Badlands Curmudgeon

In memory of Ted Lindsay, let’s consider labour in professional sports leagues. In each of the top four North American professional sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL), organized labour has improved the working conditions of players; but always only after a vigorous struggle. 

I spend most of my time stuck in a tornado of anxiety – any thoughts that are not firmly attached to the mandatory activities of my daily life are soon swept away and destroyed. Sometimes these storms of anxious thought abdicate their rule of my mind and I find the ability to record what diffuse thoughts emerge from the ditches and bunkers of my psyche. This is one such interregnum; I feel the urge to write about Kanye West’s new track, XTCY, and the time I was surprised by a corpse.

You will probably think me terribly privileged, writing about death like this, and you will probably be right: I am among the most privileged people on the planet. But consider that in normal circumstances, in any society, death is an arresting phenomenon, even among its mere observers. Today, we may observe shock and mourning even in the nascent consciousness of the chimpanzee; delving into the past of our own genus, we find that the most striking monuments of any generation are monuments to death. We build statues, the Egyptians built pyramids, and Homo neanderthalis scraped shallow graves in the dirt. Meditations on death are not reserved for the elite.

I should also mention that I have seen more of corpses than most people, having taken part in the dissection of cadavers at the university. Cracking open someone’s cranial vault with a saw gets you to terms with human mortality pretty quickly. But enough of this mental onanism.

A few weeks ago, in the dog days of this summer, smoke from fires to the West hung thick in the air. The heat, smoke, and distant devastation left me with a sense of impending doom. Sometimes it snowed ash and I felt like I was standing on the lips of the apocalypse’s maw. One evening, in honor of the trees burning beyond the horizon, H and I were standing on my balcony burning a few trees of our own, adding our own smoke to the banks far above our heads. Then we saw her. Twenty-five stories down and a block away (across the street from the homeless shelter) we saw a woman lying on her side, limbs splayed awkwardly, on a raised slab of concrete by the street corner. Then we saw the ambulance – lights on but no siren – roll up slowly; we saw one paramedic attempt the defibrillator while the rest loitered; we saw the stretcher and the blue blanket rolled over her face; we saw the silent ambulance slink away from the scene, siren off. Nothing marked the spot. H and I mourned her for a little while. I remember commenting that “at least it was a warm night”, as though the warmth of the evening might somehow be a consolation. The warmth of that evening continues to strike me as odd – I think my subconscious sees death as something cold (a sudden snap of synapses failing like the snapping of a twig in frost) rather than something warm (an ever-expanding fuzziness like limbs warming at a campfire). The hubbub of Saturday night took no notice of the city’s loss. A taxi carrying revelers passed the ambulance as it was leaving, the city’s homeless population crossed the street there like they always do, and the noise of celebration continued to echo up into my apartment.  A couple of days later, I walked past a different person laid out on that concrete slab – soundly (but safely) asleep.

Later that evening, I stood out on my balcony again, this time wearing only my boxers. I blew my smoke, H emerged from the apartment and embraced me, and my dog laid himself down at my feet. If I looked to my right, I could see my reflection; to my left I could see the corner where the corpse had lain; in front of me was the rest of Calgary and the foothills, as far as the mountains. In that moment I felt nostalgic for the present. It was though a sneering voice was speaking to me thus: “O, Wormfood, are you not Alexander? Are you not as much Alexander as Alexander himself ever was? H is your Hephaestion and your own legs are your Bucephalus! This balcony is your prow, this apartment is your ship! The Hellespont and its waves are before you -- troughs of green trees and crests of concrete and steel. Cross it now, for somewhere, in that vast distance, is your Persia, soft and ripe for the taking! Throw your spear and claim it as god-given – it will be yours!” This moment passed too, and I lit another pipe.

I have listened to Kanye’s XTCY on many different occasions and in many different moods and it never fails to take me back to that latter moment. The opening chords, though pleasant in tone, have an unsettling twang. Sexual moans are layered throughout as if to mock the listener, as does Kanye: “You got sick thoughts? I got more of them.” He sneers on, sometimes in falsetto, detailing his sins (escorts, masturbating to his sisters-in-law, filming his sexual partners). His response to these sins is not penance, but excess: “Damn! You need to be locked up? Nah, we need a bigger hot tub.” The music is deliberately cloying and the lyrics troubling – these combine in an entirely unpleasant sense. Kanye toys with the listener, pretending to finish the track with a now familiar series of mocking “scoop-di-woops”. After a moment of silence, he resumes the track with another repetition of, “You got sick thoughts? I got more of them.” The true ending comes abruptly – halfway through another invocation of “ecstasy”.

was well armored 

but all its defenses could not stave 

off the inevitability 

of death you too 

child will die 

 soon 

70 million years old 

horseshoe canyon 

Raul Esparza

Le Chiffre

Hannibal Lecter

Hannibal Burgess

Matts Mikkelson

Javier Bardem

Raoul Silva

Anthony Bourdain

Today, a newspaper published an obituary for a woman who abandoned her children; her children wrote the obituary and described what she did to them and relished in her death. This has lead to much hand-wringing from elite newspaper-reporter types. 

To this I say, “Vengeance is the spice of life.”