Nudity is Only Skin-Deep

I worked at a crappity retail location selling knock-off Tommy Hilfiger sweaters, tiny Hong Kong women's fashions, and cheap bongs years ago. The store was in a mall, and I frequently worked the opening shift. My boss frequently set up little tests of my loyalty and competence. He hired what he called "mysterious shoppers" to check out my customer service skills. He was a strange and suspicious man.

One day, I showed up, opened the folding security doors, and was met by a scene of chaos. Pretty much the entirety of the floor was covered by heaps of plastic coat hangers--I'm talking at least a couple of hundred coat hangers. They were in tangled heaps, and there was no way the shop could be open to the public in this condition.

I hastened to tidy up the mess wondering why my boss thought it necessary to test me so. I'd pick up one hanger, and a bunch would come attached like Bizzaroland Barrel of Monkeys. I eventually got them all picked up and stashed in two giant garbage bags. The store didn't have any storage space, so I eventually stashed them in the change room. I figured that if someone wanted to try something on, I could just haul the bags out of the way.

A few hours later, my boss strolled in. He looked around the store, nodding contentedly, then said, "Good" before leaving again.

When I was a kid, my Dad told me many stories about growing up in rural Newfoundland. One story stuck out in particular. There was a schoolteacher or a pastor, I can't recall which, who was sexually abusing children. Dad was one of the kids attacked by this guy. The grownups didn't believe the kids because he was an upstanding community member. So the kids decided to take matters into their own hands.

Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Night, was a big holiday in 1950s Newfoundland. The kids timed their vengeance for this night. They waited for the pedophile to go to the outhouse, and once he was there, they quickly bound the door shut with rope and proceeded to build a great bonfire around the privy. They got a fire going, but the man's screams drew the attention of other grownups and he was freed.

He packed up and left the town. I have no idea if he ever molested another kid again, but he never bothered these ones again.

Years ago, when I lived in the Rocky Mountains, I stared overhead at the lurid green glow of the Aurora Borealis. Dad told me that when the night was cold enough and the air was still, I could make the northern lights move with a sharp noise. And so on those bitter, biting winter nights, I would stand outdoors and strike over and over again with a hammer hoping to make the lights dance. It didn't work, of course, although sometimes I pretended to believe it did. My attempts to influence the goddess of dawn were fruitless. Even the dog watched with disinterest while the sky glowed like something out of science fiction.

Years later, I would stare intently at the exact same coloured glow of the text on a Commodore PET screen. Sometimes, I even wished I had a hammer.

“I was admonished to adopt feminine clothes; I refused, and still refuse. As for other avocations of women, there are plenty of other women to perform them.”
― Joan of Arc

She was old. A gift to my mother from her mother from her mother before. She was taller than most dolls. Tall and lean with peculiar creases where leg met torso. The legs didn't turn in their sockets. They didn't have sockets. The legs would tip back and forth with the stiffness of an arthritic swimmer, skin a pale peachy pink, slight dimples behind the knees. I think her hair was real. It was thick and curly and dirty blonde. She was my mother's bridal doll, and I was about to kill her.

In the late 1970s, when I was about six years old, I was a weird kid. I didn't like to wear dresses, and I didn't much like playing with dolls. Most kids I knew played games like change the diaper or feed the baby. This mystified me. I already had to help do that stuff with my little sister and babies of my parents' friends, and that wasn't much fun at all. The way I figured, people who liked changing diapers were crazy. Very occasionally, I'd pick up my dolls and play with them. Sometimes I played terrible car accident. That limbs could be removed from the torso of a Barbie knock-off was an amazing feature. Arms and legs would litter my room in gory disarray while I ran around making ambulance noises. Other times I'd play mating season. Since I didn't have any boy dolls, I'd fashion a makeshift penis by jabbing a safety pin into the crotch of one doll and then have it hump another, doggy-style. When you grow up on a farm, that's just the way things are done. Captured spy was another fun game. Mom got pretty mad when I broke a bunch of straws off her broom to jab under the fingernails of a trussed-up doll exhorting it to reveal the top secret plans.

I had special plans for the bridal doll. This would be a one-time-only affair. Today I was going to play Joan of Arc.

What was anathema for city kids was commonplace for me. No one hid the matches or knives from me. Although I wasn't big enough to wield an axe safely, I knew how to strip tinder with a pocket knife. I knew how to build and tend a fire, and if I let the wood stove go out, I was in trouble. Today wasn't about cooking stoves, though. Dad was burning brush in the back yard, and I was going to play with fire.

I suppose I knew about Joan of Arc from tv and from Jehovah's Witness literature. I liked to look at the line drawings in the magazines and books while the elders droned on and on at meetings. I remember seeing drawings of people being burnt to death at stakes, Bibles chained to their chests, flames licking at their upturned faces. Although Joan didn't have a Bible strapped to her chest, neither would the doll.

And so I gathered up sticks and branches and dried old weeds. Since my little sister wanted to be a hairdresser, she cut off all the doll's hair. The doll looked up at us with blank glass eyes. She accepted her fate. I jammed a stake into the ground, tied the nude doll to it with baling twine, and built up the pyre.

I watched in morbid fascination. It looked exactly like what I imagined a real person would look like going up in flames. She didn't burn like a bit of wood. Her skin begin to melt and then slough off while smoke poured heavenward. Her glass eyes rolled in her head.

My reverie was interrupted by the angry shrieks of my mother. Play time was over.

When I was about six or so, I remember hearing my cat Siam making a ruckus in the porch. I went to see what was going on, and to my horror, I saw her chasing a bat. The bat flitted in desperation from one end of the porch to the other, and I screamed at the cat to stop. I flung myself on top of Siam, trying to hold her down, and the bat continued to swoop.

It was obviously a vampire, and my cat didn't know it was in mortal peril. She just thought it was a mousebird.

Siam squirmed beneath me, determined to resume her hunt, and I held the cat even tighter, determined to save her from becoming the undead. I was also scared, myself, because the vampire might turn me, too.

I screamed for my Mom, and eventually, she came running. I think she'd been working in the garden or something. She opened the door, the bat flew away, and Siam gave me stink eye.

And then my Mom sat down and told me a bit about different kinds of bats, and how vampires weren't real.

It was a bit anticlimactic, somehow, to realize vampires aren't real, this kind of bat only eats bugs, and the worst possibility was only rabies.

I was just reminded of something that happened long, long ago, back when my own personal plumbing equipment was first starting to do its adult thing. In those days, my Mom cautioned me against tampons. In her mind, using a tampon was like being fingerblasted by Satan himself, and she'd have none of it for herself or her daughters.

And so I was stuck riding the fat cotton pony: maxi pads approximately the same size and shape as size as a crappity sleeping bag. These were the sort of thing that announced to anyone who glanced below waist level that you were most assuredly on the rag. No matter how baggy my pants, the damned things would often poke out from the back, giving me the appearance of a poorly-hidden rudimentary tail. To top it off, when I sat down, I'd be about an inch taller until the squelch kicked in.

Yuck.

So it was with a certain amount of illicit naughtiness that I'd leaf through teenybopper girl magazines with their ubiquitous ads on feminine hygiene. There, between the ads for beltless sanitary napkins and floral douches, I'd find advertisements for the sexy, sexy tampon.

What was a pubescent girl to do when presented with this cure for pad-induced diaper rash? I read the ads furtively, and noted that most of them offered a sample kit with a free tampon starter kit and instruction manual which would arrive in the mail in a discrete, unmarked package. Since I couldn't afford to purchase tampons at the store, and had no way of doing so without it being noticed by Mom, I decided to write a letter to Tampax and get one of these magical kits.

One day, the package arrived. I felt a frisson of guilt and naughtiness. I had a tampon. Next time Aunt Flo came to visit, I was going to take that tampon and jam it right up my wazoo! Oh yes, yes!

Menarche is a crazy time, in case you've forgotten or don't know. Your monthlies aren't necessarily monthly, and with the hormonal shitstorm that is puberty, everything doesn't work in an orderly fashion. It's hit and miss. Sometimes you'll gush like an oil geyser without warning, and other times the pressure will build and build for weeks, and your damned endometrium just plain refuses to slough itself off. Or when it finally does, it takes its own sweet time and goes on for a few weeks at a time.

Have empathy for girls at this stage. It is a deeply unpleasant time.

Anyhow, the bloodgates opened, and I opened my mysterious guide to internal hygiene. I was confronted with an unattractive cardboard tube with a bunch of cotton jammed inside. I looked at it skeptically, then read the instruction manual. It seemed pretty straight-forward.

It wasn't.

Not everyone is built the same. I jammed and jammed that thing, but it was going nowhere. I ended up destroying it against my tender bits. I gave up in frustration and used another giant maxi pad.

*grumble grumble*

After a day or so, I decided I was going to give it another go. I opened another package. This one looked quite different. It looked like a plastic bullet. Bang bang.... This time, the thing was going in. I was determined.

I put a leg up on the bed and attacked my nether regions with the blood torpedo. It was hard work. It was painful work. But with perseverance, I finally got the thing in and voila! Cotton hypodermic. I had successfully injected myself with a wad of cotton.

By that point, it was quite late, and I still had homework to do, so I did some homework, forgot all about the tampon, and fell asleep.

The next morning, I was awoken by the shrill ringing of the telephone. This was back in the time when I used to wake up en route to the phone, and this time, I woke up running to the phone all while experiencing an utterly bizarre sensation while simultaneously hearing a strange farting noise.

I was farting! But not from my ass!

What the fuck? This was NOT in the instruction manual!

The whole time I ran to the phone, it felt like a half gallon of air was escaping from around the cotton wadded up inside me.

I didn't use a tampon again for years.

When I was small, and my little sister smaller, Dad put in a basement and our mobile home was set on top of it. A porch was constructed, and a stairway was being built. From its time being exposed to the elements, there was still a fair bit of water on the concrete far below. Mom and Dad joked that it was our swimming pool.

One winter day, my sister, overstuffed and off-balance in a giant snowsuit and all the multiple layers, tripped and fell head-first down the unfinished stairwell. It was a strict free-fall to the cement twelve feet below.

The only thing that saved her was the stirrup-pant elastic of her snowsuit catching on a protruding nail. She was still so tiny that just this was enough. She shrieked and flailed, screaming, "I can't swim! I can't swim!"

Terror combined with relief is often hilarious. In our relief, we laughed that her terror was at the wrong thing.

She can swim now. It's a good thing, because that nail wouldn't be enough anymore.

(I serendipitously discovered something I wrote in 2001 for a kinesiology class (of all things). It's something of a bio, and I hope you find it interesting. It covers a lot of eclectic ground. Some of the stories I've talked about here before, but you'll probably also find new material.)

Prologue

I sit in a state of limbo between youth and middle age. Okay, so maybe I’m not really sitting, but the limbo part still counts. With pelvis tucked under, head tipped way back, and snakelike undulations, I dance from one age group to the next. I used to believe time is a linear thing, but over the years have come to realize that’s not quite the truth. Time is not linear. Neither is it circular. For me, time encapsulates both shapes and is a sine wave or a moving spiral. My life has been a journey from one bizarre or memorable physical experience to another. Upon first glance, many of the events don’t seem to have much in common, but upon closer examination, recurring themes make themselves evident: hair, animals, pain, trances, and those ubiquitous spirals. These themes intersect from time to time, as travelling circles are wont to do.

Growing up, I suspected I was in no way a typical kid. Nevertheless, I was reading novels which told me all children believed that of themselves, so I thought maybe my oddness was all in my head. Looking back, however, I can see my original suspicions were bang-on. I was not a typical kid with a typical family. No, just about every aspect of my life and upbringing was peculiar. How many kids do you know who were raised in a fundamentalist Christian background, moved thousands of kilometres, read voraciously, were dependant upon horses for travel, sled dogs for firewood, and themselves for gathering food in the wilderness? And how many of these kids turned out as secular humanist, agnostic, belly dancers with penchants for writing and the martial arts? Not too many, I would guess. It’s been a weird and wonderful thirty years, and this is a cross-selection of my life, in no particular order.

The Life of an Amish Gypsy Wannabe

My family veritably lived the lives of Gypsies during the 1980s, travelling across Canada in an elusive search for employment. I was a latchkey kid when my parents worked, and a hard-working child when they were unemployed.

I started off living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in the early 1970s, then moved to a little place way out in the boonies called Dorn Ridge. For a brief time, I lived in Saint John in a campground and in a Moncton apartment when I was about four or five. In 1980, we began our peregrination in earnest by relocating to a small coastal town in Newfoundland called Musgrave Harbour.

We had no running water, and local wells were contaminated with naturally-occurring carcinogenic minerals. This made food preparation very time-consuming, since we had to travel several miles to find a clean well. Sometimes wells believed to be clean were fouled by the actions of ignorant people. Once, while hauling buckets of water out of a well, my father found a used sanitary napkin and some bloodied panties. As a result, we had to travel even further to find a clean well. We also had to haul extra water for our livestock (geese, chickens, dog, cat, goat, and horses). We relied on our animals for food, labour, transportation, and protection.

For a few months, our only electricity was supplied by a gas-operated generator. This made things even more difficult. All our food was prepared on a wood stove, so I had to help gather firewood after school. Because we had to conserve our gasoline for electricity, we seldom drove anywhere in our truck. Instead, we went to our three weekly religious meetings with a horse and carriage. Luckily, our Kingdom Hall (a church for Jehovah's Witnesses) wasn't too far away, so the trip didn't take too long. It's a wonder people didn't think we were Amish instead of Jehovah's Witnesses.

Much of our time was spent picking berries or working the fields at an isolated garden patch. I picked blueberries, cranberries, partridge berries, and bakeapples. At the garden, I planted and harvested potatoes. The potato site always seemed dreadfully cold, and a windbreak and campfire were always set up to give us a modicum of shelter. We’d put the billy on to boil for breaks, and sat in the lee of the wind while sipping too-hot cups of tea and munching on raw potatoes. During the caplin spawning season, we’d go down to the beach and fill buckets with tiny, silver, glistening fish and take them home to dry. Sometimes, we’d walk out amongst giant soggy rocks during low tide and pick the purple mussels which hung in succulent clusters.

Shortly after moving to Newfoundland, we packed up just a few belongings, sold our livestock, and took off to British Columbia in our big orange truck with not much more than a camper, a dog, a cat, and the clothes on our back. We hoped there would be work for my father in British Columbia. The search for employment was why we’d moved to Newfoundland in the first place, but it just hadn’t worked out.

In times of near destitution, we lived off the land. When my family lived in the Rockies and the north coast of Newfoundland, I was sorely punished if I didn't pick rose hips/berries/mushrooms after school, gather/stack firewood, gut and pluck chickens, or help my mother with canning venison or rabbit meat. I was responsible for gathering wood for the stove with the dog sled. I also stacked wood and cut kindling.

These chores were a matter of survival. Several other Jehovah's Witness families in the mountain areas were in the same predicament. Paid work was scarce. Our families pooled resources and did the hunter/gatherer bit together. My father and another Jehovah's Witness in the area couldn't afford individual moose licenses, so they had to split one. Fortunately, my father bagged a huge bull--enough to feed both our families for the winter. He also had a snare line, and wanted me to accompany him on his patrols. I always demurred, though. Although I would help butcher, I didn’t want to do any actual killing or collecting. I didn’t want to watch my father twist the necks of bunnies. Neither could I bear the thought of finding them suffocated with bulging eyes or gnawed-off paws. In the meantime, another family raised domesticated rabbits for meat and fur. We traded moose meat for rabbit meat, rose hip jam for mushrooms, and fresh baked bread for pies. The women sewed slippers and bottled jam to sell at craft and farmers’ markets.

One way the families coped with the meal problem was by taking turns with the kids. One family had eight children, and gladly took on more. We just gave them food, and it was distributed to all.

Similarly, none of us wore new clothes, but operated a hand-me-down network. This was very unfortunate for the youngest children, who ended up with ancient, worn-out clothing.

Oddly enough, the most difficult bit wasn’t when we were living off the land in British Columbia or Newfoundland, but when we spiralled back to rural New Brunswick when I was thirteen or fourteen. My school bus arrived at my door at 7:10 am, and I didn't get back home until roughly 6:00 pm. The buses were extremely overcrowded, with three or more high school students per seat. On more than one occasion, I arrived at school with fierce cramping in my legs and buttocks from perching thirty kilometres on a scant ten centimetres of seat.

My family was still very religious, and we attended meetings three times each week. I sometimes had sandwiches on the hour-long truck ride to religious meetings, but molasses sandwiches are a poor substitute for a proper meal, especially for growing children and hardworking blue collar workers like my Dad. At this point, both of my parents worked in the city, so they had just enough time to feed/water the livestock, wash up and change, and return to town for the meetings.

By the time we got back home, it was well after 10 pm and far too late for a real meal, especially when I had to get up so early in the morning. I had to suffice with a bowl of cereal or a couple slices of toast. Obviously, there was no time for any homework or studying on meeting nights, but I somehow managed to maintain excellent marks and do very well in regional science fairs. I unexpectedly received a bursary to attend university.

In my early twenties, I continued the spiral pattern by moving back to Fredericton, and then to Moncton. Although I wouldn’t mind living in British Columbia once more, I do hope I don’t end up living in Newfoundland again. The cold, windswept, Eastern beaches don’t call to me in the same way as the mountains, rain forests, deserts, and tundra of the West.

My travels have given me the opportunity to meet countless people. They have also given me ample opportunity for self-reflection. I am an agnostic. This is not a decision I came to lightly, but upon years of reflection (and probably countless hours spent commuting to religious meetings). I don't begrudge religious people their beliefs, as long as they have applied honest thought to them. I have no respect for blind faith, but for examination, reasoning, and understanding. It was only when I began to apply these principles to my own life that I realized my life is what I make of it. Gone are the days of passive acceptance of life, lack of interest in my surroundings, and dreadful fear of annihilation in some literal, fiery Armageddon. In their stead, I have a voracious hunger for new knowledge and self-improvement. In this way, I am both a classic existentialist, dependent upon myself for just about everything, and an experiential junkie.

In case you've been wondering what's with all the poetry entries lately, I've taken on another challenge: a poem a day for 66 days. I expect the stuff to be of varying quality, but I'm looking forward to the creative brain flexing.

In the meantime, my 100-day squat challenge is still a go. I missed a few weeks of the challenge due to leg surgery, so once I was healed I decided to do 100 squats a day until I was all caught up. I lost track, and out of a strange sort of laziness, I decided to just continue doing 100 squats a day for the rest of the challenge. I might just continue doing 100 squats a day when it's done. I think it's great for my general strength and flexibility, and really, I don't find body weight squats taxing. They're also making my pistol squats much easier....

Wait wait wait, you may say. Surgery?

Yeah.

About two years ago, I noticed a new mole a few inches above one of my ankles. A bit paranoid, I asked my doctor about it. He took a look at it and told me not to worry. He said it was just a mole. A year later, I asked him about it again. He once again told me not to worry. I didn't like the look of it, though. It didn't feel the same as any other mole I have. It felt slightly dry, and the edges weren't smooth. So I asked him to excise it. I could tell he thought I was being a hypochondriac, but he agreed to remove it with a punch biopsy. I've had a mole removed before (from my back). It wasn't a huge deal. It barely hurt.

This time, it hurt like fuck. The freezing needle must have gone right into a major nerve cluster, because I gave a good yell. Once the freezing set in, it was fine, though, and the punch biopsy didn't hurt at all. The doctor assured me that it should be healed up in less than a week.

It didn't heal for months. It never even got a scab. I had to keep it clean, moisturized, and bandaged all the time. I stopped doing aerial silks because the wound is in exactly the right place to be constantly re-injured by leg wraps, which are an integral part of aerial silks.

About a week before I was scheduled to leave for Peru the doctor called me. It wasn't just a mole. It was a basal cell carcinoma.

Fan-fucking-tastic. Cancer time. Luckily for me, this is an extremely-slow-moving cancer. An appointment was made for me to go in for surgery to have it removed. As you can imagine, I was pretty freaked out and filled with a plethora of what-ifs.

On the scheduled day, I ran to the dermatologist's office. I knew it would be my last time running for a while, so I made the most of it. I got to the office and laid down on the gurney, sock off and pant leg pulled up. The doctor prepared the freezing needle, and I prepared myself for the suck. This time, however, the needle wasn't that bad.

The freezing worked pretty well, but not enough. On the surface, the cutting was fine, but he had to gouge in deeper. He cut out a piece of me about the size of an almond, and it hurt like fuck. You know how it feels when you hit your funny bone? Well, I figure his scalpel hit the nerve cluster that first freezing needle hit, because all of a sudden, I was hit by the funny bone sensation if it were made of sheer pain. I yelled. I jerked. I tried not to, but I couldn't help it. I felt a wave of nausea and faintness. He apologized, but then it was over.

He plopped the excised flesh onto the table next to me. It looked like a little piece of raw chicken. Such a small bit for such a big pain.

He stitched me up. It took a double row of stitches, and I looked down at the site, aghast. It protruded like Frankenstein's monster making duckface lips. He told me that because of the location, the stitches would be under a lot of tension. I was therefore not to run, jump, or anything else which would increase the tension for fear that my skin would rip. Walking was ok, though.

I nodded. I felt faint. I called a cab and went home. For the next two days, I sat on my ass. It hurt too much to walk more than a few steps. I hoped and hoped that the surgery was sufficient, and that it had gotten all of that skin cancer out of me. I didn't want to go in for more excision. What if they had to dig it out of me with some sort of doctor shovel?

The stitches healed wonderfully. The wound no longer stuck out, but the skin had relaxed and settled back into shape. When I had the stitches taken out a week and a half later, I went right back to training. I'd lost a bit of stamina, but it was good to be back.

A couple of days later, I was all set to go training again when I was hit by a wave of nausea which I just couldn't shake. So I went home.

The next day, I clued in to why I felt nauseated. The wound had become infected once the stitches were pulled out. What had looked completely neat and tidy suddenly looked like an infected zombie bite. I went to the doctor, and he was afraid I had cellulitis. This scared the crap out of me. knightky had that last year, and it was BAD. I was put on antibiotics and told that if the infection spread, to go to emergency right away.

I was lucky. The antibiotics worked, and the infection didn't spread at all.

And guess what? The excision worked. It got all of the carcinoma. I have a clean bill of health.

Take that, cancer. To celebrate, I'm living my life as fully as I can. Celebrate with me?

I remember going trout fishing with Dad, my sister, and our next door neighbour, Jake. I think I was about seven at the time, and my sister about three. The fish were biting that day, and I was very excited to catch a fish. Jake and Dad were catching plenty. My sister wasn't trusted with a hook, yet, but instead had a big washer at the end of her line. She was young enough to not know the difference, at that point.

While my Dad was catching a fish, and explaining what to do, Jake snuck down below and somehow, forced a small fish through the hole of my sister's washer, then snuck back up beside us.

"Look!" he exclaimed. "You've got one! Reel it in!"

And so, to her great joy, my sister caught her very first fish.