Brakes on fire

I came rocketing back into Toronto at the end of last week with my brakes on fire. The devil had got into the A.I. of the A.B.S., causing them to seize and then un-seize, and clench and then un-clench. In a rhythm. Eventually there was nothing left of them, and twin fire trails were shooting out of the wheel-wells of the car. I could not slow down, though (fortunately) I also had the presence of mind not to speed up. I came round that last bend on the QEW and saw the Gardiner closing down on me like a mouth. Toronto, known for its traffic, was easy that day, and I managed to coast off the Gardiner onto Lakeshore, catching all of the green lights the whole way across town, my foot nowhere near the gas, till I finally bumped to a stop in front of the Jones branch of the Toronto Public Library. That branch is not too far from my home. I was safe.

The first thing one notices upon returning to Toronto is the smell, the ketamine Elon musk of the place; it comes off especially strong now in springtime, as all our sins are exposed to heat. We shut down the public washrooms during the pandemic and then razed them to the ground, and all of the private (corporate-owned) washrooms now admit “customers only” (read: no homeless), and Toronto has become the open-air toilet it’s somewhat always been. The construction is as bad as it’s ever been — one cannot move fourteen consecutive metres in any given direction on any given downtown street, by foot or by car — likely because our minders are doing their best to get through the Rob Ford Memorial Backlog before FIFA ’26. Here’s an open suggestion from a citizen: maybe think about whether all those FIFA visitors are going to think particularly well upon a city with no public toilet facilities but which smells openly and honestly of piss.

While I was away last week I got a pedicure. Zenned out into the 26th century, I was so bone-jangled by that chair. Got my toesies painted an almost insectoid shade of emerald green; I love it. I think it’s the colour I used to think (hope?) my soul was. I’m going to by a dozen bottles of the shit. While I was away I also bore down pretty hard on the second draft of my Safecrackers script, and I think that sucker is d.o.n.e. It sucks about as much as second drafts always suck, but also, this is about as much as I can do with it without at least a little time away from it, so it’s off to the printers for sizing, and I’m back on the fury road for Pride month, with the aim to stroke a couple more milestones and objectives off the list before the midyear review. May the Force be with me!

Get thee to a library

I finally got my library copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message, which — especially at this exact moment in time — was clarifying. It was also a dauntingly superb piece of writing on its own terms, and is one (of several) recent library books that I’m just gonna have to go buy myself at some point in the future so that I can dog-ear and underline it, the next time I go through. Except, I don’t really do things like that. Except, maybe I should?

I’m also halfway through Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow, and it’s absolutely savage. It’s an incredible piece of writing. That they wrote something so immense, so political, so searingly (and justifiably) angry, and it’s a YA novel… I am quaking in my boots. If anyone wants to track down the Illumicrate special editions of Iron Widow and its sequel, buy them for me, and then mail them to me, please don’t even finish reading this newsletter.

Last of the time lords

Spoilers for the second season of the third volume of Doctor Who.

About twenty years ago on this blog (before it was a newsletter), I watched the first season of the second volume of Doctor Who, the one with Christopher Eccleston, and when Nine regenerated into Ten at the end of exactly one season of television, I uttered the angriest W T F in the history of the internet. There's a Doctor Who apologist who follows me around my online spaces like a ravening flea, and they immediately jumped into the comments of tederick.com to tell me this was all Totally Normal And Part Of The Fun Actually. It was the wrong response: decades of history of the television program whatever, but trying something new, and starting to get into its vibe, and then being thrown out the TARDIS door to start all over, definitely did not feel like Part Of The Fun.

You can see where this is going. I've long since become used to the regeneration rhythm (although, notoriously, I skipped David Tennant's entire tenure as the Time Lord, out of spite), but even so, I slammed into Ncuti Gatwa's surprise exit from the TARDIS on Sunday like I was running headlong into a brick wall. There wasn't enough time, in manners both macro and micro; not enough time in a two-episode finale to hang the Doctor's sacrifice on the life of a baby we've barely met; not enough time to think that Mommying poor Belinda (Varada Sethu) was Part Of The Fun Actually; not enough time, generally, in this cursed streaming hellscape where we only got two 8-episode seasons with Gatwa in the first place, making his tenure as the Fifteenth Doctor technically longer than Eccleston's as the Ninth, but only by a few hours.

I am not a Doctor Who zealot. I don't go down rabbit-holes of which showrunner was better than which (although Jodie Whitaker's incandescent return as Thirteen in the finale, only a couple of minutes long, was a bracing reminder that she was brilliant, and the writing during her tenure was not). I don't have a ranked list of companion pairings, with annotations (partly because honestly, who could beat Clara/Twelve?). I enjoy watching Doctor Who, generally, whenever I watch Doctor Who. But this was the first time since 2005 that I felt like my investment in this series had been sloppily, even cruelly, handled.

I loved things — a lot of things, actually — about that finale. On the whole I grade it a positive, even if it came with a surprisingly churning feeling in my stomach when I realized yes, they were really going there. (An outcome that was partially spoiled by inexcusable social media work by the BBC Doctor Who team, the day before I watched the episode.) The Fifteenth Doctor, like Thirteen before him, was fucking incandescent. If the creative brief for these seasons was to bring joy back to Doctor Who, Gatwa did so, every time he did anything. But Fifteen's exit also forced me to note, to an even greater degree than usual, the ways in which watching Doctor Who all these years is starting to feel like grappling with the process of time and aging itself: tumbling ever faster, slipping even more frustratingly between the fingers, and gone far too soon.

Doppelgängland

• Look, you don’t need me to point you to anything to read about how bad everything is, but this one about the American erasure of knowledge does contain the line “deals with the president aren’t worth the sweat from the handshake,” in addition to its many other virtues. (Atlantic gift link, except I stole the link from somebody else, so does that mean I’m re-gifting? I don’t know how the internet works)
• I also stole a gift link for the best possible op-ed about the total moral failure of Elon Musk, who recently caused the deaths of around 300,000 children. I am the Robin Hood of gift links (NYT)
• This premise of “blowhard syndrome” is a decade old but I strongly recommend we make it mainstream! (That’s What Xu Said)
• Can’t say I remember openin’ no SM-33 from Skeleton Crew (Giant Green Space Hand)
• This week’s “just trust me.” It’s a tough one, though, so I guess we’re going to find out which of you actually trust me. Probably the whole thing above about me driving a flaming car has problematized the experiment (The New Yorker)