After Mom died on May 3rd, we had to have her body immediately removed from St. Peter’s. Mom had long stated her preference for cremation. She did not want to be worm food. And she had already selected the funeral home that she hoped would carry out her wishes.
Thanks to my Aunt quickly booking an appointment over the phone, three days later she accompanied my Dad and I for a consultation with PX Dermody. We met a representative named Denis who could not have been more accommodating and thorough. It helped that he was a Habs fan like my Dad.
Mom had originally planned for us to make these arrangements through the Internet. Had we been able to do that, we would’ve only been charged two thousand dollars. But PX Dermody required a credit card in order to make the transaction happen. I never got one and my parents cancelled both of theirs years ago. My Aunt has one and we briefly flirted with the idea of paying her back if she used hers. But she couldn’t afford it, so we all decided it was much easier to take care of all this in person. My Dad and I ultimately paid with a cheque.
I picked out a beautiful blue urn that everybody felt was appropriate. Mom was a lifelong fan of The Toronto Maple Leafs. All that was missing was the logo on the front. Because of the added expense and the fact we were doing this inside the funeral home rather than online, the total cost ended up being three thousand altogether, a third more than Mom would’ve wanted.
As we waited for Denis, we looked around one of the showrooms where we would be having our meeting. Thank goodness Mom had a deep fear of being buried in the dirt. The cheapest coffin we saw was between five and six thousand dollars, if I remember correctly. The highest price tag was five figures.
Death is expensive.
During the meeting, we were told Dermody would need to make a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate in order for us to collect a death benefit. It took me a week to find it but once we did, we were able to receive a cheque for $2500, the maximum amount you can claim, which thankfully offset most of the cost of PX Dermody’s services.
Less than two weeks later, we were notified that Mom had been successfully cremated and we needed to pick up her remains. Now permanently placed in her blue urn, she rests comfortably on a triangular bookcase creviced in a far corner of our living room. I thought it would be unsettling seeing her there but it’s been strangely comforting. I sometimes smile knowing she’s back home with us.
About a month after all of this was taken care of, my Dad decided to start doing push-ups again. Having lost so much arm strength since being forbidden to do any kind of strenuous exercise during his six months of chemotherapy (you can’t “raise the roof” with a picc-line in your arm, among other restrictions, because you can’t get the damn thing tangled), he tried to make up for lost time. As he kept pushing himself to do more and more reps, he decided to push for one more.
That’s when he heard the pop. For an entire week, he kept his painful secret to himself. Then, a day before Father’s Day, he couldn’t take it any longer. He rushed himself to an open clinic and asked to see a chiropractor. The place he went to didn’t have one on staff anymore so they offered a referral.
By the time I got up that early Saturday afternoon, having returned home by this point, he begged me to book him the earliest appointment with the Stevenson clinic. Closed on Sundays, we went for our first visit the following Monday fairly early in the morning.
When filling out the requisite form for new patients, which I had to do on his behalf, he believed he had popped out his shoulder, something that had happened at work fifteen years earlier. But by the time the good doctor started examining him, he realized Dad had a much worse injury. He had actually popped a few ribs.
After one was immediately snapped back into place, my appreciative father told the doc, “You’re a miracle worker,” to which the amused doc replied, “I’ve been doing this for 40 years.”
As it turns out, unlike 2008, this was not a one-and-done proposition. It would take many sessions spread out over several weeks before all of Dad’s ribs were adjusted back into place and his pain would finally go away. Because my Dad was a burner for a steel company for several decades, the doctor noticed tremendous tension all through his back and legs. He recommended physiotherapy.
And so on the days he wasn’t being twisted and pulled back into alignment, there we were down in the basement with the physiotherapist who taught Dad numerous stretching exercises as well as giving him very effective deep tissue massages. Over time, Dad’s posture greatly improved. I was surprised by how diligent he was at following all her instructions. If only he was this good at cleansing his bowels.
Six months later, while we’re now going every two to four weeks as opposed to every two or three days, and while he has greatly improved for the most part, Dad still has some work to do. It would be nice if OHIP covered this kind of medical expense. At least we’ll get a deduction next year. Considering how much he pays for every session, I hope it’s sizable.
Losing my Mom in the spring and nearly losing my Dad to the same illness within the same span of time, needless to say, is the primary reason this space was unusually quiet at various points during the year. For the first time since its inception in February 2006, there was one full month of dormancy. Normally, I post at least one entry every four weeks. Not this past June.
All in all, there were just two dozen new offerings for the entire year, a record low. While the subject matter was familiar to regular readers, it was nice to hear from new ones who were discovering the site for the very first time.
One reader appreciated my piece about John Cusack blocking me on Twitter a few years ago having experienced the same frustration herself recently. Another asked specific questions about my review of Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island which I couldn’t answer from memory so I had to look at certain scenes again before responding.
Then there was the guy who wanted to know where he could find the sexiest version of the Macarena video online which I don’t remember ever seeing but he happened to have caught it back in the day on MuchMusic. Strangely, it is impossible to find now. God knows I tried for him. It’s apparently not even available on video. His search continues. Best of luck to him. Maybe The Ringer should pick up the cause.
And many thanks to Steven who shared his appreciation for my Lauryn Hill piece about the story behind her unexpected hit cover of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, one of his favourite recent songs. While nothing compares to Frankie Valli’s bombastic original, Hill’s silky smooth, funky version, which wasn’t even supposed to be released as a single, modernizes the arrangement without losing the strengths of the melody and lyric. It remains incredible that she laid down that vocal while eight months pregnant.
Speaking of The History Of The Mystery Track, the ongoing series thankfully resumed with two new entries this year. Back in 2000, Our Lady Peace released a concept album entitled Spiritual Machines which was a tribute of sorts to The Age Of Spiritual Machines, a speculative treatise by the controversial futurist and tireless inventor Ray Kurzweil. Since the band had released a sequel last year, it seemed fitting to finally tell the story of the bizarre unlisted spoken word piece that ends the CD.
When Alanis Morissette hit it big by railing against Dave Coulier in You Oughta Know, it spawned a mini-cottage industry of covers. The most notable one became a surprise radio success in his own right. But the band who recorded it petered out well before the end of the decade.
You Oughta Know What Happened To The 1000 Mona Lisas also discusses the other mystery track they recorded, a jacked-up version of the old Wings track, Jet. I was hoping the band’s frontman would respond to my questions on Facebook about all of this but I never heard back. If he decides to belatedly reply and add anything of value to the story, I would definitely update it.
Although it was released last year, my Mystery Track piece on Eddie Vedder paying tribute to Layne Staley received far more hits in 2023. I’ve found over the years that certain bits of writing need time to be discovered (like my Seinfeld trivia series that continues to attract readers) and that’s when they start climbing up my all-time Stats page. So far, my Alanis story on Your House is the most read installment thus far. I suspect that will change over time.
The relentless misery of 2023 affected my movie viewing habits as well. After only screening a little more than two dozen pictures, all lousy, I just managed to write six reviews, all of them critical of recent horror films.
Halloween Ends, the concluding chapter of a completely unnecessary reimagined trilogy, is the latest attempt to erase the lingering stench of the franchise’s overall worst entries while finally killing off its iconically masked heel, supposedly for good. It fell into the same trap as all the other sequels and remakes. Nothing will ever compare to John Carpenter’s definitive, albeit flawed, original.
The Invitation does some reimagining of its own as it attempts to modernize Bram Stoker’s Dracula through the lens of contemporary feminism and the visuals of a period costume drama. It falls disappointingly short despite some moments of truth and some decent performances.
Violent Night is a Christmas movie that desperately wants Santa to be John McClane and is so awful, it ranks right down there with the worst in the genre. We’re talking A Horror Christmas Story bad, which I also subjected myself to this year. Horrendously violent and deeply unfunny, it’s a total miss.
I didn’t care for The Pope’s Exorcist, either, which is based on a real priest whose actual shortcomings are far more interesting (and conspicuously unmentioned) than the fake exorcisms Russell Crowe performs in the movie. Possessions are bullshit of course but there’s no excuse for weak scares.
I haven’t liked a Scream movie since number two but the recent revival of the franchise has been stubbornly profitable for Paramount, its new distributor. The quality continues to dip in Scream VI as predictability adds to its ongoing credibility problems.
With its two leads gone from the series under highly questionable circumstances (Free Palestine and stop being cheap with women’s pay) as well as its latest director who realized he couldn’t make the movie he wanted to, the status of number seven is uncertain. Let’s hope they cancel it because Wes Craven can’t be replaced.
Finally, there was the peculiar Hatching from Finland. Distributed by IFC Films in North America, it’s about a horny stage mom who openly cheats on her cuckold husband while overly pushing her young daughter into a gymnastics career she has zero passion for. The kid makes a big mistake early on and well, suddenly we’re in a vengeful creature feature as well. It is beyond strange but certainly not any good.
Darker moods inspire stronger poetry, I’ve found over the years. And despite all the unrelenting anger and despair I was feeling this year, which led to long periods of inactivity, I still managed to lay down eleven new pieces, most of them focusing on my state of mind.
Poems like Embrace The Pain, Tunnel Of Hate, The Ultimate Goal, It Never Goes Away and Lost In The Abyss were all conceived while my Dad went through the second half of his expanded chemotherapy sessions and my Mom was suffering not only from the latter stages of her terminal cancer but also an unexpected COVID infection that was only belatedly detected once she went to St. Peter’s.
While not explicitly about their suffering (you’ll note the lack of specifics in these verses), clearly, whether intentional or not, their mortality was at the forefront of my thinking. Obsession, fury, depression, you can’t go wrong utilizing these powerful themes in your work. Seemingly stuck in faulty thought patterns has been a personal problem for years. Recognizing them is the first step. Eradicating them altogether has been the tricky part. The struggle goes on.
The rest of the poems were less enigmatic. They Don’t Care was initially inspired by an old random comment I read by some fool who equated the far left (who want free health care, free post-secondary education and no wars) with the far right (who are racist, don’t believe in free stuff and want as many wars as possible) while defending some dopey right-wing politician who was being protested against by police abolitionists.
But after rewriting the last verses completely, the second half of the poem also takes shots at the increasingly isolated Biden Administration who pretend to be liberal but are as fascist and cruel as any dictator you could name, including the one currently brutalizing Occupied Palestine. Here’s hoping Genocide Joe doesn’t get reelected next year. And that Julian Assange and the Palestinians are soon free.
While Functioning Normally is about ultimately winning the constant tug-of-war against the most persistent kind of evil, Bitter Reflections is the more resigned aftermath, the hard acceptance of so much wasted time on something that has caused so much unnecessary anguish and sorrow. May that anguish and sorrow disappear for good. Life should be happy, not torturous.
The more I think about it, I can understand if readers thought Exchange Of Fire was secretly about Russia and Ukraine which I’ve haven’t really discussed here. Yes, I am describing the brutality of war with particularly vivid imagery but my intention was more metaphorical, not literal. That said, poetry can be a mix of things and the concluding line “We were all deceived” really could apply to any situation and not just a specific global conflict. All governments lie, as I.F. Stone wisely advised. It was always my goal to improve my poetry when I began this website almost 18 years ago and I’d like to think that over time I’ve succeeded.
All It Takes originally began as a poem called Two-Second Solution which was supposed to be about how the massacre of Gaza could end in an instant if President Joe Biden simply pulled a Reagan circa 1982 by ordering Apartheid Israel to stop murdering Palestinians through one terse phone call. But Biden is fully committed to the genocide (he has expedited without the approval of Congress billions of dollars in state-of-the-art weaponry) and then has the gall to complain about his bad poll numbers like Trump, the racist buffoon who’s going to beat him next November.
But after reworking the first verse, All It Takes became more general about walking away from bad situations. I may still use that Two-Second Solution title in the near future but I haven’t really figured out where to go yet. Real life has gotten in the way once more.
It’s not often I share something on Christmas Day but after not posting for nearly a month, the time was right to share one last series of verses. Making fun of posters is an irresistible proposition. They’re curiously everywhere and nowhere at the same time. But when they do make their presence known online, it can be very annoying.
Most can be easily ignored (like the clowns who defend Woody Allen) but for the determined ones who demand your attention, it’s best to swat them down as harshly as possible. Until they foolishly come back for more hoping for a different result. And then you smack them down again and again and again until they get the message, which never deters them so you end up blocking them, too. It’s like being visited by a specter you can’t see that just as quickly vanishes into the night.
That was the basis for Repeatedly Burned. Posters are impulsive and always think they’re right when they’re usually not. They’re rude, inconsiderate, ill-informed and usually right-wing in their politics, although some will protest such a characterization. (I get this from time to time on the increasingly inaccessible Twitter. The block button solves the problem in an instant.)
Ridicule can be a writer’s best friend when directed at the appropriate targets. Getting into pointless arguments with someone who has an active platform is beyond stupid. Our tolerance for bullshit is low. But more importantly, we never run out of ammunition.
This has been a horrible year. Losing my Mom, almost losing my Dad, the genocides in Occupied Palestine, Myanmar and the Sudan, the stalemate in the Ukraine, the ongoing pandemic still claiming lives, the environmentally corrosive wildfires, the tortuous persecution of Julian Assange, the warming planet. It’s so easy to lose hope when you dwell on everything that’s wrong with the world.
But my Mom is no longer in pain and my Dad is slowly recovering from all his ailments. Millions of protestors are marching and disrupting for the beleaguered Palestinians all across the world. There is increasing political support for the WikiLeaks founder who should be freed immediately. We have excellent vaccines to combat COVID. And young climate activists are applying political and legal pressure to finally force governments to stop drilling for fossil fuels. May they finally succeed and save us all.
As long as we have life and as long as we have some kind of growing solidarity in the right direction, we have reason to go on. We can’t let the dark forces of fascism rise again, especially in our own countries. And we mustn’t allow cowardly, corrupt centrists to protect and maintain an unsustainable status quo that only benefits the superrich who only care about their own violent and racist self-interests.
We cannot continue to pretend that positive change isn’t instantly possible. In a lot of cases, it is. If an American President can theoretically threaten to cut off military funding for an evil white supremacist occupation, then why shouldn’t it happen? When the far right assume power, they don’t wait to enact terrible policies. So why can’t so-called progressives move forward with healthier ones at the same pace? Why hasn’t there been a codified replacement for Roe vs. Wade?
2024 is shaping up to be another difficult year. There may be growing disgruntlement about the state of the world. But all good things are worth fighting for. Seeing young people advocate for Palestine and call out the hateful bullshit of Apartheid Israel while corporate media slowly validates their views is why protesting is both necessary and powerful. Change is coming. Let’s hope for the best kind.
As for the future of The Writings Of Dennis Earl, I’m hoping to soon recover from an uninspiring year. I’m proud to have had anything decent posted in this space in the past 12 months, considering all the time I needed to spend taking care of my parents. And even when I wasn’t taking Dad to appointments or trying to comfort my depressed Mom during her final weeks, I was too depressed and angry to muster up my usual amount of creative energy.
I can’t promise what will be in store in the coming year. Everything is uncertain. But I do hope to offer more pieces than I did in 2023. And I’m pleading for a lot more peace and a return to happiness.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, December 29, 2023
10:18 p.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 