Personal – Page 9 – Nicolas Demers

Giving Thanks For Whistler

Boo on me. Working so hard on my blog & gallery redesign that I totally forgot to write about Thanksgiving. And it was pretty special, since I spent it in Whistler with a few close friends. Just one day (Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon), but it was a hell of a day.

The good omens started on the drive up. It had been raining for a few days, but the weather was just then clearing up. Which meant dozens of gorgeous rainbows lining Highway 99. The first almost took my breath away, and it took all my concentration to keep my eyes on the road. Over the next couple of hours, I did get a little more used to them—and the gorgeous scenery I hadn’t seen in a while.

Then dinner, walking around a bit, and hanging out, then off to bed.

Monday promised to be clear, so I set my alarm for 6:00 to get some sunrise pics… forgetting the crucial detail that Whistler is surrounded by mountains. At 6AM it was still mostly dark, nowhere near actual sunrise. Oh well. So I wandered around, took some nice photos of Whistler in the early morning fog, went back to my room, tried to get back to sleep, couldn’t, went out again and finally saw a good sunrise over Blackcomb Mountain around 9AM. Then a few minutes later the fog came back in and hid it. Boo.

We had breakfast, walked around Whistler for a bit, then spontaneously decided to go up Whistler Mountain. What a difference 2 months makes! The last (and first) time I was there in 2003, it was August. Now snow covered the whole mountain (enough for at least one small avalanche), the hiking trails were closed, and I was kind of freezing. Sure, I was dressed warm, but obviously not enough for the mountain. Still: we kept moving, admired the scenery—and it was breathtakingly gorgeous with the fog-slash-clouds playing around the many mountains whose names I never bother to learn. Oh, and on the way down, we caught a glimpse of a mother bear out with two cubs.

We had an early turkey dinner, because most of us had to go back to Vancouver. That evening I went to see Between Heaven and Earth, part of the VIFF lineup. Excellent movie, much better than what I expected. I thought it would be about the trials and tribulations of two families of wandering circus folks in Uzbekistan. And it is about their trials, but so much more than that. The circus people are not passive recipients, they’re involved in their community, and even in national politics. There’s issues of tradition vs. modernity, faith and religion, and the greater social/economic picture of Uzbekistan. Great stuff, stark and troubling at times, but not sensationalistic.

If I lived downtown I’d be home by now

(Arrr!)

Well, I’m blogging from home, but still. It hit me tonight, with a dazzling clarity, as I grabbed a bite just before catching the last Trainbus: if I lived downtown I wouldn’t have to commute way out (okay, not way way out, I know) to the boonies, on top of an exhausting day at work.

(Arrr!)

Still haven’t taken any real steps to move out of the ‘burbs, but this is yet another kick in the pants.

They loved the t-shirts, but the fridge magnets were a hard sell

It was the August long weekend so you know what that means? The Vancouver Pride parade. The sun was shining, the rainbow balloons were floating, the leather queens were buff and be-harnessed. The idea this year was to have a moving game: a few players would bump the ball around while two held up the net, and a few more would run around giving out free junk to the crowds. We were supposed to (a) watch out for the overhead wires, and (b) not do any hard hits, because the ball would go into the crowd and someone might get hurt. Which happened many times anyways, though nobody was ever hurt. Besides, the crowd loved the spikes and hard hits. Hey, you gotta give the people what they want.

I played for a while, then switched off to hand out goodies. And, hah, part of me flashed back to those days of yore when little hypershy me had to sell chocolate bars for the scouts. Let’s face it: everybody wanted the t-shirts, but the fridge magnets? Not so much. I had to be a bit more assertive and in-your-face to move those suckers. Plus, we ran out of t-shirts early on while we still had stacks of the magnets at the end. Which reminds me, I should have gotten one for myself. Oh, but we also had some bitchin’ press-on tattoos with the VGVA logo and Web site; I put a couple on myself, and they made me feel all tough and butch.

Yeah, it was an awesome day. But afterwards I was exhausted, sweaty and disgusting. They’d asked us to wear league t-shirts, but maybe I should have thought twice about wearing this year’s colour. Because dark purple and blazing sun don’t really mix.

Burn in Hell, Jerry Falwell

Okay, I wasnâ€™t going to write about Falwell’s death… but then I thought, what the hell, all the cool kids are doing it. Let’s start with a stirring eulogy by Christopher Hitchens:

“People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.” Ha! Yeah, Hitchens is kind of an obnoxious asshole who loves to hear himself talk sometimes (seriously, “Chaucerian frauds”?). But when he’s right, he’s right.

Marc Adams came to SFU in 1998 to talk about his experiences growing up gay in a fundamentalist Baptist environment. Adams had gone to Falwellâ€™s Liberty University. He survived—not all gay students did.

Marc talked about Kent, a student who was kicked out of Liberty for being gay. Even though they were in the same prayer group together, Marc was too busy trying to “become straight” to reach out to Kent. They never talked about being gay, not even as Marc helped Kent carry his suitcases to the curb. Marc feared a close association with Kent would arouse suspicions about his own sexuality. “A couple months after that I got a letter from him in the mail and the first thing he said was that his parents obviously did not kill him, but they did throw him out of the house and he was living on the street. He told me though, that he had found a way to cure himself of his homosexuality, that he had been able to do it, and he left a phone number for me to call. And so I called the number and it rang to his parents house and his brother told me how Kent had, just a couple days earlier, broken into their house and taken one of his fatherâ€™s guns, and blown off the back of his head.”

I remember some members of the audience were in tears during Adams’ talk. Me, I wasn’t crying; I was angry. If I’d had the power, I would have cheerfully burned Liberty University to the ground right then. Though he didnâ€™t pull the trigger, Falwell and his followers are to blame for filling that boyâ€™s head with lies, fear and shame, making him feel he had no other options.

Here’s something I didnâ€™t know: before getting into the homophobia and anti-abortion business in the 70’s, Falwell used to be a segregationist. From a sermon he made four years after the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education:

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration… He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”

Not too surprising from a little toad (thanks, Christopher!) whose other career highlights include bigotry, lies, corruption, and the outing of Tinky Winky. Blaise Pascal wrote, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Falwell spent his life proving Pascal right, and inspiring others to do the same. He was a monster and a creator of monsters. The world is better off without him.

PS: This will blow your irony meters. Apparently, Fred Phelps (yes, that Fred Phelps) will picket Falwellâ€™s funeral. For real. Damn, that’s too funny.

I Knew Where My Towel Was

We had our end-of-year volleyball tournament yesterday. My team won first place, which surprised the hell out of me. I havenâ€™t won first place at anything in a while, and it was a very/ even game: with only a couple of exceptions, all our matches were won or lost by a handful of points. So I blocked and I passed and I set and I reffed for a bit and then I blocked and passed and yelled some more and sweated like a pig, from morning to mid-afternoon. Good thing I had my towel with me.

Which may not seem like a big thing, but I realized Iâ€™d never brought a towel to play. Until this weekend I just used my t-shirt to wipe myself off (yes, even for big tournaments), but I figured maybe I needed a little more. And, who knows? Maybe itâ€™s the towel that helped me win. Because the rest of the players could sass what a hoopy guy I was: they knew they were dealing with a frood who really knew where his towel was, and their strength failed them.

(RIP, Douglas.)

Iâ€™m sad to see the season end, but grass volleyball is coming up soon, so itâ€™s all good. Maybe if I bring a towel there too, Iâ€™ll end the summer with off-white skin instead of shining alabaster. Unfortunately, tanning is right out. Curse these melanin-impoverished genes what my folks gave me!

Dungeons & Dragons

I discovered The Order of the Stick about a month ago (with this episode, to be precise), and was immediately hooked. It’s got great plots, character development, action and adventure and tons of humour. Half of that is the hilarious metagaming dialog which spoke to right to my geek heart.

I discovered The Order of the Stick about a month ago (with this episode, to be precise), and was immediately hooked. It’s got great plots, character development, action and adventure and tons of humour. Half of that is the hilarious metagaming dialog which spoke to right to my geek heart. All this talk of hit points and +5 modifiers and levels by the characters themselves took me back to those long-ago gaming Dungeons & Dragons™ sessions I played with my brother M and a few friends. Ah, memories: the rattle of the dice, the scribbling on character sheets, the memorizing of monster stats, pretending we were wizards or paladins or thieves… Good times, good times.

We started playing around age 8, even before the (1^st Edition) Advanced D&D came along. I remember our first couple of games, on our grandfather’s dining room table. Good old module B2! We played with our older brother and dad—who’d introduced us to the game and bought the module and dice. He never wanted to play himself, and bowed out as soon as we found gaming groups of our own. M and I played for more than a decade (and two editions), up until our early twenties when the last of the old gang moved away. I didn’t mind not RPGing anymore, since by then I’d come out of the closet and finally had a bit more of a life. Still, it was fun while it lasted, and I got to flex a lot of my creative muscles. Plus, let’s face it: there aren’t that many social outlets for awkward teens with hyperactive imaginations, and I’m grateful to our parents for, first, introducing us to the game, and second, ignoring the fundie-driven “D&D is Satanism” hysteria that flared up in the 80’s.

But though I haven’t felt like playing since, I do get nostalgic. Now, we used to read Dragon™ magazine for most of our gaming life. Dragon had excellent articles on many RPGs (not just D&D), art, modules, short stories… and comics in the back pages. After devouring the OOTS archives, I suddenly had a hankering for those long-ago comics.

What’s New? with Phil & Dixie lasted only a few years, delighting readers with its hilarious commentaries on games and the gaming world. The creator, Phil Foglio, has been keeping busy: check out the terrific steampunk adventure Girl Genius.

Yamara started in the late 80’s and apparently kept going for a bit after we let our Dragon subscription lapse in ’93-94. It was also chock-full of metagaming dialog, with this strip being the best example. And yeah, we totally did that too. Or would have, if our DM’s had introduced this kind of mystery monster.

And Wormy. A beautiful, intricately drawn story about a cranky cigar-smoking dragon, that ended abruptly in the late 80’s. Gremorly the wizard and Solomoriah the winged demon cat kicked all kinds of ass; I believe the July ’81 strip was my introduction to the story—and what a strip it was!

No trip down memory lane would be complete without a nod to Dungeons & Dragons, the TV show. Actually, more than a nod. I recently got my hands on the entire show on DVD, and I’m happily making my way through all the eps. I loved the show when it came out, and it still holds up pretty well. The voice talent is only so-so, the dialog was kind of clunky and (this being an 80’s kids’ show) full of “morally uplifting” messages, but that’s okay because the visuals are what I signed up for, then and now. Venger on his nightmare is still an awesome sight, as is Tiamat and pretty much all the various creatures and places the children see. The animators did a top-notch job of adapting to the screen the fantasy monsters I was already familiar with, and I can tell they had a lot of respect for the source material. Which is more than I can say for the losers responsible for that similarly-named abomination. Bleah.

Terra Firma

Hey, that was interesting.

I took the SkyTrain into Surrey today, which means going over the Fraser River. And I always got kind of twitchy doing that because I’m afraid of heights, and there’s nothing like guard rails on that bridge. It was just too easy to imagine myself (and all the other commuters) falling down, down, down into the water and then sinking down, down, down to the bottom of the river. I’m not really sure how deep it is, but the point is: down. I’ve skytrained into Surrey a couple of times in the last few weeks, though before that I hadn’t done it in a long time. And something was different today: I didn’t get nervous going over the water, not at all. I just gazed down at the river in perfect serenity.

Here’s the secret: I’ve been gradually desensitising myself against acrophobia. My new job is on the 9^th floor of a downtown high-rise building (sometimes taking me as high as the 16^th); at least once a day I stand by the floor-to-ceiling windows, and just… look down. (And sometimes out. We’ve got a nice view of False Creek.) It’s a bit dizzying, and definitely disorienting to look down at other buildings and see the people walking around like ants. But it’s worth it. The little flutter in my stomach isn’t gone yet, though it’s much easier to ignore. And apparently it’s totally gone when I’m less than nine storeys above the ground (or the water). Très cool.

Now that I think about it, I never got the chance to get used to heights until I started this job. There are no high-rises out in the boonies (well, there are a few near downtown Coquitlam, but not where I live); ditto for my old job, in East Van. Ditto for school. What’s the tallest building at Simon Fraser? The AQ, with six floors? I only went there a handful of times, mainly to get cool photos of the North Shore mountains. There was the zip-lining thing, in which I stared down the fear, but it didn’t make it go away. This will, though. I’m learning that patience and perseverance is the key to fears and hangups.

Heh. Maybe I should get into the self-help industry.

Accidental Community

Iâ€™ve just returned from the first meeting of the Accidental Community project. There was a photo slideshow by local artist John Kozachenko, a very brief overview of the history of gay menâ€™s communities in the West End, Q & A and interactive discussion, and a look at future directions for the project. Fascinating stuff. I learned that the man after whom Davie Street was namedâ€”Alexander Edmund Batson Davie, 8^th Premier of B.C.â€”was rumoured to be gay, though he had a wife and children. But apparently he hung out with gay people who, upon his death, started a social club in his honour and renamed the street after him. The articles I could find online donâ€™t elaborate on just what kind of social club this was.

I was invited to this meeting by one of the project members, whoâ€™d contacted me a couple of months ago via my queer history project, looking for leads for his research (unrelated to mine, but it never hurts to ask). Unfortunately, I couldnâ€™t really help him, since I havenâ€™t kept in touch with the one person I interviewed and all my other sources are publicly available. Still, Iâ€™m enormously flattered that my little project got his attention in the first place.

In addition to some cool history, another thing I got out of this meeting was how disconnected I am to the West End, living way the hell out in the suburbs. True, there are advantagesâ€”itâ€™s much cheaper to live out here, and I do have some (non-gay) friends nearbyâ€”but maybe Iâ€™m missing out on more than I realise. Years ago I voluntarily severed almost all ties with queer communities; Iâ€™ve since eased some of the way back in, and only recently have I realised what a mistake that self-imposed exile was. Where to go from here, though? Thatâ€™s what Iâ€™ll have to figure out.

Riding The Rails

16:59. I sit on the train, looking out at the water and the mountains. As we come up to Second Narrows, I see dozens of crows flying about and perching on the trees. Yep, it’s that time of day. Hi, guys. Long time no see.

I was laid off last September, and spent the next few months looking for work. I haven’t written about it because… well, it just wasn’t that exciting to live through, and wouldn’t have been much fun to write about. Maybe some other time. But all’s well that ends well, and I’m again gainfully employed. This is the fourth week of my new job, and it’s been pretty interesting so far. A different culture (much larger and established company), different technologies, and a different routine, which honestly I’m still adjusting to. But on the whole it’s a positive experience, and part of that is my commute: for my new job is downtown, which means taking the West Coast Express.

And this train kicks so much ass. No more fighting rush hour traffic, all by myself in my car. I can relax, sit down, buy a muffin, listen to my iPod and read (or I would, if I weren’t so prone to motion sickness) and/or chat with friends and coworkers. And I’m magically whisked from the boonies to downtown (and back again, in the evening) in just over half an hour.

Best of all, I get to see the sights. Part of me feels like a tourist discovering Vancouver for the first time. Some things I’m familiar with: Burrard Inlet shrouded in early-morning fog; the North Shore mountains topped with snow, tinged orange-pink in the sunrise; the twinkly lights of North Vancouver. But I’m close to the water, and there are things I get to see close up, or from a different perspective. The ducks on the shore, completely unafraid of the big noisy metal thing rushing by. Passing under the Second Narrows Bridge. The big-ass cranes in the harbour, surrounded by containers from all over the world. The old sugar refinery, which for the longest time I thought was abandoned. The West Coast Reduction plant. The Shellburn Oil Refinery with its tall chimneys next to Burnaby Mountain. The sulfur storage facilities in Port Moody—which as far as I can tell consists only of honkin’ great piles of sulfur amidst the machinery. I’m not even clear how they transport it to and from the place. It has to be by train, though, since I can see streaks and piles of bright yellow on parallel tracks for a couple of miles westward.

Great stuff. Maybe I’ll get jaded someday, but right now it’s all new and fascinating.

Mind you, I also get to see decaying, graffiti’d building fronts as we get nearer downtown, with homeless people peeing in corners or sleeping in doorways. I’ve seen those sights enough times walking down Granville Street or driving through the East Side. It’s not all pretty scenery or productive industry. But, that’s part of my city too, and I won’t ignore it.

He Had A Dream

Would you believe I’d never listened to the entire speech before last night?

Happy belated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day from a non-American!

Would you believe I’d never listened to the entire speech before last night?

Happy belated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day from a non-American!