Remembering 2023, My Eighteenth Year Of Blogging (Part Two)

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.

Remembering 2023, My Eighteenth Year Of Blogging (Part One)

Fifteen minutes after Midnight on New Year’s morning, I recapped a tumultuous year.

The next day, my Dad resumed chemotherapy. It was his seventh trip to the lab and he was not looking forward to it.

Two weeks earlier, just before Christmas, while in the middle of session six, a nurse noticed his suddenly reddening face and sprung into action. There was unmistakable crimson all over his chest and arms, like he was suddenly developing a bad sunburn from the inside. As some of her colleagues came over to investigate, they all reached the same conclusion. Dad was allergic to one of the drugs.

As a result, they stopped administering it. In order to flush out the redness, antibiotics were quickly inserted into his arm and over time while he was still getting treatment from the other drug he wasn’t allergic to, the redness thankfully disappeared.

It was very reassuring to know that this was not unusual and more importantly, there was already a procedure in place to solve the problem. But when Dad found out that his sessions were now going to be twice as long from hereon out, he was not pleased. He had already been through so much in the last three years and as the year progressed, it was about to get worse for our family.

The day after the new year began, there we were once again in the lab for session seven, this time for five hours. Well, I was there for about half of that. Dad told me I didn’t have to sit with him the entire time, as I had been since the beginning. So, shortly after anti-allergy meds were intravenously being inserted into his bloodstream (for the earlier sessions, he swallowed pills instead), which added an hour to the four reserved for the actual chemo that immediately followed, I left the hospital and explored the city, eventually returning to keep him company, do word searches, eat lunch & drink water. Classic rock swept through the room as various beeps would go off and on throughout the day.

Dad thankfully never experienced another allergic reaction again. But the added chemo time robbed him of his energy. Having lost about 60 pounds before his surgery the previous July, it was a relief he was able to gain back 10. But this wonderful momentum he was experiencing was shortlived. He’s been eating mostly smaller meals since. His appetite is not what it once was.

Then there’s the tingles in his fingers, the numbness in his feet and the chills that would result in higher heating bills that winter because he was always so cold, even while wearing a Deckardian cardigan. But like the tough guy he’s always been, he never missed a session. With one notable exception, we would return here every other week until March.

On February 27th, I woke up with a sore throat. No big deal. I’ll just have a lozenge. Maybe I’m just dry again. (I sometimes don’t drink enough fluids.) Dad was about to have his penultimate chemo session, number eleven. Instead of bringing more lozenges with me, I took a big pack of Tic Tacs, a gift from an old friend.

I should’ve brought more lozenges.

No matter how much sucking I did, the soreness remained. At one point, I briefly thought about popping into a nearby Shopper’s Drug Mart to buy another pack of lozenges since we were running low at the house. But I walked on past and returned to the hospital instead.

I should’ve bought more lozenges.

While quietly sitting next to Dad for the final leg, I suddenly felt a chill of my own. Did they not pay the heating bill in this place? Why am I shivering? On the ride back, I was also feeling warm. As soon as I came home, I went upstairs and reached for that trusty electronic thermometer. Now I had a fever as well.

As it climbed to over 102, I was grateful for Aleve, which gradually, and eventually, over the course of the next couple of weeks lowered my temperature to a normal level. But needless to say, I didn’t eat supper that night. The following night, I hurled. It happened so fast I didn’t even make it to the bathroom and it’s only a short trot away. My 20-year vomit streak was over.

I would throw up a couple more times over the next couple of days. My food intake was limited to unused cans of Ensure meant for my mother, tiny portions of apple sauce and a sliced apple here and there. I drank fluids most of the time. Then came the dry heaves. It was horrendous. I was very worried about making my mother sick. As it turns out, it didn’t matter. She was already in much worse shape.

As I slowly recovered in March (having lost about 10 pounds in the process), our family doctor ordered Mom to have an IV for three days. It was the beginning of the end of her living in our house. Prior to that experience, Mom was still able to be somewhat independent. She didn’t go outside anymore. It was too fatiguing. But she didn’t require assistance when she walked around on the inside, especially to the bathroom.

Her appetite was shrinking and so was she. One night, she asked me to make supper for her and Dad: a skinless hunk of Atlantic salmon, one of her favourites, plus a few french fries. She threw it all up. As the winter transitioned into spring, Mom couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. After her IV treatments had ended, she couldn’t do anything on her own. Unsteady on her feet, she felt too dizzy. Instead, she spent the entire time in bed, sleeping for many more hours a day.

While Dad and I were off for these epic chemo sessions, an old friend of ours, the same one who gave me the pack of Tic Tacs, cheerfully agreed to keep Mom company and look after her while we were away. It kept her going and it allowed us to focus on Dad’s own health care. At that point, Mom was still able to sit in her chair during the day.

Before Dad got treatment, he would require a blood test to make sure he could take the expanded dosage, which he also did when he was still undergoing two-hour sessions. It was something of a relief that before the final session could happen, something was wrong. He needed more time to recover and so did I. This meant that he couldn’t get in his last session until his blood work improved.

It was now the middle of March. Mom came to the sad, inevitable conclusion that I couldn’t be in two places at once. Either I would have to stay with her or I would have to leave with Dad who was also quite vulnerable. Dad had already made trips on his own to pick up this big ass anti-vomit pill he needed before his last sessions (which had been regularly prescribed after he threw up once earlier in the year) and to get his blood checked so Mom wouldn’t be alone.

By this point, I was thankfully eating regular meals again. I just had an annoyingly persistent cough that would eventually stop either in late March or early April. I wore my mask around Mom constantly.

The weekend that Dad found out his blood work finally came back normal and he could conclude chemotherapy on March 20, a week later than originally planned, Mom had a made a fateful decision. It was time to go to St. Peter’s. As hard as we tried, we couldn’t take care of her anymore.

On St. Patrick’s Day, three days before Dad’s twelfth session, a couple of paramedics arrived. They would gingerly place Mom on a gurney and then secure her in the back of their emergency vehicle.

“Love you, Mom,” I said as she blew kisses to me without looking back just outside our door. It was the last time she would be in our house alive.

After Dad’s final chemo session wrapped up in the late afternoon, he was asked to ring the bell by one of the nurses, a fun tradition for patients deeply relieved to be done with their treatment. But Dad demurred and asked me to do it instead. It took a couple of tries but I rang it three times on his behalf. A small amount of hands clapped and cheered for us. It was near the end of the day. Not many people were left waiting for their turn.

Four months later, Dad and I returned to the hospital for the beginning of another round of checks. First, he needed to get a CT Scan. About two weeks later, after a near two-hour wait, we were told in five seconds by his kindly, highly skilled Australian surgeon that he was “all clear.” Dad was right. This could’ve been done over the phone.

Then, he was booked for a colonoscopy. At first, it was supposed to happen on the morning of November 2nd, which meant he would’ve had to commence his cleansing on his birthday the day before. But then we received a notification in the mail that they had pushed the date back to about three weeks later.

On November 23rd, after finishing the last of his low-fibre meals, he swallowed these two tiny laxatives, guzzled down a powdered version of citric acid dissolved in water and proceeded to drive me insane by not drinking nearly enough fluids to get the process started.

According to the pamphlet they give you to prepare for your procedure, you need to drink about 1.5 to 2 litres of clear drinks like water and transparent fruit juice over the course of 4 hours to make everything work. While Dad did drink several cups of black coffee (which to be fair, is also acceptable), he only sipped water every once in a while. And he wonders why it took him six hours to have his first shit.

Because it was taking so long, he decided to stay up all night so he wouldn’t have to keep getting up out of bed to go to the bathroom. Stressed beyond reason, I barely slept and was dog tired the following morning. After taking two more pills and another quick swig of that dissolved citric acid in water, he continued to purge.

By the time we reached the hospital, he had to go at least two more times. Apparently, his surgeon was able to see everything he needed to. Dad came out when it was over and told me he was “all clean and all clear”. I was immensely relieved. Dad called it an early night and got a good night’s sleep despite making multiple pee trips to the bathroom, his usual late night routine because of his type 2 diabetes.

The following night, however, he suddenly sprung on me that the doctor had removed several polyps from his bowels. It was only after this was done that he was given a clean bill of health. We’re supposed to get a call to let us know what they found. If they’re benign, fantastic, he’s in the clear. If they’re not, at least they’re no longer inside him. As far as we know, he’s good for now.

For the next two years, Dad will continue these series of tests to make sure his stage 3 cancer doesn’t return. It all starts with another blood test next June.

If only Mom was given the same gift of extended life.

After getting settled into St. Peter’s on St. Patrick’s Day, the phone calls started. She was getting harder and harder to understand, her mouth so dry she frequently sucked on ice cubes but they didn’t make her any more coherent. Some calls were better than others. On more than one occasion, she got violently ill and had to hang up. She was more concerned about Dad and me than herself. She was in hell and we couldn’t do anything to alleviate her suffering.

Just a day after she moved into her first room, we missed a call from the hospital. When I called back, I was stunned by what the nurse told me. Mom had COVID. When I was sick a few weeks before she left our house, I was very worried about her catching my flu. It turns out she’d already been infected for 3 to 4 months. It was thankfully a mild case and it passed. Dad and I are very lucky we didn’t catch it ourselves. We had no idea she even had it. How she caught it remains a mystery.

Over the next 48 days, Mom’s spirit blackened and her physical condition gradually deteriorated. At first, she would call us every day. Then I called her until she wasn’t picking up anymore. Dad and I visited her once a week as a parade of family and friends arrived to show their support every day. She turned 75 a little over a month after she arrived.

When Mom started talking about assisted suicide, I despaired hoping she would not go through with it. I didn’t want to watch her die. The hospital told her she wouldn’t live long enough once everything was set up, anyway, so her suffering sadly continued and she dropped the idea altogether.

Unable to have solid foods, and loathing much of the liquid diet she was offered, Mom was done. Not helping were her new roommates who blasted music late at night or kept their TVs going throughout the day. At least watching the kids play outside a local primary school gave her some small comfort.

The last two visits we had with her were emotionally wrenching. Whenever I got teary-eyed, which was often, I had to look out her big window so she wouldn’t see how sad I was. As her pain meds got increasingly more powerful, she was either completely knocked out (her eyelids still open while she slept) or her voice was reduced to a desperate whisper. It took several tries to understand what she was saying sometimes. The frustration mutual.

“I love you, Mom,” I told her as Dad and I departed her room for the last time. With all the strength she had left, she faintly but unmistakably replied, “Love you, too.” Four days later, she died peacefully surrounded by a couple of family members and the nurses who had grown to love her as we always had. My aunt gave me the news when I called her back. It was a shattering gut punch. I cried constantly for days.

Three weeks later, we had A Celebration of Life ceremony for her at our local church where Mom had maintained lifelong friendships with so many parishioners, many of whom were in attendance along with family, therapy pool buddies and dozens of others. I wrote the eulogy but refused to deliver it. I did not think I could get through it without weeping uncontrollably. The non-binary minister, a very lovely person who was very kind to Mom and our family, read it on my behalf adding personal touches of her own. 

Less than two weeks after Mom’s death, our family doctor called me offering her condolences (she couldn’t attend Mom’s service because of a prior engagement) and booking me for a visit at her clinic. I knew what this was about. Before she left for St. Peter’s, Mom insisted I get checked out since I now had two parents with cancer in the same location. The doc told me to get my blood drawn (everything is fine) and put in a request for a colonoscopy, two years ahead of schedule.

It took a while to secure a date but once I did, I was prepared. For those who are trepidatious about the whole procedure, let me just say if you’ve had as much diarrhea as I’ve had in my life, you’ll do fine. On August 7th, the day before my rescheduled trip (it was originally booked for the 4th but the hospital made me change it), you take this white powder stuff, the aforementioned citric acid, and mix it with water until it dissolves. Tastes kinda like vitamin C. You should refrigerate it the night before. You also swallow a couple of tiny pills, the previously mentioned laxatives. They come first, actually.

You have to fast and drink constantly so the concoction works, which is why I got annoyed at Dad for not drinking enough during his preparation. Almost an hour after I started, part one of shitapalooza began. Even after I went to bed, I still had to get up and ass purge four more times. The next morning, round two began which topped me off. Unlike Dad, I did not have to go again at the hospital.

With my asshole too sore to care about a camera being inserted in there and with some mild sedatives calming me down, the whole procedure was done in minutes. I’m clear. My Mom would be so relieved to know that. I get checked again in five years.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, December 29th, 2023
8:18 p.m.

Eulogy For Mom

I’d like to begin with a quote. “All she ever wanted to do in life was dance.” That’s how The East Hamilton Journal described my Mom back in August 1992.  From the age of 4 when she started taking classes and picked up a baton for the first time, Colleen Cork Earl had already defined her future.  And what a future it was.

She practiced relentlessly, over six hours a day for years, a decision that would have serious consequences down the road.  But the results were undeniable. “800 trophies, awards and medals”, The East Hamilton Journal reported.  That’s ridiculous.

Listen to some of these accolades: a two-time Miss Majorette of Canada, Miss Majorette of Ontario, multiple Kiwanis scholarships, the Junior World Champion, the American Juvenile Champ, the Duchess of St. Louis, the Top Twirler of The Day in Utica, New York.  Honestly, if I listed every event she excelled in, we’d probably be here all day.

She certainly never let it get to her head.  You wouldn’t ever hear her describe herself as the greatest baton twirler of all time but she probably was.  No matter how high she hurled it, Mom prided herself on never letting it drop.

When she won Miss Majorette of Canada for the second time, Mom met the Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.  There’s a great framed photo we’ve had for years of the two of them together on that fateful day.  You may have seen it on Facebook. 

But she didn’t have any fondness for the man.  She had a good reason, though.  He kept asking what her name was.  No matter how many times she told him, he always forgot.  It annoyed her to no end.  She never let it go. 

Mom’s talents ultimately got her on Television.  In 1959, she had the distinction of being one of the Tiny Talent Time originals, a small group of dancers known as The Happy Tappers who performed at the beginning and end of every episode during her numerous appearances on the show.  They also danced during live commercials holding signs for the show’s sponsors.

Mom loved telling the story about a certain cow that got a little too nervous on camera and well, let’s just say you had to be careful where you tapped.

As Mom became a teenager, she grew out of Tiny Talent Time and started appearing on other shows like Mickey-A-Go-Go on CHCH and It’s Happening for CTV.  Producers didn’t like her hair colour so she dyed it bright red.

It was the CTV experience that pretty much soured her on TV altogether.  Mom wasn’t tall enough in the eyes of the producers even though she was pretty much the best dancer they had on their shows. And it just wasn’t the greatest working environment for young women.

But she adored Robbie Lane, the longtime frontman for The Disciples, who was a fixture on the show and they became lifelong friends. She later appeared with him on The Robbie Lane Show where she earned about a hundred bucks a week kicking it up in go-go boots.

While on TV, Mom also joined the Hamilton Theatre Guild and appeared in numerous live productions throughout the 60s and 70s.  You name a famous stage show and she was in it, usually as a dancer or in a small role.  We still have all the original programs.

One of her castmates was a young lady named Brenda Copps who later became our family doctor and went out of her way to take care of my Mom, especially during her cancer years.  We’re grateful to her for all that she did to keep Mom going for as long as she could.

Mom would be the first to admit she wasn’t Streisand when it came to singing.  But humour was her secret weapon.  Her biggest role was Minnie Fay in Hello Dolly! The Spectator’s theatre critic described her performance as “a hilarious, unbeatable highlight.”

“She’s a delight to watch,” he raved.  “She milked the part for every laugh it was worth without ever overdoing it.”  She even got her own bio in the show’s program.

As much as she enjoyed performing, though, her heart lied elsewhere.

At some point in the late 1960s, Mom got her teaching diploma which meant she wasn’t allowed to compete anymore.  When she wasn’t teaching in a bunch of American States, she started her own business:  Colleen’s Dance Studio.

From September to June, she would work six days a week, Monday to Saturday. And then came the recital.

She originally called it Colleen’s Variety Show.  High school auditoriums would be rented and the places would be packed.  I think Mom preferred this part of her professional life because she had complete creative control and it was personally fulfilling for her to see the best of her young students grow and evolve, and succeed on their own talents.

Mom knew how to stretch a dollar, especially while making costumes for the kids. Even though they didn’t cost very much to put together, the dancers always wore something they felt comfortable performing in that also made them feel glamourous.  She even made me look good.  Although maybe the purple ruffles were a step too far.

Now this is the most amazing thing about my Mom’s career as a teacher.  She would personally choreograph every single routine the kids would do on recital nights.  Throughout the year, she would introduce a new move at the end of every class until she had a completed dance for them to rehearse.

Even though she wrote down every step in her binder, she memorized every single routine every single year.  Most years, there’d be, I don’t know, maybe 30 to 50 acts in a single night.  In 1988, there were 70.  So half were performed on night one and the other half on night two, just like WrestleMania.

Mom was always a nervous wreck. If she was a wrestler, they’d call her The Ultimate Worrier, but she was also a problem solver.  The really little kids would always forget their routine and so there was Mom, off to the side of the stage, performing their dance by memory as they looked over trying to mimic her moves to the great amusement of the crowd who knew exactly what was going on.

It was a lot of work but Mom got so much out of the experience.  I have fond memories of the end of the night as one kid after another would embrace her and thank her as she clutched a whole slew of flowers they had just given her at the curtain call.  She was always touched.

And then it all went away in 1992.  For years, Mom had been keeping a secret.  She was in a lot of pain. The first thought was arthritis. Then, maybe it was repetitive strain injury. Eventually, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. She went through numerous treatments: hydrotherapy, physiotherapy, water exercises, splints on her wrists.  She refused to take prescription drugs because she didn’t want to deal with the side effects.

Thankfully, she did get some relief but not enough to keep her business going. So, she did the next best thing. She passed the torch to a couple of her best students:  first Kathy Young Milligan and then Erin MacDonald Newton.

As a tribute to the name of the dance teams Mom put together of her top talents in the 80s, Kathy renamed the business Silhouette Dance Company and then when Erin took over, it became Expressions Creative Dance which still exists today.  So Mom’s professional legacy lives on.

When she wasn’t dancing, Mom worked as an usherette at the old Hamilton Forum where in the late 60s she met a hockey fan named Ron.  They married in 1973 even though he rooted for the Habs and she supported the Leafs.

They watched a lot of hockey together.  It’s how they bonded.  And then I was born in 1975.

Mom was, by her own words, an over-the-top mother.  She had to be.  I was small and often sick.  It took years to figure out what was wrong with me.  It wasn’t cheap to feed a kid health food but Mom always did it cheerfully and without complaint.  And if I was being bullied, which happened a lot, look out.  She’d even scare Brock Lesnar.  Just like my Dad, she was my chief protector.

My Mom was tough.  She abhorred con artists, especially telemarketers, which is why we started screening calls, and she was unafraid to stand her ground when the circumstances warranted it.  Good luck trying to sell her something she didn’t want.

She survived a car accident, two robberies, numerous bullies, a New Year’s Eve mugging, a bomb threat that was probably a cruel hoax, countless falls as she gradually lost strength in her legs, a gall bladder attack, a burst appendix, her heart stopping during her cancer surgery in 2021 and a Covid infection that lasted three to four months that we didn’t even know about until she went to St. Peter’s.  It was the return of her stubborn cancer that sadly spelled the end.

Even though she was miserable in that hospital bed not able to eat the food she enjoyed at home, for a short time she still managed to watch her beloved Leafs on a hospital TV and started calling us everyday for a quick chat.  When she stopped calling, I called her.  She had countless visitors, including me and Dad. She was never alone, especially in her final moments, which were heartbreaking.  Even the nurses, who she all knew on a first-name basis, spent time with her.  She was that loved.

Mom made friends easily.  And they would stay loyal to each other for decades.  Whether it was fellow baton twirler Sandy Baker and her husband Pat Quinn, dozens of church folks from Delta and Livingston, including my godmother Millie, her water therapy pals at St. Joe’s Villa and Westmount or the Alzheimer’s Support Group Mom joined after Grandpa got sick, Mom loved them all.  And they loved her in return.

Even the friends she had lost touch with would reconnect with her at some point decades later like one of her favourite teachers Doreen Bradt who’s also a talented artist and Sandi Watts who actually helped put Mom back in touch with Doreen.

Her oldest friend was probably her first:  Johnny Paulowich, her favourite dance partner, who she first met when she was 4.  There he was, 70 years later, visiting her at St. Peter’s.  They never lost touch.  I’m glad he got to see her one last time.

There were many laughs, phone calls, lunches, dinners, emails, gifts, cards, letters, trips and a lot of welcome visits, especially in her last year when she needed so much support to get her through an impossible ordeal. 

Mom treasured her friends just as much as her family.  She was a great sister to Joyce, Bev, Ev and Steve, always offering support when they needed it or anything else she could do to help them out.  And she adored her nieces, her nephews, and her great-nieces and great-nephews, always spoiling them like crazy.  And they adored her in return.

Mom was an active member of Delta for decades.  She was a Sunday School teacher, a steward, an usher and a greeter.  She was a beloved member of UCW’s Unit 8 becoming the membership & corresponding secretary for the UCW executive. She audiotaped the services which were sent to housebound congregants. She helped count the offering money. She was The Bag Lady for numerous church sales, The Card Lady sending out sympathy cards and she joined Pastoral Care calling lonely elderly members who couldn’t come to church anymore.

A few years after she retired, Mom helped some of the older Delta kids put together Copycats, a series of pantomime shows.  Mom once again found herself in the role of choreographer.  When I was looking through her stuff recently, I found a purple binder.  Inside were all the lyrics to the songs and the complete routines that were used for the 2000 show.  She never threw it away.  That was Mom.

I will miss her so terribly.  But at the same time, I’m grateful she’s no longer suffering and depressed.  It was horrible to see her that way.  She deserved better.  She did so much good in her life.  For her family, her friends, and for all her communities.

Those last visits at St. Peter’s were tough but I don’t want to remember her in that state. I prefer the image I have of her before she got terribly ill.  The smart, resourceful, warm-hearted goofball who was easy to talk to and so comfortable to be around, excluding the times I made her mad, even though we always made peace and laughed about the temporary tension.  She was a great mom, a loyal friend, a loving sister and aunt, a generous spirit, a peerless talent.

Cancer may have claimed another victim but it can never erase the history of a wonderful person. She was and is an inspirational lifeforce, someone who lit a spark in the many who knew her and invited into their lives, treasuring every moment, especially now that she’s gone. Yes, there is sadness and grief but take comfort in this everyone. Her generous spirit will never die.

I can’t tell you the number of times Mom encountered a former student long after she retired.  There were more than 1500 she taught and sometimes they arrived in the most unexpected ways.

We used to have a roofer for a neighbour.  His wife took lessons from my Mom when she was a kid.  At Delta Secondary, there was this guy named Sam Slade who got on stage in our auditorium and had all the girls screaming in ecstasy at his gyrations.  My Mom taught him those moves.

And then there was the PSW who came to visit just before she was transferred to St. Peter’s.  As I let her in, she said, “You know, I used to take lessons in this house.”  Then she saw Mom.  “Oh my God, Colleen!”

I’m convinced Mom taught everybody in this city.

For those who believe, she’s at one with the angels now, making sure they know their first position from their fifth, their step ball change from their grand jete, that they properly stretch beforehand, all while still yelling at the Maple Leafs when they lose.  Those bloody Panthers.

Thanks to Mom being a pack rat, so much of her life has been preserved in words, pictures and video.  So many memories for all of us to treasure.  And what glorious memories they are.

(Special thanks to Rev. Jess Swance, Evelyn Cork, Brenda Campbell Ellison, Kathy Young Milligan and Janis Webster.)

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, May 27, 2023
5:42 p.m.

Remembering 2021, My Sixteenth Year Of Blogging (Part Two)

Not every entry this year was dark and foreboding. With the ongoing pandemic continuing to disrupt all of our lives, it’s more important than ever to make time for silliness. And nothing was sillier on this site that my puerile song parody, Oh, What A Fart.

While researching another piece, I borrowed a greatest hits package of The Four Seasons from the library. An unintended pleasure: I could not stop singing along to these classic songs. (I ended up buying my own copy off of Amazon, one of many CDs I purchased from the site this year.)

After their highly successful run in the 60s, the group adjusted to the disco revolution and found even more success at the tail end of the 70s. December 1963 (Oh, What A Night), their last number one, is a particular highlight. For whatever reason, I conjured up a flashback scenario where a guy embarrasses himself on a date by clearing the room with his flatulence, a moment of infamy that still haunts him. Written at a time when my mother was slowly recovering from cancer surgery, it was welcome comic relief.

Yes, this year was a terrible one for the most important woman in my life, the woman who birthed me and raised me and continues to love and support me no matter what. It was incredibly painful watching her deteriorate thanks to a mysterious giant-ass tumour that had latched itself onto her bowel and pressed hard on her stomach. She lost about 20 pounds but thankfully, now that the tumour has been carefully removed, she has regained her lost stature. She has come a long way from the start of the year.

During her horrible 11-day stay in the hospital back in late May and early June, I tried to keep myself busy by returning to a project that has been an undying passion for most of my life.

After nearly a year and a half, The History Of The Mystery Track series returned with three new entries in the Spring. Having already written about the best version of You Oughta Know in 2019, it was finally time to write about Your House, the other unlisted song from Jagged Little Pill.

Subtitled Alanis Morissette Fantasizes About Stalking Her Ex, it proved that the Canadian not only can sing without instrumental back-up, she really can protect the identity of a former lover. Poor Dave Coulier.

Lauryn Hill Covers Frankie Valli, the aforementioned article that motivated me to get The Very Best Of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, tells the unlikely story of how Can’t Take My Eyes Off You became a hit all over again thanks to a modernized contribution to a bad movie and fierce demand for new material from a fresh new talent.

Finally, I wrote an epic essay on The Osbournes Family Album, the 2002 compilation featuring personal favourites without track numbers from members of the family and a whole slew of uncredited dialogue clips from the first season of the infamous MTV series. It took a while to match the audio drops with the right episodes but it was worth the expanded effort.

This was not a great year for watching movies. Extremely distracted by so much bad news, some screenings were agonizingly long, much longer than the actual running times. But somehow, someway, I still managed to write dozens of reviews in this space despite screening far fewer flicks this year.

2021 began with a 25th Anniversary assessment of Big Bully, the atrocious Rick Moranis/Tom Arnold comedy which I had missed during its original theatrical run. That was followed by the rare Australian softcore feature Felicity which was not nearly as hot and explicit as I had hoped.

Back In Time, the flawed, indulgent but still enjoyable documentary about Back To The Future which I watched twice, was one of the few good films I wrote about this year along with the US cut of David Cronenberg’s still provocative Crash and the sleeper horror flick Gretel & Hansel.

Every other title I critiqued was various degrees of disposable garbage. There was recent fare like the limp Fatale and the action/horror misfire Rogue with its lousy special effects. Jason Blum’s Blumhouse productions struck out twice with The Craft: Legacy and a totally misguided reworking of Fantasy Island.

I found myself not freaking out during other horror duds like The Prodigy, Phantom Of The Paradise (which at least has some killer original songs), You Should Have Left, Black Rock, Virus and the 1979 version of Jack The Ripper.

There were franchise stinkers past and present like Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Shaggy D.A., The Forever Purge, Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions, Bad Boys II, Bad Boys For Life, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and its 2019 remake.

There were brutally unfunny romantic comedies like Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, Zack & Miri Make A Porno, How To Be Single, Little Black Book, The Lonely Guy, That Old Feeling, All About Steve, Her Alibi, The Pallbearer and Back To School. And then there was the falsely advertised Aspen Extreme and the badly aged Steven Seagal martial arts shooter Hard To Kill.

Overall, because of the immense difficulty I had with focus and concentration which needlessly prolonged the viewing of certain titles, not to mention stubborn perfectionism, screenings were down considerably compared to the past six years.

Not all the news was bad this year, though. Hits for the site are up slightly. Over 12000 page views compared to the roughly 9500 for 2020. 2021’s hit count is the highest since 2019 where there were just over 11000 but a far cry from the golden years in the middle of the last decade where annual page views were between 21000 and 40000.

As for shares, that’s up, too. There were more than 300 articles and reviews posted and shared by readers on Twitter and Facebook this year, bringing the current combined total since the start of the WordPress era 11 years ago to over 1750.

The most read piece of 2021 is eight years old. More Interesting Things I Learned While Watching The Fifth Season Of Seinfeld On DVD generated just under a thousand hits bringing its complete total to over 5300. A couple of 2014 pieces on Woody Allen continued to do well because they were unfortunately linked in an anti-Semitic rant by a kooky right wing blogger with a suspect political agenda. Because of that, April saw the biggest audience growth this year with over 2700 hits. So…thanks?

As another insidious variant of the Covid virus swoops in and expedites the infection process around the world and with the ominous rise of climate change continuing to devastate our planet, the future becomes ever more uncertain. It’s easy to despair at all the tragedy dominating the headlines as our normal lives continue to be put on hold. It’s easy to rage at incompetent governments and greedy pharmaceutical companies for putting capitalism ahead of human rights. God knows we have every right to feel this way.

It’s much harder to be hopeful. But we must. We cannot let fear dictate how we live, how we feel, and how we love. We cannot let the grifters on the right and sadly, the few on the left, as well, scare us out of our skepticism and basic decency. We must doubt questionable actions and beliefs and fight for those who need their voices amplified. We must always question bullshit and never swallow it whole. We must always know the truth whether it’s willingly shared with us or whether we have to sniff it out for ourselves.

Everything is extremely shitty right now but it won’t be that way forever. We must ride through these days of sorrow because, like the song says, there is a light that never goes out. It must never burn out.

As we struggle to navigate all these uncomfortable changes swirling around us, it’s best to find outlets of escape wherever and whenever we can. For me, that’s meant listening to a lot of music, especially all the dozens of CDs I bought this year, some of which I’ve been hunting for for years, sometimes decades.

It’s also meant diving deep into the cinematic archives even if that has meant deliberately suffering through an unhealthy amount of terrible movies. On the plus side, at least I have something to write about.

This I know for sure. The History Of The Mystery Track series will return. I was working on several more pieces during my mom’s extended hospitalization but none are remotely ready to be revealed in this space and who knows when they’ll be completed. There will obviously be more movie reviews and possibly more poems. It would be nice to offer more essays on various subjects. It would be even nicer to finally try my hand at original fiction, something I haven’t pursued in 20 years.

It has been a catastrophic year: for you, for me, for all of us. And 2022 may not bring the reprieve and the relief we are all desperately craving right now. But we must hang in there. We must not surrender. We must not resign. We must survive. And we will.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, December 30, 2021
2:45 a.m.

Remembering 2021, My Sixteenth Year Of Blogging (Part One)

It happened again. Six days into the start of yet another miserably tumultuous new year, chaos disrupted the solitude. It was a shock to the system. The rage was palpable. I mean, the injustice of it all. It was difficult to concentrate on anything else.

Here I was all set to comment in real time on all the craziness happening and I couldn’t do it. Why? Because those fuckers at Twitter suspended me for the third time.

On January 5th, I wrote a critical tweet about James Comey, the former FBI Director who was peddling a new book. I objected to his assertion that the Justice Department shouldn’t pursue criminal cases against outgoing President Donald Trump because it would look too partisan. “What a fucking cunt,” I snorted.

The next day when I tried to get into my account, I was locked out. I had supposedly broken Twitter’s policy on “hateful conduct”. I mean I wasn’t trying to be nice but frankly, the comment was warranted.

Twitter disagreed. I appealed and heard nothing other than the usual automated emails acknowledging receipt.

Twitter Suspends Me For Calling James Comey A Naughty Word laid out the whole story the day of the suspension.

The Twitter Police may have disapproved but WordPress, God bless ’em, afforded me, as it always has, a more unfettered platform to repeatedly lambast an extremely privileged white guy and all the stupid shit he did when he held powerful government positions without any worry about being censored or punished. Basically, I got to repeatedly call James Comey a cunt in this space and it was glorious.

In a weird twist of irony, as I calmed down during my Twitter sentence, I ultimately found myself doing other things and being a bit more productive than usual. At the same time, I waited and waited for a response about my appeal. None was forthcoming. While doing a little research online, I discovered that some people have been waiting years to get their accounts back which remain frozen. Great.

After eight days of feeling resigned and deflated about taking a stand that meant nothing, I broke down, deleted the tweet and resumed wasting time on the least popular social media website.

Why I’m Ending My Appeal Of My Latest Wrongful Twitter Suspension explained my reasoning in the usual terse language while also opining on the massive temper tantrum that happened outside and inside the Capitol which had long petered out by that point. Having already tantrumed myself about my own annoying situation in the earlier piece, I went on to criticize Twitter’s highly dysfunctional appeal system. Unlike the overzealous Trump supporters who destroyed their lives for a lying idiot, my anger was more justified. Thankfully, there have been no further disruptions since.

Two months later, as the walls of scandal were closing in on the embattled New York Governor, I wrote about a cringy appearance he made on The Howard Stern Show. Embarrassing Quotes From Howard Stern’s April 13, 2020 Interview With Andrew Cuomo came about after discovering the transcript on the official New York State government website. (You can also hear the original conversation there.) It was not the only time he appeared on the program.

Stern is known for being overly gushy to questionable political figures but this particular segment stands out for being one of the most shameful displays of hero worship ever expressed on his long running radio show. I singled out the most egregious quotes which have aged rather badly.

Following Cuomo’s public resignation, Stern has barely mentioned him on the air. At least he didn’t invite him to his birthday party.

Speaking of media figures I used to admire, what the hell happened to Glenn Greenwald? Yes, it’s true. Despite willful blindness on my part, he’s always been an asshole, bitchy and ever combative while always ascribing the worst possible motives to those he detests. But, along with a whole slew of other things he got right, he also covered two of the most consequential stories of the last decade: Edward Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s numerous mass surveillance programs and Operation Car Wash, the corrupt investigation that resulted in a coup fully blessed by Barack Obama in Brazil.

When Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States, a whole lot of Americans expressed relief that Trump’s pathetic attempt to cling to power had utterly failed. New York Times journalist Lauren Wolfe was one of them. Known for his seething antipathy for the mainstream press when he feels they’re overly reverential, which sometimes gets overly personal and petty, Greenwald needlessly went after her hard on Twitter. When she got fired, he was blamed for drawing attention to her own tweet.

Shut Up, Bitch, a satirical poem written from his own prickly point of view, makes light of his thin-skinned defensiveness about the whole mess and his shameless self-promotion for his new venture, a Substack blog. Forever whiny despite coming into prominence through his best selling books and multiple columns on all things political, I also pointed out his constant aligning with the far right. I’m not the only one who finally tuned out his bullshit this year.

Slow Motion Genocide commented on America’s police state and the police abolition movement which continues to gain support as more innocent people, including young teenagers, continue to be murdered by law enforcement. Resentful is about the mentality of a mass shooter in a time when gun violence continues to be a national plague with no end in sight.

Other poems in 2021 were more personal. Partial Satisfaction reflects on my return to the chatroom in 2020 after staying away for nearly a year. The opening verse is based on a real exchange of DMs with a very strange person on Twitter who I had been friendly with for about half a decade. She acted very peculiarly during the course of the conversation, misinterpreting some of what I was saying, thinking I was hitting on her when I was just looking for advice about my non-existent love life. She discouraged me from going back to web chatting and I’m grateful that I ignored her.

Looking back on these old messages I had kept, I realized I had always been the comforter, the consoling rock whenever some calamity had befallen her. It wasn’t a healthy friendship and it was completely one-sided. She would bail in the middle of conversations, sometimes apologize later and then do it all over again. During our last exchange of messages, I even expressed remorse for upsetting her when it was all her problem and not mine. After not hearing from her for days, I finally cut the cord and blocked her. I do not miss her. She’s a mess I no longer want to clean up.

As for my return to the chatroom last Christmas week, I had some fun sexy times as usual but with Flash disappearing at the start of the year, I made the most of my limited time in one of the oldest sites still standing. Although I tried getting in through the new modern version, albeit to no avail, I haven’t chatted in this capacity since I left for the last time. Maybe it’s time to finally move on. To this day, I have never met anyone from these places in the real world. Perhaps that’s for the best.

Speaking of that, time for another rant. Back in high school, I became friendly with a guy who for a short time was my movie buddy. We had a regular routine for trips to the downtown cinema. I’d meet him at the bus stop close to his house, he’d walk up to greet me and then we were off to see a number of pictures over the course of about seven or eight months during our third year attending classes together.

I remember one time I asked if he wanted see another movie and as usual he said yes. But when I went to meet him at our usual spot, he was a no-show. So I went by myself. The next time I saw him at school, I asked him where he was. He acted surprised claiming I never asked him to hang out with me in the first place. But he made it up to me by treating me to a double feature the day I won the Student Council Presidency.

During the summer break, we continued to see the odd film (I also went with other friends and by myself) until one day I called him and if memory serves, he didn’t want to go anymore. So I stopped asking him.

After graduation, I would continue to run into him from time to time usually at a mall and our encounters were always warm and never awkward. (I didn’t hold a grudge.) After college, I started volunteering at Cable 14 and there he was working a number of jobs behind the scenes. In this space about 14 years ago, despite not really hanging out anymore, I still considered him a “good friend”. Looking back, that was a gross overstatement on my part. He was barely an acquaintance.

Having not seen him around in years, when I joined Facebook in 2007, we reconnected but we barely messaged each other. I didn’t really relate to him anymore. He had become very politically conservative.

Three years later, I signed in and discovered he had unfriended me. A mutual friend asked me what was going on because she was unfriended, as well. No explanation was ever offered, although she suggested maybe he decided to drop me because we didn’t talk that much anymore. I don’t think that was the reason.

Anyway, about four months later, he suddenly refriended me and demanded I stop writing my many “dark and depressing poems” which I considered a genuine insult. No one tells me what I can’t write here. And besides, why did he suddenly care about my blog after ditching me for all that time?

He also expressed an interest in wanting to work on something with me but he never did say what he had in mind, not that I enjoy collaborating which is a giant pain in the ass. At that point, he was working behind the scenes in the news department of a major Canadian TV network. I don’t know if he’s still there.

I’m trying to remember now when he said this other thing that pissed me off. There was a moment where it looked like we were going to get together and catch up in the real world. He said whenever I leave my house, we can meet. I said anytime is good. No, he responded. I mean you need to move out of your family home before I’ll see you. What the fuck? Finally reaching my breaking point, I blocked him.

But that would not be the last time I would hear from him. No longer running into him out in public because he moved out of the city, he then emailed me to ask me something or other. I don’t remember what the questions were but it was odd that he never mentioned me no longer being on his Facebook friends list. I answered him because not doing so would’ve made me obsessive and distracted. I just wanted him to go away so after responding, I blocked the two email addresses I knew he was using.

When The Huffington Post published my piece on the 2014 Toronto Mayoralty election, there he was leaving a comment, correcting my work. This time, I didn’t respond. Then, sometime after, he started following me on Twitter. I couldn’t hit the mute button fast enough. Looking back, I should’ve just blocked his annoying ass.

Many peaceful years went by and I never once thought about him. Then came this past April. Out of nowhere, he left a comment asking me about my work situation and how I was making money. I was so fucking angry.

No “Hello, how have you been?” No apologies. No respect for my boundaries. His phony tone was too friendly and oblivious about our past. I had taken a break watching a terrible movie (which I eventually finished although I went back to rescreen certain sequences) and now I was distracted again. Why won’t he leave me alone?

After stewing over this for a day, I decided to post the comment and just not reply to it. Things settled down for a bit. But then over the course of a week I realized this was me being passive aggressive and it was no real solution at all. Not only I was aggravated by his unwelcome presence on my site, I was equally peeved by his presumptuousness. Commenters can tick a box that will notify them of any responses to their postings (they’ll get an automated message) and sure enough, he was expecting an answer. He didn’t become a blog follower, he only wanted to follow responses to his own goddamn comment.

It remains the only time he has ever made an appearance here. After a week of quietly raging, I did some snooping online and learned some things. First of all, he’s a massive poster. I found tens of thousands of comments on the CBC website alone. Secondly, he’s no longer on Facebook or Twitter. It turns out I’m not the only one who finds him irritating. Not sure if he was suspended or simply deactivated, but he can’t pester me on those sites anymore.

I noticed that he had a new email address so I promptly blocked it. In the end, I realized I couldn’t stand to look at his comment so first I spammed it then just flat out deleted it. Finally, I blocked him from the site or at least I think I did. Despite the relief of this welcome erasure, I continued to be angry but knew that the best way to let go of these feelings was to write more poetry.

The defiant Enjoy The Depression sums up the whole disappointing saga, the title a direct reference to his knock on my previous poems. I’ll write as many “dark and depressing” things as I goddamn please, you fucking fraud. The Asshole Returns began as a diatribe against him but ultimately expanded into the world of trolling in general.

Still seething, I then wrote I Have Contempt For You which directly references my decision to delete his attempt at concern trolling. I eventually calmed down for a time but when I started obsessing again I wrote Bitch In Denial and finally Unresolved Tension to soothe my offended soul. The concluding couplet of the latter, “There is no solution/There is only letting go”, points out that I have no intention of talking to him ever again and that it’s ridiculous to keep thinking about someone you can’t stand. I hope he never bothers me again. Eight and a half months later, so far so good.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, December 30, 2021
2:14 a.m.

Twitter Suspends Me For Calling James Comey A Naughty Word

The former director of the FBI has a new book coming out. Yesterday, The Guardian, which acquired a copy, made note of one revelation. He doesn’t think the current President of the United States should be prosecuted.

In Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency and Trust, James Comey argues that the incoming Attorney General, which President-Elect Joe Biden is hoping will be former President Obama’s rejected Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, should steer clear of any investigations of Donald Trump, the man who famously fired him four years ago, asserting it would look overly partisan and biased:

“Although those cases might be righteous in a vacuum, the mission of the next attorney general must be fostering the trust of the American people.”

He goes on to compare Trump’s situation with that of Richard Nixon who ultimately resigned in the face of impeachment over covering up the illegal Watergate break-in. Nixon’s Vice President Gerald Ford, originally the Speaker Of The House before replacing tax cheat Spiro Agnew who also resigned, would infamously pardon his former boss and would pay the price for it in the 1976 election when he was defeated by Jimmy Carter.

“By pardoning a resigned president, Ford had held [Nixon] accountable in a way that Trump would not be, even were he to be pardoned after losing re-election. That might not be enough accountability in Trump’s case. Or it may be, especially if local prosecutors in New York charge Trump for a legacy of financial fraud.”

It’s the absolute stupidity of this argument (how is letting an unrepentant crook off the hook by not putting his feet to the fire or by giving him a clean slate “accountability”?) that prompted me to write this angry tweet about it:

“Why nothing changes. Imagine being in a time where the federal government is deeply loathed and distrusted and thinking letting a corrupt President completely off the hook will make everything alright. What a fucking cunt.”

Then, I linked to The Guardian report and added two hashtags: #FuckJamesComey #ProsecuteTrump.

The tweet was posted at 10:48 p.m. I was able to continue tweeting, retweeting and scrolling down my timeline well into the early morning hours until I called it a night.

Today, however, when I went into my account mid-afternoon, I learned I was suspended. According to the geniuses at Twitter, the tweet had been flagged for supposedly violating “our rules against hateful conduct”.

“You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

The very white and very straight cisgender male James Comey, who is neither physically or mentally handicapped nor seriously ill, is an extremely privileged 60-year-old Irish American who has a very questionable human rights record thanks to his two decades working for the federal government first as a US Attorney, then Deputy Attorney General and finally, the head of the FBI, all jobs he held in the aftermath of 9/11. (Before that, he spend years working as a US Attorney in both New York and Virginia.)

As I told Twitter in my inevitable appeal, I neither threatened, harassed nor incited violence against this man. I don’t follow him, he certainly doesn’t follow me and while I’ve been highly critical of him both on their site and the one you’re reading, I have never directly interacted with him. I’ve never DM’d him nor used his handle in a public tweet.

And yet, here we are again having to beg the Twitter gods to allow me back onto my account. When does this end? When does this obvious bullshit cease? I’m beyond tired.

I mean, if you don’t want me calling James Comey a cunt, just say so. Make it a rule. Don’t call the man directly involved in George W. Bush’s torture program a cunt. Don’t call the man who endorses an FBI technique that allows the bureau to pretend to be journalists in order to nab suspects a cunt. Don’t call the man who supports sending informants into the Black Lives Matter protest movement a cunt. Don’t call the man who supports bogus sting operations against vulnerable, powerless Muslims a cunt. Don’t call the man who became the legal muscle for Lockheed Martin, the federal government’s biggest defense contractor which supplies weapons that have murdered and absolutely decimated innocent Muslims in the middle east a cunt.

The weird thing is I’ve used the word cunt to describe dickhead guys on Twitter for years but admittedly not very often and this is the only time it’s been flagged. Why? Did someone complain? Did your oh so brilliant algorithms once again mistake harsh criticism, which is perfectly legal, for a non-existent threat?

Since I filed my appeal, Twitter has acknowledged it on my account (“We’ll take a look and will respond as soon as possible.”) and through an automated email message. But, because I decided to appeal, I remain locked out. For now, the only way to get back in is to cancel the appeal, delete the tweet, live with being in Twitter jail for 12 hours (DMs only) before everything is back to normal.

I refuse to cancel. Once again, they fucked up. It would be nice if they were accountable for a change.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, January 6, 2021
7:51 p.m.

UPDATE: It appears, based on the time noted on the aforementioned email I was sent, that I was officially suspended at 7:13 a.m., seven hours and 25 minutes after my tweet was posted. An obvious question: if my disparaging comments about James Comey were so objectionable to the Twitter gods, why did it take this long to flag it and suspend me? I’m hoping for some immediate answers shortly.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, January 7, 2021
12:21 a.m.

Remembering 2020, My Fifteenth Year Of Blogging

John Lennon said it best: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” I can’t think of a more fitting epitaph for 2020.

When the year began, my father was reeling from his hospital stay in the last three days of 2019. He came into the ER on December 29th with one ailment and came out on New Year’s Eve with two more. He was so exhausted from the experience he went to bed early with my mom and didn’t ring in the new year at midnight.

The septic kidney stone, one of the most painful things he’s ever experienced, proved very stubborn indeed. In our local medical facility, he underwent his first surgery to get it reduced in size. After a couple of months of agony that would ebb and flow constantly (some days were more excruciating than others), and once the infection had disappeared he underwent a much needed second surgery. Now even tinier, he finally peed it out. We were all very relieved.

While being examined in the ER (after two hours of waiting to be called), he underwent a blood test which determined his blood sugar levels were at 20. He’s now a Type 2 Diabetic and has made long overdue changes to his eating habits and lifestyle which still astounds me. If only he would check his levels.

All of the stress he endured during his hospital stay gave him a third ailment – shingles – which he neglected to tell us right away because my mother and I are excessive worriers. When his new physician met with him for the first time and saw those large red scabs on his legs, she wouldn’t touch him. She prescribed these rather large pills to ease his suffering. He said it was the most painful thing he’s ever experienced, which, in the aftermath of the septic kidney stone, is rather alarming. My dad is the strongest guy I know and for him to have felt as vulnerable as he did at the end of 2019 and in the early months of 2020 was sobering in many ways.

When I was woken up on December 29th last year I was not expecting to spend 6 hours of my life on next to no food concerned for his well-being wondering what the hell was going on. What I really wanted to do was write. What my parents wanted to do was their laundry.

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

As a result of all this uncertainty and unease, contemplative pieces that would traditionally be posted under more relaxed conditions during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays would be delayed. My annual review of this website’s output, once again divided into two separate entries, originally scheduled for New Year’s Eve 2019, surfaced a little later on January 2 & 3, 2020. I was so distressed about my dad I abandoned my usual good and bad moments of the year pieces which I had only half-heartedly started anyway. I didn’t even bother starting this year’s editions.

The last of my first wave of History Of The Mystery Track stories, a second one about Nirvana originally scheduled for late December as well, followed a couple of days later. I’m so grateful to have spent those final months of 2019 reviving an old passion of mine from my younger years. I was thrilled to salvage a concept first introduced in my college radio series and extensively reworked here in a series of thoroughly researched essays. (The one about Britney Spears & The Backstreet Boys got some unexpected traffic late this year when a fan posted it in a comment forum on breatheheavy.com. It even got a couple of likes!) Unfortunately, a series of circumstances has prevented further progress. But I’m still hopeful that another batch of offerings will be available in the future.

The second night my dad was in the hospital I watched my last movie of 2019. Angel Has Fallen, the threequel to Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen, is just as bad as its jingoistic predecessors. Having already written assessments of the earlier installments, I threw together another one for number three and it first appeared here the same day I posted the last of the two year-in-blogging retrospectives.

Although I screened fewer movies in 2020 (178 compared to 238 in 2019), I managed to present 45 individual reviews which may be the most I’ve done in a single year in the blogging era.

There were critiques of horror films like Blade II, the Rabid remake, Amityville 3D, Hell Fest, Of Unknown Origin, Hostel Part II, The Craft, the Psycho remake, Cujo, Sweet Sixteen, The Blob remake, Motel Hell and the recent feminist reworking of The Invisible Man.

There were my takes on comedies like Sydney White, She’s The Man, Superstar, Leave It To Beaver, Beauty Shop, Barbershop: The Next Cut, Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star, The House Bunny, Bingo, Doctor Detroit, Green Card, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Trainwreck, Knocked Up, The Girl Next Door, Hot Tub Time Machine and Hot Tub Time Machine 2.

I reviewed the science fiction films Passengers, John Carter and Rampage; thrillers like Fatal Attraction, The Da Vinci Code, The Hunt For Red October and Edge Of Darkness; the Clint Eastwood drama Gran Torino; three quarters of the Billy Jack franchise: The Born Losers, The Trial Of Billy Jack and Billy Jack Goes To Washington; and three documentaries: Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, Justin Bieber’s Believe and Revolution.

I don’t usually get a lot of direct feedback from people whose work I write about but shortly after tweeting out a link to my long review of The Trial Of Billy Jack, one of the film’s stars, Michael Bolland, who played the abuse victim Danny, sent me this nice tweet. Now in his 40s, he’s a stand-up comedian. Good to know he’s still around and very positive. Thanks again, Mike!

Speaking of Twitter, I am very tired of being suspended for doing absolutely nothing wrong. Two years ago, my account was frozen because their seriously flawed algorithms wrongly believed my exuberant retweeting about the 2018 US midterm elections could only be performed by a bot. After angrily complaining, they immediately apologized and reinstated me.

But when it happened again this year during the US federal election, they refused to do the right thing and locked me out for an annoyingly prolonged period, 10 days in total. As the world held its breath wondering if creepy Joe Biden would dethrone creepy Donald Trump for the Presidency (he did, four days after election day which Trump has refused to accept or fully acknowledge), I silently seethed not being able to tweet my own thoughts in real time along with everybody else on the service.

So I vented on here instead. Five days later, despite repeatedly complaining to no avail, nothing had changed. So I vented again. Realizing that they were never going to unlock my account from their end, I figured out a clever way to do it myself. And it worked. I’m grateful they’re none the wiser about it. Honestly, I should not have had to find a workaround when I should not have been suspended in the first place. I was lucky. Sadly, many others have been wrongfully banished from the site on a more permanent basis. (Bring back Barrett Brown.)

I’m deeply appreciative of my Twitter journo pals Gina Tron and Scarlett Harris, who I reached out to during the lockout, for being so understanding and supportive during my unnecessary absence. (I had seemingly lost all of my followers which thankfully was only temporary.) Despite being respected writers, and very sweet people, Twitter didn’t listen to them, either. None of this would’ve been necessary if the powers that be would just verify my account already. Isn’t writing 10 Huffington Post articles enough for you people?

In the midst of all this nonsense, my grandmother died. She hadn’t been well for some time. Having just turned 99 in October (because of her advanced-age dementia, she thought she made it to the century mark which wasn’t such a bad thing for her to believe in the end), she suddenly collapsed in the presence of a PSW and was rushed to the ER in Welland where she spent her remaining years with my aunt & uncle who were taking a much needed coffee break when they got the call. She was given no more than 2 days to live.

The day after she was checked in, my other aunt drove my mom to go see her for the last time. But as soon as they entered the building, they were told she had already gasped her final breath. When they were taken to go see her finally, her mouth was wide open, like something out of a horror movie.

Despite terrible eating habits, a longterm smoking addiction she eventually kicked about 30 years ago and a very grumpy demeanour that I only saw some of the time, what got my Grandma in the end was a simple blood clot on her lung. Whenever my mom or her sisters would bring up her questionable, shall we say quirky lifestyle choices, she would always wave off the criticism noting, “I’m still here so I must be doing something right!” It all feels so ironic now.

I’m glad she was in my life for as long as she was. She was kind to me, always spoiling me and her other grandchildren with hugs and kisses and generous gifts. She loved movies and when I started writing reviews in high school, she would always ask my opinions about the latest releases I used to see in my local multiplexes which carried over into college. (As a teen, Grandma was an usherette and actually kept a diary of reviews which is sadly lost. She wasn’t a hoarder of sentimental items, for the most part.)

When she lived with us for 15 years, beginning in 1997, my dad would rent a bunch of movies to watch with her and my mom but after she kept falling asleep through a few, that practice was discontinued. Like myself, she’d rather watch movies on her own. For a time, she even participated in our annual Oscar pool and even won a few pots.

I remember her always buying scratch tickets for each of us on family dinner night on Sundays. Mom always told her she was wasting her money (we never won more than maybe, oh I don’t know, 12 bucks, probably). She was undeterred. She loved the lotteries. But the race track and casinos were her absolute favourites. The constant sound of slot machine ka-chinging must’ve been heaven for her.

When she died that first week in November, we were fortunate to have unusually warm weather for both the visitation and the burial site service which was necessarily restricted to family only. (A proper indoor funeral, which Grandma would’ve preferred, could not happen.) At the visitation, spread out over one afternoon with certain parts of the family limited to their own designated hour, a repeatedly looping photo collage set to light background music featured her in countless photos over the years with all of us. It was delightful.

The funeral was short but moving and funny. I was asked to a be a pallbearer which, for a weak, skinny man, is a difficult fucking job. The casket was heavier than Grandma. But I was honoured to do it with five of my cousins, thankfully most of them stronger than me. She’s resting right next to my grandfather who died of Alzheimer’s 20 years ago. Their plots, far away from where they eventually relocated to, were purchased in the 50s when a traveling salesman gave them the old hard sell and they lived closer to the cemetery.

It was also a gloomy year for millions around the world as the Coronavirus, first detected exactly a year ago in late 2019, would spread rapidly over the course of the next twelve months. Lockdowns and social distancing and mandatory indoor masking by-laws became the norm. So did checking the latest numbers on CNN and Wikipedia. There are now more than 80 million cases worldwide with nearly 2 million gone. But we’ve got vaccinations happening now so there is finally some hope for the new year.

During the first lockdown in my city, my public library was closed for three months in the spring, then reopened for curbside pick-up (you could only get stuff you reserved and you had to book your appointment online in advance) before fully reopening with numerous changes in late July. (We’re currently back in curbside pick-up mode again but at least you can use their computers this time and pick up your stuff whenever.) It was the only difficulty I had during those early days of the crisis, not being inside those wonderful buildings exploring their collections. With a second lockdown now in effect (which should’ve happened two months ago), it looks like we’re in for a long winter.

The darkening mood was perfect for writing poetry. And for a brief moment in time there was a welcome return to rhyming verses and a small but positive response from readers. The most popular poems were The Consequence Of Drive and Mediocre White Man, the latter of which was inspired by a complaint Quillette journalist Jonathan Kay made about this reply to a Robyn Doolittle tweet regarding the monstrous Matt Lauer. Why did Kay delete his response to me, I wonder? Maybe because I retweeted it and liked it and that embarrassed him? Good. The man’s a knob.

Man Of No Substance skewers President-elect Joe Biden and his partisan supporters for pretending he’s some kind of political saviour when his shitty human rights record paved the way for Trump. The Open Door Now Shuts focuses on the dangers of loneliness and sexual repression in the frustrating world of online conversing while Flood Of Anticipation imagines a hypnotic encounter of carnal delights.

No poem I wrote was more prescient than The Coming Rage. After the needless murder of George Floyd during the first lockdown (among other horrifying crimes against Black people), millions of Americans and international citizens collectively marched to protest the growing militarization of the police and its chronic inability and outright refusal to reform its white supremacist origins. And while “Abolish The Police” soon got watered down to “Defund The Police”, the message irritated the right people including the incoming President who stupidly thinks giving well-armed fascists a substantial raise will improve their behaviour. This is only the beginning. If things don’t improve, revolution is inevitable.

Prisoner Of Sympathy was inspired by a falling out I had with someone I once considered a close friend on Twitter. For many years I always comforted her through all her many dramas. There were times she even threatened to quit the site and I convinced her to stay. Despite her ever present neuroses and sudden, unexplained disappearances during our DM exchanges (which she only sometimes apologized for before doing it all over again), I liked talking to her and she liked talking to me.

No subject was off-limits except apparently my own needs and how they weren’t being fulfilled. Suddenly, she questioned my motives even though I wasn’t looking for her to take care of them. For someone whose whole writing career revolved around love and sex, it was an odd, perplexing reaction. I was just frustrated in general which I thought she could relate to on a much smaller scale but she got paranoid and bolted without once again saying good-bye. I apologized needlessly for upsetting her when I did absolutely nothing wrong.

We never spoke again. I gave her a week to reach out – I certainly wasn’t going to do it – but I’ve since blocked her and moved on. Like a number of women I’ve met online over the decades, she turned out to be too toxic and is not missed. What a waste of six years. It’s like someone else I follow on Twitter said a little while ago: they are not your friends. I need to stop learning that lesson the hard way.

Besides railing once again against the unimportant Golden Globes and throwing up all my usual Oscar pieces (predictions, the availability of nominated films on video, and the results on the actual show), I only managed to offer one wrestling piece this year: Three Men Who Survived WrestleMania Retirement Matches. As the pandemic raged on, with the notable exception of Ring Of Honor most pro wrestling companies foolishly carried on without always taking the necessary precautions which inevitably resulted in easily preventable infections.

Watching several WWE pay-per-views on DVD beginning with the scaled-down WrestleMania 36 was a weird, surreal experience. I felt like I was watching a rehearsal instead of the actual show. (The eventual arrival of the silly Thunderdome, reminiscent of Bryan Adams’ Heaven video but with flat screens, in the summer hasn’t been much of a substitute for the absent fans.) Yes, there were some exceptional matches like the three-way ladder match for the tag titles. And it was great to see Drew McIntyre finally get a world title push, but that wasn’t WrestleMania.

The cinematic pairings like the boneyard match with The Undertaker (who finally retired this year) and AJ Styles, and that wacky funhouse encounter between John Cena and Bray Wyatt were not exactly brilliant replacements for traditional matches in front of large, ravenous audiences. With ratings for the increasingly unwatchable Raw and Smackdown going way down (Raw is now generating just a million and a half viewers, a far cry from the eight million it had during the height of the Attitude era), I haven’t been this uninterested in professional wrestling since the mid-1990s. I know the WWE is in rebuild mode now that Cena is a movie star and Roman Reigns has become a Paul Heyman guy, but maybe it’s time for a regime change. And full scale unionization.

For the first time in a decade, The Writings Of Dennis Earl has generated less than 10000 annual hits. Since I stopped writing for HuffPost (they don’t pay, I didn’t sort out their password policy change in time to even submit another entry, and they’ve changed their submission criteria anyways which greatly limited my proposed ideas), page views have declined consistently and precipitously in the last several years. With the 15th anniversary of the original site approaching (I originally debuted on MSN Spaces before moving here in 2010), obviously something has to change.

Paradoxically, hits actually started to increase in the last couple of months so maybe momentum will finally swing in the more positive direction again. Regardless, I still enjoy doing this. I just wish it was possible to reach a wider audience and make a good living at it. The Constanza period lives on.

Until this year, I had never really understood or paid much attention to the Shares statistic because of ignorance (it has nothing to do with stocks and bonds, unfortunately) and for quite a while, I only had as many as 2. But something changed in 2020 and now I have almost 1400. My review of My Boss’ Daughter has gotten the most with 14. Right behind are a couple of Sophia Bush pieces that sandwich an entry from one of my old Winners & Losers series. Most of the rest of the shared pieces are in the single digits.

WordPress only keeps track of links posted on Facebook and Twitter with the former having a slight lead over the latter. Perhaps I should examine this more closely. Who is sharing all of my work? Whoever they are, thank you for all the support. It means a lot. Kinda funny how it all just started happening only recently, though.

Since the start of the WordPress era, this site has generated just over 251,000 page views. Pretty small potatoes, but hey, I’ll take it. While I’m proud of the nearly 1300 postings I’ve put together over the entire run of this site, I wasn’t able to do my usual wide variety of entries this year. (Most of the offerings were movie reviews.) As we continue to survive a terrible global crisis together, here’s hoping I somehow find the motivation and determination to right the ship.

Nothing I wrote this year was a big audience breakout, but the archives continue to generate interest as several Seinfeld trivia pieces finished in the Top 10. And I’m happy some attention was afforded to a few of my History Of The Mystery Track essays. One of the many disappointments this year was not being able to continue on right after that second Nirvana piece. I’m not sure how to continue, frankly, as we enter a new uncertain future. But as long as something excites me and as long as I can figure out a compelling way to express that excitement, this will be the forum to showcase it.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, December 31, 2020
9:57 p.m.

Twitter Still Refusing To Unlock My Account

It’s been 6 days since Twitter wrongly froze my account for supposedly exceeding the number of times a user can retweet, the second time this has happened to me, both occurring during American elections.  I have complained at least half a dozen times and while I have received both an automated response and a personal one, I remain locked out.

Common sense would tell you that if a human being is complaining about being unable to tweet every day for almost a week then he is probably not a goddamn bot and he probably didn’t break a precious Twitter Rule.

There is this strange paradox about Twitter.  They want you to maximize your enjoyment of the service which I have for almost eight years but by God don’t you enjoy it too much or we’ll think there’s something wrong with you.  You’d have to be a fucking replicant to want to tweet and retweet that much.

But that’s the problem.  How much retweeting is too much?  Twitter does not establish a limit.  I have no idea what is considered “aggressive” to the point of arousing suspicion.  And that’s the other problem.  It’s not human observers at the company suddenly noticing something amiss.  It’s a fucking computer picking up something by mistake.  Goddamn fucking algorithms.

And here I am once again reduced to grumbling in public as well as privately.  It’s fucking insane.  (My 99-year-old grandmother died suddenly over the weekend and I can’t tweet my 700 followers about it.) It literally says on my profile page that I’ve written for The Huffington Post.  I have my own author’s page on there.  I have my own website on WordPress.  I’m being followed by some pretty prominent people in the media some of whom I’ve become friendly with.  How many actual bots can fucking say that?

None of this matters to Twitter.  They don’t give a fuck, otherwise this would all be resolved much quicker.  In fact, the first time I was locked out in 2018, it was resolved so quickly I even got a welcome apology.  

So, what’s changed?  Are there fewer people manning the controls now?  Why is it taking so goddamn long to reinstate me?  If you go to the contest a suspension page, there’s a message that basically says they’re backlogged and there will be a delay in responding to complaints.  As I said to them in my most recent complaint, I understand and appreciate that they’re dealing with too many cases at once.

But as I also said, my case is simple.  Drop the requirement that I have to input a cell phone number (I do not own a cell phone nor am I planning on getting one) to get a confirmation code and simply restore my full access.  Takes two seconds.  Honestly, why is it taking so much longer now to do what took roughly a day to accomplish two years ago?

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, November 9, 2020
10:37 p.m.

UPDATE: I’ve just discovered that I’m no longer following anybody on Twitter. Before my wrongful suspension, I was following several hundred accounts. No longer. So fucking infuriating.

I’ve contacted two Twitter friends via email to let them know what’s going on and they’ve said they’re going to vouch for me to Twitter Support which is very sweet of them to do on my behalf. I’ve also noticed that my account is labelled “Restricted” for “suspicious activity”, a completely ridiculous assertion based on zero facts. I love how being engaged in American politics through retweets arouses their suspicion.

Anyway, despite my ongoing frustration with this bullshit, I think I may have found a possible solution. I’ve been doing some research and I might be able to get that elusive confirmation code after all if I input my landline number instead of a cell phone which I don’t have. Google locks out users of their Gmail service and offers them a choice of receiving the code through text or an automated voice message. Twitter may do the same. I’ll try this tomorrow and see if it works.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, November 12, 2020
2:31 a.m.

UPDATE 2: Well, that didn’t work. But the good news is I’m back in, no thanks to Twitter Support. We’ll just leave it at that. Also, I think all the accounts I was following have been restored so that’s a relief. Now to get caught up after a 10-day hiatus.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, November 13, 2020
7:19 p.m.

Remembering 2019, My Fourteenth Year Of Blogging (Part Two)

Before dizziness and a plugged left ear became my temporary, highly annoying reality for a few weeks at the start of the year, my life was strictly movies with a few good ones worth writing about.

My overall goal was to see more of the worthy and less of the dreck.  Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline Of Western Civilization, which I screened on New Year’s Day, turned out to be a good place to start.  I was fascinated by the players in these now highly influential LA hardcore bands from the early 80s, even if Spheeris didn’t always follow up properly on curious things they say and write about in their music, most particularly the uncomfortable white supremacy elements.

The sequel, The Metal Years, the more famous of the two films, for me, is Spinal Tap but more pathetic.  The overemphasis on deluded pretenders and talentless glam metal flameouts, at the expense of their more significant predecessors who deserved their own documentary, is a miscalculation.  They’re not interesting and relentlessly making fun of them is punching down, just like Spinal Tap which is hit and miss for me.

Unlike her earlier film, here Spheeris almost never lets a live performance play all the way through.  (There are constant talking head interruptions.)  Even she doesn’t have the patience to suffer through this pretentious bullshit (with the notable exception of the genuinely talented Megadeth).  I had a difficult first screening of Metal Years (my Blu-ray player has an irritating tendency to cut to black constantly; I played most of it on my computer) so I watched it again but my negative feelings towards it were strengthened and solidified.

Shortly thereafter, I had a look at Evocateur, the CNN film about legendary TV blowhard Morton Downey Jr., one of the more maddening figures in the so-called glory days of the syndicated talk show.  It’s surprising in a way that the film doesn’t mention Downey’s famous appearance at WrestleMania 5 considering how crucial it was in disturbing the carefully cultivated image the man had molded for himself, that of someone who was always in charge and never lost a “debate” (if you can call screaming at someone that).

The appearance on Piper’s Pit as well as an earlier guest spot on Wally George’s program (which actually is shown in the film) proved he could only triumph if the game was rigged, a timely theme in our current fucked-up political environment.  Just a few months after WrestleMania 5, Downey’s talk show was cancelled and his once high profile media presence would greatly diminish throughout the 90s.  He would ultimately die of cancer after smoking for most of his life in the early 2000s.

To write longer, more thoughtful reviews like this was a delightful, welcome breakthrough that I hoped would continue for the entirety of 2019.  And while, sadly, that did not exactly happen, there were other written assessments of similarly worthwhile films I was pleased to have posted in this space.

It may have taken me nearly a decade to see it, but David Fincher’s The Social Network is a brilliant character study of an asshole, and not just any asshole, the asshole of assholes:  Mark Zuckerberg.  As eerily portrayed by the equally slimy Jesse Eisenberg (and sharply written by another asshole Aaron Sorkin who deservedly won an Oscar), what unfolds is the story of an ingenious creep who turns his sudden rejection by his girlfriend into a multi-billion dollar media enterprise, but remains deeply unloved and isolated.

Facebook exploded like no other social media website in history but this past decade has shown that its future is potentially rickety thanks to a plethora of reputation-destroying scandals that have put Zuckerberg in the precarious position of routinely defending stupid policy decisions.  I would love to see Eisenberg play him again in a worthy follow-up.

Another standout was the original Cape Fear.  Released in 1962, it has aged rather well despite the needless restrictions of its time.  I’ve always loved the minimalist score, which was replicated in Scorsese’s superior remake, and from the opening credit sequence it sets an appropriately ominous tone for the entire film.  I admired the brutally clever performance of Robert Mitchum, a sickening misogynist who constantly tests the stubborn liberalism of his former lawyer Gregory Peck, once again playing a decent resister of high moral character.

Having waited two years to screen The Force Awakens, I needed to play catch-up with this recent wave of Star Wars films.  For what it’s worth, I prefer the New Hope prequel Rogue One over The Last Jedi, even though both titles feature extraordinary visuals, sensational action sequences and genuine laughs.  But Solo is the worst in the franchise since The Clone Wars.  Only Harrison Ford can play the iconic nerf herder, thank you very much.

Atom Egoyan’s Remember is a sneaky little thriller about manipulation, memory and the undying need for closure.  One character is so convinced of who he is, he agrees to go on what turns out to be a fateful mission to find an elusive Nazi.  The big reveal in the climax is genuinely shocking.  Christopher Plummer’s terrific performance is the key to making the whole thing work.

I never bought the conceit of The Amityville Horror, one of the weakest haunted house movies of all time, but Daniel Lutz firmly believes he lived it.  He’s the real-life subject of My Amityville Horror, a challenging documentary about how the tragic blurring of reality and delusion can be difficult to definitively untangle.  A small child when his dysfunctional blended family moved into that infamous New York house, his experience ultimately shattered his sense of inner peace.  Divorced, bitter and angry, he tells his story for the first time.  There’s not much we buy, but he’s a hypnotic figure with his distrustful stare and surprising skill as a master shredder.  Eat your heart out, Yngwie Malmsteen.

I was less impressed with the recent Halloween sequel.  Completely erasing all of the previous chapters, as expected it fails to do anything fresh with the Michael Myers character.  Instead of a young guy stabbing and strangling teenagers, now he’s an old man stabbing and strangling teenagers.  The unresolved ending and the box office success of the film means another unnecessary chapter is forthcoming.

It wasn’t the only derivative horror film I wrote about in 2019.

The House On Sorority Row is a blatant rip-off of Prom Night, admittedly a much sillier film.  Speaking of laughable, The Beast Within is a really bad possession movie with terrible special effects.  Speaking of lame visuals, The Legend Of Hell House is a not so spooky haunted house movie in its own right, despite a decent set-up.  And speaking of implausible horror films from the 70s, Hands Of The Ripper and The Lady In Red Kills Seven Times don’t know how to scare you, either.

Death Ship is another whopper about how easy it is for a Nazi ghost to transform an already grumpy George Kennedy into a killing machine.  Pathology is an out-there thriller about a med student sucked into a dumb game of random murder.  The Pit features a weird, bullied pre-teen with a MILF fetish who disposes of his enemies by feeding them to mysterious midgets in monster costumes.  Dead Silence is an eye-rolling precursor to the Annabelle franchise while Creepers is a Dario Argento bomb that wastes the talents of Donald Pleasance and a very young Jennifer Connelly.

I also dismissed a couple of early Abel Ferrera films.  Ms. 45 actually starts off with a provocative premise:  does the lead character become psychotic because she kills her second rapist or was she was always a serial murderer lying in wait?  Unfortunately, the movie loses its way when its anti-hero becomes less discriminating about her targets.

Much worse is The Driller Killer, another nonsensical cheapo 70s thriller about a nutty artist who sees an ad on TV for a portable drill with its own battery pack which becomes his weapon of choice as he mostly disposes of the homeless.  I don’t know what’s more annoying:  the pointless horror sequences or the shitty punk band rehearsing in his apartment building.

I didn’t just torment my eyeballs with older forgotten fare, I also suffered through recent mediocrity like Neil Jordan’s Greta, about a naive young woman with a clingy elderly stalker; Ma, featuring Oscar winner Octavia Spencer as a once bullied high schooler now luring the reluctant kids of her enemies into impromptu garage parties and, when they eventually reject her, death traps of her own devising; Brightburn, about a young, uninspired supervillain protected by a stupid mother, and The Curse Of La Llorona, about a social worker who unwittingly releases an ancient malevolent spirit which kills her client’s kids while terrorizing her own.

For the first time in nearly five years, I went back to the cinema to screen the Pet Sematary remake.  The most memorable moment?  When the picture cut out during the final scene.  Months later, I borrowed a copy from the library and realized that the projectionist did all of us a favour.

Horror movies don’t have a monopoly on crap as I was reminded once again when I continually subjected myself to terrible comedies.  Honestly, doesn’t anyone remember laughter?  Because Wedding Crashers, Isn’t It Romantic, Can’t Buy Me Love, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, the original That Darn Cat!, Swearnet, Daddy’s Home Two, Ernest & Celestine and the first version of The Out-Of-Towners sure as hell don’t.  To drive home the point, there are more unexpected laughs in The Room than planned ones in The Disaster Artist.

Actually, the funniest movie I wrote about this year was the infamous Chuck Norris action craptacular Invasion U.S.A.  Released by Cannon Films in 1985, it envisions an invasion of America that could only happen in the fever dreams of Dick Cheney.  It’s a film so embarrassing even the very right-wing Norris has disowned it.  Honestly, if you’re feeling really down and need to laugh really hard at something incredibly stupid, punch your ticket to this one.

If that doesn’t work, maybe take a gander at Gotti featuring John Travolta’s less than intimidating portrayal of the late New York mobster.  Most of the unintended laughs come early, though.

When I first saw Wanted in a theatre back in 2008, the audio was cut out for the first few minutes which pissed me off so much I deliberately lost focus on what turned out to be a wasted screening.  After all this time, I finally watched it again on DVD.  What a disappointment it turned out to be.

The Equalizer didn’t work for me, either, but at least it wasn’t as deplorable as Vendetta.

For much of the year, these movie reviews dominated the site.  (I posted 44 overall.  Look for my delayed assessment of Angel Has Fallen shortly.)  That is until October when The History Of The Mystery Track series debuted.  Originally a short-lived radio show I did in college, having failed to figure out a way to turn this impossible subject into an organized book, after more than 20 years I finally decided to write about it in this space instead.

Much to my surprise, the results have been quite rewarding.  Once I completely rewrote my book introduction and substantially revised the section on definitions & categories, I plowed ahead with full-length pieces on Guns N’ Roses, Alanis Morissette, The Clash, MuchMusic’s Master T, The Rembrandts, Radiohead, The Rolling Stones, Britney Spears & The Backstreet Boys.  Speaking of that last piece, if anyone out there knows what the mystery track on the All I Have To Give CD single is, please leave a comment here, send me a DM on Twitter (@DennisCEarl) or fire off an email so I can update that portion.  I tried getting answers from a Backstreet Boys superfan (who was very nice but wasn’t 100% sure if indeed it’s the same one found on Selections From A Night Out With The Backstreet Boys) as well as a boy band-obsessed Jezebel journalist (who never emailed me back, unfortunately).

Additionally, I offered two stories on The Beatles, two more on the first two Friends soundtracks as well as my first Nirvana piece.  (Look for a second one very soon.)

Rather than acknowledge corrections and updates, I decided to quietly make changes where appropriate and there might be more down the road.  My hits are down substantially this year (barely over 11000 compared to 21000 in 2018) so I hope no one minds me doing this.  However, if a reader points out a mistake or something pertinent I missed, I’ll make an exception and acknowledge the assistance which is only fair.  I’m hoping to do more Mystery Track pieces in 2020.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I have many poems left in me.  I’ve written dozens over the years but in 2019, I only managed to present two, the best of which clearly is A History Of Disappointment, a belated kiss-off to all those wasted times interacting with incompatible women online.

After staying out of chatroom websites for over seven years, I broke down and returned.  I blame Her, the entertaining Spike Jonze dramedy that made me feel an intense loneliness I couldn’t shake.  It didn’t help that I had also come out of a prolonged on-again/off-again period of anxiety at the end of June.  And I haven’t had sex in almost 15 years.

Most of the sites I used to visit are long gone and it was difficult to find a new one that was accessible and easy to navigate.  I ended up going back to a place I hadn’t been in since the early 2000s.  Still overcrowded and moving at the speed of speed, it was a surreal, mostly miserable experience.  Being rejected by countless women of various types saps your soul.  Being insulted by someone who can’t spell is a sign I shouldn’t come back.  (It’s “bore”, not “boar”, you fucking idiot.)  And there were far too many weirdos.

It wasn’t all terrible, though.  Some women were friendly and cute even if we only chatted one time.  Others shared with me some rather personal stories and unusual fantasies.  In those moments, I was simultaneously skeptical and titillated.  One woman claimed to be Sara Jay, the famous porn star.  I’m convinced it was an imposter.  After four evenings trying to get something going, I bailed for good.

Haven’t Felt In Years (I must’ve thought of Matthew Good’s Haven’t Slept In Years when I came up with the title) is about drug addiction.  I thought about someone in immense pain and how numbing it is seen as their only solution.  But of course it only temporarily masks discomfort.  It never really eliminates it.  And the more you avoid reality, the more reality comes for you.

As President Trump continues to infuriate a growing amount of Americans, more books are being written about his ineptness.  I read three this year.  Cliff Sims’ Night Of Vipers, Omarosa’s Unhinged, and Michael Wolff’s Siege: Trump White House.  None of them were consistently insightful but there were enough revealing quotes from each of them that were worth sharing in this space.  As we enter an election year and the impeachment process reaches the Senate, uncertainty abounds in the American Republic.  All I know for sure is that Bernie Sanders would’ve won in 2016.  And barring some unforeseen circumstances, he can win in November.

Since The Writings Of Dennis Earl began in 2006 (back when I was on Windows Live Spaces), it’s been tradition to end the year with an annual retrospective of my blogging experiences.  But because of an inexplicable family emergency in the last three days of 2019, real life demanded a rescheduling and further reflection.

It’s been a rough ending to the year which has carried on into the early days of 2020, but I’m thankful that my dad has been getting proper care and will start to feel a lot better again very soon.  He’s the strongest person I know.  My family will get through this together.

As for me, despite the many frustrations I personally experienced in 2019, I’m very proud of the work I produced in this space in the past 12 months.  These pieces are among the best writing I’ve ever done and had I not had so many interruptions, I would’ve offered more.

Why have my hits plummeted after some modest progress just a few years ago?  I wish I had a good answer.  I simply don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m not giving up.  My life itself may seem forever stalled but I still have things to say and this platform in which to post them.  I’m always grateful and appreciative to you, my blog followers (almost 200 now), commenters and readers for visiting and engaging.  Please continue to do so.  Let’s keep the conversation going.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, January 3, 2020
3:05 a.m.

Remembering 2019, My Fourteenth Year Of Blogging (Part One)

Let me tell you a story.  I assure you it is not a work of fiction.  God knows I wish it was.

On January 18th, I was watching a lousy movie, The Death Cure, the concluding chapter of The Maze Runner trilogy.  Not even ten minutes into it, I decided to get up off the couch for some reason and that’s when it happened.  I suddenly felt incredibly dizzy.

No big deal.  I’m probably just dehydrated.  It’s happened before many times.  Just heave more fluid down the ol’ gullet, suck on some chewable Vitamin C’s and you’ll level out.  But a week later, despite eating normally and drinking & chewing like a madman, I still felt off.  Standing in place just for a few moments was weird and uncomfortable.  Maybe I wasn’t dehydrated at all.

Then my mom attempted to clean my left ear with a Q-tip.  Holy shit, was it loaded with gunk.  Thick and black, it looked like molasses mixed with tar.  The first go-round was fine.  The stuff was coming out.  The second go-round was worse.  I could feel the Q-tip pushing the remaining gunk further in.  This was a problem.

The next day I did something stupid.  Foolishly thinking my finger would somehow do a better job, the gunk was now even deeper in my ear than it was before.  I could barely hear out of it and I was freaking out.

We used to have this bottle of hydrogen peroxide, I think it’s called.  In 1993, when my earwax was again firmly wedged in my left ear (a frequent problem throughout my life), mom would pore a little in, my head leaning in the opposite direction so it didn’t ooze out.  A kleenex was placed over the ear hole.  After it loosened up my inner grossness, I lifted my head and tilted it back to the left so the kleenex would absorb the escaping contents.  We did this numerous times throughout the summer before I was fine again.  It was like having Canada Dry with tickly pop rocks in your ear.  Perfectly harmless but effective.

The colour of the gunk was always yellowy orange, a healthier sign than what was happening in January.  The peroxide was thrown out a little while earlier because it was well past the expiry date.  Unbeknownst to any of us, the best before was 1989.  (The store that sold it to my mom doesn’t even exist anymore.)  Thankfully, there was no damage done.

Feeling very vulnerable and dumb, I went over to Shopper’s Drug Mart one night to find a new batch.  Mom had already called ahead (because that’s what she always does on my willing behalf) and I spoke with the very nice pharmacist who really went out of his way to put me at ease and find something relatively affordable that would help.  (He even printed off a couple of pages of information that turned out not to be necessary, but he meant well.  He’s an intern still in college.)

As I tried very hard to hear him (my ear was now ringing), I noticed that the peroxide on the shelf had to be used with some other product, so that was out.  Ultimately, I settled on olive oil.  You put some drops in, let it stay in there between five and fifteen minutes and then you spray water into your ear hole to help ease the shit out of you.

So at home we tried it for the full fifteen and nothing more was coming out.  It was terrifying and deflating.  For the next week, I needlessly suffered with a ringing left ear.  Fortunately, there was a little pop and the hearing slightly improved, then I lost it again, then it popped again, an aggravating process that played out many times.  Somehow I was still able to sleep despite my ear constantly trying over and over again to pop.  It’s an ominous sound, like the opening notes of John Williams’ Jaws theme.  And it never stops.

Realizing despite some modest improvement that the situation was not going to completely resolve itself, Mom booked me an appointment over the phone.  A few days later, I made the trip.  I seemed to be sitting in that waiting room an awfully long time.  There was a good reason for this.  They had forgotten I was even there.

Eventually, they clued in and I was walked into one of their ridiculously tiny examination rooms.  My usual doctor, who got a major promotion shortly before this visit and now works fewer days than before, wasn’t there to see me.  But her very nice, much younger replacement looked after me.  She looked into my ears and knew exactly what to do.

Ironically, there was way more black sludge found in my right ear.  The solution was simple.  They would both be flushed out with water.

After the doctor left, the very nice elderly nurse popped in to tell me that she would be right with me.  Then she left.  Moments later, she returned to tell me there was another patient with plugged ears who needed to be attended to first, a most unusual occurrence.  After the door was closed again, I could hear her talking to one of her colleagues.  It sounded like this patient was, ahem, less patient than me.

45 minutes after I first arrived to check in with the receptionist, the nurse finally returned, profusely apologized for the delay (I wasn’t upset, really) and explained what was going to happen.  She was going to fire hot water into each of my ears.  While she did this, I was to hold this little container that would catch the water and, hopefully, all the escaping guck that had been refusing to be evicted back home.  I had to hold it under my ear, not on my ear.  Otherwise, there would be serious damage.  No problem.

I was strangely relaxed.  At this point, I was desperate.  I just wanted to hear normally again.

I have to say it’s quite the sensation having a flood of hot water flowing through your ear.  It’s like having a tidal wave in your head.  When the left was flushed out, I was shocked to not see any black guck in the container.  What I did see was softer, brownish guck.  The olive oil was working after all.

When the process was repeated for the right, oh my God, to see all that tar-like earwax, a marble-sized ball, was startling.  I didn’t even know it was in there.  I hadn’t been having any issues out of that side.

In a matter of seconds, as the remaining drops of water slid out of my grateful ear holes, it was like a miracle.  The ringing was gone, that annoying hum had disappeared and I was hearing so clearly it was jolting.  The thank yous came rather easily.  The replacement doctor came back to take a final look inside and despite some raw soreness on the left, she gave me the all-clear.  I was advised to put olive oil in my ears once a week before I went to bed, but I haven’t felt the need to do so.

And yet, I still felt dizzy so I continued to drink lots of juice and water, and suck and chew on several Vitamin C’s.  Within another week or so, suddenly I was completely better.  I had learned online that sometimes when you stand up, say, a little too quickly or awkwardly, you can experience vertigo.  It’s nothing serious and after an undetermined amount of time it goes away on its own.  My three weeks of bizarre uncertainty were over.

Three months later, a new crisis emerged out of nowhere.

For Mother’s Day, my family ordered Chinese food.  Because of my many food intolerances, we requested no MSG.  Normally, this is noted on the bill when you go to pick it up.  Not this time.  This freaked me the fuck out.  My heart started to race and even though I kept eating my delicious food regardless, I couldn’t stop obsessing about it.  (I found out later from mom that they don’t always put the no MSG thing on the bill.)  Oddly, this didn’t stop me from finishing off my leftovers the following night.  Sometimes hunger is more powerful than fear.

When I didn’t get violently ill, we all came to the natural conclusion that indeed there was no MSG in my food and I worried, as usual, for nothing.  But I still couldn’t relax.  And a few nights later, when I tried to eat a different supper, I was so adrenalized I struggled mightily to eat just half of it.  The following day, it happened again.

Shortly thereafter, I had a terrifying night in bed, completely panic stricken.  I honestly thought I was going to die.  I had noticed during the winter dizzy spell that my heart palpitations had returned.  One morning during that awful period, I got up and had the dry heaves.  I didn’t think it was a good idea to eat anything that day.  When I did eventually eat during that week, I started with lighter meals and snacks before moving back to normal portions.  The palpitations haven’t gone away since, though they ebb and flow depending on the day.

This time in May and June, though, was worse.  I was both tired (from a lack of sleep) and super excited (because of the adrenaline).  I kept obsessively taking my temperature which was almost always fine.  I didn’t have the flu.  But there was one night where it did creep up ever so briefly to 100 before falling back in line again.  I didn’t really exhibit any other symptoms, though.

Thank God for echinacea which started to calm me down and eventually led me back to normal meals.  By the last week of June, I felt a hell of a lot better.  The palps didn’t want me to forget them so they would make infrequent reminders of their existence, a mild nuisance.  For the next three months, my health was close to perfect.

Then I signed up for the federal election.  This was my ninth time as a poll worker overall.  (I’ve mostly worked provincial elections.)  Everything was fine until a week after my three and a half hour training session.  Prior to this year, I’d never had a stressful experience working for the government.  This time would be different.

Perhaps because I was still feeling vulnerable, a simple task involving the contact of my election day partner to arrange a time to pick up our materials at the returning office downtown became needlessly worrisome.  Because I was trained three and a half weeks before the actual morning we would start setting up our voting stations, there was plenty of time to make that phone call.  In fact, I figured he would reach out to me first.

When he didn’t, I started to freak and once again, I wasn’t able to eat consistent meals for a short time.  Even the day after we set everything up (he turned out to be a swell guy), it was back to the echinacea so I could intake regular food again.  As before, I laid down on my couch much of the time because I thought I was getting sick again.  One afternoon, I sucked it up to vote at an advance poll.

The good news is I was perfectly fine for the pick-up day and my actual job duties (although I did have to call my mom before the polls opened to tell me what my SIN card number is since I forgot to bring it with me).  The bad news is I got legitimately sick again in the days following the election.  I must have caught something from an inconsiderate voter.

Almost immediately, I noticed a bad taste in my throat which eventually became sore.  I also started getting the shivers and eventually had a 101 fever.  The dry heaves returned more than once.  My food intake greatly diminished yet again.  Most delightfully, this flu bug eventually morphed into a bad cold.  At one point, I sounded like Johnny Cash crossed with Bea Arthur which truthfully wasn’t entirely terrible.  I had an awful cough, too.

I had already postponed a get-together with an old friend going through a hard time (I finally saw him earlier this month and he seems to be doing much better) and a check-up with my dentist.  After I fully recovered, I gave myself extra time to adjust to normalcy before my mom booked the appointment.  Unfortunately, I started freaking out again when he discovered two cavities.  Once he had them filled and once I finally burned off this incredibly stubborn adrenaline, things calmed right down again.

Then came the afternoon of December 29.  I’ll never forget it.

While laying in bed just after 12:30 p.m. (I’m a night owl who sleeps late), my mom called out to me.  Awake enough to hear her, by the time I quickly reached the staircase, she gave me explicit instructions:

“Could you please get dressed?  We need to take your father to the hospital.”

Holy shit.  What the hell’s going on?

By the time I got it together and made my way downstairs, I saw my dad, the strongest guy I know, in absolute agony.  He had a pain on the left side of his stomach.  It started at 9 in the morning when he got up, earlier than usual.  Mom ordered a cab and we were off.

At the ER, they took his temperature (normal), checked his blood pressure (slightly elevated) and asked him to rate his pain on a scale of 1 to 10.  He said it was an 8.  For the two hours we waited for him to be treated, it went up to a 9 (but it would go down a bit to a 7).  He thought he was gonna pass out.  I noticed his eyes were closed a couple of times.

Finally, we got the PA announcement to send us to The Green Zone.  You pick up the phone.  No one answers, it just rings constantly.  And then this sliding science fiction door opens complete with its own sound effect.  Mom couldn’t hang up the phone properly so it almost fell to the ground.  Annoyed (this is how I broke my old phone 20 years ago), I put it back in the cradle.

Dad had to make a urine sample and then we waited another hour.  A good-humoured nurse took his blood.  Then after another wait, the first doctor examined him and asked a bunch of questions.  She thought it might be Diverticulitis, the exact same diagnosis my aunt got this summer, an issue she’s still struggling with.  For some reason, she also mentioned they may have to check his bum.

After another break, another doctor arrived.  She’d seen the blood work.  It was bad.  Dad’s blood sugar levels were way too high.  20 instead of the 6 to 8 sweet spot.  They were gonna take more blood out of him.  The word “diabetes” was first uttered.  This was not the ruptured appendix incident of 2001.

Figuring the rectal exam was forthcoming, Mom wondered out loud if we should excuse ourselves.  Perplexed, the doctor firmly declared to her patient, “I’m not going to touch your bum.”  Dad jokingly snapped his fingers in disappointment and there was, for a brief moment, some release of the awful tension.

Then, we moved to a different part of The Green Zone.  Dad sat in a lounge chair and was hooked up to an IV.  None of us had eaten.  I had only consumed a 2-dollar can of Canada Dry and half a dozen Tic Tacs.  My parents slowly exchanged sips from a 3-dollar bottle of water which stopped being cold ages ago.  As the 24-hour digital clock revealed it was almost 6, with Dad scheduled for a CT scan (and asked to provide another urine sample), he remained while we cabbed it back home.

Somehow, we managed to eat some regular food for the rest of the night.  Mom called the hospital every hour or two for updates.  All we would learn is that he was staying overnight.

The next morning, we found out he had surgery.  What?  We bussed it over there before Noon.

Over the phone, mom was told he would be on the third floor since he was having Same Day Surgery.  But when we got inside we got scolded by a nurse.  If we weren’t supposed to be in here, how come someone let us in?

Eventually, we found out what floor he was going to be recuperating on now that he was admitted into the main part of the hospital and as we briefly waited for his arrival, there he was just being wheeled down by two cheery nurses.  He was mellow and fatigued but in good spirits.  Plus, his appetite had returned.

So, what the fuck was causing his pain?  A tiny kidney stone (which he still has) and an infection (he’s on antibiotics).  The surgery involved the implementation of a stent to prevent further complications.  His blood sugar level dropped to 11 from 20 and his pain had completely disappeared.  It would go up to 14 before the end of the night.

We found out the hospital tried to get in touch with us just before Midnight the previous evening but Mom allowed me to go online (I use dial-up) and so they got a busy signal.  Mom told me she’s glad she didn’t know about the surgery.  She would’ve worried more.  Neither of us were able to eat very well anyway.  I had two apples for supper instead of burgers.

On New Year’s Eve, we got some great news.  Dad was coming home.  My aunt’s husband picked him up in the early afternoon and brought him back.  He’s doing well but his lifestyle is going to change.  He’s a Type 2 Diabetic and he needs to adjust to a new diet.  No more sugar in his coffee among other sudden restrictions.  We got him his first batch of meds with another pick-up coming next week.  The stent will have to come out, he needs a new family doctor (his old one retired 20 years ago and he didn’t find an immediate replacement) and he’ll be seeing some specialists soon.  We still don’t know what caused the kidney stone or what will happen to it so we’re hoping for some answers there.

Since he came home, I’ve been able to eat a lot better (I didn’t have anxiety, I just didn’t feel like eating hot, heavy meals) but Mom, who cooks his suppers, is still a bit stressed about what to do about his diet.  Like me, she’s a super worrier but we’re all coping as best we can.  We’re just glad Dad’s ok and hope he follows doctor’s orders which he thankfully is at this point.  We’re very grateful to my aunt, who works in a doctor’s office, for all her insight and support.  We all have to adjust to this sudden new reality.

As for me, going forward in this new year and decade, I’m aiming to be more vigilant and sensible while simultaneously attempting to be far less irrational and needlessly terrified.  It is a constant, embarrassing, often isolating struggle.  I am a classic overreactor.  But here’s hoping there’ll be fewer meltdowns in my future.

If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s this.  I can have stunning, unexpected moments of terror like this and yet still find ways to be creative and productive.  My audience may have suddenly shrunk in the last twelve months but as you’ll see, this website has never been better.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, January 2, 2020
2:50 a.m.