A Bit More Detail

Low-resolution as it is, I think that this photo's flaws does a great job, if inadvertently, of exposing who I was at that time (September 2002) and in the years before. (I took this photo from my archived personal website, here.

I had only come out to myself in February of that year. That only came out at the end of a long process of very careful development that I did not recognize at the time. Me at 20 was 60 pounds heavier than me as of this picture (30 pounds heavier than I am now). I was hiding, from myself, from others within my carapace of flesh, to an extent that I was literally not capable of understanding.

There are certainly things that I wish I had done better; hindsight exists. Still: That me at 20 did as good a job as he could of surviving, and deserves credit for that. Me at 40 would not have existed without his efforts. I'm grateful for how I survived me at 20; I'm grateful to have been able to become me at 40.

One of the many things that has been bothering me about the COVID-19 crisis is the way that the city of Toronto around me has been shutting down. Work and those strictures have gone, of course, but so have almost all of the other events of life. Stores are shut down; neighbourhoods are almost always barren of people; the sorts of events that I normally partake in have been sensibly cancelled. (Jane's Walk and TCAF are among the events that have been closed down, and I may never get a chance to see the Diane Arbus show at the AGO or the Winnie the Pooh exhibit at the ROM. I live in hope for the second category, and look forward to next year for the first.)

The great machineries of life of Toronto, human and mechanical, are grinding down. When will they start up again? What will be the background against which this revival will happen? What loss and suffering will there be in the background of this? More importantly, from my particular perspective, what loss and suffering will there be among the people I know, here in Toronto and around the world? I have some fears for myself, but more fears for others both known and unknown. (I am not fond of living in a situation where fatalities from a pandemic really can amount to low single-digit percentages of the global, and local, population.)

I cannot help but feel a sort of anticipatory grief at seeing my dear cosmopolis of Toronto shutting down. It is a cause of grief in itself, and it is a symbol of worse yet to come. I can also extrapolate easily enough from the specific case of Toronto to all the other great machines out there in the world, places I've lived in and places I've only visited and places I have yet to visit and the many many places I will never see. The pictures I saw earlier this week from Venice, that great first prototype of the cosmopolis, felt so wrong. One March, you have a living city; one March, you have a city clamped down on account of mass death. There are things Toronto can pick up from Venice, but I would prefer this not be one. But this isn't really under anyone's control, is it?

I am--I believe--keeping things in perspective. There will still be a world after this crisis is done, whenever it is done, one that will be recognizable. I just find it distressing that a proper perspective is not all that comforting. How, exactly, will things be skewed? This uncertainty is something that I do not like. Ending my 12-month Metropass, on account of the certainty that I will not be travelling much at all in April, at least, feels significant. How much more will my lived world shrink?

These past few days, I have been thinking of the classic song "Sous le ciel de Paris", a hymn of love to that metropolis written and performed just a few years after Paris risked destruction in the Second World War. Has a similar song been written for Toronto?

Watch on YouTube

Shakespeare passed, peacefully and quickly, at 7:20 pm at the Bloorcourt Veterinary Clinic.

I was the better for him, and I think he was the better for me. I began to miss him the moment he passed, and the world around me somehow no longer seems to fit the way it should.

Still: Shakespeare had a good death, at the end of a good day spent mostly at home in comfort with people who loved and cared for him, and he had a better life. I would like to think I was good for him, and I know he was good for me; our voyage together from September 2008 on is one I would repeat.

(One major exception to this: I would make sure this time to expose him to Caitians, including M'Ress, at an earlier date. Positive role models matter.)

I grieve him, but I celebrate his life.

I am very deeply moved by the way that you have responded, celebrating with me his life in the past and supporting me and him in this hard time. The staff at the Clinic helped make this terrible thing bearable. I would also like to thank particularly Jim for supporting me at the Clinic, and Paul for managing today's costs, across the Atlantic even. There are so many others who helped, in private chat and comments, that I fear the SHIFT-2 combination on my laptop keyboard would give out. I am grateful to you all.

I will be thinking of a way to appropriately commemorate his life. More info will come later.

Even after this sad day, I consider myself lucky. Thank you all.



I was lucky.

I owe thanks to the woman who, when I visited the John Fluevog shoe shop at 686 Queen Street West, took three photos of me posing in the in-store trompe l'oeil Vogvault. A room tilted 90 degrees to the side can be uncomfortable, I'd think.

Yesterday morning, I had a bit of fun. While I was shaving, I decided to play with a mustache for a bit. I've almost always fluctuated directly between having a full beard and having no facial hair at all. On a couple of times, I've played with a goatee. But a mustache is something I've never done, at least partly because of the intense reactions it has gotten from others. I wondered: What would happen if I did that now? So, I took a selfie of myself with a mustache, went to shave it off, and then took a selfie of me without.



I posted the two photos, with and without, on Instagram. I'd also taken care to crosspost them to Facebook, with and without. The photos also made it to Flickr, too, with and without. (They made it to Twitter and Tumblr, too.)

The reactions I got were very interesting. The reactions, as I noted, were intense; I got not a few GIF responses. On Facebook, a notable majority of people seemed to be hostile to the mustache, even intensely so. On Instagram, as one friend pointed out, the reactions went the other way; my mustache photo got nearly twice as many likes as my non-mustache photo, and the comments were accordingly more enthusiastic.

What was going on? I might speculate that my Facebook friends tend to be people I know relatively well, even having real-life relationships with them, while many of my Instagram friends are more random additions. Was it a matter of people with relatively little attachment to me being interested to see what I might do? I wonder.