*Little Leaf

Little Leaf

Oh! The sun shines on you

Little leaf

No sign of puffs to cloud your day

As you flit as you see fit

Little leaf

None save gentle breeze directs you

Affects you

 Little leaf

All eyes are on you 

Each bird upon their bough marvels at your tumble

Gently. Safely. With no need to beat your wings

And the rain shall not strike you

Little leaf

For the tree from which you've grown is a canopy

Yes, its branches stretch and stay there

Thick and sturdy so they are, to block the drops

They all adore you

Little leaf

These creatures and their features
Stop and stare - forget themselves 

As you fall

                                                                                                                 Little leaf

And though you leave your tree today

Proud and tall and standing

The wind shan't cease to whisper 

Keeping you aloft, carrying you 

                           where 

                          you 

                            need 

                           to 

                            go

Nowhere in particular

Little leaf

For oh! The sun shines on you 

Little leaf

As emerald as the envied gem

Who is forever unknowing

Of the soothing breath that's blowing

Your figure to and fro

And so, cascade!

Little leaf

Upon you no caterpillar shall engorge this day

For you are truly free

Little leaf

*Rowan

It can be a girl's name, too!
Rowan was born December 31, 2000-and...uh...2011. That sounds right.
She swallowed meconium on the way into the world, pre-infant waste that can cause all sorts of complications when ingested.
She was incubated and one-of-a-kind as Sarah and Peter looked on, helpless.
I was in Halifax, wishing I was home so that I could be in the way, trying to cheer everyone up. Over the phone Sarah told me that the baby may have brain damage because of this. She may have respiratory problems. She may not get to be at all, in fact. It was a waiting game.
Teary-eyed, I got off the phone and immediately went to the Halifax Shopping Center and bought an Xbox 360. I didn't know what else to do.
Rowan is healthy and very clever and she rides the bus to school and her mother would be so proud of her fashion sense and inquisitiveness.
I keep a sort of diary for Rowan now, telling her all about her mother as best I can, intent on giving her the whole collection in some sort of odd ceremony when she's around 14 and I'm God knows how old. Maybe it's my own attempt to fight back at my personal trauma. I try to provide the best representations that I can before years of mourning have convoluted and obscured the exact truth of things.
I am eager and terrified to watch her grow up. I think of the quips yet unuttered, the jabs and clever punchlines I feel she's destined to deliver. That's the danger of a reality such as this one--I'm expecting something of the child that she cannot be.
Remember that Hartman stuff I mentioned earlier? And the Lacan? In his paper, Hartman refers to Lacan, who says, "The relief so commonly expressed on awakening from a dream comes from the realization that (unlike the psychotic) one has not after all fallen into the chaos of the real" (this is on page 539).
I get this, but what does it mean for those who are still living (according to Lacan) within the realms of the real, due to their age? What about those just emerging from the real into the symbolic and imaginary? Those on the cusp? Does it work differently for them?
A day or two after Sarah died, we all sat around the kitchen table of the house on Finn Street. It was dark and we were all quiet, all thinking to ourselves.
We heard crying then, and Rowan was ushered out by one of the concerned adults, to stand before all of us. She said she'd had a nightmare that "Mommy was in a dark room and couldn't get out."
To this day, it is the most chilling memory from all of it--the funeral, all of it. And do you wanna know what popped into my head when she said that to all of us?
"Smart kid..."

 Here's something else I wrote for Rowan. 

*High School Sweethearts

High school.

It was raining of an evening. We were all in a car because where else would we be? I don't know who the 'we' was, exactly; I'd need her to answer that. You get old enough and the we's just kinda blur together. People can be switched in and out;  the players can pass hats and scarves back and forth, like dress-up or a cookout at Barbie's mansion. I know that I was in the back, squished against the door panel (we probably had more bodies than seat belts in there). I opened my door, turned to her and asked if she wanted anything from the gas station. I asked only her, specifically. I didn't ask her questions for the answers, but instead for her responses.

"Surprise me," she offered, doing her best this time to surprise me. 

"You got it," as I exited the car. I came back with lock de-icer. 

By the time we were old enough to drive our parents' cars and formulate our own saucy world views, we were inseparable. Nobody else seemed to enjoy our rampant cynicism as much as ourselves, and so we stuck to one another first, letting others in through cautious osmosis.

Everyone said that we were together and we were, but not as they meant it. They meant tangled sheets and her in my Homer Simpson t-shirt and nothing else while brushing her teeth. They meant making out, grabbing budding breasts and unsure members. They meant Paul and Sarah, up in a tree.

That was never the case. Never-ever. Try telling the high school mob not to believe what they want to believe, though. People assumed we were boyfriend-girlfriend since we were together so often, and we got tired of specifying otherwise. Instead, we'd exaggerate the assumption and make jokes about it. We did take one another to the prom, but that was mostly because we didn't want to go with anyone else. We were also not conventionally "attractive", with her being too tall and me being frail and underweight. 

For the most part, we went to different post-secondaries. I chose to go to Nova Scotia so that I could be far enough away from Newfoundland to miss it, but close enough that I could be easily flown home by my parents if I got too sooky or frightened. The day before I left, she pitched a tent in my yard, adjacent the family motorhome, which was full of all of my clothing by then. All of my books. She camped out with her sisters. She wanted to make sure she was there when we shoved off, even though she could throw a rock from her yard and hit my own. 

Well, she could have if she was coordinated. 

*Chicago (and the Cubs)

Okay, even if we all know that the story ends tragically with Sarah dying of cancer and me becoming a grad student, the journey to that point might begin to get a tad boring. I'm beginning to realize that I'm summarizing our life cycles at various stages of the timeline, and that's bound to get taxing for the reader (you) eventually. You don't need every little detail, do you? "And then, one time, Sarah and I went to the zoo!" Who needs that?
We never went to a zoo together, actually, but we were both in the same city as a zoo, once.
Chicago. Or, "Chicargo" if you're of that group of people.
Peter and Sarah, Paul and Andie; spouses and spouses-to-be, unleashed on the third-largest American city, to refuse change to the homeless of another country while also checking out Lollapalooza.
Here was my future wife's chance to finally meet the other half of my brain, the one person throughout life who saw things as I did. Andie, my wife, had heard so much about her...
Sarah turned out to be a total drag, though. She was moody and not that fun and didn't joke and didn't ask Andie getting-to-know-you questions and didn't make jokes about how stupid my face is and didn't seem herself. When I wandered with Peter into the glub of people waiting for Queens of the Stone Age, Sarah and Andie stayed behind. Sarah then drunkenly pointed out most of my faults and didn't sugarcoat them the way that she always did when we were both single.
Like, pretend it was five years prior to this, and we were eating in a restaurant somewhere. Now, if the waitress was cute, Sarah would make a point of saying, "We're not having sex with each other. We're just eating. He has a bunch of stupid tattoos that you can look at if you see him with his shirt off."
She thought she was helping. I'm not exaggerating this, by the way, this is the exact sort of thing she would say to complete strangers.
Anyway, Chicargo marked a really weird interlude that luckily only lasted a couple of days and never saw light again.
In time, I came to learn that she was so weird because she missed the kids, and lacking motherhood and all of its instincts, that thought had never even dawned on me.
We all did a poor job of taking pictures on that trip, but I have one among the annals of my hard drives, where she sits with her husband atop a giant Ferris wheel, and she has a look of boredom and longing for the ground. It's one of my least favourite pictures of her, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good one.
I think back to those days (so recent) and wish she and I could've had a minute to ourselves. Our partners weren't stopping us, mind you, we just weren't trying as we should have been. I wasn't trying as I should have been.
I would have liked to have had coffee with my Yin's Yang in that city of gangsters.
With Sarah and I, sometimes a minute was all it took.

*Swimming Through Time

Though this seems more likely to cost me marks than gain them, I will briefly mention a theory of Jacques Lacan (all of the best theorists seem to be named Jacques). It might be wise to brush up on it because Hartman refers to it a fair amount in his paper, which we may look at again. Otherwise, this will act as a meaty concept to chew on while you're driving to work today.
Lacan, in the 50s, introduced this idea of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. Kinda sounds like The Matrix, doesn't it? The whole concept builds on Freud, who I'm not about to try and simplify, but Lacan tries to explain human cognition, I guess, and how it is formulated. He mentions the moment that a toddler first encounters a mirror, and how crucial that moment is to development. If I'm getting this right, that very moment is when a person begins to formulate the imaginary sense of self. That is, a person becomes aware of their place in the world, and immediately begin to concoct a version of themselves within it. It's not a true, or even accurate, version, mind you (hence the name). It is sort of a description of the ego; who you believe yourself to be, and how great your self truly is.
The symbolic deals with language and its usage in organizing the psyche. That is, the self can only be understood through symbolization found through the world and one's relation to it.
The real refers to all that is "out there" beyond the other two concepts. That is, what exists before the toddler stumbles in front of the mirror. It is the self before the application of language, symbolism, experience and so on. It is a realm beyond words, always beyond the tips of our tongues and outside the realms of explanation (as I'm demonstrating beautifully right now).

This somehow relates to me at age 12, shivering, wet and miserable. I'm pressing blueish fingertips to the side of my neck to feel my racing pulse. I'm measuring my heart rate. I watch the giant clock above the pool deck. The clock hands are multicolored, one of the few things in the room that I enjoy. I count the thrums of my pre-pubescent blood as it oxygenates my brain, keeping it healthy enough to realize that I don't want to be here. This was "swim team," an activity and an entity that I was inexplicably the member of for several years.
I say "inexplicably" because I was the worst one on the team. Now, some folks will say, "Oh, dude, I was the worst on that team" when they reminisce about t-ball and 4-square and other hyphenated games. Not me, though. It was really obvious to everyone around that I was the slowest, most uncoordinated swimmer out of about one hundred kids in four different age groups.
I couldn't dive, and would instead fall into the water with akimbo limbs, no doubt sickening referees while costing my swim club precious seconds in the coveted Boys 12 & Under 50m Freestyle. I couldn't swim straight because I didn't open my eyes underwater. I couldn't turn properly because I couldn't see the wall that I was meant to re-direct and push off from. I collided with lane ropes. I didn't use proper form. I couldn't swim. Oh, sure, I could prevent myself from drowning (which is why my parents sent me in the first place) but that's not the same thing.
I met Sarah here. Carbonear was the town she lived in, an eternity away when your usual mode of transportation was my ability on a bicycle. It was about half an hour by car.
In head-shrinking rubber swim caps, sporting junk food pot bellies, we got to know one another. I try to remember those times now and of course I cannot. Several years of swim team, all spent with her, and now I can no longer recall how much often we spoke, whether or not we got along, if we had the same friends. It's all lost in the ether, amongst the whiffs of chlorine.
Years later, there were drama festivals and pimples and scattered encounters as two students from two different schools tend to meet. This is all lost as well, and I wonder just how much time we spent together then.It did feel like a lot, like something we both had to wait for. Of course we knew of each other and of course we were "friends" by kids' terms, but were we who we would become? I just can't remember, and so I wonder about it all the time. I guess I'm doomed to continue wondering.
It was a phone call, when she told me she was moving to Bay Roberts--biking distance, surely. "Some place called Finn Street," she'd said.
"Wait...that's right outside my house." She must've been moving into the Drovers' old place.
Then she moved into the Drovers' old place.

*Finn Street

Finn Street

Stoned. Sneak in through the basement

Are we doing this again?

We thrive on the encasement

Joke about our kin

Make some plans - forget them

No need for what or when

Laugh at this goddamn town

Pigs roosting in a pen

You walked out on a Friday

What day is it again?

Remember when we tango'd

And used to play pretend?

We'd dress up - wig is itchy 

Let's go out, buck the trend

Laugh at this goddamn town

And everyone within

We used to gape the jaws

Can we please do that again?

Ain't fun now, all alone

Some hipster with no friend

I'd tear this whole place down

To hear "it's not the end"

Laugh at this goddamn town

Now I am one of them

*Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes

She's my imaginary too-dead friend

And she would blow your mind

I know that you can't see her

But she's always lookin' fine

Her hair is done just right

Her lips are painted pink

But her features aren't her strong suit 

She likes to make you think

Like, "What if sharks could walk on land?"

"How often do whales sleep?"

"Do hobos sometimes just hold hands?"

"Does Bono own a jeep?"

She can juggle cards and throw her voice

And dance upon her hands

You'd love her and you'd have no choice

She's really rather grand

I saw her ingest marbles once

Then she pulled them from her nose

On roller skates she glides and jumps

On skis she melts the snows

She picks up fire engines

And hides them in your ear

She tickles your intentions

Turns seconds into years

Her lungs they run on he-li-um

She exhales sweet perfume

She floats up to the ceiling then

And freshens up the room

She is Earth's magnetic north

She is all time zones

That way, if I leave my porch

Her compass guides me home

She's always been so dear to me

And I the same to her

She keeps away the bumble bees

And ticks found in my fur

I always keep her by my side

So I know who I am

I couldn't lose her if I tried...

I couldn't lose her if I tried

I include her in my plans

We're gonna join the circus soon

And go out on the road

She'll breathe with help from tent balloons

Before we do our show

She grows a beard that's really thick

She swallows sharpened swords

That's just the tip of all her tricks

We'll win big top awards

She makes these things look easy

Cause she does 'em all with ease

You'll gasp at our finale 

Up on the trapeze

I swing out and fall freely

As I tumble to the ground

Then I land upon her pinky

Like I didn't weigh a pound

I already hear you cheering

And she can hear you, too

If she was nowhere near me

I don't know what I'd do

She's my imaginary too-dead friend

And how we love to play

She said she'd meet me ten to ten

She must be late today

*Class is in Session

Okay, let's tackle the hard part first. I have to kinda explain what trauma theory is, and, crucially, why I'm using it.
Ahem.
Trauma theory (in my words) tends to deal with large-scale human suffering and death. It examines the accountability, I guess you'd say, of the fiction that develops in response to these atrocities. Since human beings try their best to distance themselves from trauma, they're already poor interpretors of it. On top of this, the really bad stuff in human history (the Holocaust and other genocides are often mentioned) automatically distance the reader (and often the writer) from the event because they were not there in the first place. Good so far? Sweet.
It gets even trickier though because whether they were there or not, trauamtic events are so traumatizing, that even first-hand accounts can be skewed, misrepresented, inauthentic, and the synonyms go on and on here. If you're afflicted by the negative impacts of the trauma (delerious with fever, for example) you're not a great first-hand source, even if you were there. If you weren't there, what can you really say about it? Writers can only do their best, as it is--maybe that's how it has always been.
As damaging as the death of Sarah Turpin was for a lot of us, she was no Holocaust. The challenge for me is to narrow what is meant to be a grand concept into a minute, personal occurrence. It is the death or loss of many that trauma theory tends to hinge on. Catherine Belling refers to it (in her paper Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction and Trauma of Pandemic Fluenza) as a "loss of access to personal narratives. The collective replaces the individual as protagonist, and the health of the public takes precedence over that of the individual." If you can access the paper, you'll find that near the beginning, page 56. According to Belling, then, trauma de-centers the individual, bypassing the person so as to refer to the greater atrocity's whole. We try and find statistics and total numbers for loss of life, placing large-scale loss into an understandable context. Humans tend to mathemetize things. A number is something that you can at least try to wrap your head around, victims and perpetrators be damned! By discussing grand loss on a grand scale, the individuals who experience trauma--indeed, who make up trauma, are forgotten.
Now, we're not gonna forget Sarah. But are we remembering her the way we intended to when she was still alive? Or is the personal trauma experienced by me, her friends, her family, distorting what it is that we're actually mourning?

*In Theory

I'm learning theory in Theory, theoretically.
We've been talking about how "post" everything tends to be now (post-human; post-feminist; post-modern), which is to say that entertainment is so overdone that we have to start sticking new prefixes to old ideas.
It's not so bad, really. Post-humanism, for example, is the exploration of humans beyond the realm of their own humanity, kinda. I managed to tie this to videogames (the wife's suggestion) for a paper, and that made it pretty fun. I'll share the paper, which you can check out here.
Anyway, my educator wants us to write Hypertext (capital H) for his class. From here on, I will refer to my professor as Joel because that's his name. (No surnames or street addresses, though. Do your investigatin' somewhere else, stalkers!).
As it turns out, you and I have been creating hypertext for years now, though I'm taking most of the credit. Hypertext is any work that champions choice for the reader, while also promoting intertextuallity and digital information. Like, if I want to provide you guys with a picture of a gopher at work, and I link that and give you something to click on, that's hypertext. I'm creating while you're manipulating. See? The gopher is a tad generous as an example, maybe, but you get the idea.
Now, we're not going to try and bamboozle Joel or my classmates by passing off our old discussions as though they were my new work, but you readers know how much good stuff is in here. It's all white goo, as we know. There's no Oreo cookie exteriors at Tragic Hero; just the filler. So, I think a fair compromise will be this: If I use old material, I'll say so up front, and add new content to old posts so that even previously published stuff is being updated for the sake of this assignment. Any class-specific material will be noted with a little star (*) so that my peers don't end up reading classic  posts about me trying to get laid from 2008.
In class, we eventually got into 'trauma theory', which explains how the guy who wrote Schindler's List can never work back to the Holocaust (capital H), no matter how hard he tries.
I know, I know: Schindler wrote Schindler's List. 
Don't worry, I'll elaborate on these theories as we go along.
Basically, trauma theory examines a work through the trauma it centers on, and then the de-centering of the subject due to the complications of experiencing trauma. I gravitated to this theory right away because if there's one thing I know, it's trauma.
Especially these days. I'd say that it is cheap to use the death of a friend to influence school work. I mean, people have to say something is good if it's about a dead friend. Our society dictates this sort of thing. You're not gonna write a story and say, "This is really about my friend who died and I miss her dearly," only to have the reader say, "It needs more thrills. Something with a boat, maybe?" No, they'll say things like, "Oh, isn't that sweet? Isn't that just a considerate thing? What a way to honour someone close."
So, let me begin by saying that I ain't that sweet. This needs to be done and I need to latch onto something that I understand in order to write it well. Sarah's death can't be understood, but I know it'll work for the sake of handing something in. There's nothing sweet about that rationale, really.
However, I will mention that she'd be fine with the idea. When I told her my plan, my wife said, "Sarah would be glad that you could use her to get some school work done," and she's right. Sarah's reaction would be, "Yeah, whatever. I'd do that if you were dead," and then she'd instruct me to depict her as a pirate or something equally inappropriate.

There we are. This feels right. This is going well already.
The funny thing is that I said 'pirate' before realizing I already had the picture.

So, let's get out our red pens and start giving me some marks! Let's see how the utmost (small-scale) trauma affects the writer and reader, and how they create material together.

Through this process, I keep picturing my biggest, die-hard fan, who has been waiting for an update to the blog for almost a year now. Then he sees this post and goes, "Finally! A new one!" But by the time he gets to the bottom of this he's disgusted, and says something like, "What the fuck?! School work!?"

*How Could This Bee?

How Could This Bee?

These walls are all white These walls are all white

No need for my eyes' rods or cones

Your laughter's as mute as a chuckling wight's

Now drowned by the buzzing of drones

Who pollinate doubt and spread their disease

A yammering, contagious lie

Told for belief to ears stuffed with gauze

As they bounce 'round the combs of their hives

I should've painted the rock with a message of truth

While you were still true to this world

We laughed at ourselves; creatures of habit

A boy with the handsomest girl

"Who livened this party and wore these bright socks?!

Who said you can be who you are?"

"I'm just here for the chips and I think she's the stripper"

Our candor was doomed to go far

So...what could undo us?

Some Cancerous Crab, waiting in ambush

Nestled and sly 'twixt the stars

A fate worse than death, or maybe just like it

Was written in thread through your scarves

Now you go, I stay 

And it's back to the party

I'm so bored I could bash out my brains

I wait for my end as others snap pictures

Developed, they all look the same

Hair of the Internet

I have to be juvenile.

Electric cars are like those rubber boots made by Hunter; they're not doing anything special compared to all the other options, they're just what everyone is buying right now.
You want to hug some timber? You want to "make a difference," but you'd prefer to do so without involving the bus? You want to look at hydrogen. That's where the actual car-oil-jihad-can't we all get along solution lies.
"Melt your Ducky Boots. We've decided that rain gear is fashionable now."
Overnight, the women of an entire municipality are a bunch of Christopher Robins.
Sad.

What if The Internet (capital 't', capital 'i') crapped out tomorrow? What if we all had to fall back on our merits?
It was originally designed to direct missiles, y'know. The military developed a global communications system so they could e-mail missiles right at Khrushchev.
However, the fellas figured out that if they were willing to wait seven hours for the loading time, they could send nude pictures of Bo Derek to one another.
It all kinda snowballed from there.

I won't name names or tombstones, but Andie told me about how her friend's next door neighbor kept banging on their wall while her friend had sex (with someone else; not with her). So, he's trying to set the mood, and this faceless cat next door is banging on the wall, yelling, "Stop having sex!" Two days later, the faceless neighbor hanged themselves.
Now, the question is, why did I find that hilarious? Oh, I laughed when she told me about it. I laughed and laughed.
What are we going to do with me?