for a hot track from the upcoming Rah Rah album, check back soon!

Another Reason to Stick To TV

One of the few things I get to have an active role in during this magical time of expectancy is clearing out my playroom--er, home office--so we can turn it into a baby room. Or a nursery. One or the other. I'm not sure which. I don't even know what the difference is. I think a nursery is supposed to have trees. Or tree-themed wallpaper?

Speaking of trees, mainly what I'm doing is getting rid of books. I love books. I love buying them, I love reading them, I love looking at 'em. Some of my fondest childhood memories are spending what felt like entire afternoons scouring the shelves of the Mayfair Branch of the Saskatoon Public Library, or on special occasions the awesome main branch downtown--whose children's section was the stuff of legend, especially Pooh Corner, which I remember as being accessible only by a tunnel too small for adults to fit. Mainly I was interested in the Hardy Boys series, the old blue hardcovers, which had a strange smell about them I would come to associate with books. For my birthday, maybe my 6th or 7th, I got The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook, which was the most mind-bending piece of literature I'd seen since The Empire Strikes Back Book-on-Record.

A few times, my ambition would get the better of my reading level. I once checked out an Albert Einstein biography that was beyond me, but luckily my mom took a break from the Narnia and Madeleine L'Engle books that were the staples of bedtime to read it to me. Whatever I gleaned from having the book read to me is now forever intermingled with dim memories of the Yahoo Serious movie. Einstein's afterlife, however, I'm much more clear on.

Anyway, the baby room. My books. I've got too many. I need to get rid of some. Right. Because supposedly a baby and a mountain of books can't co-exist. So this afternoon I filled my biggest backpack full of books and trudged over to my favourite used book store on Main Street. It's the place I would go to find the books I have to get rid of if I hadn't already read them. It's curious the way the dynamic changes when the clerk realizes you're in there to get rid of books rather than buy them. When I'm buying books there, there's plenty of chat and small talk, what we in the business like to call relationship-building. When I'm trying to lighten my literary load, on the other hand, it's polite but terse. No small talk. At all.

So the clerk is going through my pile of books. He examines the books and divides them into two piles. With every new volume he rifles through, I have to resist a growing urge to snatch the books back and run down the street screaming, "NEVER! You'll never get my books! They're mine! All mine!"

But really, rationally, what do I need with my old copy of Kerouac's Big Sur? Am I going to read it again? Not a chance. I'd sooner reread Desolation Angels or Dr. Sax anyday. Which is why I'm keeping them. Just in case. I have an unreasonable fantasy that I'm going to reread all my favourite books--not when I'm old, but, like, this weekend. Yeah, fat chance. I get it. So let them take my books. Let someone else carry that weight.

The clerk takes a second look at my run of early 00s Best American Crime Writing anthologies, and suddenly I decide that those are the most indispensible books I've ever owned. Now they're going to be gone forever! I can feel a panic attack coming. The clerk shifts them over to the pile closest to me. "These ones," he says, pointing at that pile of books, "thanks, but no thanks." A wave of relief. Although I'm shocked and a little saddened he didn't want my copy of The Last Honest Man.

The clerk makes me a very reasonable offer on store credit for a little over half the books I lugged in, and I take it. I should take cash, but you get less, and who am I kidding, I'm going to buy more books. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but Friday. Friday, I'm definitely going to buy more books. I've already eyed-up a copy of the recent Houdini biography on the shelf at the front of the store. Sorry, Nicole.

mp3: "Television" by Robyn Hitchcock
mp3: "Television Man" by Man...Or Astro-man?

See Jesse Eat. Eat, Jesse, Eat.

If this video makes you uncomfortable, imagine being related to the guy.

(buy the album here)

We're both victims of a weird experiment!

If I'm not thinking about Batman (which is rare), I'm thinking about the future. And you can't think about the future without thinking about the past.


I spoke on the phone with one of my oldest friends, JW, a couple of weeks ago. He was blowing through town on his way from Japan to Saskatoon, where another old friend was getting married. JW is set to be back in Vancouver any day now, and hopefully I'll get to meet his family. His new family. Not the people he grew up with, those familiar faces in memories of my adolescence, but the people he'll grow old with. Ol' JW has a wife and daughter. PH tied the knot about a week ago. WS just got engaged. RY's got a little tiny bundle of joy. Even newer friends like M has an infant. MO-L's expecting this fall. And, lord knows, I'm sure most of the people I haven't kept in touch with over the years have fashioned their own human beings and partnered up.

As weird as it is to think of the kids I was young and foolish with becoming responsible adults, taking out mortgages and raising young 'uns, I'm less freaked out by my own impending fatherhood. Which is not to say I'm not completely freaked out about it at moments, like when I read the "worst-case scenario" sections of books like What To Expect When You're Expecting, or Girlfriend's Guide to Being Preggers, or when I read about freak accidents in the paper, or when I dwell on the state of the planet or how much post-secondary education will cost by 2026. Mostly, though, I'm elated. This crazy little baby is going to have a great mother who is beautiful, smart, funny and sensible. It's going to have a dad who will make embarrassing jokes and try too hard to "hip with the kids". It's going to be born having already attended concerts by the Neins Circa, The Thing with Ken Vandermark and Jonathan Richman and whatever else I can convince My Baby Momma to come out to (though I think Nicole's pretty much had enough of crowded halls, uncomfortable seats, and wack hipsters for this trimester). It's going to be adored by an overwhelming extended family who will spoil it despite its parents concerns.

It's kinda wrong and hideous to keep my eventual baby it, but I don't wanna know what it's gender is until I meet it. The English language needs better words. Or maybe we just need to figure a unisex name (hey, shouldn't Jayden/Jaden count as ONE name??? Also, when did Quinn become a girl's name?) for this little creature. But that's a whole 'nother messy diaper.

mp3: "Old Friends" by Chuck Prophet
mp3: "When We Refuse to Suffer" by Jonathan Richman