Author: hamishmacdonald

Today Craig and I are going to the nice new café at John O’Groats to have a planning day, but before we go there, it’s important for me to finish this page, to know what’s important for me this year, and in the years ahead.

Thinking about this in bed this morning, a few things came to mind:

1) I want to go deep: I want to read and to write and to draw, to discover what’s inside me and bring that out, rather than watch TV or distract myself with the internet.

2) I want to focus on what I can do, what I want to do, what I do well””and not bitch about the other stuff, like political and financial injustices, which I really have no intention of working on.

Lance Armstrong doesn’t owe me an apology! I don’t care about him, even though there is a whole industry devoted to trying to get me outraged about him and entertain myself to death.

3) I want to stay calm and centred: I get wound up about work and getting things done, and it doesn’t get any more done, and is probably what would kill me. Why take care over my health and eat all these special foods if I’m not going to take care of that?

4) [This one’s kinda personal; the gist is that we need to make some decisions about family.]

5) And then there’s the question of where do we want to live, in terms of our quality of life.

These aren’t easy questions, and built into even asking them is the expectation that there are answers to these. Some answers may be incompatible. But we still have to ask the questions!

Like being calm, though, like being centred, it’s important for us to remember that these are our answers, our choices, and that we are allowed to do what we want. There are no right answers out there, and it’s a matter of choosing rather than deciding between pros and cons. And life is going to happen even if we avoid the questions, so we might as well be the ones making the choice.

It’s New Year’s Eve-day and the family have no plans, so we’re all doing our own thing. I decided to doodle, picking up the 30-Day Drawing Challenge (though Lord knows how long ago I started it).

Here’s what I came up with:

1. Favourite book character; can’t be a movie. Well, I don’t have one of these, so I just chose the lead character from the most recent book I finished, Now Is the Hour, by Tom Spanbauer. Chuck Palahniuk says Spanbauer is the man who taught him how to write, so I figured it was worth a try. I liked it and thought it had real life to it, though the territory (midwest US farm boy comes of age) is extremely well-trod.
2. Favourite word. Enantiodromia refers to the tendency for things to find a balance. Jung used the word (as I understand it) to describe how suppressed desires will come out more even strongly in other, possibly inappropriate areas of life. (cf: homo-hating Republicans who get caught in public restrooms with male prostitutes.)
3. Favourite animated character. I don’t have one now, but when I was a kid I yearned to be Mickey Mouse, and pretended with a Method-actor intensity that I was him. Now, though, I think the Disney corporation is a vile peddler of imagination-ruining nonsense. (Girls, there are only about three available princess jobs in the world, and princesses tend to become very, very unhappy. Or dead.)
4. Favourite TV show. Craig and I enjoyed a show this year called “Getting On” by UK comedian Jo Brand. It was a clever, dry-as-gin, yet engaging look inside the crushing and ridiculous bureaucracy of the National Health Service. I thought it might be no fun for Craig to watch on TV more of what he has to deal with every day, but there’s a lot of cathartic joy in seeing someone articulate””with humour and insight””exactly what your situation is like, and that’s exactly what this show did.

By contrast to Getting On is the TV I’ve been seeing here in Canada: the Canadian news strikes me as extremely good, but the adverts are just shockinglybad. The voice-over actors are all doing what sounds””to my UK-conditioned ears””like a berserk level of over-emoting up and down the scale from the women, and way, way too much of that gravelly fake-manlymanly extreeeeeeme voice from the men.

Then there are all the pharmaceutical and “Rah! Rah! Support the troops!” ads from the States. Presumably there’s a target-marketed type of individual on the other end who responds to these messages. The thought frightens me.

The Canadian ads go for a more folksy, funny, “Aren’t we quirky?” angle, but they still ring a really fake note to my ear.

My mum asked me to crawl out under the eaves and retrieve some boxes of my old stuff.

Fast-forward about eight hours, and I’ve now relived my life from grade school through high school, on to theatre school/university, then through my days of striving and struggling in Toronto — pictures, letters, newspaper reviews, theatre programmes and posters, and a bag full of journals and notes documenting all my trysts, brainstorms, and the working notes of my play and first two novels. I even found a plaster mask of that younger self buried in that mountain of paper.

I can’t help wondering what he would have thought of the 44-year-old me. I didn’t get famous, but I found a good way in the world. After years of wrestling with myself and going through heartbreaks, I reached a real peace by my 40th birthday and met my husband three days later. Plus I just spent a few weeks working from my client’s office, where the team and he company’s owners gave my self-esteem such a boost (once again) that it feels like I’ve got a million bucks in the bank. I was even given a mansion to stay in for my last week there.

So, yeah, it’s not what the young me pictured, but it’s damned good, and he was a little stupid anyway.

Yet, as I got pulled into all those journals and show-notes again, I couldn’t help but also be a little impressed. Theatre was such a brilliant thing to study. Movie-stars and celebrities, yeah, make fun of them all you like, but working in theatre is real art. Or science, even, since that’s about making a stroke of luck repeatable. I can’t think of any better education I could have had in art and life all at once.

Studying acting was a deep, weird, gut-wrenching couple of years. Then and after, I was always falling in love with someone, too, which both fed the work and got in the way (it’s hard to be honest with an audience of hundreds when you can’t be honest with your one self). But there’s a kind of fondness to the melancholy ache of those memories. “You were young, you were sexy, you were free!”

Yeah, but not really. I didn’t know things would work out. I was dirt-poor. Those hand-made greeting cards I found in the bag? I came up with those when I quit my awful waiting job, because it was that or go to the welfare office. (Well, I did go there, and the interview was such a demeaning violation that I left it saying, “Forget it. I’ll find another way.” Slowly, gradually, I did.)

Everything I do now, you can see the roots of it in my earliest primary school journals (pages of creative writing sprinkled with cartoons). But the path between there and here seems so tenuous. Letters from a great aunt in Scotland, a Scottish postcard from my grandmother, and now I live in “the Old Country”. I guess it’s all there, Chekov’s guns lying all over the place to give clues about what would happen in later acts. But they could have backfired so badly.

My pal James and I went to a house party while I was in Toronto. He called a limo service to take us there. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “it won’t be some douchebag SUV.” Honk-honk: guess what picked us up. When we arrived and walked away from the shiny black treehouse on wheels, I said to him, “Look at us: Who knew we would make it? When we were first friends, going to nightclubs, we were broke most of the time and perpetually single.” Now, well, we’re not that. (Though my lifestyle and income are — ahem — more modest than his. Power to the entrepreneurs.)

And what about all those shows, all that artistic effort? The posters, he scripts, the cards — it all seems a bit pointless. The shows closed, some of those people I worked with are dead now. And yet, I aspire to staying as deeply creative as that awkward young me strove to be. The understanding those experiences gave me seems like the only thing I can actually hold onto.

What to do with all those books, though, the lines and lines of angst and questioning?

For now, the paper avalanche has been sifted through and reduced to one bag… which I’m going to take to the basement. At some point I’ll figure out how to use it all, but for now it’s just reassuring — if a bit emotionally wrenching — to feel like my past has all been relived, bundled together, and added to my present self. I think everyone feels compelled to validate their own experience, but I tend to find art that does that a bit tedious. I’m more interested in using my imagination to look ahead.

In the airport. My right ear is ringing like a sunuvabitch. Deafness awaits.

Outlined the novel yesterday on fake digital index cards in the Storyist app. It feels so good to have those ideas gathered in a form I can act on. I also made some more edits to Chapter One based on the character work I’d done the day before.

It’s taken me so long to reach this point, but there’s something neat about allowing a story to percolate for so long. Ultimately, I figure it doesn’t matter when I finish it; it’s more important that I have fun being in the story, telling it, shaping it.

Normally, I outline then write a chapter and consider it finished. This time I see this being more of a layering process, adding in detail and (hopefully) humour, rather than feeling it all has to be there in the first draft.

I spent much of yesterday evening in the hotel last night looking for my Canadian passport after repacking my messenger bag for the flight. (Down the other side of the desk, under the curtain.)

Then I tried to watch an Australian film about a secret gay cabal who placed eligible young men into positions of power. It was awful, and deeply offensive; every scene of contact between men was clearly meant to evoke “Eew! Isn’t that eewy?”, like that was a shortcut for evil and depravity. I deleted it rather than subject myself to the rest. (And yes, I feel I can offer comment without seeing it all.)

A thoughtless afternoon coffee made for a terribly restless night, and it was compounded by the steady rumble of the (apparent) battleship engine installed behind the hall cupboard.

Then this morning I turned on the shower this morning, which blasted hot rain everywhere in the bathroom before I could shove it toward the wall.

Now here I am at the airport, actually in fine spirits despite how cranky the above must sound. I kind of like being in travellimbo. It’s raining, not snowing as forecast, so that eliminates a hurdle. Now I’ll just hope for, as my friend Kirsten wished me, “a bearable flight.” That’s as high as the bar goes nowadays.

So this one is “Your favourite place.” If you’ll pardon the expression, when I tried to free-associate on this theme, I drew a blank.

Place is a bit of a challenge for me. I don’t feel like I really belong anywhere, probably because I’ve moved to a new place every ten years, so I’ve never had a chance to really identify with one location. That said, I wouldn’t trade the experiences I’ve had, and for all that I’ve lost culturally by doing that, I’ve gained a broader perspective than I would have had, and a sense that I don’t have to choose; I get to belong wherever I am at the moment””even if I’m missing a lot of back-story, information, and fitting-in behaviours.

So for this one, I chose something more general: “cafés”. As I’m saying in the doodle below, I love cafés, because they represent the possibility of of doing creative work and not having to be alone to do it””yet getting to be alone!

(Which sounds awful now that I read it. Not that I feel the need to get away from my beloved; one of my most favourite recent experienced was going to the new café at John O’Groats with Craig, drawing and writing while he read and took pictures of the wild Pentland Firth outside.)

The café I drew is one back in Edinburgh, Black Medicine. It got crowded and studenty, but I do remember having a great writing session there when I was working on Idea in Stone. That memory is an important touch-stone today, because I’m using up a few vacation days before I go to Canada, and today I’m in the pub, determined to get back to my novel.

(People keep asking, “How’s your novel going?”, and I know they’re being supportive, but it does put one on the spot somewhat””sort of like when I was an actor, and after a show someone would say, “So what are you working on next?” Usually I had no idea, or I’d gone on some auditions, but talking about that would invoke the dreaded jinx and set up a potentially awkward question for the future. “So did you get the lead in that film you auditioned for?” No, Christian Bale did. But I’m sure it was close.)

The bottom panel is horribly drawn; as I write this, I’m assuring myself that’s okay, because this is drawing practice. In it, I’m saying, Then there are diners, though we don’t really have those in the UK, so my favourite one of those exists in my imagination, where I go to review my projects.

—

So. It’s Canada, 1967. Height of the Cold War. Our story begins in a snowy field, miles and miles outside Ottawa, where cipher clerk Eddie Miller is about to have a job interview at the government’s secret nuclear-bomb-proof bunker. Except he can’t see it, just a little shed jutting out of the snow…

Yeah, I know, I skipped Day Four”””Draw your favourite place”””for now, ’cause today happens to be my buddy Cosgrove’s birthday, so I did Day Five: “Draw your best friend.”

Now, this one’s a bit contentious, ’cause I’m not into ranking things like books and movies, and especially not people. My husband is, of course, my best friend. But my buddy Cosgrove and I have also been friends for a really long time. So here he is:

Then there’s my friend Patrick, though; he and I have been through the wars, so I also consider him a “best friend”:

So there ya go: some best friends.

I once read that doing “extreme” sports doesn’t actually confer any qualities to other parts of our lives (e.g. bungee-jumping won’t make you feel more confident on dates).

But, you know, driving is making me believe that’s not true: Learning to do this dreaded thing””even starting to have fun at it””is a real confidence-booster. What else might I be able to do? I’ll be driving that car around like I’ve got a bloody dragon’s heid in the boot!

I still have a lot to learn, but that nightmare of suddenly appearing in the driver’s seat of a car on the motorway… it doesn’t apply anymore (even though I haven’t dealt with those lessons yet).

Perhaps the oracle at Delphi was wrong. Perhaps knowing ourselves just chains us to a past description””a story””of who we’ve been, and blinds us to our potential.

Un-know thyself!

I don’t think it’s racist to admit that I didn’t realise until last week that fundamentalist Muslim cleric Abu Qatada and fundamentalist Muslim cleric Abu Hamza were different people.

Here’s my doodle for (really non-consecutive) day two of the Thirty-Day Drawing Challenge: “Draw your favourite animal”. I guess this one’s fairly predictable:

And, finally, on Saturday (after driving practice, which is going really well!) Craig and I went through to Thurso for Chinese with our friend Donald. Over dinner, the conversation turned to the weather and how dark and cold it’s getting these days. Donald asked, “Why would anyone live in Scotland?”, and we were all silently stumped for an answer. Then Craig and I went to see the new James Bond film (which I felt was a fun, solid, good, and modern advancement of the stories). Part of the story takes place in Scotland, and as soon as they showed a sweeping location shot in Glencoe, I thought to myself “That’s why we live in Scotland.”

I’d still find it difficult to answer Donald’s question for anyone. It’s really a case of “If you don’t know, then you don’t know.”

P.S. This was the fortune in my cookie:

Is this referring to Toronto? Charlottetown?

I had my second driving lesson today, and as much as it must have seemed like a mess to the instructor, it was full of breakthroughs for me.

I drove around other cars without worrying at all about crashing into them and killing everyone inside. Suddenly it just seemed obvious, like “Of course I’m not going to crash into them.”

Changing gears above first was easy, too (getting into first still poses a challenge, especially when I’m trying to think about other things, like making a right turn). The gearbox in the instructor’s car is much more precise and yet forgiving than our car, but Saturday afternoon was devoted to being “Clutch Day”, and I think I made progress. (I can stop without stalling almost every time.)

Learning to pass the driving test is not my goal. Learning to drive well is my goal. And it’s not even a goal: I understand it’s a process.

Even though the meme is quite old, I’ve decided to do the “30-Day Drawing Challenge“. I just may not do it in 30 consecutive days.

Here’s day one: me.

In my first lesson, my instructor and I somehow got onto the topic of bungee-jumping and other “xtreeeme” sports. I mentioned something I read somewhere, which proved that there’s actually no transference of qualities from that experience to any other aspect of life””in other words, propelling yourself off a bridge with an elastic band attached to your feet won’t make you feel any better about dating.

You know what? I think that might be wrong. Driving is something I’ve avoided for a long time. I’ve even had recurring nightmares about it (suddenly popping into the driver’s seat on a busy motorway but the controls don’t work, I’m surrounded by huge lorries, I’m actually sitting in the back seat but trying to reach the controls, &c).

But I’m starting to get it. Slowly, and maybe it’ll take me forever, but I’m making progress, and that’s a good feeling.

I mean, hell, I learned how to write in shorthand. That was a skill I had to acquire from scratch. But it wasn’t exactly scary (except a few times early on when I’d taken important notes and couldn’t read my outlines after). Driving is still a bit scary, but I’m finding ways to deal with that, like EFT, which may just be hocus-pocus, except that it works consistently for me.

A big part of that may be because the technique gets you to articulate what you’re afraid of. In this case, it’s hurting other people, looking foolish, being overwhelmed and discovering I can’t learn this, or causing expensive car-damage. Oh, okay. And can I trust myself to be a careful and safe driver? Yes. Can I be a patient and committed learner? Yes.

So that’s that. And last week I wrote a ton of copy in the face of some unreasonable deadlines. I hit a wall with that at one point””so I had a nap, then finished the job. Amazing how a nap can reboot your brain and energy.

I just looked over at Craig and said, “It’s nice to have spare time.” I don’t have anything planned at the moment that requires me to use my evenings to prepare for it. That feels really good. I feel like reading, doodling, and writing this.

Yes, this is just what I needed. Driving lessons are enough of a commitment for this month.