Josh Dare: This blog will eat you

Review: Toronto School of Philosophy

Josh Dare — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 01:44:00 GMT

AWAKEN TO CONCIOUS LIVING, an ad for the Toronto School of Philosophy on the subway promised in larger-than-life capitals.

Being a new arrival in Toronto, it made me think the city must be an outrageously bohemian capital for there to be a school solely dedicated to philosophy: the dissection of reality, as I understood philosophy to be. And that school has such a wide reach that subway advertising was the most effective method of reaching prospective pupils – future students, ready to question the nature of their existence, and they just happen to be riding pubic transport. What kind of intellectual utopia had I moved to, and could I walk among them although my proverbial stature is no match for their apparent might?

The ad promised,“the school goes beyond ‘armchair philosophy’ and offers a setting for conscious self discovery.”

The first class

“Know thyself,” our teacher seamlessly carried on from the ad, before asking, “Why did you come to the school of philosophy?”

A hand shot up instantaneously. “I have social anxiety disorder. Speaking in groups makes me so anxious.” The group of 20 people half-heartedly listening suddenly got interested. “Speaking right now is really hard for me.”

Although this didn’t seem to be addressing question, or even adequately address why she felt it necessary to tell a group of strangers that she was scared to death of speaking to groups of strangers, the group of strangers responded in turn that she was doing fantastically, and they would have had no idea about her anxiety because she was doing so well.

Wisdom loving

Philosophy is the love of wisdom, the class was taught. What makes someone wise, we were asked. Answers popped up around the room. Calm, someone said. Another, fair. Informed, balanced, and pure and variations on like all made appearances at some point. Think of the wisest person you know, the class was implored. There was a heavy weight of a room full of people collectively thinking OPRAH.

The exercise

Each week, the class was taken through what is (cultishly) called The Exercise. Really, it’s just meditation, but at the SoP, it’s The Exercise. Rest your hands in your lap, then individually and systematically focus on each sense: touch. Smell. Taste. Sight. Hearing. Simply rest in this great awareness for a few moments, the instructions read. Or, ya know, in layman’s terms, ‘Just sit still’.

The cult of philosophy

The inference to a cult didn’t end with The Exercise. As people who were just starting at the School of Philosophy, we were ‘level one’. The servers in the cafeteria were level four, and in line with apparent level four curriculum, were sequestered to working in the cafeteria in order to become acquainted with servitude. The school, meanwhile, remained acquainted with free labour.

Beauty

There’s beauty in everything, the class was taught in another lesson. Or, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. See some beauty in something this week, the class was instructed.

I responded well. There was a person I work with that shat me. To tears. I looked at him. Not just with my eyes looked at him, but looked at him. Through him. Sure, I thought, there’s beauty there. Not physical beauty specifically, though I could see how someone could find him attractive once I took a step back from my preconceptions. Inner beauty. He meant well. To me, he may have been an annoying prick, but there was honourable intent in his endless whining. He was trying to help me when he could have been bitching me out to anyone who’d listen behind my back. That was beauty. He has it.

“I saw beauty,” another classmate offered after I shared my ultimate break though. “My good salad bowl,” she told us. “I only bring it out when I’m hosting a dinner party. Why is that?, I thought. So I ate my salad out the good salad bowl all this week.”

Reasoning

Much like a cult, people began to resign from personal ownership of their problems. The school offered an alternative to making tough decisions by yourself: levels of reasoning. Take it one step higher, the school taught. Is it best for the individual? If so, is it best for the family? The dilemma was propelled through society, humanity and the universe to reach a conclusive answer. Sound reasoning, to be sure. Class, discuss.

“I have a problem,” proffered one lady, who’d be fairly silent until this point. “I have a delivery coming by courier tomorrow. They say they can only tell me they’ll be at my house between 9am and midday! I have to be at work!”

Philosophising about what was learnered

The 10-week semester culminated with a bonus week where the class was invited to demonstrate to the class what they had learnt from the school. If not directly, evidently they were informed they could offer an abstract demonstration.

Salad bowl lady brought a bowl of salad for the class to share.

As per every single statement he had made in the class that semester, a man stood up prefaced, “I’m a graphic designer.” He continued, “But I’m also a spoken word poet. I’d like to perform for you all.” Which he did, before handing out copies of his CD to each classmate.

Spoken word poet man had a talent for such things, but this was no requirement to contribute. Another man performed a song that he had performed at a friend’s wedding to great adulation from the other class members.

I feel it’s necessary to explicitly point out that these are demonstrations of what was learnt at the school of philosophy: spoken word poetry, off-key singing and salad.

I didn’t partake. I didn’t take part: because my ‘skill’ is writing. If I were to deliver an honest opinion to the class, I would have spoken about the notion ‘know thyself’. I now know myself, I would have begun, enough to know that I do not belong to the same category of broken that has encouraged the rest of the class to attach to this quasi-religious course with such gusto.

I’m glad I didn’t take that opportunity though. While the School of Philosophy didn’t dissect any fabric of the meaning of reality, it did expose a societal fabric that showed that, despite the flawed execution, these people were only trying to dissect their own reality. It’s not up to myself to take that away from them.

Toronto School of Philosophy

29 Madison Avenue, Toronto

416 960 4833

www.schoolofphilosophy.ca

El Confuso

Josh Dare — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:48:00 GMT

Got tired of waiting for Xtra! (Toronto's gay street press) to publish my piece. Figure I might as well get some mileage out of it. Enjoy.

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El Convento Rico: it’s Latin. It’s gay. But it’s also straight. So basically it’s College Street’s Ricky Martin.

If you’ve not heard of Rico bar, it’s a dingy basement Latin drag bar in Little Italy. The translation of the name is open to interpretation: “Convento” definitely means ‘convent’; however “Rico” could mean a number of things, like ‘rich’, ‘delicious’ or ‘tasty’ (which is probably the preference).

Open on Friday and Saturday nights (plus Sunday nights on long weekends), Ricos is decidedly a gay and lesbian bar. When it opened 17 years ago, it was a little thorn in the little boot of Little Italy. The area was densely populated by recent European immigrants who didn’t really take to the idea of a gay and lesbian bar right in their ‘hood. El Convento stuck it out, however, to become a staple of College Street, nestled right next to Blockbuster and a thousand Italian restaurants.

While not being in the confines of the gayborhood (read: Church Street) has been tough, they see their location as an advantage. “That’s what makes us different,” general manager Fab tells me. “And that’s what helps. It gives our gay clientele the feeling that they are accepted.”

Although they opened as an outwardly gay and lesbian bar, they’ve now “evolved” and pride themselves on their mix of gay and straight clientele. As Fab explains, “Originally we opened to the gay, lesbian and bisexual community, and now we have evolved to cater to… everybody. No matter what your sexual orientation is – gay, straight, confused – we’re just here to satisfy everybody.” He mentioned that there is a misconception in the gay community that the bar is turning straight. “Over the years, it has progressed– but I think it’s hit its plateau. I can honestly say we have a 50/50 mix.”

Fab doesn’t agree that the onslaught of straight punters cheapens the experience for the gay crowd. “A lot of our gay customers enjoy interacting with the straight community,” he countered when asked. “I think they feel that they’re not sequestered to being open about their sexuality just in a gay club. Or, be going to a straight club and not being able to be open. Here, you get a bit of everythingwhich makes them feel, ‘I’m just like everyone else’ and it doesn’t limit them to what they can or cannot do.”

They’re doing what they can to ensure that they don’t lose the gays. “A majority of our performers are female impersonators,” Feb tellsme. “We make sure that we do hold our special Mr and Miss El Convento Ricos; our anniversary parties, which are gay-orientated; our New Year’s party, which is gay-orientated. Our music in general – yes, we play Latin and top 40 – but you can’t get through a weekend without hearing that disco tune.”

Ask for any stories which illustrate the club, though, and you’ll hit a wall. “Stories do no justice,” says Alisha, the reigning Miss El Convento Rico. “You have to experience it for yourself.”

“I think it is a magical place,” Fab piped in. ”As soon as you walk in here, come down these stairs – it’s like a different place. Whatever problems you’re having in the world, or whatever problems you’re having in your day-to-day life, it all goes out the door. You come down here and forget about everything.”

I came down the stairs, and wondered if there was separate entrance that I missed because my perception of the world hadn’t changed in any seismic fashion. It was just a smallish room that was playing host to what appeared to be a stagette night. At least, that’s what the sea of feather boas suggested. During the course of the night, the TVs displayed “Congratulations to our new brides!” while the stagettes’ names rotated on a marquee and gaggles of hens squealed at the digital recognition.

Fab had already told me that the bar is a popular destination for bachelorette parties. “They like to come and enjoy the show, watch everybody and party with everyone in here,” he said. “It’s one last hurrah. It’s a new alternative to going to a strip joint I guess.”

The music dimmed, and an announcement warned that a drag show was coming. The announcer also promoted the forthcoming long weekend Sunday night at Rico because the Chippendales were appearing. “And guys,” he cooed to the men, “if you’re thinking, ‘why would I want to go to that?’ – last year,all the women came and got all fired up over the men… but had no one to go home with.” I couldn’t see the announcer, but the tone of his voice in the conclusion suggested major sad face. So not only am I at the first gay bar inthe world that has to so desperately encourage their male patrons to come and see the Chippendales – the CHIPPENDALES – but they do so by promising a bounty of dripping wet pussy.

So, is it a gay bar, or is it a straight bar that features gay people? “We’re still a gay bar,” Fab reassured me. “We characterize ourselves as a gay bar and make sure everybody knows that we are. We’re proud to fly the gay flag outside.”

Drag shows are interesting at El Convento Rico, as there’s no stage – so the shows are perfomed ‘in the round’, with the audience making an accommodating wide circle on the dance floor so the queens can mime and gesture from the centre. The positioning means that really only one side of the audience at a time is getting to see the show proper; while the other half of the club is literally getting a bum deal.

Similarly, whether the gay crowd or the straight crowd is getting the best proverbial “view” at any time at ‘the tasty / delicious / rich convent’ is also open to interpretation.

El Convento Rico, 750 College Street Toronto.

http://www.elconventorico.com/

Write right

Josh Dare — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 02:02:00 GMT

I recently fell into a reflective state cleaning up the files on my laptop. Amongst the files I migrated from my old laptop to my new one were articles and blog posts that I’d written eons ago. So I re-read them. Laughed at a couple even, which is like the literary equivalent of sucking your own cock.

What happened to me? I used to write real good and stuff.

Facetiousness aside, it does feel like I’ve fallen off the horse. When people ask me what I do these days, I earnestly say, failed writer. And being endlessly self-critical while simultaneously magically blame-y, I have a few reasons.

I’m not writing much lately

I had a run with posting daily on my blog to see if any magic would come from cyclically spewing words on to the page, but all that did was make my own voice echo in my own head with the sameness of each blog post.

This excuse wears thin though, because aside from the produced blog posts, I wrote few articles this year: several for CitySearch Australia, which is edited by a “friend” who was doing me a “favour” by letting me write for free in the name of getting me 'back on the horse'; and I’ve wrote an article for Xtra!, a gay paper here in Toronto. That article, which I’ve just re-read, was written on spec - and pretty damn good if you ask me. Good enough to be accepted by the publisher, so spec won – however it’s been ‘scheduling pending’ since August. Which is fucking ridiculous, and killed my confidence in getting paid work for the time being.

My head is busted

A dear friend told me that one of their concerns when I was in my traumatic brain injury-induced coma is that I would wake up and not be able to write – because “we know you like to think of yourself as a writer,” was the gentle way it was put. And honestly, this is the one that freaks me out the most – maybe I lost a bit of myself after the accident, and that was the bit that wrote well?

I only write about myself

This one was pointed out by my travel buddy Bree, who has been urging me to write because I moan about it so much. When I told her I was writing this very blog post, she said, “Do you ever not write about yourself?”

Another monkey on my back, my sister Bec, has my blog bookmarked, which is awfully sweet and sisterly. When I noticed it recently, she asked why I wasn’t posting much. I told her I was bored of it; bored with my voice on it, talking about myself incessantly. “Isn’t that what a blog is?” she asked. “Kind of like your own personal reality TV show?”

Her idea of a blog’s purpose is contentious, but she was right about why I’m bored of it. I’m tired of talking about me. With the accident and moving to Canada, there’s been nothing but self-centric posting going on. I moved to Canada to escape the selfishness of overcoming trauma, except I only left the trauma behind and not the selfishness.

If there’s one thing working holidays are good for, it’s trying on new and different faces. So I’m starting a new tone for the blog for 2010. I plan on mixing it up with actual publishable work (addressing central questions and everything); maybe even some short stories, if I can develop my fiction-writing skills enough to produce something I want to share. And I promise: no poetry.

WATAH!

Josh Dare — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:01:00 GMT

Recently at work, because of my inconspicuous location I was put in charge of looking after the card for someone’s 15-year anniversary. Someone casually asked me if so-and-so had signed the card, so I replied, “Oh I dunno… I’m just the gate keeper.”

Which was hysterically echoed as, “THE GATE KEEPAH!”

Another time, also at work – did I mention this is my Canadian work, where they all have funny accents? – someone asked me, “Josh, say ‘water’.”

“Water,” I said.

“WATAH!” was once again echoed.

And I dreamt of cultural harassment laws that operate the same way as sexual harassment laws, which exist only in a world where I’m not forced feel like an Australian clown.

The reason we were talking about water, though, is because I was disgusted at the way water is wasted here. In fact, I raised the issue of water with the dude who mocked my “watah” because he left the tap running while he ditzed his way around the kitchen.

Coming from a country experiencing severe drought, I told him, you shouldn’t waste water like that. “I’m sorry,” he said, blankly, ingenuinely. While the water still ran.

There are small visual postcards that remind me of pre-drought Australia everywhere, from sprinklers to the OMG YOU CAN’T DO THAT hosing of driveways.

Canada is different to Australia though – they seem to be under the impression that their water supply is infinite. The poor bastards are snowed on for a majority of the year, so have a seemingly endless amount in their reserves from all the melted snow water.

I have read though that water is going to become the greatest commodity in the world as the population explodes and drinkable water becomes scarce. (Haven’t these people seen Tank Girl?)

So I guess it’s up to me to be this country’s water defender. I’m sorry, that's WATAH DEFENDAH.

Homesick

Josh Dare — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:38:00 GMT

I got to Canada on July 14. Today is October 27. Which, by my calculations, makes it 105 days. Or, 3 months and 13 days. Or, 15 weeks. Or, 2520 hours. Or, 151,200 minutes. Which is 9,072,000 seconds.

So I lied. They’re not my calculations at all; I just whacked the dates into a website and it spat all those numbers at me. The point of that exercise: that is exactly how long it took for my homesickness to kick in.

It came on quite suddenly and innocuously. It was actually a video on theage.com.au that did it. (Sorry, dear friends and family who are still in Australia.)

It was showing the new Fairfax building on the corner of Collins St and Spencer St that has just been finished. I worked just a few doors down from there and saw the foundations go in. It made my heart ache that I wasn’t there to see it complete. It looks like an awesome building. And just that one piece of architecture reminded me how freakin’ beautiful Melbourne is.

One thing that’s surprised me is how visually unappealing Toronto is. Sure, there are a couple of impressive buildings around the place, but there’s no cohesive beauty – at the risk of sounding biased, like you find in Melbourne.

Bias aside, I’m sure any impartial person could admit that Toronto is a little ugs. There’s not much pizzazz.

So I saw all these images of my home city, and I thought: I should be there. Why am I wasting my time here setting up a life? I should be there, my permanent home: setting myself up with a beachside apartment in Elwood, riding to work every day. Being a tourist in my own city, rather than a transient resident in this one.

It’s a very intense, hurried feeling – like you should be there right now because all of this is happening right now and you aren’t there right now.

Then it passed, as it always does, because I remind myself that Melbourne’s not going anywhere. It’ll still be there when the ugly beast that is Toronto chews me up and spits me out.

Telephunk

Josh Dare — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:15:00 GMT

I have to start out this blog post with an apology. Many years ago, a good friend of mine, Kelly, who has lived in Canada, told us that Canadian mobile phone companies charged you to receive calls. Bullshit, we shouted. You don’t ask to be called! How could they charge you? They do, said Kelly, steadfast. But I didn’t believe her, even up to the point I arrived here myself and signed up for my own Canadian mobile.

So, Kelly: I’m sorry I doubted you. (Oh, and happy birthday!)

Yes, Canadian mobile carriers will charge you to receive a call – the exact same amount they’d charge you if you made the call. Which sucks if you’re on prepaid, because if you have no credit, no one can call you. That would screw so many Australian prepaid users, who rarely top up – or even go weeks without buying more credit and just let people call them.

There’s no grace either – I was on a Very Important Call, discussing my banking or some such, and the call suddenly and mysteriously disconnected halfway through. Aww, you forgot to keep your account topped up, didn’t you newbie?

When I was signing up for an account (you totally can’t live on prepay over here), I said the guy in the shop, listen – I know you didn’t personally create the charge so I’m not blaming you, but how is charging to receive a call justified? “You’re still using the network,” he said flatly.

Hang on to your hats though! They’ve found a lot of other things to charge you for too. Like caller ID. Not receiving the caller ID of the person calling you, but actually sending your caller ID when you call people.

So, hypothetically, someone could be charged for answering a call from someone they didn’t want to talk to but they had no idea it was them because the caller ID wasn’t displayed. Get it?

Hi, I’m a Canadian mobile company. Dolla dolla bill, y’all.

What this does, however, is open up the market to selling ‘packs’. For example, for only $10 a month, all your incoming calls are ABSOLUTELY FREE. And look, for just $5 extra a month you can send your caller ID! OMG JOYGASM.

With the bad comes the good though – I guess they make up for their shitty, shitty pricing by chucking the word unlimited on to everything else to balance it out. For $35 a month, I’m on a fairly reasonable plan: 1,000 minutes peak, and unlimited after 7pm and weekends. And unlimited text messages. Considering it’s rare to make many calls before 7pm, that pretty much means ‘unlimited everything’.

Does this balance out the dual arse rape of paying to receive calls and again to send your caller ID? Just give me a ring and you'll find out.

Cloudy with a chance…

Josh Dare — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:10:00 GMT

And on to a blog post I’m reminded to write every time I call Australia…

HOW’S THE WEATHA?

It’s cute that it’s a conversation topic for pretty much every Australian, especially Mum. I get it – Canada’s got a reputation for being cold; Australia has a reputation for being hot: conversation ensues.

However, disappointingly in terms of conversation, so far the weather has been entirely agreeable.

When we got here in July, there were some hot days. It was summer, of course, so… kinda expected. But almost immediately after we landed, Canadians were apologising for the season. It’s not usually as mild, apparently. Which is odd, because honestly, it was pretty freakin’ hot.

Well, a little more ‘sticky’ than hot. The difference with Australian summers is the humidity, which is outta control here. It’s not something I’d ever really considered before, being from Melbourne, but the air is so thick with heat, it feels a shitload hotter than the actual centigrade temperature would have you believe. Because of that, every weather forecast contains the actual temperature and a handy little “FEELS LIKE” box. I can only remember one day where it ‘felt like’ 40, so I suppose that’s mild by Australian standards.

We’re in the midst of fall now though, so the thermometer’s dropped a bit. After a cold snap last week where the days were starting out around zero and reaching only 8 or 9, we’ve climbed back up to days of around 16 or so, which is totally doable.

What’s a little less tolerable though is the perverse amount of pleasure Canadians take in deriding their weather. “How are you liking the cold?” they’ll cheerfully sneer. I tell them honestly, I’m a winter baby; I love the cold. And without fail, every time that’s countered with a maniac, “JUST WAIT TIL WINTER!”

It’s almost as if they think we haven’t heard that Canada gets a bit cold. On the contrary, I’m looking forward to it – it’s totally different for me, ya know?

That said, the thing I’m actually looking forward to the most is surviving my first winter here so I can reply flatly, ‘ya know, it’s really not that bad’ – despite the fact I froze my nuts off the whole time.

This blog eats me

Josh Dare — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:56:00 GMT

As mentioned yesterday, we’ve been shopping around for a new place to live. The process over here is to look on Craigslist. They are stupid crazy over Craigslist for some reason, despite, y’know, all the Craigslist murders.

Searching through the “rooms, shared” board is draining, especially because we’re looking for two bedrooms and it’s hard to narrow your search for two separate furnished bedrooms and get decent results. So we’ve placed ads in the “rooms wanted” category.

Our ad basically read: we’re looking for two separate furnished rooms at a place that’s walkable to a subway. When you place an ad is you’re given an anonymised address (az56523178324@craigslist.org, for example) and when someone emails that, it’s forwarded on to your proper email address. You can’t email from that address, so you have to use your own email – so that’s where the anonymous privacy stops. That’s why you only write back to decent offers.

Such as the one we received from someone called Judy. “I have a 2 bedroom apartment in my home which is located 5 minute walk to Eglinton West subway station,” it read. It carried on, and she sounded like a pretty nice chick with a suitable apartment for us.

So I wrote back a basic reply using my mail@joshdare.com address, saying the place sounded great and we’d like a viewing. The problem being, of course, that my email address is derived from my website – so if anyone had the wherewithal to even care, from the email address you could figure out there’s website at joshdare.com. And if you did have enough sneaky sneaky about you, you could visit that website, see the links and realise, oh hey! He has a blog too!

And then proceed to read it in meticulous crazy stalker detail.

Then reply:

Thanks for your reply.

I was reading your blog. I don’t want to find myself or my home described on your blog…About the loud music, I hope it won’t be an issue. I didn’t quite understand what you were saying about the person who hit you.

It is possible to see the apartment as long as you agree not to write about it on your blog. If you don’t like it, that’s fine and that should be the end. When would you like to come by? Phone me or give me 2 or 3 times you might be available. When do you want to move?

What. Do. You. Fucking. Mean.

She’s gone ahead and over-reacted over the two most recent posts where I described the houses we’d viewed, and how the hostel told me off for music that wasn’t actually loud. She missed the point of both entirely, but I suppose the two posts she referenced could be construed as somewhat relevant to a landlord.

However, casually trying to clarify what my opinion was of the person who sent me into a coma and a month of rehab: you fucking crazy, lady. On which planet would that be OK? Why is it any of your fucking business? And get to that post, you would’ve read my more morose posts where I acknowledged the somber gravity of what happened; and how much it fucked my head. Why you think it’s even polite to bring it up in conversation – when I don’t even know you – is a concern.

At the end of the day, I put the blog posts up for the whole world wide web to read, so shouldn’t be surprised when someone does. It’s just that I don’t put them up for prospective landlords to read. If she’d read it and kept it to herself, fine – but I certainly don’t put them up so they can serve as fodder for a paranoid grilling.

So, from now on, think I’ll just go back to using my Hotmail.

Welcome to suburban Canada

Josh Dare — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:13:00 GMT

So, with our meticulous house auditioning process completed by late July, Bree and I shifted into our new suburban abode. I’m sorry, did I say we moved into our suburban abode? I meant we moved on to A FREAKIN’ MOVIE SET.

The scene in our street is like every Hollywood suburban movie you’ve seen: big ass cars (and we are talking huge trucks, like Hummers only bigger) driving down wide tree-lined roads which are dotted with quant little houses, most of them with a porch.

However, they’re not called porches here – they’re ‘patios’. And they substitute for a backyard; in the sense that during the warmer months, people sit outside on their patios for the cool. Because you’ve seen it on TV before, it’s probably easy to imagine a fat old black lady sitting on her patio sunlounge, next to a screen door, fanning herself and drawling, “… it shure is HAWT to-day…”

And you’ve seen it on TV because it’s actually like that. For real.

I suppose sitting in such an accessible spot promotes more of a community feel, but because I’ve been raised with the Australian backyard mentality, I don’t think I could do it – I’d feel naked exposed. It’s about a metre away from the bitumen, so it’d seem like the cars driving up the street were watching me as they drove by. It’s a moot point at any rate because we don’t have a patio – we have a massive backyard instead. With a BBQ and all, so I feel right at home.

With Halloween approaching, the neighbourhood has gone crazy with decorations. It’s only October 22, but there’s so many houses with spooky motifs already. Jack-o-laterns, cobwebs across everything, “boiling” cauldrons, spookily-lit windows – the 31st is going to be insane.

If that all that wasn’t every-low-budget-suburban-sitcom-ever-made enough, imagine my face when I walked down the street one day and saw a LEMONADE STAND. Honest. To. God. A 5c-a-cup lemonade stand. Not only did I assume homemade lemonade stands never left the movie screen; I never thought they would have left the 1950s… especially at that price. Still only a nickel! Plus America – so, by extension, North America – seems to be gung ho on safety – to an extreme paranoid level – and it’s children making lemonade, so there’s zero accountability or responsibility there. Or, y’know, respect for basic hygiene.

But the one thing that absolutely clinches our desolately suburban location for the locals we talk to here: we can walk to a WalMart. That is apparently a very sore thumb to the ‘middle of nowhere’ argument, because as it turns out, WalMarts only start where the city stops.

We came here for Toronto city, not Toronto “outskirts” – so after only a brief stay at this suburban residence, we’ll be moving downtown in the coming months... just as soon as we scout out another location.

Damn, those crickets are loud

Josh Dare — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:37:00 GMT

Fuck me! It’s been a while since I posted here, eh.

That’s because I had a little epiphany that made me decide to be more ‘in the present’. Yes, blogging relates to that. How? Think of it as the text-based equivalent of a camera: to take a photo, you have to have enough foresight to have the camera out; or walk around with the camera in hand, ready to pounce on any picture moment. So the blogging equivalent is walking round seeing everything through the eye of the blog instead of my own. As in, when doing something, I’d think about how it would fit into my blog – rather than actually doing it. It sounds retarded, because surely I could just do whatever and just happen to write about it later, but I don’t work like that. The blog would be sitting on my shoulder the whole time, whispering about how cool whatever I was thinking about doing would write up. So I wouldn’t feel like I owned any particular thought.

Why this in mind, then, you may wonder why I decided to embark on a Twitter crusade last week. Isn’t that, oh, exactly the same thing? Turns out: yes.

For a week, I pledged to make a daily tweet to see if there was something about the service I was missing that could only be garnered by regular usage of the micro-blogging service.

There’s not, but I did take a major positive away from the experience: I should blog more. Not this micro-blogging crap, but proper full size blogging. If only due to the fact that I’m not doing a hell of a lot of paid work, so I should keep on my literary toes.

So I’ll be doing my best to post more often, and have a list of blog topics I will mine through over the next few days to bring this puppy up to speed – so you can be in my present, too.

Getting hit by a car: one year on

Josh Dare — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:28:00 GMT

One of my loose “rules” about my working holiday here in Canada is that I’m not telling anyone about my accident. A lot of the reason I left home was to escape the adversity of surviving my accident; as in, I felt I wouldn’t be able anything without it being in the shadow of the accident. So, even though I absolutely acknowledge that it did happen and it had a profound impact on my life, I’m not readily volunteering the story to people I meet. I’m just not keen on it becoming part of my ongoing dialogue here. However, I can’t let the anniversary pass by uncommented.

Almost exactly year ago (give or take time zone differences) – September 11 – I was excitedly preparing to move houses the next day. Confirming the moving truck, making sure my electricity was going to be connected – you know, standard moving guff. Then I went home and started packing my excess belongings in the car. Of course, that’s when it happened. Technically, right about now (9:49am in Canada, so 11:49pm in Australia) I was entering what would become my two-week coma, which preceded my stint in rehab.

In fact, my rehab centre (Epworth) recently noted the anniversary also and sent a letter asking me to make an appointment for an annual check up along with a questionnaire for me to complete ahead of the appointment to help their studies. My mum had to call them and apologise because I couldn’t make an appointment as I’m now living quite independently in Canada. By all reports, they had a joyous fit and are now desperate for this questionnaire to be completed. (The term “rehab success story” was bandied around, but I don’t know if they said it or just my mum did.) I don’t know what they were expecting – an unemployed slob eating bag after bag of Cheetos while watching Foxtel, perhaps – but apparently moving on and doing something that’s not mediocre is something not oft accomplished with my fellow patients.

It’ll be interesting for me to complete the survey though, because it’ll make me acknowledge areas I’ve made gains. For example: you may remember that I was told not to drink or do drugs for 12 months following the accident. (Did I just hear a “ha” in the audience?!) So in my head, that has been warped to: after 12 months, you’re pretty much back to normal. I’m noticing – or distorting reality in my memory to fit my conclusion or whatever – that my memory has improved. It was pretty bad to begin with, but the “blessing” of the proprietary nature of memory problems is I just don’t remember the worst of it. In actuality, it turned out to be forgetting stupid little things like whether I’ve mentioned something in conversation I’d been meaning to. That seems to have dropped off a lot recently, so I guess it’s an ongoing area of improvement.

I haven’t quite left behind the mental scarring of the accident. I get stupid and persistent worries or thoughts that I attribute to the lingering fear – like, if I’m using an escalator I might think about my foot getting caught between the steps and being ripped off; or at other times I’ll think my spinal cord could be ripped out by something sharp passing behind me. They’re just thoughts that randomly pop in and out of my head and pass just as quickly as they come, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be thinking them if I hadn’t been through major trauma.

Besides my minor ongoing quibbles, I’ve done a pretty good job of moving on and forgetting about the accident. Not so much the people around me.

A few weeks ago, I was crossing a road with the lights at a pedestrian crossing, and a skateboarder sorta ran the red sorta crossed, didn’t see and took me out. We both hit the bitumen. I thought it was a funny coincidence, like a dry ‘hey look what happens when I cross roads’, so posted it on my Facebook. To be met with a flurry of people telling me to be careful when crossing the road. These weren’t standard ‘look both ways’ responses; these were ‘you are obviously have severe issues crossing ordinary streets’ messages. In the end, I had to comment and say that all the “concern” was very sweet, but absolutely unwarranted. What I didn’t say is that it was pretty condescending. I don’t have a predisposition to getting hit by things. I got hit by a car, once. Although the outcome was pretty serious, it’s not indicative of any behaviour that results in me colliding with vehicles.

If there were any doubts about not mentioning it to Canadians I met, there wereren’t after that. So after going out for a commemorative drink tonight to mark the fact I didn’t die a year earlier, I’m hoping to put the whole episode to bed and eventually only vaguely recall ‘something’ that happened to me with a car ‘once’, ‘years ago’.

I’ll finally see the sunshine after being in this damn shadow for so long.

Picking a Canadian pad

Josh Dare — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:02:06 GMT

Our method for picking a Canadian residence was about as meticulous as the method we used to choose the hostel: haphazard.

In total, we saw three places. The first was generously described as a “loft”. There’s obviously some cultural difference with the use of the word, as I would have thought “loft” meant like a nice mezzanine level or something. You know, like a New York loft. No, apparently “loft” here basically means “attic”.

So Bree and I were shown these bedrooms that more than gently reminded us of Anne Frank’s last residence. The first bedroom was of an OK size, but no window. The second room was much better, but… accessible only via a door in the first bedroom.

“Would you like it?” the realtor asked. “We’d need to figure out the many, many privacy issues,” was the reply – because hey, we just started looking and that might’ve been the best out there.

The second was a bit of a distance out of the city. To clarify, it was a subway to a station called Ossington, and then a 15-minute bus ride north. Beautiful, beautiful house – turns out the landlord is a renovator by trade, and had been living in the house and doing it up for a good while. But, his work needed him Downtown often so he was moving closer. With five bedrooms and a decent backyard, it was a very good-looking place. We were being shown the kitchen when this dude walked in from the backyard and put on his shoes. We assumed he was a tenant, and said hey.

“Hey!” he said, before he joined us and was shown the rest of the house. Because he was just inspecting as well, but had managed to talk his way into taking his shoes off in the backyard. His name was Neil, and he was a little too excitable; telling us that you just don’t get places like this, and hastily and excitedly agreeing with everything we said.

The landlord was telling us about the past tenants he’d had, including the ones that didn’t really work out – like the older person that was going to clown college full time. “Oh, I went to clown college,” Bree said flatly. With the perfect pitch and timing that two people who have been spending too much time together get, I pointed at the clothes she was wearing and said, “She even kept the outfit.”

Neil. Was. In. Stitches. And it wasn’t really that funny, it was just my standard level of funny.

We caught the bus back and checked out our third and final place. This one had been confusing to arrange: the emails were signed off Terrence, but the email address came up as Country Alex. And one room was in one house, and the other room was in the house next door – which belonged to someone else entirely but Terrence was filling them for conveniences sake. Following? It didn’t really matter in the end, because the rooms had kitchen sinks in them and looked like abodes that would be perfectly set as the backdrop to every slasher flick ever. You know, creaky floorboards, that sorta thing.

We chose the middle (“renovated”) house, despite its location, for a few reasons:

- We were offered a trial month, so if it didn’t work out we could just walk away.

- The rooms are really nice.

- It’s fairly cheap – a month here costs each of us less than the two weeks did at the hostel.

- There’s a backyard.

- It’s honestly not that far once you know where you’re going.

- It’s furnished and set up for travelers and students – everyone has their own separate fridge and locks on their bedroom doors.

- Neil was rejected for being a try hard with no input from us. Go landlord.

We are not backpackers

Josh Dare — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 03:59:00 GMT

Since we arrived here a little under two weeks ago, we’ve been living at a backpackers’ hostel while looking for a permanent place to live.

We had a meticulous method for choosing the hostel: a couple of months before departure, Bree and I Googled “Toronto hostels” and stumbled across the site for the Canadiana Backpackers Inn.

We saw “free pancake breakfast”. We saw “free wi-fi”. We booked.

The next time we got together, we had a rare frank moment and said hey, we only booked because we saw free pancakes and free wi-fi… we should look around. We did, and it seemed like the best thing going. Plus, we were already booked, so… meh.

We arrived at 11pm on a Tuesday, about 30-odd hours after leaving Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport. Imagine how tired we were. Go on, give it a shot. Yeah… tired. So we got to the hostel and quietly reported to the front desk, and they then showed us to our room.

I’m sorry, did I say room? I meant cupboard. Showed us to our cupboard.

Reasons Bree is awesome #1: she needed the toilet shortly after putting down our bags. I could hear her laughing hysterically in the loo. She came back and reported delirium had set in with jet lag and the tiny size of this room was hysterical.

It’s true, I told her: I had pictured our bunk beds in one corner, and a wide enough girth left to, oh I don’t know, unzip our bags and have them act as living cupboards for the couple of weeks. We barely had enough room to even stand our bags up. Even then, they had to be relocated to open the door.

The next day, we approached reception to ask if there was some kind of shelving solution they could offer, because we packed our lives into our suitcases and need ready access to them. (Apparently, we are courteous to a fault.) After a brief discussion, they figured out the subtext was “we’re not happy with the cupboard”, and moved us to another room – which was much bigger.

How both rooms are the same price, when one room has a desk and two set of drawers and the other has… floor and air, is a mystery to me. But this room is much, much better.

I’m perhaps a little too comfortable in this room, as the other day I was playing music through my iPhone speakers (thanks for the going away present, friends!) – at what I’d consider a moderate volume, but that is obviously subjective – when I heard a very loud rapping on the door. So I answered it.

“Hey guys!”, a hostel worker beamed.

“Oh, it’s just me,” I replied.

“Oh, really? Because I figured there MUST BE A PARTY GOING ON.”

In stripper fantasies, this is the part when the chick walks into the room and makes a helicopter with her bra. But, no. She was just being a total bitch while telling me to turn down my music. Fair enough to tell me to turn it down, but she was carrying the angst of a million noise complaints before me, forgetting that this is my first “offence” and she hasn’t told me to turn it down umpteen times before. Her loud knocking was clearly audible over the music, but her diatribe went on for a good five minutes; banging on about how there are students in the building. All I needed to hear was, “Can you turn it down?”

That night, at 11:30pm or so, we were sleeping. Or, trying to. Some backpacker chicks from some foreign country decided against this however, and were – at a guess – playing horse race in the corridor, making gallivanting noises on the way back to their rooms. Where was bitch face then, huh?

Their inadvertent mission to ensure I didn’t feel comfortable in the room carried on the next day. I’d just returned from my shower and was still in my towel while checking something on my laptop. The door opened and a random dude came in.

Need to reiterate here: there was no “loud” music playing, and there was no knocking. Just me, in a towel. On my laptop. Luckily this was momentarily before I whipped it all out to put my undies on. “Sorry!” the Mexican cheerfully said, as he emptied my bin and carried on his day.

As for the free pancakes and wi-fi: the wi-fi is the bomb. Bree and I use it almost constantly. But the Canadiana’s wi-fi is a bit shit, so my laptop always picks up a wi-fi signal called ‘dlink’, which is an unsecured network that is better than their one and mustn’t be very far away.

The pancakes are served at 9am promptly, so Bree is never here to get them (she leaves for work around 8am). I’ve been a couple of times, and the point they fail to mention is that you will be forced to eat with backpackers. At a backpackers’ inn! I KNOW, RIGHT? Oh, and the pancakes are kind of… sub par.

For those not paying full attention, here’s the recap:

- we booked at a place called Backpackers’ Inn, yet have a thing against backpackers.

- we booked for the free wi-fi, yet use a neighbour’s unsecured network.

- we booked for the free pancakes for breakfast, yet only one of us eats them (and they’re rubbish).

We can’t wait to move out on Tuesday.

Canadians are AWESOME

Josh Dare — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:55:00 GMT

Ever since we landed in Canada, I’ve been banging on to Bree about how awesome Canadians are. Friendliest motherfuckers in the world, I’d tell her.

Even our immigration officer was friendly. I’ve seen Border Security, so I know how hardcore they can be. But ours was joking away and having heaps of fun with us while she issued our working holiday visas. Fairly sure I turned to Bree after we cleared and went, “See? AWESOME.”

We got to the hostel, and the staff were super friendly in an unremarkable way – or at least, they must’ve been unremarkable because I don’t remember anything they did specifically, just that it totally added to my Canadian love.

We were hunting for dinner on the night of our arrival, and popped into a UK-style pub called Elephant & Castle. The bartender was apologetic in a totally over-the-top American way, saying, “Sorry guys! We stopped serving dinner a couple of hours ago. Gabby’s is just up the road serves dinner until 2am though. I’m Shannon anyway!” she beamed. “How was your flight?”

This, coupled with the fact I was probably excitable because we just moved overseas, sent me right into overly-friendly mode. Like, to a ridiculous level. Bree and I were looking at something in a mall, the clerk came over and was talking to us. Hearing our accents, she asked where we were from. After a chat, we left, and the clerk called, “Enjoy your holiday!” So I turned and said, “Actually…” Bree groaned because she knew what was coming. I finished, “We just moved here.”

“They’re not all awesome!” Bree snapped at one point. “People are the same where ever you go: some people are cool, but some people are dickheads.”

The day after our arrival was my birthday, so went out for a drink. Because we’d only been in the city a day, we made an impromptu pub crawl out of it. It was a slog, so we took a break on our walk between drinking holes by sitting and chatting on small wall next to the pavement. Cameras in hand, we did what all generation Y people seem to do and started taking photos of ourselves to mark the occasion.

Trying to get the perfect pic of the two of us, Bree had her camera in hand, arm outstretched as far as it could it go. Smiling and posing, our faces would’ve made the perfect picture as a dude rode past on his bike and snatched the camera out of Bree’s hand.

He dropped the camera shortly afterwards so we got it back, but I’ve stopped calling Canadians awesome. They’re as flawed as any other people.

The things you stress about when moving overseas

Josh Dare — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:49:00 GMT

I left Australia on July 14 at 10:15am. Yet I started stressing about leaving Australia on, oh, May 14 or so.

Any removed third party could easily say, well hey – you had like, months of not working to pull yourself and get organised and move overseas; why was there any stress at all? And to that invisible removed third party, I would say: fuck you, guy. Because they totally called me on it. But while reading this, please keep in mind I was suffering from a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder from ‘the accident’ – so multiply everything by, oh I don’t know, a million, and you’ll get an idea of why it was so stressful.

The first major stress was the luggage weigh allowance. Because we were flying into North America, for some arbitrary reason they allow two suitcases with up to 23 kilos luggage in each; in contrast to the UK’s one suitcase with 20 kilos. What I’m trying to say is: that’s an insane amount of luggage. Ridiculous, even. But as it turns out, when you’re packing up your packable life to move overseas for a couple of years, it can be tight.

I thought that would be plenty, so I merrily packed away; continually checking the weight of each bag with a set of scales I borrowed from my brother. I even ensured I was packed a full week before I left, so I could make sure I had packed everything I would need in an average week. Go me. This was all fine and dandy, until the night before I left when I returned the scales to my brother and was informed two things that fucked my head: firstly, you can’t accurately weigh on carpet (as I was); and secondly, the scales I borrowed were fucked at the best of times. I weight again. The first bag was 28 kilos. The second was 25. My head was 0 kilos, because it exploded there and then and left a small pile of ash on my shoulders.

I was staying the night at my brother’s house, which is around 30 minutes drive from where I was living, so I’d already locked up home – plus it was getting late, so I wasn’t going to go back to repack. There were no other scales at home anyway; and who’s to say that the fucked weights were that far off? That’s what I was trying to tell myself as I sketchily tried to get some semblance of sleep while tossing over the multitude over possibilities of the dramas at check in the next morning.

I couldn’t afford to pay any excess luggage fees (true to their name, the fee is excessive), so I thought about the things I could ditch. Honestly, because the weight allowance seemed so generous considering what my stuff was weighing (thanks, carpet!), I stuffed so much crap in, there was little rhyme or reason. I couldn’t, say, ditch all my running gear; or ditch all my work stuff; or whatever – it was one big amalgamated mess of clothes. Any item considerable heavy – y’know, laptop, set of iPhone speakers – was already in my carry on luggage. So it was just clothes, and clothes can’t weigh that much singularly… can they?

Result? I didn’t get a wink of sleep. But there’s a happy ending, as I was fine the next morning: I only just barely scraped in weightwise. However the check in chick may have been a bit more accommodating because I think my sister had done the honours and told her I was stressing my little head off about moving overseas.

This was meant to be my cue to chill the fuck out, because I basically lied and told everyone that I’d be looking forward to the trip once I sorted out the luggage – and for the 15 hours to LA then the 5 hours to New York, it was. But I knew stress number two was waiting in New York.

Y’see, my travel buddy Bree managed to fly for free on Qantas frequent flyer points. So we could arrive together, I took the same flights. Qantas had booked Bree onto a flight that landed in New York’s JFK airport, and then the connecting flight to Toronto that left from La Guardia airport a mere two hours after we arrived. We had worried about this timeframe before departure, which prompted Bree to call Qantas and ask how they expected this feat to be pulled off. They told her it was illegal to sell tickets to a flight we weren’t able to connect with. This calmed us, until I called my travel agent to book the same flights at the same airports, and she said, “Oh boy, you will not make that flight…”

The reason being that we landed at 5:30pm: peak hour. And although it can be a mild journey between airports, at peak hour who knows what the traffic conditions would be like. Bree told me to book a different flight, but I booked the same and told her that even if we did happen to miss the connecting flight, the adventure would start early. So we started calling that leg of our journey the Amazing Race portion and dreamt of pushing people out of the way to reach a taxi rank.

Luckily, we had enough aforethought to hunt around for a car service that would pick us up at a designated time and drive us to the other airport. We had another stress that’s not even worth reporting on at La Guardia (the luggage collection there is fucked, we waited like half an hour), but in the end: we made the connecting flight. With enough time for me to get a meal at Wendy’s.

Thanks to a prolonged unemployment spout when she moved to London, Bree was stressed about finding work in Canada. Aforethought wins again, as she engaged a Canadian recruitment agency while we were still in Australia, and they found her a job. A good job, at that. We landed on Tuesday, and she started on the Friday.

This is quite a long entry, but what I’m trying to parlay is: it was fucking stressful. But we really didn’t need to be stressed in the end. Is there a moral to this story? I feel like I should be giving some kind of sweet conclusion, like some Asian masseuse. Y’know, something warm and fluffy that’ll help you sleep at night like, ‘you don’t need to stress about even half the things you do’. But honestly, beyond telling you to weigh your bags properly and book connecting flights that allow greater transfer time, I got nothing. In fact, if I had to do it again tomorrow, I’m pretty sure would do the same because it made getting here – on time, in one piece, with all of the luggage we wanted to bring – that much sweeter.

What next for the car crash kid?

Josh Dare — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:48:00 GMT

Sorry about the bout of silence since finishing the fifteen parts of my tale of woe. Quite a read though, eh!

Anyways, I’ve kept myself reasonably occupied. Anyone who works would probably not be able to relate to the busyness of someone unemployed: the day starts with a morning jog, followed by breakfast, followed by the gym, and by golly if it isn’t 2pm by then so the day’s practically gone, with barely enough time to do mundane day-to-day stuff before settling in for the night.

I have an added layer of busyness attached however, because tomorrow, I am:

Moving to Canada.

So I’ve been busy packing and sorting out my affairs in this country before I jump ship to another. Again, sorry about the silence, but… priorities.

Canada will be great for me. On one side of the coin, you’ve got the fact that I’m already at my parents’ house (aka the easiest to leave from) so don’t have a lease. Plus I don’t have a job, and little in the way of commitments to keep me here. Yes, yes, boo hoo how depressing.

On the flipside of the coin, I’ve been through a lot of trauma recently, and it’ll be grand for me to lay down new memories. The way I see it is: if I went and got myself another job and another apartment here in Melbourne, it couldn’t help but be in the shadow of the accident. As in, “Aw look at Josh – even after the accident he managed to get himself another job / apartment.” Fuck that. I’m kinda over being a victim of it.

So I’m going to Canada, where I’ll at least be starting new – and there won’t be remnants of my near-fatal turn hanging round every corner.

I’ll be blogging from Toronto from here on in, so strap yourself in for the ride while I experience America’s hat.

Josh's final thoughts (Part 15)

Josh Dare — Mon, 18 May 2009 00:17:00 GMT

Yes – just like Jerry Springer, the host gets to spout some opinions about the whole ordeal. I haven’t really gone into my inner thoughts about the accident until now – neither on the blog, or in real life – so strap yourself in.

Firstly, if it seems a bit self-indulgent to write fifteen parts about my one accident, you may not have gathered that this is a bit cathartic for me. Like I can write about it, publish it, and then I can come to terms with it and move on. And a lot of shit happened to me in the past months. Plus, I’m quietly proving to myself that I haven’t lost the ability to write. I’ve clearly got ‘quantity’ down pat, next up is ‘quality’.

It’s weird having a “the” event in my life. You know, how as a shortcut, someone may say “since the pregnancy”, meaning since the time they got pregnant. Now I have “since the accident”, which would sound like I wet the bed to a casual passerby. It’s easier to have a handy the to drop into conversation, because I have a whole bunch of complex emotions about the whole thing so it’s usually better not to delve by explaining my reference point.

Someone I know (a café owner in Richmond near the rehab centre, if you need details) said that it must be “a sign”. I don’t believe in signs (nor any gods) but it’s hard to take the accident onboard and not dissect any spiritual reasons for it happening. It could’ve been karma; maybe I’ve treated people badly in the past and it came back to hurt me. Even though I’m entirely up my own ass about this whole affair, I’m still not drowning in enough self-pity to believe the ‘sign’ angle. Mainly because it absolves any real-world person of any action that wasn’t “pre-destined”.

I have a lot of trouble watching TV or movies where someone gets hit by a car. Just today I was watching the Lost season five finale, and Sayid’s girlfriend is hit by a car pretty bad. Watching it happen made me want to hurl.

I often think about what it would have actually looked like when I was hit: which part of me went where, which part broke the windshield, the position I was in on the road after I landed, where I was bleeding from at the time… I can’t. It’s too fucking scary. Seeing a representation of someone getting hit on the screen is a bit much for me because it makes it real, and forces me to wonder if that’s what I looked like.

And what I looked like to the crowd that soon formed: was I this crippled wreck by the side of the road that everyone thought was going to die? That’s a million times worse than any ‘naked in public’ fear. That’s literally dying on a stage.

This is the blessing and curse of amnesia – the brain has clearly blocked out anything it feels is too big for me to process, and I totally get that. But the rest of my anatomy can’t do the same because it doesn’t have its own memory to wipe. Just today, I was struck by the thought that my eyes and ears would have seen and heard everything: a quick glance to see headlights are heading my way, the crashing sound as the car collided with me, the vision of my head hitting the bonnet of the car… And that’s where I have to stop because I’m thinking about it in too much detail. So while I can’t remember it, it kills me that I have senses that experienced it first hand. It’s all way too real.

The thing that really kicks me in the balls is that when the accident happened, everything was going so right. I had a great job, and was moving to my own apartment that was by the beach. When I came to after my coma, they were both gone and I was back at my parent’s house like a teenager – at square one again, after all this progress. So I’ve been angry.

I’ve spent a lot of time blaming people for my accident – like the driver. Sure, the guy must be culpable in some respects; but the police have it down as my fault. I started half-heartedly blaming auxiliary people for flimsy reasons in a desperate attempt to pin it on someone else. But the other day I had an epiphany that’s haunted me ever since.

It could’ve been my fault. No one else’s. Mine. I’m the reason I was in a coma.

Sure, the guy could have braked or looked where he was going or however it happened. But for me to be on the road at the time, I would’ve crossed the street without looking, or crossed thinking I had enough time. So even though (possibly) an amount of defensive driving could’ve saved Avraham extensive repairs to his car, and me a couple of months in rehab and this emotional hangover, I can’t get past the fact that this could be 100% my fault and I have no one to be angry at but myself.

My fault I’m not living by the beach in Elwood; my fault I no longer have the awesome job; my fault I can’t jog because it hurts the pin in my ankle; my fault I have scars on my body. But, most of all, it’s my fault for scaring the shit out of my friends and family. And I just can’t come to terms with that yet.

I know that’s very much a hardline – even unfair – approach, and it probably means I have a bit more acceptance to go, but it’s my thinking at the moment. I’m not trying to be melodramatic but it’s the soundest conclusion I can reach. It also doesn’t help that with no job to distract me, I have nothing but time to process such thoughts and reach ‘sound conclusions’ that are unshakable.

The whole ‘not working’ scenario also gives me far too much time on my hands to think and dissect (as you can probably tell by this scathing self impression), and I’ve come to the conclusion as to why I’m so critical of myself: the accident showed me that I’m no longer invincible. Not that I was fielding bullets without wincing before, mind you; but not invincible in a metaphorical sense. Perhaps because of that, I am doubting myself a lot and my self-confidence is shattered. But I suspect that this has a lot to do with the many experts in rehab that told me to expect monumental changes in thinking or character. I’m not really exhibiting any, so I have to double guess myself at every step to make sure it’s not the brain injury talking.

Even with that in mind, I’m getting a bit over a couple of my friend’s attitudes towards me now. It’s not an “attitude”, per se, but the ongoing implication that I’m reveling in being at home all the time. Or that I’m enjoying being paid by the TAC, who match my pre-accident income. Or that I’m simply being lazy and not working – despite the fact I have a medical certificate, and it would be illegal for me to work. In a nutshell, some of my closest friends don’t take what’s happened to me as seriously as I would like. And I can’t despise them for it because they were – and still are – there for me in the absolute shittest time of my life to date.

I can’t blame them – even through the coma and brain injury, most of the stories I’ve gotten back about my time with amnesia have been “fun”. The shit I was speaking, for example. So they’re the stories I repeat, because the others are god-awful depressing or boring. I try not to dwell on the subject with friends now, although I usually bring it up far more often than I’d like to. So you can see how someone would think it’s a laughable subject – I’m just not ready to fully chortle at it yet. There’s no gentler way to express this, but it has fucked up my life royally for the time being. It’s not as funny as I make out most the time.

At the end of the day though, I think that being able to make fun of it – in this blog, for example, and the times I have in conversation – is a sign of strength. As a wise man once said: you have to laugh at things, otherwise you would cry. Taking a bad situation and turning it into something you can deal with is fucking hard; much harder than I ever thought it could be before the accident. I’ll get there one day.

Thanks for coming along for this part of the ride.

Ch-ch-changes (Part 14)

Josh Dare — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:51:00 GMT

As a sorta-distant friend – OK, OK, acquaintance – said to me recently, “You can’t expect to go through so much trauma and not be different.” And I absolutely dismissed his opinion, coz hey – I hardly know the fucker, so who is he to opine?

Plus, I’m totally of the opinion that I’m the same – please see the fifty references in earlier posts about not being retarded and being fine.

But, just like how people didn’t tell me that I was beginning to look to buff before the accident, I now get accounts like, “Oh yeah, you were still pretty fucked up when you got out of rehab.” So they may be on to something.

The thing is, I feel exactly the same now as I did then, when I was discharged. But, according to reports, I was definitely ‘slow’, and ‘disconnected’ back then. I quizzed my mum, and apparently yeah I was a little bit slow, she says.

A friend has told me that I’ve ‘lost the spark in my voice’. And another friend has told me, in a roundabout fashion, that I’m now a bit of a cunt, so have I had counseling?

Being analytical has always been one of my strengths – or dismissively analytical as the case may be, because I dismissed most ‘complaints’ due to what I’ve perceived as environmental factors. I’m not working; I’m not doing anything; so of course I’m a bit flat.

I do feel like I’m progressively more of myself back though, not that I’d ever admit that a part of me was ‘missing’. The cunt remark, for example, I’ve established is due to the fact that I’ve always been a bit of a cunt (to the point where my old nickname was ‘The Cunt’), but I would dress it up a bit and probably make a joke. That power recently went walkabout, so I would just come out with a cunty comment and leave it hanging thickly in the air.

I hadn’t really identified it earlier, but in a way I knew I was doing it; or, more to the point, I knew social interactions weren’t as fun for me as they used to be. (Being a plain old cunt in nowhere near as good as being a funny cunt.) I feel like I’m getting back on track now though, but as always my friends will be happy to report back if there’s any discrepancies.

I have changed emotionally though, and this I totally put down to environmental factors (feel free to step in and correct me at any point here).

My best mate and I now call me ‘needy’. I’m not asking for heaps from people or anything, it’s just that I’m at home all day while they’re at work, so when they’re free to do something, I treat it as a given that they should do something with me. Which, obviously, is not apparent to all. Or anyone.

I’m pretty vulnerable. I met a guy that I fancied pretty hardcore back in December, and even though we “just” had an awesome chat and swapped numbers, I thought I was in. Like, totally in. So, I sent him a text message. Then waited a couple of days, didn’t hear back, so texted again. Gave that one a couple of days, then – shock, horror – in a totally not gen-Y move, I tried calling him. It rang out to voicemail. Long story short, even though by this point I figured the guy wasn’t interested, I had to be rejected before I could move on. Thanks to stalking him on Facebook, I finally got it sometime in February. Poor fucker.

Stil on the vulnerability, I’m very open to persuasion. My sister has been reading the blog, and after one entry (part 12, from memory) she texted me to ask if I’m OK, because I “sound depressed”. I wasn’t, but immediately I thought, OH MY GOD MAYBE I’M DEPRESSED. I also use my Facebook status to update when I put up a new chapter to this series, and a friend commented on a recent one and put, “YAAAAAAAAAWN.” And I thought, am I… am I boring people? She maintains she was being a smart arse, but that kinda stuff does hit me quite effectively now.

I am having memory problems though – to the point where I totally forgot to mention it when I originally posted this entry, so this is a hasty addition. They warned me my short-term memory would be shonky in rehab. They were right. I don’t forget anything significant, but stupid little things. For example, I forgot that my sister, her husband and I had played Guitar Hero together, until I suggested playing it again, only to be told we already had a few weeks ago. My counselors suggest making a diary to help me keep track of goings on, but I just would never write “We played Guitar Hero” in a diary due to its insignificance. I’m am quite hard on myself for my memory though – if I’m watching TV and there’s a guest star, I’ll beat myself up if I can’t remember their name. My long term memory should be unaffected though, so check me out beating myself up all Catholic-style for no reason.

Physically, I have no hangovers. Sure, I was wearing a neck collar to help my collarbone heal for a while, and district nurses had to come to my house every day to change over the lining, but beyond that, there’s not a lot. I can’t jog due to my ankle pin, though I’ve only attempted to do so once which resulted in a bit of pain. I have some weird numbness above my left knee but it’s too vague to describe to even ask for assistance with, especially considering I have no damage on that side of my body.

It’s also disheartening to note that I now have no particular affliction to crossing the road or being generally more aware of vehicles. It defies belief, but I haven’t managed to walk away from the whole experience with any grand life lessons.

The problem being: amnesia. Everything that’s reported back to me is everything funny that happened – the shit I was talking while in PTA, that sorta thing. It’s hard for me to grasp that it was probably a gravely traumatising experience for most involved, especially for my family and the friends that were either on the scene, or waited patiently for me to come out of a coma. But I called my sister a yuppie cunt to her face, isn’t that hilarious!

Aren't you bored? (Part 13)

Josh Dare — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:53:00 GMT

As one of my friends eloquently posted on Facebook, “Aren’t you bored?” I was using my status update to boast / report that I now have a medical certificate until May 31, so won’t be working or generally being productive until then.

Since the accident on September 11, I’ve been discharged from two rehabs – once on October 30, which is when I’ve been at home since; and the other sometime in January. It’s now April. I’ve pretty much been home for six months, so that’s an absolutely understandable question.

The thing is, I’m not bored. At all. I don’t know if that says more about my ability to keep myself entertained, or how “intense” my recovery is, even at home. I’m tipping the former.

The thing is, if six months ago, someone said to me, “Would you like six months off work, paid?”, I would’ve been like, fuck yeah! Bring it on. But the reality is a bit different than what you’d speculate – it’s not partying 24/7, it’s watching a lot of TV and getting out of the house as much as possible because you just might suffocate if you stare at the same four walls all day.

I do try to keep myself “busy” though – that’s ‘stay at home’ busy, not ‘contributing member of society’ busy. I have a routine that’s slowly evolved.

It started out with Ellen and The View – 12pm and 1pm on channel 9, respectively. My continuing interest in them is pretty low, to be honest – you can only watch Ellen dance over the coffee table so many times before it loses a little appeal. But it did give me something to frame my day around; especially considering I started my stay-at-home career during summer, the shit TV season. It has given me a renewed appreciation of Lost and Desperate Housewives though, so I dutifully download the new episodes of those on Mondays and Thursdays.

Once I was discharged from outpatient rehab, I started at the gym. The TAC is paying for me, so I’m really meant to be doing a physiotherapy program, but I’m just doing a normal one. Poorly. Don’t get me wrong, I was a gun at the gym before the accident – and plenty of people have cheerfully now reported back, “Yeah, you were getting in to great condition before your accident” – but without the framing of work to schedule my day around, it’s just harder to motivate myself. And I’m giving myself a very generous allowance to slack off once I’m there, because, as I tell myself, I’m only ‘just’ getting back into it. However, just like Ellen and her dancing over coffee table, that lie is losing steam real fast.

I have friends that only work four days a week, and they’re luckily three different days off. I can harass Monika on Monday, Kelly on Tuesday and Kristy on Wednesday. We don’t do something every week, but texting them at 8am saying DO U WANNA DO SOMETHING TODAY? gives me something else to do.

Since the accident and subsequent coma diary, my sister has gotten adorably clingy – so every Wednesday night we have ‘sibling night’, which has been dubbed ‘date night’ but c’mon, it’s my sister, that’s gay. And since that’s been going well, I started a sibling night with my brother every Monday.

It does seem particularly needy to frame my week around friends and family like this, and it absolutely is, but it gives me something to do and ensures I get out.

This blog keeps me suitably occupied as well. It has probably gone unnoticed, but I do try to update it three times a week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Or, if I’m feeling slack, I go for twice: Tuesday and Thursday. It’s rarely been kept to schedule, but having something to avoid doing feels just as purposeful as actually doing something.

Re-rehab (Part 12)

Josh Dare — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 01:39:00 GMT

Even though I was “free” and back at home, I hadn’t quite finished rehab yet. I still had to complete outpatient rehab.

Cue another play on words using Amy Winehouse’s Rehab.

Unfortunately, for blogging’s sake, I wasn’t given any notes that I could make fun of. I came close to not having anything to make fun of – I was discharged from my main rehab on October 31, and they apparently had to “squeeze” me in at outpatient rehab to see the treating doctor before they began breaking for Christmas. They did, though, and started me on an ‘intensive’ two day a week program sometime in late November.

This is in stark contrast to my program at inpatient rehab, where I had a pretty full day. Well, once I was promoted from PTA stage at least. My most hardcore day was Wednesday, which kicked off with speech, then occupational therapy, then physio, and then psychology. Most days I had at least two sessions, which were an hour long. It sounds like I’m bitching about nothing, but all I wanted to do was lie in bed and watch Ellen and The View and rehabilitating totally interrupted that. Not because I was finding that I was overtly tired after the accident or anything – fact is, I’m just a lazy bugger.

They must have done a bang up job at rehab though, because by the time I got to outpatient rehab, all my counselors – besides my physiotherapist – discharged me after the first session.

Occupational therapy said hi, sat me down and asked me some logic questions, then gave me instructions to make a coat hanger, which I then dutifully made. This will come in handy in my dream coat hanger creation career if I ever pull my finger out and do something about it. I probably should, because as soon as the hanging loop was done at the top of the fucker, she said, “OK, great job! You’re fine.”

I had two sessions with the speech therapist. I was slurring my speech a bit, and sometimes tripped over words – not because I couldn’t find the word (I knew exactly what I wanted to say) but I just couldn’t sound it out as fluidly as I used to. She told me to slow down, then she said, “I won’t discharge you because it’s a hassle to reinstate you, but if you have any problems, come see me.”

Physio was more exercise bike and standing on half fit balls to build up my balance. (It wasn’t just because my ankle was fractured – brain injuries can often affect balance. I was dodgy even on my “good” ankle.) The goal of physio was to get me back to gym – after maybe three sessions, she started asking me which gym I wanted to go to.

The session I was most looking forward to was the driving assessment – I wasn’t allowed to drive again until a therapist went on the road with me and saw that my driving wasn’t affected.

So, one morning we did just that – me and a fully-fledged driving instructor in a dual control car, with the therapist sitting in the back seat. It wasn’t like a driving assessment for your licence – it was much more lax than that. If it was, I would’ve been asked to stop driving so they could drive back – I fucked up heaps. I sped to get an amber light, I didn’t realise a car was indicating right because they were doing a U-tun on a roundabout rather than turning right, so went when they were coming my way… At the end, they asked, “Where do you think you went wrong?” I reeled off that list. They said, “Yup, and you were speeding most of the time too.”

Licence: back. I was now a fully-functional adult again. With a reinforced opinion that I was largely unscathed by the accident because, hey, check out how quickly they discharged me.

Avraham Weinfeld must die (Part 11)

Josh Dare — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:52:00 GMT

It was a pretty joyous occasion to be discharged from rehab. My sister got all teary that I was actually “walking out of hospital”, which I thought was sweet but odd until I considered the alternatives she was referring to.

Mum drove us home, and we put on the kettle as I flicked through the mail that had been redirected from the two properties I was tied to: the apartment I was living in, and the apartment I was moving to. Bill, flick, flick, notice of something or other, flick, flick, letter from AAMI (insurance company). It was addressed to “Joshua Dale”, and had only the street address of the old apartment – not the apartment number. I opened it up to have a read:

Dear Mr Dale,

Our records show you were involved in a car accident on September 11 with Mr Avraham Weinfeld that has been determined to be your fault.

The car has been repaired at a cost of $4,500, which is your responsibility. Please forward this amount to us at your earliest convenience.

Regards,

Some Cunt at AAMI

Helpfully, AAMI had provided a number to call. I rang. Bring, bring.

“Hello AAMI.”

“Hi. I just got this letter (reels details).”

“Yes, how can we help?”

“I know all about the accident – all about the accident – because this dude hit me, I was in a coma and then rehab. For the past two months. I was only discharged from rehab today, actually, and read your letter.”

“Oh sorry to hear that,” said Miss Empathy 2008.

“I’m not paying to repair the car that hit me.”

“But it is on record as your fault, it says here that you ‘ran out in front of the car’…”

“Listen, I have amnesia, and no idea how it actually happened. I won’t be giving you money to fix the car that almost killed me.”

“Well sir, I’ll make a record of that…”

“You can make whatever the fuck you want, I’m not paying.”

And so on.

The best thing about the whole endeavour for me was that I learnt the guy’s name: Avraham Weinfeld.

It’s not the first time I’d thought about the driver. In fact, it had come up in quite heavy rotation with people who visited me in rehab. A friend told me that when he was younger, his Dad was driving the family somewhere and a P-plater hit them. Someone in his family had to be hospitalised, and you apparently could not get rid of the father of the P-plater – he was there almost every day apologising.

People asked if I had heard from the driver that hit me. Which hadn’t, until the insurance claim letter.

The only indication that he may have tried some follow up came from my mother. Y’see, he was Jewish – it’s a pretty Jewish area, so no real surprise – and the first ambulance to the scene was a Jewish ambulance. (I think the Jews are instructed to call the Jewish ambulance first.) The ambulance driver that came out to the scene later called the hospital in an attempt to reach my Mum and find out how I was. To take that as constitution as a check up from the driver involves a certain amount of quasi-anti-Semitism: an assumption that they all speak to each other.

I have no doubt that he has thought about the accident since. In fact, I have always half-heartedly maintained that, given the option, I’d rather be the one that was hit rather than the driver. (However, I’m sure if I was given the option I’d go for the one without extensive rehabilitation.) That dude probably has a conniption every time he turns the key in the ignition; and has flashbacks of my tall lanky ass coming through the windscreen every time he drove down a suburban street at night.

So, although contrary to the title I don’t wish Avraham any particular harm, I do think it was fairly poor form to not attempt to make sure I was OK.

(Dishonouring my) Discharge (Part 10)

Josh Dare — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:32:00 GMT

On October 31 2008 – Halloween, and round about a month and 20 days since I was hit by the car, I was “finally” deemed well enough to be released on an unsuspecting public. I put finally in quotation marks because thinking back, I can’t really recall hanging to get out of the joint. I obviously wanted to, so was pretty pumped the day came.

It was preceded by a ‘weekend stay’, as they call it, the weekend prior. Saturday morning my Mum picked me up, took me down to the parent’s house in suburban Seaford. I saw a few mates, watched TV, and was dropped off back at rehab Sunday night.

The purpose of the weekend stay is, pretty obviously, to suss out if any newly-acquired injuries would affect ordinary day-to-day life. This wasn’t so much the case with me, as mentioned I was moving to my own apartment in Elwood from a share house in St Kilda when the accident happened – so finding myself living back with the ‘rents again at 27 was most certainly not ‘ordinary day-to-day life’.

I’ve lived here before, obviously – just before the place in St Kilda East, actually. When I moved out, the parents must’ve gotten the inkling that it was for realsies that time, as after I moved all of my furniture out with me (and it was literally everything upstairs, my domain), they went ahead and bought their own furniture: like a bed, a couch, a bookshelf… you get the idea. And bless their determined cotton socks, now refuse to move any of it, so my stuff is in storage while I’m living on top of the crap wares purchased for weekend visitors.

Anyways, there wasn’t any problems, so I was shuttled outta rehab and into parenthab. To signify the event, and to warn of any forthcoming doom, the rehab centre holds a ‘family meeting’, where they discuss any problems that might arise and how I did in rehab. Like school, I suppose, but I didn’t get a report card – just some notes, that I’ll faithfully produce and desecrate below.

Physio

You’ve been very compliant with everything you’ve been asked to do in physio and as such you’ve made good improvements.

I honestly had no idea I was allowed to be anything but compliant. I wish they’d told me that before I subjected myself to countless kilometres on an exercise bike and spent hours balancing on half an exercise ball.

Neuropsychology

Given information received from the accident scene and the lengthy period of post-traumatic amnesia, we would expect some changes in your thinking skills post-injury. Josh, you reported few changes. (Mum) has reported to some repetition in conversation and not recalling conversations as reliably. No changes in behaviour have been noted.

I have no come back here or anything to be a smart arse about – I was one repetitive little mofo. If the re-enactments of the people who copped it are anything to go by, I would deliver a sentence again, later, with the same enthusiasm as the original time I said it. Which was probably not more than a few minutes before, but what can I say: was fucked up.

Josh, you have coped remarkably well with your injury and being in hospital.

Again, no come back – just wanted to reiterate that no one thinks I’m retarded. Well, no medical professional. Go me.

Speech therapy

My role your speech therapist has been to assess your communication skills following your brain injury. At a day-to-day level, you have demonstrated the ability to independently meet all your communication needs. Your written expression skills were considered functional for day-to-day tasks.

The written skills were a bit of a concern for me, coz of the whole ‘like to pitch myself as a writer’ thing. But hey, this is part ten of an epic blog post that’s got about 7,000 words now, so I’m hoping that means I’m OK. Otherwise you have totally just read an unmitigated load of crap.

Life goes on... without me (Part 9)

Josh Dare — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:04:00 GMT

By all accords, I had quite a busy life while I was in sitting in my little room in rehab. Not actually at the rehab centre, of course – but shit, in general, just went down. And all without me.

You may recall I was in the process of moving when the accident happened – and I wasn’t just moving ‘anywhere’ – the apartment I was moving to was stunning. It was in Elwood, and was actually beach front – on the corner of Barkly Street and Glenhuntly Road, if that means anything to you, or you wanted to look it up on Google maps or something. Though why you would is beyond me.

Probably the most emotionally-charged entry in the coma diary is the day that the family figured out that I wouldn’t be able to move into the place once I came out of my coma, so they had to sign over the lease – so some other motherfucker moved in instead. I hope they’re enjoying their walks on the beach. And the entry was so emotionally charged was because my sister knew how much I was pumped – I’d taken her on a drive by the week before, excitedly pointing out the people that were taking up space in “my” living room.

The loss of the apartment has been the hardest thing for me to deal with – and to be honest, I’m still kinda not over it. You don’t understand, it was awesome. For a while, I was dirty at the family for signing it over – but I wasn’t allowed to drive for a good couple of months, so would have been stranded at my luscious pad with nothing to do but stare out the window to the ocean. Besides the fact that I didn’t have a view to the ocean from the apartment. I wouldn’t have even been able to do my shopping, unless there was a supermarket within walking distance.

Why couldn’t you go back to the share house, you might be thinking – only problem was, when I decided to move, they all decided to move too. Even the freeloader. So they moved while I was under, and unfortunately for me, to a two-bedroom house without even a study for me to put my stuff in and quietly move in without telling a key resident.

So we come to the reason why I’m probably the most distressed about the loss of the apartment – I was moving back to my parent’s house. Apparently I had asked my Mum during the severest stage of amnesia if I could move back with her ‘where I could feel safe’, but I haven’t the faintest recollection of it. She was quite touched, apparently. So, at 27, I was back with folks. Ordinarily, the shame would be a killer, but I really had no choice.

It wasn’t just the apartment I lost – I found myself without a job, too. I was a contractor at AXA, and the project I was working on was in the process of wrapping up also. Thinking about it after the fact, I can’t remember any milestones I had to complete before I finished – not because my memory’s now a bit fucked, but because I honestly had nothing to do. I’ve since found out they were on the verge of offering me a maternity cover job in marketing, which would have been rad. But the world turned into a right piece of shit while I was in hospital with this whole recession thing, and AXA shed about 10% if its work force – so there certainly wasn’t anything for me to do there.

Not that my accident went unnoticed – obviously, not showing up to work the next day would have been a dead give away. I honestly don’t know how the information filtered to them, because it’s not like any of my family or friends would have known who to call – but it did. And they had a massive meeting with everyone I worked with (which included stakeholders from all parts of the business), and told them I was in a coma. And possibly now retarded, I assume – but who knows. All I do know is that they gave everyone the details of the EAP – employee assistance program. Certainly makes me feel special that they felt counseling could have been required.