Finding The Flavour In Crackers

I'm currently contemplating an attempt to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, and that has me grappling with the truth that not everybody has delusions of grandeur. I haven't got theatre kid friends, so I'm left feeling rather misunderstood. At times I wonder if my parents raised me with the illusion that I can achieve anything but are now surprised that I actually believe it.

Anyway, I'm an artist who paints on Dollarama canvases. Quite literally. And my current mental project is to try and make a character out of Caledon, Ontario.

For a while now I've pondered making some sort of adaptation of the creepypasta 1999, which is about the only thing Caledon is known for, but that's a piece of history I don't think I'm equipped to tackle yet. If I want the setting to be a character, I have to build it. If Hollywood can set a hundred movies in Manhattan, I can set four in Caledon.

I'm convinced every Arcade Fire song is written about Caledon. They sing about the soul sucking dryness of suburbia depressingly well. If you live in a suburb without a car you may as well be in the middle of the Pacific without a paddle. Yeah, there's beauty if you look real hard, but there's also a lot of boys in camo pants and bass pro hats. That more than anything is why I might just move to Britain, even the remote places aren't that remote.

With small places, It's easy to pick out individual elements as opposed to vibes and customs, so I started compiling a mental list: the Cheltenham badlands. Traffic pylons. Italians. But you need to be careful. If all you have are copy-and-paste elements, you'll get a movie with all the local charm of Dudley Do-Right. I feel like Dogma does a good job of making a really white place look unique(...?). I dunno. There's small turns of phrase we grew up that are kinda unique, like "blacktop recess". Maybe that's grasping at straws.

My latest nebulous movie concept is Freak in a Beak, a humorous jab at folk horror. The idea hit me while watching The Passion of Darkly Noon. I feel like the constant demonization of the mentally ill in horror movies is something that shouldn't avoid scrutiny the way it does. I'm not great at comedy but damnit, I'll try. If 1994's Threesome is a comedy I feel like there's still hope for me.

I Am The Dwindled Son

This is a poem from an eclectic poetry book I had growing up, Poems of a Snow-Eyed country. All the poems were by Canadian poets, divided in chapters by geographical region. It has a pleasantly ramshackle vibe that I could never find in other poetry compilations. The book itself was a reject from an Etobicoke library, and at this point is filled with cryptic scribblings that I wrote in there in middle school.

Anyway, a lot of my favourite poems are in this book. One day I had the urge to read I Am The Dwindled Son, so I tried looking it up online. I'm used to finding Rabbie Burns poems with a quick Google search. But Dwindled Son wasn't online. At least, not yet. Besides the work of some of the more well-known poets like Leonard Cohen, I bet a lot of the poems in that book aren't online.

Ultimately the preservation of a lot of niche things comes down to individuals. Trash archivists, as I call them; not because what we archive is trash, but rather because the hoity-toities think that high culture is the only thing worth preserving. High culture will not survive the apocalypse. Besides maybe clowns. Street clowns are the true vanguard of anarchism, I will die on this hill.

Without further rambling, said poem:




I Am the Dwindled Son
by Alfred Desrochers

I am the dwindled son of a race of supermen,
The violent, strong, adventurous; from this strain
I take the northland homesickness which comes
With the grey days that autumn brings again.

All the fierce past of those coureurs de bois-
Hunters and trappers, raftsmen, lumberjacks,
Merchant-adventurers, labourers on hire-
Bids me to seek the North for half the year.

And I dream of going there as my fathers did:
I hear within me great white spaces crying
In the wastes they roamed, haloed by hurricanes:
And, as they did, I hate a master's chains.

When the tempest of disasters beat upon them,
They cursed the valley and they cursed the plain;
They cursed the wolves which robbed them of their wool:
Their maledictions dulled their pain.

But when the memory of a distant wife
Brusquely dispelled the scenes that faced these men,
They brushed their eyelids with the back of their sleeve
And their mouths chanted A la claire fontaine.

So well repeated to the echoing forests
This simple lay (where the wood-warbler tunes
On the highest branches his own plaintive song),
It mingles with my own most secret thoughts:

If I bend my back beneath invisible burdens
In the hubbub of bitter leavetakings,
And if, when thwarted or constrained, I feel
That urge to strike which clenched their massive fists;

If from these men, who never knew despair
And died even while they dreamed of conquering nature,
I take this sickly instinct for adventure
Beneath whose spell I sometimes fall, at night-

In this degenerate age of ours, I am like
The beech whose living sap was never drawn,
And I am leafed around by dead desires,
Dreaming of going forth as my fathers did.

But the faint words emitted by my voice
Remain: a rosebush, branches and a spring,
An oak, a warbler in a sheen of leaves;
And, as it did in my forefather's day,
In the mouth of him who was coureur de bois,

My joy or sorrow sings the landscape still.