And you wondered why my love songs are always the grieving kind
Why I wander off to search for my reflection in the crowd
― Laura Gibson, “Empire Builder”
 
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.
― James Baldwin
 
I confuse music with happiness.
― Alan Mills

Sometimes, other people’s lists have their own highlight colour. My first love had a list of random favourites on his blog. As a result, there are things that will forever make me think of him: Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Hum’s You’d Prefer an Astronaut, Josie and the Pussycats, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Fiona Apple’s “Never Is a Promise”, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth…
 
I haven’t had anybody to share the things I love with. It makes me sad whenever I think about how I’ve experienced the best moments of my life alone. When you lead a solitary life, you have to become your own witness.
 
Whenever I attend a show, usually alone, I look for myself in photos and videos people share on social media, even though I tend to stand in the back with my arms crossed. It’s not narcissism. It’s as if I’m looking for proof that I was really there, sort of like how I would sometimes look at myself in the mirror while crying to make sure my emotions were visible and not just a figment of my imagination.
 
So I connect the dots, drawing a self-portrait by archiving the things that are important to me, put it in a bottle and throw it at sea, hoping that someday someone may find me.

On ne m’avait pas dit qu’une fois arrivée ici / Je n’aurais plus nulle part où m’en aller.
― Les Sœurs Boulay, « Nous après nous »

Je ne me suicide pas parce que j'ai envie de partir. Quand on a envie de quelque chose on est sauf. Je ne pars pas parce qu'une fois partie je n'aurais plus envie de rien et qu'il faudrait que je m'extermine. Ma logique m'effraie.
― Réjean Ducharme, L’avalée des avalés
 
 
I’d been living in my basement apartment for six years, but I’d never bothered making it nice because Montreal didn’t feel like home to me. One of my biggest fears is dying here. There would be nobody to ship my body home, or to even know where that is.

I’ve always been attracted to the ocean. On my last trips, I’ve gone to Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, British Columbia, and back to Newfoundland. I’ve been looking for a place for my body.

 
Wherever I would go, no matter for how long, I would never do touristy things. It wasn’t that I was above it. What always interested me was finding out if I would like to live there, so I would just go about my days as I would at home: go to a café and write, go to the pool, eat out, go for a walk, stop by a bookstore, go to the movies…

 
I booked my most recent trip to Newfoundland through a travel agency. I flew in to Deer Lake, on the northern tip of the island, and drove down to St. John’s over two weeks. The agency had sent me a list of suggested attractions along the way. It happened a couple of times that I punched one of their suggestions into my GPS only to end up in the middle of nowhere on what could not possibly be considered a road, praying to God that I would make it out without a flat tire.
​
“Just east of Bonavista you’ll find Elliston, a community that claims the title of Root Cellar Capital of the World with over 135 root cellars, some almost 200 years old,” read the document. Fortunately, it was a paved road that led me there. Next to Nanny’s Root Cellar Kitchen, there was a plaque:
 
A favourite poem of Reverend Charles Lench, the Methodist Minister serving Bird Island Cove/Elliston, 1898-1902
 
If you want to see a town
The sort of town you like,
You needn’t pack your clothes in a grip,
And go off on a long, long hike.
 
You’ll only find what you left behind,
There is nothing really new,
It’s a knock at yourself, then a knock at your town;
It isn’t your town, it’s you.

​I don’t care if forever never comes
‘Cause I’m holding out for that teenage feeling
-Neko Case, “Teenage Feeling”
 
I’ve always been a sucker. Not as in gullible, mind you. What I mean is that, when I was seven years old, I watched Dr. Zhivago over two nights as it played on TV and, when the titular character saw the woman he loved as he passed by her on a tramway and ran after her, dying of a heart attack while she kept on walking, completely oblivious to the drama unfolding behind her, I also died a little. It became my favourite movie, as it would for any normal seven-year-old. When I saw it on VHS a few years later at the store, still split over two cassettes, I bought it with the hard-earned money I made babysitting my cousins.
 
In 2011, it played as part of a film classic series at Cinéma Banque Scotia. I didn’t miss my chance to see it on the big screen. I was afraid that it would disappoint now that I was a more critical adult but, as I was watching it, the thought that came to mind was the phrase my grandmother had uttered when she watched Fly Away Home (also a favourite of mine): “They don’t make them like this anymore.”

​I’ve always been curious. We speak of acquired tastes. Taste is a muscle. I always wanted to enjoy more. I liked eating so much that it would upset me when I didn’t like a particular food. Like olives. So, every once in a while, I would have one, just to see if my taste had changed. As a result, there isn’t much I don’t eat today, including olives.
 
The first time I ordered a coffee, it was because I wanted to be like the Gilmore Girls. Every sip made me gag, but I was in front of friends, so I kept on drinking, trying my best to hide how I truly felt. Now it’s a treat I can’t go without for one day. I’m the kind of asshole who talks about his preferred tasting notes when trying to figure out which bag of beans to buy.
 
*
 
You have to suppress a lot of yourself to sleep with men. You have to pretend you’re an empty shell. You might even have to use weed or alcohol to bypass your demisexuality.
 
It’s only because of the pandemic that you realize “Wait… So I don’t have to do this?”
 
*
 
When I was still in university, I decided to make a list of all the things I wanted to do before summer was over to avoid what usually happens: so many plans at the start and so few of them achieved by the time the fall semester came around. My plan worked. When school started, I’d checked off every item on the list except one: going to my first dance show. I kept it in the back of my mind until the end of the semester, when a classmate and I went to see Carol Prieur performing Marie Chouinard solos, a show I picked simply because I saw an ad for it when I walked through Place des Arts. The show ended with Prieur physically interpreting Henri Michaux’s drawings while frantically running up and down the stage like eyes making their way across the page line by line. When the performance ended, everybody gave her a standing ovation. Everybody except me. Not that I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. My legs no longer worked. I guess that’s why we say we’re floored. It’s not just metaphorical language.
 
I went from never having seen a dance show to going to see every dance show in Montreal.
 
*
 
I was lucky enough to go to my first punk show because some of my coworkers at Cagibi were in a band called Pantyhos. So I made my way to Fattal to catch their set at Death House, except I couldn’t “ask a punk” where it was since I didn’t know any. Luckily, I ran into another one of my coworkers in the parking lot and he showed me the way. I’ve gone back to Fattal many times over the years and to hardcore shows more generally. Sometimes, at a show, I would get emotional; I would think about the child I used to be, about how if I told that child that I would one day be going to punk and metal shows and they would be my favourite thing, the child I was would reply “No, that’s impossible. There’s no way you’re talking about me.” It makes me excited about what else I will discover that I don’t even know yet. It makes me curious about who I have yet to become.

Shock

​Online events.
 
 
Denial
 
Ça va bien aller. “We’re all in this together” and other positive affirmations.

Early in the pandemic, in a panel on Zoom, one of the curators where I work said that he feared that all new works would be about the pandemic, although he understood that it would be something that people would need to process. Now I fear that none will be. Even the most realistic movies and TV series have gone out of their way to create a world where the pandemic never happened. Judges on Nailed It sat a bit further apart. If there were post-pandemic generations, they would not believe us.
 
 
Anger
 
When a child bumps into a chair, they will be mad at the chair for hurting them.
 
 
Bargaining
 
If I wear a mask when I walk into a restaurant, can I take it off when I sit down to eat?
 
 
Depression
 
If we have not been able to adapt to the pandemic, we will most certainly not be able to adapt to climate change.
 
 
Testing
 
I tell a friend that I might make an exception for my birthday and go to a punk show.
 
“When’s your birthday?”
 
“In five months.”
 
She laughs.
 
 
Acceptance
 
Things are now changing so fast that, because works are programmed years ahead of time, by the time they are presented, they are already outdated. To present works that are still relevant, we might have to do away with programming works altogether and rather offer artist residencies that end with a presentation to minimize the amount of time between programming and presentation as much as possible.
 
Most works I have had the chance to see since the beginning of the pandemic have felt completely disconnected from reality. The only time I didn’t feel that way was at the outdoor Phoebe Bridgers concert at Parc Jean-Drapeau, even though they had to interrupt the show four times because people in the audience kept falling unconscious, including twice – fittingly – during their climactic song “I Know the End”: “I’m not afraid to disappear / The billboard said ‘The end is near’ / I turned around, there was nothing there / Yeah, I guess, the end is here.”
 
As the nihilistic characters in Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction (based on Bret Easton Ellis’s novel) stumble towards their violent demise, they attend a series of parties the names of which move from the mundane to the apocalyptic: A Pre Saturday Night Party Party, Dressed to Get Screwed Party, The Edge of the World Party, and – finally – End of the World Party. I was wondering when such themed parties would begin occurring, but of course we haven’t reached the acceptance stage yet.
 
Then I saw the colourful, balloon-filled poster for grindcore band Captured! By Robots’s USA & Canada Fall Tour 2022: “FINAL FUNERALS! IT’S YOUR LAST CHANCE TO DIE!!! You’re invited!! TO THE FUNERAL FOR THE HUMAN RACE / COME CELEBRATE THE END OF HUMANITY”. The few balloons that aren’t filled with human skulls are adorned with a series of tormenting phrases: “YOU DESERVE THIS / STUPID IDIOTS / YOU DID IT TO YOURSELVES / YOU’RE DONE / HAHAHA / YAY!!” It’s possible that the poster flows from the concept at the heart of the band – human singer JBOT performs as a man enslaved by guitar/bass- and drum-playing robots – but it still felt strangely à propos.

​When we used to talk about timeless works, of course we didn’t really mean timeless; we meant works that remain relevant to human beings across time. Our idea of timelessness was like Milan Kundera’s in his novel Immortality – the images of others that persist, whether we knew them or not – hilariously androcentric and short-sighted. We no longer need timeless works; we need works that are relevant to the times we are living in. Or, if works are to be timeless, then we must mean that they will be relevant not to human beings but to mushrooms, worms, cockroaches.
 
“What another would have done as well as you, don't do. What another would have said as well as you, don't say, -- written as well as you, don't write,” wrote André Gide in his essential Les Nourritures terrestres. Now, I would add “What you would have done as well in 2019, don’t do.”

​
​From now on, every show should be titled We Are Dancing on Our Future Graves.

​“I write to mourn everything.” (April 3, 2014)
 
 
 
“Are you happy?” the former curator at my work asked me. Funnily enough, a co-worker and I had just been talking about this.
 
I always felt that each person was their own barometer. I consider people who are stupider than me stupid; people who are smarter, smart; people who are more beautiful, beautiful; people who are uglier, ugly. Given that no one is average in every way, our perception of others and ourselves is necessarily skewed.
 
So how could I know if I’m happy? Sometimes I think “How could I possibly be happy?” At other times I think that maybe I’m the happiest person on Earth and I just don’t know it.
 
*
 
I remember going to the Liberté dairy production facility in Saint-Hyacinthe with my brother. He was interviewing workers about sustainability for a university assignment and he’d asked me to videotape it. They told us that they’d created a yogurt drink with the most eco-friendly packaging they could produce. The product had been a commercial failure because the container had the dreaded carton spout instead of the less eco-friendly but more convenient plastic cap. Customers want to make more environmentally friendly choices, they said, just as long as they don’t have to make any sacrifices.
 
*
 
After being cooped up in Montréal for two and half years because of the COVID pandemic, I go spend the Holidays by the harbour in St. John’s just as cases are rising again with the Omicron variant. Still, men on Grindr want to hook up. I think about erotic thrillers, one of my favourite movie genres, about men who are willing to risk death for sex.
 
“They should make an erotic thriller that takes place during a pandemic,” I think.
 
Wait a minute… This isn’t the first pandemic. Erotic thrillers reached the height of their popularity in the early 90s before the internet eradicated the need for them with easily accessible porn. I google “erotic thrillers AIDS”. It only took me thirty years to make the connection.
 
*
 
“[The] death instinct would thus seem to express itself – though probably only in part – as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world.” –Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923)
 
*
 
At the Liberté production facility, the person in charge of sustainable development told us that, because it is the action they can easily do, consumers tend to only think in terms of recycling. And, because plastic no. 6 isn’t recyclable in most areas, they try to avoid buying products that use it. Instead, they buy products that use more plastic. They feel better about recycling more plastic than they do about buying less.
 
*
 
I always felt that every inch of happiness was something that had to be fought for and, even more importantly, protected; that my happiness was hanging by a thread.
 
The pandemic made me realize that everyone’s happiness is. People would rather die than not stand in line to consume an underwhelming brunch.
 
*
 
“In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection that is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.”
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
 
*
 
What was I thinking those times I had unprotected sex? Mostly that it didn’t matter, that I wanted to die anyway.
 
*
 
I watch Theo Anthony’s Rat Film, an essay documentary about Baltimore’s rat problem.
 
“There’s never been a rat problem in Baltimore,” a city exterminator tells us, “it’s always been a people problem.”
 
Anthony brings up American ethologist and behavioural researcher John Bumpass Calhoun. Between 1958 and 1962, Calhoun conducted a series of experiments on Norway rats. He created a “rat utopia”, an enclosed space in which 32 to 56 rats were given unlimited access to food and water, enabling unfettered population growth. However, the population never exceeded 200 rats and stabilized at 150. By the end of the experiment, the only ones still alive had become asexual.
 
Since then, I’ve only been able to see Grindr as a virtual cage.
 
*
 
“Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one’s actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view ‘realistically’; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome.”
 
Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors
 
*
 
I put my recycling and garbage on the curb. The next day, it is gone.
 
Out of sight, out of mind.
 
*
 
I watch Nosferatu the Vampyre. In Werner Herzog’s retelling of the story, Count Dracula moves from Transylvania to Wismar, spreading the Black Plague across the land. Bodies pile up on the streets.
 
*
 
“This metropolitan world […] is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.
Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets – living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.”


Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities
 
*
 
POZ parties.
 
*
 
In his memoir To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Hervé Guilbert chronicles his fight with AIDS. In one chapter, he sees an old friend, a psychiatrist, who tells him he has found a good trick to talk to his patients about AIDS. He tells them, “Don’t pretend you’ve never wished for death at one moment or another before you contracted this disease! Psychological factors are crucial to trigger AIDS. You wished for death, well, here it is.”
 
*
 
My friend Aurora and I are hanging out on her balcony on a cold spring day, a spicy hot chocolate in hand. I complain about my incessantly runny nose.
 
“Maybe your body needs to expel liquid,” she says. “When’s the last time you cried?”
 
“I shed a tear this morning, actually.”
 
“Why did you shed a tear? I thought you were happier than you’ve been in years.”
 
“I am. Maybe specifically because I’ve been more alone than I’ve been years. So it’s bittersweet.”

​I asked you why you said I was funny when I was crying.
 
You’d asked me why looking at the ocean makes me cry. But to put it into words, to say it out loud, is to cry. You feel weighed down by everything and the ocean stretches out before you, seemingly infinite, and you are nothing but something that could drown. All this pain for nothing.
 
“I was smiling because I was endeared,” you said, “so I said ‘you’re funny’ to explain why I was smiling.” And I am nothing but something that can drown.

«Elle comprenait seulement que rien n’est plus fort que cet instinct de revenir là où on nous a brisé, et de répéter cet instant pendant des années. En pensant seulement que ce qui nous a sauvé une fois pourra nous sauver à jamais.»
Alessandro Baricco, Sans sang
 
Even though I only live an hour away from my family, I hadn’t seen them in eight months. The pandemic was to blame, of course, but even at the best of times I would only go see them every few months. There is that no public transport goes to Lacolle. More importantly, there is that I have really bad FOMO. I saw about 300 artists in concert last year. But COVID cured me of that. Now I can be in Lacolle without thinking about all the things I’m missing because there is no longer anything to miss. The pandemic has taken with it all of the advantages of living in the city and left only its inconveniences: too many people everywhere and too little of anything else anywhere.
 
It was the best time I had at my parents’ since the summers before I first moved out when I was nineteen. Why the summers? Because, free from going to school, I was alone. Reading by the pool. Listening to music as loud as I wanted since our closest neighbours lived 350 metres away. (I MISS THIS. Maybe my love for concerts has been little more than an attempt to recreate this, which would partially explain why I tend to prefer underattended shows.) Reading in the bathtub. Watching movies. I’d bought a TV with the money I made working on the farm so I could watch movies in my room after everyone had gone to bed. In the winter, its light would sometimes reveal a mouse travelling through the house at night. A few days later, we would inevitably find it in the trap in the kitchen closet.
 
I remember I’d asked my mom to buy me a cup so disgustingly huge that the first one broke as she brought it home. I would fill it with hot chocolate that I would sip on as I read in bed.
 
After the infamous ice storm of 1998, I dragged a twin mattress in the office downstairs, shoved it in a corner, and covered it with cushions and pillows. I would spend my days reading there.
 
This time, I read five books in the fifteen days I was there. Reading on my parents’ balcony, I saw a hummingbird hovering over the bushes and a doe eating in the field across the street with its baby deer. Just like Marchbanks in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, “I had my books. I had Nature.” The fewer humans there are, the more life there is.
 
Because I had brought weed oil with me, it was the first time I was able to get stoned at my parents’ house. One such night, after they had gone to bed, on the way to my bedroom, my arms filled with snacks, a thought hit me: being high aside, here I was, finding solace in doing the same thing I had been doing over two decades before, in doing the same thing I had been doing ever since. My source of comfort had never been a person. And, if it was, that person was me. Being alone wasn’t something that had been done to me; it was something I had chosen.
 
As Brittany Julious wrote in her own personal essay about solitude, “This solitariness was […] about doing the things I’ve always wanted to do. It was about being the person I’ve always wanted to be. It was about seeing things myself, staying curious, learning, laughing, confronting my fears, finding what I love and never letting go.”
 
I don’t remember the movie I watched that night. But I know it was extra good.