The Oral Tradition

When I was little, I used to think people shut off like robots after I left their company. Powering down in 5... 4... 3... 2... Power down. They existed only to fill in the landscape I perceived as Life. Sort of like they'd mentioned in Wim Wender's Wings of Desire.

Hm. [Film] extras. Extra... people.

My high school's student body was comprised of a cast not unlike those found in The Breakfast Club or near the zip code 90210. Leads aside, the rest were mere imaginings.

Without my imagination giving them animation I surmised they went home to pretend houses, shut a door sequence to their virtual bedrooms and froze in a semi-erect locked position. Empty eyes glazed over, devoid of sparkle.

I've never denied the existence of my hyper-developed ego.

I was a lousy, lower lettered student in high school. This fact used to really bother me. During lunch hours I would mingle from clique to circle jerk chatting the spectrum from popular to leprotic. One day I was engaged in a typical banal question/answer sequence which ended me up with a giant question mark over my head and an exclamation point next to my ear.

The Comrade: What did you get on yesterday's test?
Dull Yet Peppy Robot Girl: Oh, 87%, I think.

How does a robot girl get marks in History I couldn't ever achieve?

I learned that she was of the small percentile that actually retained information through rote memorisation. But not for long.

Dull Yet Peppy Robot: When I study, I can remember stuff for 2 days and then it's gone.

At home, I would wrestle with assigned homework for only so long before looking for any distraction. Sneaking into an elder sibling's bedroom, I spied something of interest sandwiched in the pile of university textbooks. The Introduction to Psychology. Human behaviour. Now that was interesting. Consider it nicked.

16 Year Old Comrade (with Flock of Seagulls hair): Fascinating.
Brother Vince: So you like psychology? Well, you're going to have to do better in high school before you get to that.

Not only would I have to finish high school, I had to do it with flying colours. Then I'd have to apply to different universities, potentially leaving my cherished city, to spend 4 years studying. Something I wasn't terribly good at. The earliest I could begin practicing would be 10 years in the future.

For those proficient in Pig Latin:
Ew-Scray
At-They

Aside from playing my double bass and occasionally writing prose in creative writing class (taught by a poor, wretched creature who left her tenure due to a nervous breakdown), high school offered no scintillating fodder I desperately wanted to explore. There was no raison d'être. There was only raison de sauter. So, instead, I honed my obnoxious social skills and secretly read what I wanted.

One evening, after demonstrating the assembly of snowmen configured marshmallows, I tucked some young clients into bed. I needed to get back to this new discovery. While chain-smoking cigarettes at the breakfast nook of my weekly babysitting job (God, I loved the 80's), I poured over the covetous textbook I'd placed in my school bag before departing from home. Just in case I was lambasted for reading material prematurely, I used a dummy book as a dust cover. The Joy of Sex.

Becoming a therapist was one small fantasy in the sea of possible career interests I'd uttered throughout my youth: firegirl, big rig driver, cop, veterinarian, decorator.

One-Time Fired Hairdresser (with no variance, always giving me the same haircut): Mary? It takes a fairy to make things pretty!

Aside from the decorator, they were typical Sesame Street occupations.

A ______ is a person in your neighbourhood, in your neighbourhood, in your naaayyboorhood, yeah, a...

Though Ernie and Bert were assumed to be gay, they weren't the campy, I'm Every Woman type. Their bedroom was utilitarian, pragmatic. The only splash of colour was on their uniquely pigmented faces.

It's a small world after all.
A cabdriver as a father.
It's a small world after all.
A seamstress as a mother.
It's a small world after all.
Sesame Street on television.
It's a small, small world.

After being handed my grade 12 diploma, with an avuncular hug and a kiss by a vice principal I visited weekly for bad behaviour, I decided to go to work instead of finishing grade 13.

During my first shift as a server I'd spilled 2 vodka cranberries on a white linen jacket and one piping hot French onion soup on one man's back. Both tables left me a 20-30% gratuity. Mortification pay. When it comes down to it, there's no sorrier person than I. At the end of my first shift, I'd made $80 in cash.

18 years old.
I was fucking loaded!
Drinks for everyone!
Bring out the dancing girls!

Most anyone who's worked as a waiter in a busy restaurant has usually had The Waiter's Nightmare.

This is a horrific mental reenactment of an evening when a server could barely keep up with her duties. Hundreds of patrons simultaneously yell, snap their fingers and basically make the poor creature feel like she did while immersed in the public school system. No end in sight.

I don't get waiter nightmares. I'm 37 years old and I still get drenched in cold sweat night terrors about high school.

Typically:
A missed assignment that was worth 90% of my grade.
A class I've missed for the entire semester. The administration has decided to tell on me.
An essay, having no idea what the topic was, due yesterday.
If not handed in today, a resulting failure was imminent.

Why do I still get these?
Could this possibly be designed?

The people I most enjoy engaging in conversation with are nerdy, brainy folk who tend to flip and sautée ideas and concepts into a colourful melange full of conflict and emotional catharsis. Add a liberal sprinkling of word play. I like this realm because this is where I tend to do my best learning. The topics are 80% interesting to me. Luckily, at the helm of this nerdy brain factory resides Ack, the ex-husband/best friend. I say luckily because he can always tell when I'm completely disinterested in a particular subject, halting the subject in its tracks because he's very sensitive to any guest's conversational needs. Usual tip off: a rolling of the eyes, heading off to the horizon. Horizon usually smack at the tequila bottle found center square in the sunken bar at Stratengers, the fine, fine bar that allows fumez bien in a city hell bent on smoking crackdown. Damned flatfoots!

It took people like Ack to make me realise that true learning, the full digestion of ideas reaped from critical thinking, involves discussion (back and forth action). It does not happen through rote memorisation of text. It does not happen during orations. No thought is involved. It happens by doing, by living or through thoughtful discourse between 2 people.

Tell me a story rich in narrative and it sticks.
The Oral Tradition.

I think teaching a subject like high school History is kind of bullshit because you'll never truly begin to understand the impact of what happened until you look into the eyes of the survivors. For the vast majority of xenophobic neighbours to the south, I implore you to get on a plane and leave the continent. They were there. Those are the people I would like to talk to. Those are the people who should be writing this stuff of history. Memory and knowledge is permanently etched into their muscles. My educators failed to mention that history is written by the victors. And subsequently it's full of holes, lies and blood.

Why didn't you tell me that WWI was about steel? Given corporate mentality, that would have been more plausible than what was claimed; seeking retribution for the offing of an Archbishop.

Michael, a regular at my engagement at the Cheer's Equivalent bar, urged me to check out the Catherine the Great exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The Comrade: I can't look at that stuff.
Regular Michael: Why not? It's amazing. That golden coach alone.

To conquer a nation, they've had to conquer the people. Which means bursting into their towns, raping their women and/or killing their children and torching their homes. Not first without specially selecting the victims' finest possessions to take back to their master.

There's a good boy.

The Comrade: Pirate or empress, it's still booty. There was a lot of bloodshed for all that bling.

It took me over 35 years to truly understand that the school system is designed to create dull, unthinking consumers who are placid; who placate their "need to shut off" by watching television; who retain information for 2 days, then expel it forevermore along with the nutrition-free cafeteria food they ate the day prior. There is an essay worth reading by a 30 year US public school veteran educator by the name of John Taylor Gatto. Here he expresses not only how the public school system fails people, but keeps them down, keeps them mindless. Keeps them servile. They don't want us to be great. That would be dangerous.

What if the school system is designed to create little thoughtless creatures whose best hope is to be a middle manager? It becomes their dream. Or is it their dream? Many of the young Americans I've met have felt lucky to have a cubicle farm job. Could these feelings have been supplanted? And what of the others? They marginalised those who didn't get with the programme, sending them into a world of self-doubt, isolation. A place where gimps reside.

After high school I worked in restaurants, mostly as a bartender, for 10 years. It was at one of my favourite places of work where I met Ack. He was a garbage collector at the time. Occasionally he'd bring me castoff treasures. He'd finished his fine art degree at a local university, but he hadn't found work in his field yet. Through serendipity and my gift of bringing people together in collaborative work scenarios, Ack found work in a multimedia company not because he was necessarily talented. He happened have a fascination for a unique historical figure. Nikola Tesla. Disclaimer: I have big ears while working.

The Comrade: Did you say 'Tesla'?
Multimedia CEO: Yeah, we've been working on a pet project on this lesser known inventor. Edison is a household name, but Tesla was shoved under the carpet even though he gave us more.
The Comrade: I know.
Multimedia CEO: You do?
The Comrade: I have someone you should meet.

Ack still remembers this bunch of renegade nerds and geeks as some of his greatest educators, enabling exponential learning.

I was having burgers and Wellington's Best Bitter beer with the love of my life, Fatty, yesterday. We were talking about jazz musicians.

Fatty: Do you know who this is?
The Comrade: No.
Fatty: It's Miles Davis. This was the last recording he did. It was a collaboration with some hip hop guys. He didn't get to hear the master cut because he'd died before it was completed.
The Comrade: Oh, that's too bad.

Though I thought it wasn't his greatest work.

Fatty: When he was a kid, he was dirt poor. He'd won a trumpet in a church raffle. He wouldn't have been able to afford one otherwise.
The Comrade: He never played before he got that first one?
Fatty: Nope.

Wow.

That made me think about the divination of vocation.

What if we are all led along a path towards a direction we'd been designed for all along? Will or no will. Effort, or none.
What if, during those times when I thought I wasn't really doing anything, I was heading in the direction I was intended for anyway?

I listen to people wherever I go. I can't help it. I think human behaviour is the most breathtaking thing in the world. Much to my mother's chagrin, I've never really took heed to her warnings of Don't talk to strangers. I kind of have to go against it anyway, given the business I'm in. Subsequently, I learned things on my own by checking them out myself.

May I have the magnifying glass, please?

Discoveries:
Cheating on someone is yucky, for everyone involved.
Black folk are not scary; they're just the most unabashedly expressive people I've encountered. Maybe that's scary to robots.
Trust your gut. It's the only real thing you've got.

I think because I've been unafraid to love and unafraid to say 'yes' to most everything when it comes to adventures in people, there's a lot of knowledge my body's retained from doing, not by learning through rote memorisation. Through my body's knowledge, wisdom is gleaned. As I am a theoretical Communist, I like to share everything I have. My findings have shown time and time again that universally we are no different from each other.

I know what it feels like to lose something valuable.
I know what it feels like to be ultimately betrayed.
I know what it feels like to be abandoned.
I know what it feels like to be the happiest person in the world.
And it's because of these that I understand people.

And maybe because of these, people tell me the craziest things.

Like...
How they jerked off thinking about the biggest set of bajoongas they'd ever seen and happen to work with. And how they admitted, after some prodding, to not having washed their hands before heading out to have breakfast with me. Apparently t-shirts are very absorbent.
How a man adopted his niece a day after she was born because his sister was unfit to care for her.
How they (God, so many) are on lithium because of manic depression or bipolar disorder.
How someone they loved just died and they were really sorry they hadn't introduced them to me.
How they hadn't had sex for over 7 years.
How they love each other, but it failed because they have no time for each other.
How their boyfriend is really, really great, but equally as boring.
How their girlfriend only sleeps on the couch. Alone.
How they had contracted herpes from "that slag at the end of the bar".
How a man in his 40's is having sex with a 70 year old woman who keeps him in fine clothes and a lovely manor.
How they did it because they were lonely.

I think about Miles and his trumpet.

What if the specific gifts we need as tools are bestowed to us in divine ways? Something happens. Something is given to us that changes our world. We might not recognise it at the time of reception, but years down the road, if we're lucky, we might. I'm thinking now that what we were meant to be... we will become, if we're not already. Just in a way we hadn't imagined.

What if it's divined?

In regards to my past vocational aspirations:
Fire Fighting: I put fires out all the time. Also, I had a fire truck pull up directly outside of work last week. The Fire Chief, a regular at the Cheer's Equivalent, was flanked by 2 other male fire fighters. Because I will never mention any of the myriad women he's brought in (we're talking James Bond proportions) to any new potential prey, he's promised me fireman pants. I love the barter system. I also love firemen pants. It's the thing I suspect makes fire fighters hot.
Policing: Every single time I step outside my home, I serve and protect.
Veterinary Medicine: I am now administering sub-cutaneous fluids to Chicken, my righteous 16 year old feline partner.
Big Rig Driver: Well, not quite, but a Hummer's pretty big, though kind of a ghastly pig on gas.
Decorator: Every single palace, treetop turret or cardboard box I've ever lived in.

Every time I go into work, I counsel. Or I just listen. Hold the occasional hand. Dispense the occasional hug. About a month ago someone wrote an article in a local free weekly about my therapy sessions masqueraded as serving at the Cheer's Equivalent. I won't link it, but it was a wower. To a friend of the restaurant reviewer, I had prescribed a hit of MDMA to her and her wonderful, if not boring boyfriend.

Ack was telling me that MDMA was prescribed by couples therapists initially as a marital aid. The success rate was so astounding they stopped prescribing it. Why? A therapist can't get rich by solving people's problems. I prescribe it. Just once. As pure as you can find it. No dancing. No loud music. Just 2 people in a cozy environment who love each other, but for some reason can't understand each other right now. My prescription would not be called Ecstasy. It would be renamed Empathy.

I don't make $100/hr. And that's okay. I'm fed really well by both the kitchen and everyone I interact with. In comparing couch with bar, I think truth comes out much easier with a cocktail. And they come back weekly to fill their prescriptions for pints or martinis. I will tell them a story about my life and in turn they tell me astounding bits of theirs.

In the Oral Tradition our muscles get wiser and more loved.