About John Bender

I can practically recite the entire script of The Breakfast Club, a feat shared by most of my generation. Just what was it about this simple teen-angst film, a movie in which nothing happens, that makes us all want to spend our Saturday in detention with a jock, a princess, a basket case, a nerd, and a reject? And then do it over and over again?

The movie’s stars have for the most part fallen out of the radar, the theme of teen alienation has been done to death, and the only ‘car chase’ scene is a bunch of weirdly-dressed teenagers running down the hall to avoid the school principal.

Yet lines from the film make up a good portion of the vocabulary of my world. Seldom do two or three days go by without hearing or making a reference to the film. One pal was heading north with dad, and she made a crack about taking her homework along to do on the boat. She’s not in school, though, but we all knew she was referring to Brian’s home life- the world of happy homework. “Hey, son, do you want to go fishing this weekend?” “Great, dad, oh, but I have homework!” “That’s all right son, you can do it on the boat!” And not too long ago I was in a pub restroom, and two girls were giggling and trying to apply lipstick with no hands…the only ‘skill’ that Molly Ringwald’s character Claire was good for.

Indeed, one of the poems in my collection The Astronaut’s Wife relates directly to the final scene of the film.

Claire

she’s so sad in red
pressing that tiny diamond
into your worn leather palm.

John Bender, played brilliantly by Judd Nelson, tells princess Claire about how her parents use her to get back at each other. Then he says, “Wouldn’t I be outstanding in that capacity?” Smoldering stuff. Near the end of the film, embracing, she pulls one of her diamond earrings from her lobe, and presses into his gloved palm.

This simple gesture pretty much defines my entire inner erotic life.

Back when I was a teenager, we weren’t allowed to go to “worldly movies” so this one I got to see on those newfangled VCR thingies, when at pajama parties with other deprived teenage girls. The innocence of those days seems stunning and heartbreaking. And so it was that there in my sleeping bag, drying a manicure, I fell in love with John Bender. Hard, relentless, witty, and gritty, with a poet’s soul, this rebel weed-smoker would define the way I fell in love. In fact, it had already happened: my first kiss was in an old barn, pathetically chaste, as I let Steven Jordan kiss my cheek before roaring away on his dirt bike. I walked about in a daze for the whole weekend, and alas, upon returning to school, saw no sign of my love. He had been whisked away to juvenile detention after stealing groceries to feed his family one time too many. I wondered then why it was not his welfare-check-blowing mother who wasn’t held accountable. All she did was sit on the couch and drink, and the fridge was empty. The affair had started when my dad felt sorry for those poor kids, and suggested I invite them to church. Steven and his sister Jennifer both came, and so began that devastating first heartbreak.

It got much worse over the years. There was Malachia, the street kid, whom I ran away with back when I was a more tragic adventurer than I dare to be now. We lived together with a bunch of gutter punks in a burned down plantation house in New Orleans. Eventually, there had to be more to life than poetry readings and ‘spare change for booze’ placards. So I returned to Canada, leaping from the gutter directly into the higher halls of learning, beginning my university career.

But Bender’s ghost came back to haunt me when I sat across the table from a Serbian sailor. Gazing into his ocean blues, I fell into the most incredible person I will ever know, a man who spoke half a dozen languages and had traveled the world over, whose astonishing insights into the human heart made my own beat faster. But magic comes with tragic, and I watched my husband’s ship go down on methamphetamine until I buried him.

And because life is nothing but a series of scenes from a movie, the last time I fell for a prison inmate, a man I could not weigh down, I looked for a tiny gift he could cherish but not have to carry about. And so I went diamond shopping. It was the cheapest diamond I could find- who knew that you could get a low-grade cut for $35 bucks? It was the most beautiful thing, that single stud, and the smile it lit in his face. This is the man who promised me he would walk a thousand miles if I needed him, and in fact, that’s pretty much what he did the last time I saw him. He hitched from the east coast to Toronto with nothing but a small back-pack and a sunburn. Apparently he had felt my malaise and had to see me. We spent our brief visit listening to Johnny Cash records and a bit of Elvis, making pancakes, and busting a move to This Little Light of Mine at church. It was the last time I would see him before he died.

Well, for all the fifty times I’ve watched The Breakfast Club, I’d never seen in on the big screen, so last weekend when I heard it was coming to a retro cinema, I packed up my longtime BFF and headed to the Fox. The old Beaches Toronto cinema is absolutely haunted, and I felt ghosts hovering around us in the dim and dank room as the lights went down. The film quality was obligatorily poor. There were no surprises in the film, having memorized every line, but still we laughed and cried at every turn. “Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?” still earns a guffaw. “Screws fall out all the time, sir, the world’s an imperfect place!” still resonates with smart-ass wisdom.

And Judd Nelson’s stellar performance as John Bender still has the same mesmerizing effect on me that it did when I was a teenage girl. Sweeping into the detention hall, sullen and alone, even the rich girl couldn’t help swooning. All that bare-bones male energy, the smoldering sexuality of the one who doesn’t have to be polite or shuffle ridiculous pretenses of decorum. Hot, heavy, and filled with feeling, nothing could be more intense. The chaste kiss in that barn 26 years ago still burns on my face, though a veritable jungle gym of sexual gymnastics have now of course graced and disgraced my adult life. Once, there was a simple gesture, fingertips kissed and pressed to the glass through the prison window, and I don’t think anything before or after has come close to the intensity of that small connection.

I chuckle when I feel your shock- for I’m just saying what millions know and keep to themselves. Regardless of your well-behaved brood, obedient husband, and respectable bookkeeping job, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There is nothing hotter than Bender, in his grubby overcoat, jeans, and long greasy air, leaning over and asking the prom queen just how pristine she is.

“Have you ever been felt up? Over the bra, under the blouse, shoes off…hoping to God your parents don’t walk in?” It’s really rather innocent considering no one has their clothes off. Claire is getting pissed off, and we’re getting hot and bothered as our pulses skyrocket to these teenage shenanigans. In his low drawl, with that half-smile, he goes on. “Over the panties, no bra, blouse unbuttoned, Calvins in a ball on the front seat past eleven on a school night?”

Yes, John Bender sure knows how to undress a girl. Without a show of wealth and a repertoire of fantastical tricks, the bad boy gives the basics the kind of detailed treatment they require, both in and out of bed. For the underclass, life is about the things that…well things that life is about! Eating, drinking, working, and doing it with your old lady.

See, the bad boy is not just fantasy: he represents also reality, for who can speak for humanity more than the man who lives immersed in it? Looking around, realistically, life is more about poor drunks and heavy sorrow and poverty than it is about fancy jobs or the quasi-intellectual bohemian figure. The boy from the ‘other side of the tracks’ is really just a mirror. The lost, poor, angry, sad, struggling blue-collar man is quintessentially human.

And that, after all, is the theme of the entire film, isn’t it, the meaning of the breakfast club? Five assorted social groups come together and find their essential humanity hidden among their differences.

“Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had a to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, and a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely, yours, The Breakfast Club.”

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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In Which the Author Confesses to a Lack of Belief and Crippling Depression

Pass me a bottle, Mr. Jones
Believe in me
Help me believe in anything
I want to be someone who believes
-Counting Crows

These days, I must confess that I’m wrestling with a beast I have long wished to conquer- depression. My emotions are typically erratic and all over the place, plunging into dramatic despair one moment and into swirls of possibility the next. And I was a melancholy child, way too deep, in between fits of spontaneous laughter and delight. Yes, I’m well aware that they call that bipolar. I don’t mind the poles, so long as I don’t go shopping during the mania part.

Sure, I accept the roller coaster. I see it as the essence of life itself. After all, there are endless tragedies and fears that would lower a spirit into hell. It would be odd to not feel some sort of grief or despair when terrified of the future, or mourning a lost loved one. And it would be just as odd to not soar to heights above when something goes right, when something lost is found, when one is happy in love or finds a key that helps make sense of the puzzles. Life’s gifts and its scars move quickly, randomly, intensely.

So up and down it goes, the yo-yo, the rollercoaster. One minute I think I can’t depend on anybody, that even the nearest and dearest to my heart can and will and have betrayed me. The next I am certain it doesn’t matter, that I don’t need anyone and can survive anything. And then I think survival sucks. Who wants to just survive? I’m sick and tired of making excuses for the traitors and liars and cowards and cheaters, for those who don’t give a flying fick about me but pretend to. The next moment, I’m more sympathetic; knowing the people who have disappointed me had stuff to work out on their own. But the moment following that, I’m not sure I can deal with how much I miss the people I love who have been taken from me in the past few years. And I hate cancer and AIDS and addiction and suicide more than I can bear.

photograph by Gonzalo Cardenas

You look around at my art, at my writing, my public persona, which is not entirely a reflection, but pretty much, you know, that’s pretty much how I am. My writing and other creative work pretty much says it like it is. Of course, I don’t tell you EVERYTHING.

But one thing probably stands out as consistent through my different modes of expression. I seem to have this huge, sweeping, all-encompassing belief in everything. Everything means something, and all of it is true. “I believe in impossible things.”

I’ll let you in on a little secret, one I find quite disturbing. Sometimes I don’t actually believe in any of those things.

To me, that’s what depression is. Lack of belief. Religion may well be the opiate of the masses, Karl, my friend. Is existential angst a better way to spend your life than opiated out of your mind on God? Most cultures through the ages have said no way. Humans all have some sort of religion or ceremony or systems that help us accept the cycle of life and death. From primitive magic to so-called sophisticated and intellectual faith, humans believe in what they cannot see. After all, it still remains unanswered- where do we come from? Even if you ‘know’ how, it is still a miracle, however sadistic.

I speak in my art quite convincingly, and honestly, too, about the magic side of life: I am clearly “a seeker” who has seen a few things on the journey, and I keep my heart open. But the past while, I wonder if I’m finally just losing the ability to hold hope, if the final disillusionment in humans has happened to me.

Today Rev. Hawkes talked about how he spends so much time in the company of sadness, that it could seize him in the middle of a trip to Costco. He’s learned to greet it, and then move on with his day. He doesn’t say anymore, “I am sad.” That would be letting the sadness be your essence, instead of a valid emotion you experience along the journey.

The Reverend always makes me cry. I have felt profoundly welcomed under his tutelage. No lesser mortal could have dragged me back into a ‘church family.’ Bloody impossible.

The childhood religious theme and coming home has all been vastly symbolic for me, solidifying my less Christian belief in connections, deep connections from mythology, with earlier ways of being. It all works for me. Who doesn’t ponder the big questions in their life? We all have this trip. We all have our in-conclusions. Nobody knows.

But the question remains… do I believe in the things I believe in? I confess that today, I don’t know. When I’m depressed I look at my trite efforts of extracting meaning from tragedy, and admit to being flummoxed. I defeat. I sure look for meaning. But the most recent losses piled up with delusions I thought were friendships frighten me.  Humans are downright macabre. Self-centred, narrow-minded, deceitful. Yes, I know, it isn’t new to me that the heart is deceitful above all things. But I’m feeling it more now, because when you’re depressed, you can’t put things ‘in perspective.’ Plus, death is anxious stuff. I feel like I did okay through an endless series of unrelated losses. And now I wonder if I have only ever been in the first stages of grief and have yet to go through more pain. Because I can’t do it. I want my fucking friends back, and I want my Marko. I don’t know if I have cried in my whole life the way I have cried in these past few months of exhausting sorrow.

Sometimes I just strip all the veneer of life’s elaborate cushions- the libations that ease social living worldwide and always have. That great opiate of the masses, as well, some religion. Hope. (Hope? What was that? I admit it, my friend, for all my bubbly optimism, I often look out the window, without hope. Hopeless. I don’t even know what hope is in those moments. You, too. This is human experience. It’s bottomless and I hate going there.

I make art series with names like Life Addiction to ward off any suggestion that I’m sending out negative vibes. I want hope, lots of it. To have it is to live another day. But yeah, sometimes I don’t feel much hope. I look around and think why the hell am I wasting time cranking Mahalia Jackson: can her stunning artistry and absolutely sacred convictions be anything but laughable in this world of war and suffering? And why was I bothering to read all that dense mythology instead of just heading to see Brad Pitt in Troy? Did it really matter what the ancients observed about human nature?

I look around and can’t believe that war is allowed, never mind esteemed, valued, and lauded- words like ‘heroic’ and ‘warrior’ show our sick, disgusting souls. War is a way of fucking life for most of the planet through most of history and I get so angry I want to jump off of it. I can’t believe it…I just can’t believe it…I mean, over and over we make war. Limbs and lives, tossed around. We just love war so much. That’s why we do it. We play it. We live it. We like it. We love to look at guns and artillery and intellectualize ‘military strategy.’ We like to fantasize about the enemies, about what we’ll do to show them.

“It’s a fact of life,” and a big one, taking up most of our evolutionary energy. I don’t want any part of that dreck, that horrific truth. It has nothing to do with me. It depresses me to be German, as much as I see great qualities in our lineage outside of that sick shadow we made on the world. But then, I could have been American. There’s The Killing Fields, the Civil War, Bosnia, Rwanda. I mean, what the hell is going on and on and on and on and on here? I want nothing to do with war. Not one human should ever have to experience fucking amputations and torture and severing limbs and explosions.

We love to kill and maim.

I want to get out of this place, but there is no escaping it- the truth of history.

I don’t believe that religion is what makes us do the war thing, though it may appear on the surface. We would do it anyways, and have. Money and land and power and who has the bigger dick are even bigger reasons for wars, big and small. It looks like it’s about religion right now- George Bush on the God team and well, we’ve all seen the South Park with Saddam as the devil. But it’s not really about that. It’s about oil. It’s about wanting to tell people what to do in their own country. It’s about George Bush dreaming about being a big warrior ever since he was a little boy. It’s not about ‘catholic versus protestant’ or Islam versus Jewish. If we look deeper, we see that as a whole, humans just love war. Our cultures adapt a faith not just to oppose another, but to cover up the open wound of what are we like inside.

I confess that lately I am so depressed that I feel I don’t believe any of the love stuff I might talk about, or go to church for. Right now I don’t think my favourite tarot cards really mean much and all the special symbols I hold onto to bridge my world with the dead, they’re probably all illusions. It’s all just dust.  For all the wild cosmic meaning life is infused with when you believe- these days, well, hmm, I don’t know about all that. I defeat.

I was literally sitting there today wondering if I could really take this “back to church” thing I started last summer seriously anymore. We’re singing about love and happiness and redemption and all I can think about is through all of history how bombs might have been falling or plagues sweeping through or massive beheadings or the slaughter of Canada’s east coast Indians and just about every other thing I can think of does not at all resonate with this religious mystery stuff. I’m just not buying it when the good reverend tells me we are all made in God’s image. I don’t feel God inside. I feel absolutely powerless.

Yeah, well, so that’s just a glimpse into one of the lovely ways depression manifests in me.  It’s spooky though to feel nothing but numbness, to feel…nothing. It’s dangerous, that’s for sure. Certainly, I can’t go through much of life like this, emptied of everything.

Then Rev. Brent talked about how he walks with sadness but does not say “I AM sad.” He often asks addicts to refer to their ‘struggle’ with addiction or their ‘walk with’ addiction, to see if we can move away from defining ourselves as ‘addict.’ That’s all fine and lovely, but I’m of the mind to call a spade a spade. I AM sad. I AM a lush. I AM angry, addicted, grief-stricken, crazy.

But hey, I have nothing to lose from trying to be a bit more positive during this dark spell. So with tears streaming down my face, feeling like a fool, I made a little promise to the Great Spirit that I’m going to live as if I believe from here on in, just like a while back, even if I don’t believe at all.

I’m going to live as if I believe I have a fate to fulfill, something meaningful to say, even if I don’t.

Just in that small, solemn promise, a hint of light angled itself through the creaky floorboards of the dark barn I’ve been in these past months. I can’t be strong and vibrant every day- it is right to give some time to mourning, also, some time to sorting out anger and hopelessness and fury at betrayal or time to work through isolation.

But…now, in this absolute fury at how we humans love war, this awful pain and fear of loss… once again those outlines of …magic, the pulse of life. Beyond all this, there’s just a glimmer of belief…just a tiny shimmering of maybe…that it’s all about something.

Life might be worth the sorrow. I hold out for this possibility, one I’ve always believed, deep down.

Visit the writer at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

7A-11D at the Gladstone

At my very first art show, I focused on removing all kinds of phrases from their original contexts, and pairing them with an arresting image of some sort. They were simple cut and paste collages that immortalized my little pink scissors, now the emblem of Do-It-Yourself for my creative spirit when it falters. The collages were pinned to a sheet, tacked up behind doors, clipped to a clothesline: there was even one on the lid of the toilet seat.

Perhaps the defining question of this particular exhibit- one of the mixed media I used for Voodoo: Art Can Bend Your Mind- was this: “What is the artist trying to say?”

Given that I had zero gallery representation and doubted I’d ever have any, and sick of all the yappity yap art talk I overheard next to $80 thousand dollar paintings of a white canvas or a close-up of genital pores, I decided to hostess an accessible art show ‘for the people.’ I thought that art could and should bend your mind, that it should be affordable so more artists could sell something while they were alive, and that it should be fun or provocative or disturbing or beautiful. I didn’t want to create the kind of alienation that made people think “I don’t know anything about art.” I wanted to engage the rest of the world in a forum where their reactions were just as valid as the urban trendy androids who namedropped like there was no tomorrow and had shitty taste on top of that.

Nowhere does this type of alienation between the art/artist and the public exist as markedly as in performance art. And there’s a group of performance artists seeking to practice, produce, and entertain or edify the public. For a decade, they’ve been doing their thing, and they are called 7A-11D.

Yes, it’s already confusing. The group’s name is already a little fuzzy and forgettable- something like Performance Art Toronto would be boring, sure, but it would help the audience sort it out and make for easier googling. Or they could use a blunt and memorable moniker like Trout or Sick Minds or Stage Rage. But they didn’t, and for now they are 7A*11D.

Last night at the Gladstone Hotel, they had a ‘funrazor’ to help raise money for their autumn performing arts festival. I thought I’d check it out. You all know how much I enjoy the festivities of men in dresses, and with catty Keith Cole as MC/hostess, I was surely in for an evening of surprises.

Hmm, problem was, Keith Cole wasn’t wearing a dress. A sequined top and a bouffant wig, yes. Dress? not so much. No, just dangling away in all his/her glory. So….what is the artist trying to say?

That’s the question I asked more and more as the night went on and my yawns got bigger. Is all performance art porn? By the time I stole out- before the show had ended- I felt like some sort of prude. It’s not like I haven’t been there, done that, whatever it was, but I have to say, for all my frank truck driver talk and my sexy joie de vivre, I found the live- er, performances- tawdry, forced, and distasteful. Was everyone trying to say something profound about sexuality in their art, and missing the point entirely, or was I the one missing the point?

I don’t know. But I sure didn’t need to see…a human, er, hand puppet. I didn’t need to hear the flexible contortionist punani licking jokes that went on for the whole of the evening, regardless of how sassy the yogalicious girl toy was.

But to each their own. There were, occasionally, a few performances that veered from the unsexiest sex statements into something reasonably weird and funny, like Elle’s human fly costume that gave Bono a run for his money. There was also a whole lot of duct tape going on, including one performance which consisted of a full head-wrap: then the artist held the microphone up to his skull and tore the tape, and half of his skin, off with full sound effects. Again, I asked, “What is the artist trying to say?” The sound of one scalp scraping?

For all the openness I had, the truth is, it’s likely I won’t be concerning myself with much in the way of performance art from here on in. I gave it a go, and it’s not for me. But it might be for you, who knows? The artists take it all very seriously, and here’s their agenda of goals so that you can decide if you want to check them out or support them:

Our goals are:

* to foster the development of a local performance art community
* to gain increased recognition for the performance art activity that takes place in Toronto and across Canada
* to activate interest in and expand audiences for performance art
* to encourage the exchange of ideas, information, and strategies in the field of performance art
* to explore definitions of performance art and facilitate an awareness of and critical discussion about its form and content
* to develop sources for the sponsorship, promotion, and dissemination of performance art
* to document work for archival and pedagogical purposes

(www.7a-11d.ca)

I don’t know if last night’s disappointing cabaret did anything to help them achieve these goals, but they did raise a shitload of money for their fall festival, and that’s great, though I’ll be giving it a miss. I guess I just don’t understand art, darling. While I did chuckle, briefly when the ‘fat femme mafia’ undressed completely and began wiggling like a bowlful of Jello on stage. But it all comes back to that question- what is the artist trying to say? And I’ll admit it: beats me.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Anhedonia

Anhedonia (a short story by Lorette C. Luzajic)

No one would guess that when Lucy leaves the university library for the day, she’s just as likely to head to a bar for a few shots of tequila straight up as she is to head home for a Detective Goren marathon.

Perhaps tonight she has had one shot over the line, or perhaps it is just the calendar haunting her into the fuzzy place of persistent loneliness that hovers gently over her life. In a few hours, she will turn 28, and while this turning will bring the same routine as last year’s and the years before it, today she feels an old, familiar weight of quiet sorrow.

She flicks the switch on the TV and tunes into a Prison Break rerun. Life is a routine of books and television and the steadying, illusory comfort of alcohol on melancholy. There have been very few men in the picture to disrupt the even anhedonia with which she had lives her life. This is the same as it was for her mother, who seldom spoke of Lucy’s father, carrying the heartbreak of abandonment and single parenting with unspoken dignity.

There’s one thing, though, that Lucy carries in her heart. In the back of the closet in the hall is a small box, and inside it are letters, lots of letters, most written in pencil on yellow paper. The letters came from men as lonely as she is, men who wrote their most solemn thoughts without fear of recourse or rejection. These pen pals Lucy had never met, corresponding with meek encouragements and patient details of books she loved, books these men might find inside the library of the place they were imprisoned. Lucy has always been drawn to guys in trouble: she is one of the women they talk about on Oprah, women who spend their time writing to men behind bars.

For the most part, this unusual intimacy has never threatened the quotidian details of an uneventful life. Her thoughts flow freely when writing to inmates who are depressed and remorseful and angry, men who forget what freedom is. She feels more herself, more interesting, when stamping an envelope to Clark, or to Allan, doing hard time in Texas for armed robbery. She feels special when a letter comes for her, scrawled in near illiteracy with statements of the heart, regrets, dreams that won’t see the light of day. This is usually where it stays, a kind communication, and Lucy won’t let it get under her skin the way some of these women will. She doesn’t know why she is one of these women, a misunderstood bunch of who take a surge of adrenalin and feelings of love from men who can’t possibly know how to love, and even if they did, were not free to really be responsible to it.

photograph by Ian Ference

Lucy knows the real draw here is that there is no threat of true involvement. She can bare her soul, but no one will really claim it. Certainly it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that her “lovers” are just as absent as the father she never knew. Whatever it is, her mom had the same penchant, though she guarded it carefully lest it screw up her life more than it already had. Her mom raised Lucy alone with dignity and sacrifice, refused to talk about the night that left her pregnant. She never knew that Lucy knew, that she had found the letters in the attic once when helping Mom get ready for a yard sale. The shoebox, dusty and hidden under blankets in an old trunk, was eerily familiar and Lucy sensed its contents somehow before opening it. Her father was inside it, a few letters from all those years ago, poorly spelled dashed hopes and apology for being locked away. From the letters, Lucy knew her dad didn’t even know about her, that Mom had wisely cut ties with a man she fell head over heels for, a man who had murdered another in a bar room brawl. Keeping her daughter from this tragedy was the only way Lucy’s mom could make the best out of the quiet mess of her own heart.

There was one glitch, however, a private pain that seared so deeply that Lucy just put it away, far into the back of that hall closet in a different shoebox. She had seen Jared’s photograph in a newspaper once upon a time: he looked no different than a million other cons snapped by media hungry for a brooding, brutal cover boy. But something in Jared’s eyes seemed soft and hungry as the daily news announced his life sentence for killing his wife.

Lucy had written, shyly at first, and later with intensity, for two years before she took the next progression. Jared was the only pen friend that she ever went to visit. Ashamed of the pull of these violent, inaccessible men, she just let it be and tried to stay away from trouble. It was different with this one, the way her pulse changed when she saw his handwriting, and later, began accepting his collect calls and hearing stories of alienation from the inside. She had something to live for, a special, private affection. The letters became intimate, and provided an erotic vitality that lay under her goody-librarian persona like a secret. Lucy drove four hours to see Jared twice a month for several years until she received the news that Jared had hung himself without warning. The last letter mailed to her hinted at why- he had said something about 15 more years being too long to wait for her.

Tonight as the clock approaches her birthday, Lucy thinks about the shoeboxes, ponders the meaning of the things that drive an individual. When her show ends, she gets up and rummages through the cupboard for a bit of whiskey. She wonders if every human quirk and idiosyncrasy is just the way of the soul, trying to find its way home.

This story originally appeared in 1000 Words, an anthology of 1000-word short stories based on photographs, edited by Jordi Ribas. Please visit the author Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

God Hates Phelps

Okay, I’ve written the poem for Matthew Shephard, who years ago was murdered because he was gay. Remember? He was tied to a fence and left to die. The reason the story became national news was not our sudden empathy for victims of hate crimes, but because the Westboro Baptist Church- Kansas’s Phelps family, if that rings the bell- started up with their ‘God Hates Fags” noise.

I don’t know what Bible these sick fucks are reading, but as a proud lifelong fruit fly and a member of Toronto’s ‘Gay Church’ I could waste my breath arguing with these crazy motherfuckers. Because all over my good book it talks about loving the neighbour, avoiding judgement, acting with compassion, ‘the greatest of these is love.’ Jesus mingled cheerfully with the cripples and the hookers. And even if you got a misguided perception from the Old Testament that it’s a sin to be gay, nowhere does it condone violence against people we think are sinners. Every group or culture pretty much around the world is either ‘whoremonger’ or ‘pedophile’ according to this sick family.

Reverend Phelps and his children often hold up signs that show their obsession with anal sex- “Gay equals Anal Sex” was one creative effort. I guess his wife and kids won’t let him knock on their back doors, so he takes it out on people who aren’t bothering him. Dude, every hetero porn out there shows anal sex is all men think about. I could picket half of the entire world, but I’ve got better things to do with my time.

I don’t like the abuse that the fabulous ones have had to endure because of this inbred halfwit’s idiocy. But when they began to speak up about this summer’s unfortunate Greyhound incident, I think, hand me the gun. Reverend Phelps daughter said today that Tim McLean, the 22-year old random beheading victim who was murdered on a Greyhound bus, umm, deserved to die….he was a rebel. We have to connect the dots, you see, and God spoke through random rage that this lazy, rebel nobody had to be punished.

Now, I don’t know Tim McLean, but whatever his faults may be, they were pretty normal ones. Seems he was a sweet guy, maybe not the brightest crayon the box, but a kind soul who worked at the fairs. Maybe murderer Li lost his mind that day, but I think even he would admit that Tim was an innocent victim. But apparently the poor kid died for our sins- he was personally responsible that Canada has abortion laws and lets faggots marry. Or maybe it was his “filthy way of life.” The guy did, after all, have a tattoo.

And because these baby-boinkers are a sensitive bunch, they’ve called poor Tim the “Headless Canadian.”

The church is in Toronto tonight protesting The Reverend Phelps Project, a play about the nasty reverend himself. They made headlines by protesting Heath Ledger’s funeral- yeah, these are classy people- stating that Heath bit the dust because he played a queer boy in Brokeback Mountain. And Elizabeth Taylor’s illness is also God’s will…apparently she’s a fag-loving Jew whore.

That these people are planning to picket McLean’s funeral is unbelievable. Why are they not locked up for hate crimes? Throw away the key. Regularly protesting at theatres (homo houses!) is one thing. Funerals is another.

And while fags are the worst kinds of sinner, the Reverend Phelps makes up for his lack of manliness by coaching his team to hate everyone else, too. Catholics are devil worshippers who suck semen out of children’s genitals like vampires suck blood from their victim, apparently. Those evil Catholics, umm, serve feces instead of bread at Holy Communion. Jews, well, you can only imagine. We can all thank the Good Lord for all who died in the recent floods- and Phelps did, loud and clear, because, he says, God hates the “vile oriental ingrates.” God hates the Irish, too. Top o’the mornin’ to you, too, Lord!

Did I mention that these people are butt-obsessed crackpots?

I need not point out the obvious facts- that these uneducated, ego-mongering freaks are nut jobs. But I will, because I’m not the Toronto Star and I’m not the Post: the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas has 70 members, mostly relatives. See what I mean?

Who's zooming who?

Now here’s a group that talks about nothing but bum-bums. We’ve got an inbred cesspool where daddies can’t keep their hands off their daughters or their nephews. And out of this sick sludge brewing up a gene pool, the ringmaster’s got to find someone else to blame. Why has the state not gone in and swept up the obvious, the family circus?

Now some have pondered whether the Westboro Church’s anti-homo mission is a disguise for the militant Islamic agenda. Though few strict Muslims encourage homosexuality and some countries punish it severely, with, umm, death, it is highly unlikely that Allah and Phelps are in cahoots. The Muslim people I have been fortunate enough to love, befriend or work with here in Canada were as diverse as any group, but had in common an above-average amount of education, family devotion, and spectacular cuisine. Not one smited me when I went to hear Salmond Rushdie speak.

The Phelps family is definitely not covering up any secret terrorist agendas, either- despite sharing a disgust of homosexuality with some traditional Islamic cultures, the Phelps don’t support the Muslim agenda, anymore than they do the Amish “whores.”

“So what if our guys flushed copies of the Quran down the toilet? We hope they did. They probably did; We hope they flush more. Mohammed was a demon-possessed whoremonger and pedophile who contrived a 300-page work of Satanic fiction: The Quran!”

Now how’s that for, umm, some Satanic verses?

I for one think it’s time for a little fatwa, or at the very least some family-child services investigationsand a hefty jail sentence for any Phelps wearing hate literature. Because Dorothy we aren’t in Kansas, anymore.

Quote of the Day

Dick Guttman, Liz Taylor’s rep, on recent reports that she’s on her last legs:

“Her hospital visit was precautionary. She will be returning home shortly. At present, she is surrounded by family, friends and fabulous jewels.”