This was stupid, don’t ever do this

Part of the reason I took my current contract was simply to see if I could balance it — if, after a few years of rebuilding my creative practice from the ground up, the seawall could withstand a return to the kind of pitched chaos that is an arts organization in summer.

Short answer: no. No it could not. Not even a little bit.

It is dismaying, I guess, how quickly the sand castle came down when that first wave breached the breakwater. Part of it, I think, might just be because the thing I’m writing right now doesn’t really feel like something I should be writing — too clever by half, stuck in a genre for which I have little affection. I could probably find a way to turn it around, but my springtime ambitions of doing something relatively high-concept, banging out 100 easy-to-diagram pages, have proven folly.

Working an intense, all-in, job commitment pretty much washes away any of that analysis anyway: time is just not with me on this thing, and maintaining any kind of longform creative thought — even only 15 minutes a day, if those days are sustained in a sequence of five or more — is just too much for me right now. I’m going to have to accept defeat until Thanksgiving, and that’s fine. Part of experimenting is accepting that the experiment can fail. We learn either way.

Meantime, I’ve barely been able to keep up with my other commitments, such as this blog, plus the review I’ve owed since August 4, plus finding any ten minutes to compose some thoughts in my journal. Privileged problems! No complaints! Maybe when I get my mind back in a couple months, the sand castle I’ll build will be epic.

Oh also

I was hanging out with my siblings and we got the bizarre idea to do EdgeWalk, and I… could not… do that. I mean I physically went and did it. But when I got out there, dressed up as a space man, I just did not want to participate. Nice view; happy with the view. Happy to walk around the lip of the CN Tower. Hanging off the side??? No thank you. That’s not a question I need answered.

I had this once before, when I rappelled down the side of City Hall, dressed as Thor. It’s amazing to confront one of those moments where your body just says: no, you may not. It’s a good reminder how little our minds matter in the real world. Up on the EdgeWalk, I was absolutely certain that the thick black ropes holding my siblings in place over a 150-storey freefall were not going to break. Nonetheless: I could not stop feeling their deaths in my gut. It was incredible.

Anyway: the nicest possible thing about turning fifty is having no testosterone left with which to falsely convince myself I have anything to prove, to myself or anyone else.

New by me

I looked at Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, newly upgraded by the Criterion Collection, for Screen Anarchy. A great movie I never want to watch, or even think about, again.

I also popped in on the 3 3/4″ Star Wars world once again, this time with a Young Jedi Adventures (or: as 5-year-old Rhea calls them: “Little Jetisse”) droid straight from Disney Parks:

Further recommendations

I could not be happier that North of North isn’t just coming back, it’s coming back soon. Not that a sitcom should take more than a year between seasons, just, we live in such disheartening times. If you haven’t been watching, dial up CBC Gem and get started on season 1. I’ll see you on September 8.

When the Green Lantern movie came out in 2011, I was still holding out a shard of hope that it would be good, so I trucked down to Mt. Scotia to take in an early-evening, first-night screening. When the film ended and the credits rolled, a guy in a Green Lantern t-shirt sitting one row ahead of me put his arms up in the air and tried to psyche up the crowd by yelling, rapturously, “finally, the Green Lantern movie we’ve been waiting forrrrrrr!”

The crowd filed out quietly behind him, and he put his arms down.

Anyway I was thinking about that guy on the weekend. The good news: the first episode of Lanterns is bloody terrific. And it’s a master class in dialogue writing: every single line is plot, character, or a subtle little lore-drop. Several of them are all three. Aaron Pierre, unsurprisingly, is perfect.