what a feeling

From TORONTO

October 10th, 2012

As I lie in bed at night listening to the backyard cats yowling and screaming and making illicit cross-species love with the raccoons, don't think I'm not remembering you, Dear Reader. Indeed, the ten percent of my brain that's not busy wishing I were a feral cat or raccoon - they also don't pay rent or taxes, you do realize that- and fantasizing about the possibilities of furry critter life, is firmly focussed on your needs. For instance, I'll think: Would my legions be interested in, say, a confession that I want to be screwed by violent fellow marsupials outdoors on rooftops or in between garbage cans; sleep under a house all day and rule the town by night, living dangerously off of the fetid remnants found in green bins and black plastic bags; giving a furry middle finger to convention and etiquette and increasingly complex garbage bin latches (nice try, Toronto); ripping off house pet ears; frightening the occasional lone nocturnal human.... Would my dear readers like to hear all those things?‏

Perhaps.

I’ve been wondering why I don’t spend more time reading and thinking about people I like, rather than people I hate. Why, for one, am I so entirely obsessed with Mitt Romney when I’m not even American…and when I can be reasonably sure that my fantasy of meeting him and taking him by the shoulders and shaking him for an hour, taking breaks to slap him across the face and shout “snap out of it!” will never come true? As for Rob Ford, It’s gotten to the point where if anyone within a six hundred mile radius is writing or saying anything about him I can sense it. It’s like I have a Mayor Ford Google alert IN MY BRAIN. I’m disgusting.

Which is why, when I die, in my next life I’ll actually come back as a slug, not as a raccoon. Come to think of it, that would be okay. Raccoons have got it hard. Between the fucking there’s so much foraging and fighting to be done. At least they never sit by the phone waiting for their agents to call. Raccoons hardly even care about auditions. I mean, they don’t even bother to do their hair or get off-book.

THIS, BY THE WAY, IS A CLOSE-UP OF A RACCOON PAW. DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS??? BAD-ASS AND TERRIFYING. AND WE WONDER HOW THEY GET THE GREEN BIN OPEN? HOLY SHIT, WE SHOULD JUST BE GLAD THEY DON’T BREAK INTO OUR HOMES AND MURDER US.

This cat I’m taking care of for the next few months has got it all figured out. Fed, watered, warm, loved. When she wants affection she just comes over and asks for it. Just rubs against you, you pet her and play with her for a while, then when she’s done with it she runs away and eats or sleeps happily in a corner for the rest of the day. I wish I could be more like that. Well I guess I kind of was, back in my twenties.

Oh shit. Now it sounds like I’ve been molesting the cat. That context thing again… (But is it really molesting, if she’s a grown cat and into it and stuff? I jest, I jest.) ASHLEY. I AM NOT HAVING SEX WITH YOUR CAT. I realize that when you said looking after Isabelle might provide interesting fodder for my blague, that is not what you had in mind. Unless… You sick fuck. (NOTE TO SELF: DO NOT INCLUDE BLOG LINK IN APPLICATIONS FOR NANNYING JOBS.)

I’ve been thinking that, the odds of my waking up as a cat or raccoon one day being relatively slim – although, hey, all those body-switching comedies: Freaky Friday, Thirteen Going on Thirty, the one with Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds peeing on one another or whatever, the Judge Reinhold/Fred Savage classic Vice Versa (see “Proof I’m Not Crazy”, below)…okay, which of those would not be improved by one of the involved parties being a raccoon? Oh, Hollywood, why are you not listening to me?

PROOF I’M NOT CRAZY. BUT BOY, THAT JUDGE REINHOLD SURE WAS! HOOO-WHEEE!

…Where was I? Oh yeah - odds being slim I’ll live out my raccoon love life, I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll do something about my actual human one.

Step one: stop turning down everyone who asks me out ever, and then complaining that no one ever asks me out. (Actually not many people do – not once I start emitting the “don’t ask me out” laser beams from my eyes. Old habits die hard. As do laser beams.)

Step two: Stop talking about laser beams.

Step three: Start dating men my own age. Older even. (I have a lot to say about step three. This blague will address no further steps.)

I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with younger guys. It’s just, well, without planning it, they’ve become kind of a Thing I’m Trying (I’ll explain in a paragraph or two), and I thought I’d try The Other Thing. At one point a few years ago I actually tried Both Things simultaneously, finding myself dating two guys (all above-board, not sneak-around-ily) who were almost twenty years apart in age. And I could relate equally to both of them…and to how good they both looked in their underwear…

Ahhh…relating.

Among other things, while it’s definitely not everything, there is a certain comfort in getting one another’s readymade pop culture references…

Not long ago I found myself driving along with a young man I’d been fooling around with (See? Even that phrase shows my age), and two of his friends. We’re driving them home after a play before going to my place to, you know, do the horizontal Charleston - as we used to say in my day - when, in the course of conversation, one of them makes mention of a friend of theirs named Irene Karras, or Eileen Cara or something… So OF COURSE I make the inevitable – and hilarious – joke about her great work on the Flashdance theme song…and get nothin’. (I’m telling you, it was funny.) From both front and back seats: silence. Dead air. Remove hand from drivers knee. Get out of the car, you old pervert, says the voice inside my head.

Not that they were being mean…they just had no idea what I could possibly be talking about.

So, since all relationships should be built on a solid foundation of trust and Flashdance jokes, I’ve resolved to date guys my own age from now on. This resolution seems familiar from the last time I made it. (Look, it’s not that I seek out younger guys, it’s just that A: Of attractive, interesting men, they are generally the ones who are single. B: Thanks to my cursedly good genes, they think I’m one of them. (A young person, not a man. Most days.) C: I’m a terrible judge of age and think they are one of me…until it’s too late. “You’re WHAT age?? Okay, I know we met on a school playground…but I thought you were one of the teachers. Here, put on your pants. (Callmethatwasfun.)”

My new strategy has another name, one that points out it might be a long haul plan: it’s called, as my friend Tracy and I once realized over a very necessary bottle of wine, Waiting For All the Good Ones To Get Divorced. And everybody’s doing it!
Maybe this will be the year I finally make a date with the Sexy Cheese man (formerly of Sexy Cheese Man and Hot Cheese Lady, before they broke up and she left him to run the fancy cheese store), instead of just buying copious amounts of dairy and expensive spreads as an excuse to moon about trying to flirt across the brie.

“THE GROSS TRUTH”, BY NATALIE DEE. SHHHH…DON’T TELL THE CHEESE MAN.

It’s a dangerous game, buying a steady enough stream of cheese to keep giving one’s self excuses to see the Sexy Cheese Man…while not overdoing it and eating enough of the stuff as to render oneself puffy and stinky and constipated, and thus no longer Sexy Cheese Man-worthy. The sidewalks of Roncesvalles are strewn with women who tipped the delicate balance.

So far, I’m working the system. I drop in just enough that I and the Cheese Man are on a first-name basis…yet seldom enough that I remain unpredictable and mysterious. My only miscalculations being when I’m already inside the shop when I realize that SCM has given himself the day off and left the place in the hands of the (younger and far less attractive) Cheese Boy…and then feel obligated to buy a chunk of Eastern Townships camembert just to avoid giving myself away. 

Side note: If I should ever date the Cheese Man you must promise not to tell him about my temporary favourite midnight snack: Kraft Cheese slices dipped in flax seeds. Don’t ask me how I discovered this; I’m not sure myself. I had a fever, okay? I got a craving.

Of course, at some point I’m bound to learn he’s only twenty-eight or something, a mere cheeseboy himself. But a cheeseboy with his own business. A cheeseboy with responsibilities.

Speaking of the R-Word, Shauna Black and I were talking recently about the other reality of dating grown-ups: a lot of them have offspring.

Now, I feel no particular need to immortalize myself through childbearing: For one, I shall forever live on in two particularly terrible episodes of Degrassi: the Next Generation. Also, now that my friends the Wasko-Patersons are expecting a child, my lifelong campaign to get some friends to name their son “Norton” after me may finally bear fruit. If anyone will do it, they will. (Don’t let me down, guys. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON THIS. EVERYTHING.) 

Anyway, Shauna and I got to realizing that, for people like us who love kids but don’t care to own one, stepmothering is one of the best rackets around: you get plenty of kid time, but when they get whiney or start to smell a little off you can send them back to their mother. It’s like the opposite of being a single mom.

Just as I’m formulating my plan and considering hitting up the games room at the Copernicus Lodge (the seniors’ home conveniently across the street), I receive an invite to Eddie Belanger and Cyndi Carleton’s wedding (from my friend Andy Bunker, whose lovely wife Tia is in Halifax, leaving him in need a skirt-wearing substitute date). I don’t have my hopes up for sexy prospects, since every wedding I’ve been to lately is all couples, all the time, and/or the best-looking people there are the ones related to me… 

But skip to several hours later that night, as I’m being spun around the dance floor by a roguishly handsome, slightly older, unattached wedding guest. I’m thinking, Exactly. This is the kinda stuff I could get used to. Here’s a man who knows how to dance a slow dance (see, older men know how to lead because they all took ballroom dancing with their ex-wives)…he looks at home in a suit…I’ll bet he even knows how to introduce himself – and other people – properly! Have you noticed that? How the simple courtesy of a proper introduction is lost on the young these days? It’s gone the way of cursive writing. They just let their unacquainted friends stand there, staring at each other (or having a whole conversation) and never bother. 

Maybe names are passé. I mean, like hey, don’t define me, old man. Or maybe it’s because they’re the first generation to have smoked weed with their breakfast cereal from the age of eight and simply can’t remember names. AND they won’t get off my lawn with their baggy pants and their nintendopads and their hippity hoppity music! Whatever their names are!

…Back to the dance floor, where, mid-spin, there suddenly appears at both our elbows a ten-year-old child saying, “Dad, I don’t feel so good.” (Hint: he wasn’t talking to me.)

It was so many things, that moment.

On the surface, yes: it was the ultimate, unimpeachable cock block. I mean, what are you gonna do? “Look kid, I’m trying to have it off with your dad here, wouldja be a pal and go puke in the corner? Walk it off, guy, walk it off.”

But on a deeper level? It was the needle scratching off the record of the sexy groovy music that was the internal soundtrack to my rocking the power of the red dress and the long black hair and not only feeling pretty hot but like THE MOST INTERESTING WOMAN IN THE WORLD…suddenly to be replaced by the sound of a booming voice saying “Welcome to your Carlsberg years”. What? I’m in a whole other beer campaign than the one that I thought I was in? …At least I didn’t fancy myself a Bud girl. (Though I did PLAY one once…on the radio. True story.)

What else was that moment, you ask? It was God himself - in the majestic form of a small pukey-stomached child - coming down from the heavens to ask, “Okay, Leese, this is the demographic you’re moving into here…this is the kind of stuff you’ll be signing up for.  Y’all ready for this?” (God likes to say “y’all”. It’s folksy.)

I mean, even in the stepmom biz, it’s not all awesome Iron Man Hallowe’en costumes and pedicure slumber parties. There will be vomit. (Great movie by the way. Good work, Daniel Day.)

So am I ready to go straight from the young guys with commitment issues to the ones with divorce baggage and spare tires and alimony payments? Wheeeee!

Why not? Like that other thing was working so well for me. Maybe we could hold off on the beer guts and comb-overs for a bit, though, huh God? I mean come ON – look at me.

My date test will be as follows: I will sing a potential suitor the line “First when there’s nuthin…but a cold glowing dre-ea-eam…” and if he can’t sing back the next line…well, then that actually would probably just indicate that he’s likely not gay. So still a good test. For the age thing, I guess I’ll just ask for I.D.

Okay, I lied. There is a step four: disregard all other steps and from now on only date Jennifer Beals. You watch that video and tell me that could possibly be a bad idea. I know, I know, she didn’t do her own dancing…but that smile is all her, baby.

…She’s still got that, right?