A Dog’s Breakfast
Sydney
Waking up in the morning has been hard this year. I have had to practise delaying my instinctive half-awake scroll through the news until I have first moved through the slow motions of my morning rituals. It is only after my first cup of coffee that I click through the headlines.
Bad news is no longer shocking, though increasingly exhausting. It doesn’t help that in addition to the global pandemic and the Earth quite literally going up in flames, my loved ones have not been able to catch a break. The grieving does not slow. So, more than ever, I am clinging to good news.
It’s no wonder something as small as a friend sending a TikTok of a donkey can be the difference between a good day and a bad day. The same reason every night has cause for a “special treat” (which could be anything worthy of the title, but is usually a bag of Sweet Chili Heat Doritos). These are, after all, unprecedented times. I recall that I had to Google the word “unprecedented” six months ago, in a simpler time.
Good news doesn’t sell. Hearing these words from a journalism instructor hurt, back when I was younger and more optimistic. Sorry to say it, John Krasinski — maybe you will prove him wrong. It’s fair to say that most headlines are bleak. With my interest focused on the environment and the damages of climate change and plastic waste, I have come to lower my expectations for positive news. Needless to say, stumbling across a relatively happy headline about the environment last week would be worthy of the title, “special treat.”
Too many species are being pushed closer to extinction. But, according to a recent New York Times article, conservation efforts have saved up to 48 mammal and bird species since 1993. This story signifies that we can make a change. But we will need to work harder. The article cites new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that says 500 species are likely to become extinct in the next 20 years.
The UN's latest report outlines eight major changes that must be made to slow down, and even reverse, nature’s decline. I set new goals for my own sustainability efforts and pray that the much bigger corporations that must be held accountable heed the UN’s advice.
And in the meantime, I connect with nature in my own ways. I hike one of my favourite trails and take conscious breaths in the forest air. This is the trail where I go when I’m having a tough day, or need a break from work, or am in the mood to politely ask a Canada goose to make room for me to walk past. It’s not far from my apartment. It is also where my good friends held a socially-distanced wedding during all of this. These unprecedented times. Celebrating love felt so foreign, yet necessary, amid so much bad news.
It is also, during a few months in the winter, where you can find (read: hear) trumpeter swans. They are named for the sound of their call, which is similar to a trumpet. It’s worth braving below-zero temps to hear their cacophonous chorus, or as my friend Kyle would say, “go say hi to the swans.” These swans are a success story. Fifty years ago, the species was nearing extinction, but conservation efforts in Ontario brought it back.
Thinking about the species we may lose in the not-so-far-off future serves as a reminder for the work ahead of us. But it also reminds me to be grateful for the animals, birds and critters we currently share our space with. Even the ones with the bad reputations. Spare the spider in your bathtub. Be polite when you ask a Canada goose to make some room on the path.
I take this time to say thank you to these creatures. And to other success stories such as the black-footed ferret and the pygmy hog and the sea otter. And as always, thank you to our pollinators: bees, butterflies and bats.
And, we all knew this was coming, to the one animal I partly helped to save: my asymmetrical-faced rescue dog with more good qualities than teeth in his mouth. Whose three-course breakfast (i.e. kibble separated into three parts, otherwise he would surely and happily choke to death) and ceremonial scratches are the perfect distraction while I drink my coffee, take big breaths and prepare for the day’s bad news.
Sydney Hamilton reads for a living and writes to feel alive. She is a fact checker, a poet, a musician and a dog mom. She studied journalism at Ryerson University and used to write bad puns that the Toronto Star actually printed.
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Melancholia
SJ
Today is a dull ache. Yesterday I spent the day in bed, linen sheets up to my ears, back flat like a corpse, crying mindlessly. Today has been emails and calls to loved ones and to strangers — co-ordinating a big future move, while simultaneously picking up the pieces of an emerging, devastated celebration.
On Saturday, en route to spend an evening laughing with Syd, Ciar, Matt and Maiz, Jake and I received the news that we, once again, had to alter our already tiny wedding. More bad news from a year curdling with it. We exited the train, in shock but unsurprised, weighing our options of which cherished loved ones to uninvite (again), with the same blank resolution of ordering a basic burger.
A few hours later, while stepping out of my almost-mother-in-law’s car, I felt a familiar cold dampness flood my hands. I lost vision, the feeling in my toes, and the ability to maintain my balance or produce a coherent sentence. I sat on the curb crying absently — hyperventilating with my palms over my eyes, floating elsewhere. The first panic attack of this magnitude I have had in several years.
It is not the second loss of the wedding — it is the constant crashing of good news and bad. It is the overwhelming gratefulness of undeserved and constant help from family, and the crushing absence of control over every aspect of our lives. I am aware that I don’t take well to oscillation — I am knocked winded by the pendulum’s swing. I am overstimulated, I am introverted, I am swimming — momentarily buoyant with potential, rendered limp watching my reasons to stay afloat crash into rocks and sink, unrecognizably disfigured, out of reach.
I recently watched the movie Melancholia. The final few moments (pardon this complete spoiler) consist of Kirsten Dunst, with a blank calm, watching a giant planet plunge toward the earth — her death palpably immanent, along with the remainder of the world and its inhabitants. Her two co-stars scream in fear, Dunst greets it as an expected guest.
Living with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) has given me a — perhaps unpalatable — view of bad news. It is a nesting presence, nurtured and familiar. With MDD, external hardships provide a concrete distraction for the daily ache — a publicly recognized “reason for mental upset.” Lifelong mental illness has led me to find a complicated comfort in shared suffering — while the world throbs with pain, it has become impossible not to acknowledge the existence of crumbling mental health. While it is situational for many, I find myself, guiltily, welcoming new comrades in despair. Everyone is collectively sad, the need to pretend otherwise recedes by the day — I have to admit, I rejoice in that.
It is no wonder that I picked up my copy of The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack — beginning the slow digestion of questions bigger than I know how to relay. It is not a matter of if, but when and how the world will explode, implode, or, in some big way, render itself nonexistent. While most likely an extension of my depression, I find this type of writing incredibly soothing. To examine and process scientific possibilities and problems that are, quite literally, far larger than life is a warm reminder that I am a sentient fragment on a precariously floating rock in a widely unexplained universe. It doesn’t matter that I have gained weight, or misrepresented myself, or tripped while running in front of strangers, or that I require pills to tolerate and carry forth my existence.
I am aware that that sounds aggressively and, arguably, unnecessarily bleak. What I have not yet taken into account is the insane improbability of good fortune on this rock — and how deeply and irrevocably I cherish it. How, not only was I born at all, I was born into the particular family I am honoured to call my own. How I found a companion that propels me toward joy.
How I have choices. To choose how to act, when to tune in, chime in, or sit out. While minute, and argued philosophically at length, the choice to keep going is a powerful one, and deserving of recognition.
How, within moments of entering Syd and Ciar’s apartment (and, worth admitting, polishing off 6-8 bottles of red wine), news — good and bad — was rendered irrelevant. The news is not gone but dissipates with the emotional proximity of shared values and interests. There is a time to progress social action, and a time to chew slowly and take in the room. The booming echo of our collective “Hamilton laugh.” The small white spotted ball of a rescue dog curled up on the couch — unaware of the garbage events outside, overjoyed to receive dinner.
To be given the choice,
Chicken, or lamb?
SJ Hamilton Heise is a song-writer and librarian currently functioning as country boy in a big city. They hold a master’s degree in information science from the University of Toronto, know nothing about musical theory, but know their way around a bag of chips.
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Grindelwald, Switzerland. Film. 2017
Bonedog
Coming home is terrible
whether the dogs lick your face or not;
whether you have a wife
or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you.
Coming home is terribly lonely,
so that you think
of the oppressive barometric pressure
back where you have just come from
with fondness,
because everything’s worse
once you’re home.You think of the vermin
clinging to the grass stalks,
long hours on the road,
roadside assistance and ice creams,
and the peculiar shapes of
certain clouds and silences
with longing because you did not want to return.
Coming home is
just awful.And the home-style silences and clouds
contribute to nothing
but the general malaise.
Clouds, such as they are,
are in fact suspect,
and made from a different material
than those you left behind.
You yourself were cut
from a different cloudy cloth,
returned,
remaindered,
ill-met by moonlight,
unhappy to be back,
slack in all the wrong spots,
seamy suit of clothes
dishrag-ratty, worn.You return home
moon-landed, foreign;
the Earth’s gravitational pull
an effort now redoubled,
dragging your shoelaces loose
and your shoulders
etching deeper the stanza
of worry on your forehead.
You return home deepened,
a parched well linked to tomorrow
by a frail strand of…Anyway…
You sigh into the onslaught of identical days.
One might as well, at a time…Well…
Anyway…
You’re back.The sun goes up and down
like a tired whore,
the weather immobile
like a broken limb
while you just keep getting older.
Nothing moves but
the shifting tides of salt in your body.
Your vision blears.
You carry your weather with you,
the big blue whale,
a skeletal darkness.You come back
with X-ray vision.
Your eyes have become a hunger.
You come home with your mutant gifts
to a house of bone.
Everything you see now,
all of it:
bone.—Eva H.D.
[Transcribed from its appearance in the film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, w/d Charlie Kaufman, 2020]
*Note: If you have seen this movie, we would love to hear your thoughts and interpretations. Or, in other words, please explain it to me?