Things I Get Myself Into

Trash, Glorious Trash

by NikkaLeave a Comment on Trash, Glorious Trash

Who loves trash receptacles? Just for today, and just for this moment, I do.

It took me a while to work up the nerve to submit to Detritus, which I have loved since I first stumbled upon it last year. I would’ve been fine just being a part of  one issue, but having that little stamp of trashy approval is the cherry on top.

There are a lot of online indie lit magazines out there, and what I love most about this one is their unpretentiousness, and willingness to let the chosen pieces speak for themselves. And so supportive, too!

ps. look for me on page 10
pps. shameless plug over, back to looking for the perfect used car

People are People, Things I Get Myself Into

Wanted: Fairly Decent Jalopy

by NikkaLeave a Comment on Wanted: Fairly Decent Jalopy
Wanted: Fairly Decent Jalopy

We’ve been stressing out about getting a car.

I know, I know, I was supposed to learn how to drive a couple years ago, but that kind of fell by the wayside. Parking in Toronto is expensive, insurance even more so, and a subway stop is an easy block and a half away from us. It’s easy to just depend on public transportation if you live in the downtown core. Before this whole COVID-19 thing descended on us like the pale horseman of the apocalypse, it was pretty easy to get around.

But now, with homeless shelters being pushed to the limit, the mostly ignored underclass of humanity that generally skates on by unnoticed/ignored in normal times has started to take over the subway. And it’s April. In Toronto. Think April means winter has come and gone? We were at -10C windchill last week. So no, I can’t blame people who just want some shelter. We’re all just trying our best to survive and stay warm for a minute.

The downside is, well… they’re homeless. They have more issues to worry about than health, or hygiene. It’s more worrying about where to take a dump, how to get the next big high, where the free soup stands are. They’re now taking advantage of the subway system, nesting in a bajillion trash bags full of god knows what, sore-infested legs bared, smelling like urine, taking up three seats  and sleeping their way from Kennedy to Kipling station.

The places the hubs and I work for were declared essential, which is both blessing and curse. On the one hand, something to take our minds off the current pandemic is always nice. On the other, the act of getting to work means exposure, which means risk, which means what used to feel like a harmless, non-eventful commute now feels like playing Russian Roulette.

So yes. We need a car. And so far, it’s been a trip.

You see, we’re in the market for a beater. The kind of car that can stop running and you can leave at the side of the road and never look back, hello-goodbye. But it can’t be any old beater. It has to at least run for a few months before giving up the ghost. I’m not just a beggar, I’m a chooser to boot and to top it all off, neither he nor I know shit about cars. I’m in hell.

The paranoia is draining. Cars on AutoTrader and Kijiji  look so good, but then the doubts start tumbling in… will this certify? What’s wrong with this car? Why is it so cheap? Is it too cheap? Will we get mugged? Is it a bait and switch? Are there liens? Is the transmission off? Is that too much rust?

It’s so bad, we’ve contemplated just buying a new one and driving it off the car lot, warranty and all, everything in good working order, but along come the questions again. Is it worth the depreciation? How much will insurance be? Do we really want to spend the next seven years of our lives paying through the nose?

When will all this end? Will it even end?  

It’s exhausting. I’m tired.  I want to stop and get off the crazy train, but I can’t seem to help myself. So I just have to square my shoulders, take a deep breath, and summon the memory of what the immortal JZ always says when it comes to things like these: get a grip. Because what else is there to do? 

Eat. Yes, eating sounds good.

I think I’ll go eat my feelings for a minute. If you’ll excuse me.

 

ps. And then you get the guys who have an ad put up but won’t answer. I mean, fine. If it’s sold, it’s sold, but DON’T LEAVE THE BLOODY AD UP.

Things I Get Myself Into

I’m in Room’s Hair Issue!

by NikkaLeave a Comment on I’m in Room’s Hair Issue!
I’m in Room’s Hair Issue!

Is it only April? This year feels like it’s dragged on forever, with all of us trudging through the stark dystopia that real life has become. Still, I’ll take the good times where I can get it, and I am thrilled to report that Silver Fox, a poem I wrote in a happier time, was published in Room Magazine‘s latest: the Hair Issue!

I’ve followed Room online for quite some time now and they always have interesting stories to tell. I tend to keep my poems to myself (no one really knows I write them… and now you do), so it is a nice ray of sunshine to have my first shared piece find a home in one of Canada’s finest, and longest running literary magazines. I’m usually not one to self-promote, but this latest issue has quite a number of wonderfully written pieces and I couldn’t be happier to even be in the same conversation as the women in these pages.

The bookstores are currently closed due to the pandemic, but they take orders online. The Hair Issue is definitely worth your while… and not just because I’m in it! (Okay, shameless plug over 😊)

Random YouTube K-hole, Uncategorized

Random YouTube K-Hole: Welcome to the Jungle

by NikkaLeave a Comment on Random YouTube K-Hole: Welcome to the Jungle
Random YouTube K-Hole: Welcome to the Jungle

It must’ve been the depressing strangeness of the past week, because I found myself recalling the over-the-top insanity that was Aqua when they first started. Barbie Girl, that crazy, life-in-plastic single, was everywhere. Their songs were like Covid-19 – horribly catchy. Aqua released earworms that dug their way into your brain and refused to die. The way my brain works is that it reminds me of the stupidest and most random music videos at the weirdest times, so I found myself grinning ear to ear when I remembered (and found!) the music video for…

Dr. Jones – Aqua

For their debut album, Aqua always had the hokiest, Halloweeniest music videos. The themes and cheesy backdrops were set to insidiously happy, earwormy dance pop that could only have come out of mid-90s Scandinavia. “Presented in Aquascope,” they did Mattel, they did pirates, they did astronauts, and here, they do the jungle safari. Naturally, that made me want to cut a path through the jungle, and who did it better than…

Roar – Katy Perry

Katy Perry is the logical successor to Aqua in terms of music videos; she never goes for the subtle if she can help it. But the girl does commit. When she’s in, she’s all the way in, from the props to the lousy acting, all the way to the inevitably happy, triumphant end.

Anaconda – Nicki Minaj

Speaking of triumphant ends, Nicki Minaj is here to help you find yours. While she flaunts hers. Everybody wins! This really should’ve just been called ASS because who can even see the jungle for all the jiggling butt cheeks in your face? It’s practically softcore porn, but let’s just pretend it’s a rap video, enjoy the, er, scenery, and forget we ever saw Drake, shall we?

Waiting for Tonight – Jennifer Lopez

Social distance? What social distance? How do you celebrate the turn of the millennium? By having a rave. In the jungle (or is it a rainforest? I can’t tell). With lasers. As we do. I’ll say this for La Lopez, it’s been twenty years and God knows how many sacrificial virgins, the woman hasn’t aged all that much. She had it then, and she still has it now. She’ll probably always have it, and very soon my patron saint of aging will probably change from Jane Fonda to Jennifer Lopez.

Listicles, People are People

An Abundance of Caution

by Nikka

Welp, it looks like we finally got the fallout of cancel culture: everything is now cancelled. Ya happy? All this cancel him, cancel her bullshit going out into the ether, and now nothing is playing, no one is meeting up, all the toilet paper is gone and we’re all holed up working from home, praying to high heaven we don’t get so much as a cough. Yeah. Thoughts and prayers that.

Because panic buying is the latest thing to do and I’m reading about people running around like chickens with their heads cut off, prioritizing the stupidest things (really, toilet paper?), here is a list of other things I would get (everyone knows cans, jars and anything with a long shelf life is essential) in the mad scramble of panic buying:

Twinkies. I’d hoard Twinkies like the Gulf states hoard oil. Every post-apocalyptic work states unequivocally that Twinkies will never go bad, and the currency of the future post fall-out could very well be Twinkies and toilet paper.

Machetes. If this is really going to all go down and we’re headed to the wilderness to fend for ourselves like extras in The Walking Dead, a few machetes would come in mighty handy. A little chopping for firewood, a little slicing for meat, a bit of hacking through the underbrush, a good machete goes a long way.

Aquatabs. Or, really, anything that has to do with potable drinking water. For obvious reasons. I stopped drinking from the tap years ago, because I couldn’t trust it, and once again, if we are pushed to the brink and forced to source water from rivers, lakes and waterfalls we aren’t supposed to be chasing, dying from dysentery is just as bad as dying from COVID-19.

Ibuprofen. Let’s see, you’re on the run (or you’re locked down for an inordinate amount of time). Your hygiene is shit. There are no willowbark trees anywhere in the vicinity, and you wouldn’t know a willowbark tree if you saw one anyway, so what’s the point? You develop the worst migraines because your body is crying out for food and water. Hoard the painkillers. Guard them with your life.

UPDATE: not sure how accurate the reports are re ibuprofen as a possible aggravator for COVID-19, so… grain of salt and all that.

Duct Tape. I don’t know about you, but duct tape is this magical stuff that is supposed to fix anything and everything, with the exception of a broken marriage, so yes, maybe a few rolls of that stuff might come in handy in my new life as a vagabond.

Clearly, I am a red shirt and these things aren’t going to be worth shit and my survival skills are all from the school of pop culture, which means I’ll be the one who thinks survival is curling up in the body of a dead tauntaun. That said, to be honest it’s kind of hard to make light of these things, when you’re facing the reality of empty shelves and fruit bins. I went for apples yesterday, and it looked like a plague of locusts had swept through our local No Frills:

I have NEVER seen these shelves be empty before. Ever. It is weird, and not a little eerie.

Also this, at the local Canadian Tire:

20200314_1211015059387455030293876.jpg

The future is here, and it is bleak.

Jaded Hindsight Edition

We Interrupt Your Scheduled Programming to Bring You: Heartbreak Weather

by NikkaLeave a Comment on We Interrupt Your Scheduled Programming to Bring You: Heartbreak Weather

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you use your boyband membership as a springboard to success. None of the overdramatic, Camila Cabelo-esque ready-for-primetime impatient grasping that usually characterizes the breakaway narrative; no Beyonce or Justin Timberlake-esque pulling focus, no Robbie Williams-esque bad boy drama, no Geri Halliwell-esque shock and awe. Just doing your time, putting in the work, waiting your turn, and then, when the time comes, capitalizing on your chance and proving that you have a helluva lot of talent as a songwriter, and more than enough charisma to outshine everyone else in your former boyband, simply by virtue of seeming above it all, and less… well, encumbered, by everything.  Not everyone exits the weird cocoon of singing groups so unscathed.

Who doesn’t enjoy success stories, especially ones where the underdog suddenly emerges to become the bright shining leader of the new world order, Hunger Games style? Not that Niall Horan is a stranger to trying times. Even pretty people get their hearts broken. Not all of them mine it the same way. It seems Horan’s answer to dealing with heartbreak is to make upliftingly catchy tunes for a sad subject matter, which is a positive way of dealing with things, everything else considered.

I liked Flicker, Niall Horan’s first solo album. Not that I’m a big connoisseur but it’s one of the best a former boybander has ever put out in recent years. Heartbreak Weather, while not quite as stellar as Flicker, is not a bad second effort. Although Horan has said it’s a concept album, meant to show matters of the heart as various weather patterns, it’s not as cohesive, track arrangement-wise. By this, I mean the order of play could use just a smidge of re-ordering. Still, it’s really nice to see Horan come into his own, and so suavely too.

People are People, Things I Get Myself Into

The Hungry and the Fat

by NikkaLeave a Comment on The Hungry and the Fat
Screen Shot 2020-03-01 at 4.27.40 AM
Ladies and gentlemen: my autobiography.*

I have, apparently, become a Chihuahua with the appetite of a St. Bernard. Or so my family doctor tells me. I’m paraphrasing. Of course that wasn’t a direct quote, no doctor would be so blunt, especially not in today’s extremely sensitive (and litigious) atmosphere, but that was pretty much my takeaway. I had asked him to please, for the love of all that was holy, give me something – gastric bypass, lobotomy – anything, to take away my horrible lack of self control when it comes to food in the pursuit of the ideal BMI. But all he would recommend was just to eat less. That is what he said. “Eat less.” And then he made me step on the scale and, having dispensed with that particular slap in the face, reminded me once again by measuring my height that I stopped growing right before I hit five feet. Dear United American Tiki-Tiki: my mother would like her money back.

Annual physical exams are excruciating. The results are fine when you’re in your twenties, a nubile sylph made of Teflon. Otherwise, to paraphrase Samantha Irby (I am paraphrasing a lot today, aren’t I?) we are all sacks of meat that are slowly beginning to rot. Notice I say slowly; the bloodwork and the cholesterol results, the heart rate and lungs and all that, came back okay. Which is something to be glad about. But, to paraphrase Lady Gaga (here we go again) there could be a hundred good results on a lab report…

There isn’t a  lot of wiggle room when you are short. “Small,” says my doctor, an adjective which, in any other circumstance, I would be fine with, but not in this instance because we are now talking about me growing vertically as opposed to horizontally. He went on to remind me that it’s just like overfeeding a pet – you can’t stuff your cat full of lasagna if you don’t want it to be Garfield, yes thank you, Captain Obvious, why did I have to go and pick such an implacable doctor – all I really wanted was some wonder drug or other, but the only drug being prescribed that day was common sense. I have no self control, goddamnit, but really who else do I have to blame? I should’ve just gotten pregnant. At least I could’ve blamed weight gain on the baby and coasted on into my forties overweight but with a lot less self-loathing. Maybe I should take up cigarettes? Hypnosis? A political cause like Gandhi?

Whatever it takes, I acknowledge that my doctor is right about the only way to go about reversing the effect of the past few years. I do not want to enter my forties as a Hindenburg impersonation. I may not be the nubile Teflon sylph I used to be – and likely never will be again – but I took a little heart from noting the weight gain didn’t just happen overnight. In comparison it should be faster to erase it than it took to gain it. Your thoughts and prayers would be much appreciated, and see you in the produce section.

* no it isn’t