Theo Fleury’s Victor Walk.

Well-publicized survivor of child sexual abuse Theo Fleury and a team of caring individuals are walking from Toronto to Ottawa to raise awareness for better protection for other survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I can’t tell you what this movement means to me, despite that I cannot participate because I will be exercising my own right as a free woman – as a ‘survivor’ myself – at the Sasquatch festival at the gorge in Washington.

What Fleury is doing is simply astounding; he has helped others like himself find comfort, find closure, find a voice, and find a way out of their pain and misery by helping as best they can to raise awareness, to be pre-emptive for future generations, in hopes that sexual abuse will by then, be eradicated.

Why hasn’t it already been eradicated? As long as there are people – for whatever reason, and the reasons are beyond me – there will be pedophiles, there will be child predators, there will be men trolling the internet, accosting and tricking their neighbour children, there will be coaches and priests and relatives with something inherently broken and evil in their souls that forces them for inexplicable reasons to have this need to seize sexual power over an innocent, un-developed child. But in my mind, and evidently in Fleury’s as well – the key to ending this horror is disclosure. And the way to open the doors for full disclosure is to eliminate the shame and taboo around child sexual abuse.

I walk around and sometimes wonder, how many people around me are harbouring this secret? How many of them have told? How many of them kept it a secret their whole lives – maybe from everyone they know – but suffer inwardly – are triggered by every day occurrences, things that people who have not fought this ongoing, lifetime battle take for granted that they don’t have to feel the shame and terrible toll of so many aspects of life that are discoloured by abuse. One thing I’ve learned in the course of my young life is, there are more ‘survivors’ than you think. I had a friend tell me once that when she told her story, she had several people disclose to her after that they were there too, at the hands of their abuser when they were too young to comprehend or understand the terror that they were experiencing in that moment, and what they were in for long after the fact.

It takes a terrible amount of courage to come forward; moreso than people who have never had to make such a large, burdening, shameful confession could ever even hope to understand. To tell is an admission of shame; to tell is to fear subjugation, excommunication, or worse: that you won’t be believed. To tell is to admit you put yourself in danger, that you allowed someone to make you feel special and wonderful in this secretive adult way the good adults in your life would disapprove of. To tell is to say, I’m broken. I’m dirty. I’m sick. I’m wrong. I’m damaged, and my body is damaged. And yet, the longer this secret is left behind, the harder it is to come forward. At that point though, it’s not because you’re little and afraid anymore; it’s because you’ve been trained for so long to lie, to not fully disclose who you are and where you came from and about this terrible secret that is hidden deeply in your back pocket, that it becomes second nature and you learn to stop trusting people.

What Fleury is doing, is taking that shame and turning it into something victorious; he is using his pain and his anger and taking action, not allowing tis abuser to win but rather, to set an example and be the person who shelves his shame and TELLS people that there are abusers and that the best way to push them down is by using your words. It is a simple message but one that is more valuable than almost any powerful message today.

That Night.

There was this one time when you and I were walking together when we were just friends, just kids, and I was telling you how I think you should visit my hometown of Jasper, Alberta. What I really meant though, was that I imagined us together there – hiking, canoeing, walking through the woods and smelling the damp bark of birch trees. There was nothing I wanted more. It was February but warm, for a February night. We were walking toward the Garneau Pub. I had a few drinks already and I leaned into you, and you caught me, softened my trip, and I felt nothing but love everywhere, falling like snow from the heaving branches of the pines that lined our wintertime walk. Our friends were up ahead, and their laughter rang through the street. There was scarcely a car. It was dark. My heart was light. Everything was so beautiful that night. I’ll never, ever forget it.

My Favourite Songs Longer than 5 Minutes.

Typically, songs run under the 5-minute mark. In fact, songs that pushed the boundaries of the 5-minute mark back in the radio days were something taboo in previous decades, forcing special “extended versions” to exist but only in Album Land; songs like the original 8-minute American Pie were shunned by radio unless a shortened version could be churned out.

Sometimes, people lose patience for long, meandering, arguably pretentious lengthy songs. But then again, sometimes 4 minutes is simply not enough time for a song to get across a mood, a tone, or what it exactly NEEDS to be successful. That few extra minutes makes a huge difference to the point where 8 minutes is simply not enough. Here are some of my personal favourites…

Wilco – Spiders (Kidsmoke)
Wilco are masters of the 5-minute-plus song, so it was tough to choose which to include on this list, so I opted for songs that were much longer than 5 minutes, or as much as Wilco tends to veer from the standard song length. Among those is the 10-minute head banger, “Spiders” which boasts a quick-paced driving beat, long, drawn-out epic guitar solos that course through your veins, bursts of lyrical energy from Jeff Tweedy as the song chaotically bursts from an undercurrent of quiet, to an explosion of lawless energy.

Ryan Adams – Nobody Girl
There are so many utterly, jaw-droppingly beautiful songs by Mr. Adams but among them is the 9-minute “Nobody Girl”, a slow jam with an epic journey of a guitar solo just before the song’s dramatic closure. Adams is no stranger to designing songs – he has a back catalogue of unreleased material that is unmatched – and so it’s no surprise he crafted a sad, lonely ballad about a sad, lonely person and managed to completely fill such a huge space with a song I simply cannot ever get enough of.

Bob Dylan – Like a Rolling Stone
“Like a Rolling Stone” is the ultimate, quintessential long song. In fact, radio stations were reluctant to play a song that was 6 minutes long and not until DJs and clubs themselves managed to take hold of the song and release it out into the world, did it become a massive worldwide hit and essentially resurrected and changed the course of Dylan’s entire career. The song doesn’t require any reason from me why it’s on this list. It’s forceful, socially conscious, interesting, amazing, awesome, intense, and one of the greatest songs of all time in the history of popular music.

Wilco – One Sunday Morning
The yin to “Spiders”’ yang, “One Sunday Morning” runs over 12 minutes of soft-spoken piano pop and a hard-to-follow but deeply affecting storyline which is, as the brackets state, for Jane Smiley’s boyfriend. The melody, though it is primitive and repetitive, is absolutely intoxicating and pulls at heartstrings like nearly anything Wilco has done in the past, to the point where the lyrics are merely important background noise to a beautiful standalone composition.

The Beatles – Hey Jude
Na, na, na, na na na naaaaaa…… a McCartney piano ballad turns, with just sing-along-style na na na’s  laden under McCartney’s impassioned rock n’ roll wailing, into a real and true moment; where time and space evaporate and all you can hear is just the music that surrounds you and you feel it, deeply and truly as it seeps oh-so deeply inside your soul and you never forget it. Having been lucky enough to see Paul McCartney this past November, hearing tens of thousands of fans na na na-ing along with McCartney was only a ridiculously memorable reiteration of what it means to be lost in a song.

Neil Young – On the Beach
The blues-infused title track on Young’s most underrated record is a deep, dark questioning of fame and Hollywood and life itself along with typical Neil Young guitar work that does a number on the song’s black mood. While the title of the record suggests something more lighthearted and upbeat, the image of the ‘beach’ is turned on its head by Young into a lonely, desolate place of soul-searching where he solemnly sings, “Now I’m livin’ out here on the beach/But those seagulls are still out of reach.”

Oasis – Champagne Supernova
Often-criticized for their musical inconsistencies and bad boy behaviour, the Gallagher Brothers have, in spite of their differences and in spite of some spotty work in the latter part of their career as ‘Oasis’, produced some of the finest songs of the last 30 years. One of those is the sprawling, soul-feeding psychedelic trip-out, “Champagne Supernova”; Noel Gallagher once  had a conversation where he asked what on earth was meant by “slowly walking down the hall/faster than a cannonball” to which he replied: “I don’t fucking know. But are you telling me, when you’ve got 60,000 people singing it, they don’t know what it means? It means something different to every one of them.”

Kurt Vile – Wakin’ on a Pretty Day
Kurt Vile and his bleak stoner alt-rock are always awesome and surprising, and I develop a stronger relationship with his songs each time I listen to them. This track, from Kurt’s most recent record, is an opener that boasts a full 9 minutes of sheer start-to-finish beauty and sadness. A line like “The phone is ringing off the shelf/I guess it wanted to kill itself” are clever firstly, and then depressing, and then you look in your own heart to peel apart the layers of meaning in a huge song like this one. Kurt cites Neil Young as an influence on his work and you can hear “On the Beach” in every pore of “Walkin’ on a Pretty Day.”

The Rolling Stones – Moonlight Mile
This is one of my favourite Rolling Stones songs for so many reasons, but particularly the song’s epic closure where a reasonably constructed acoustic-riffed blues ballad takes a turn for Richards/Jagger grit and piercing pandemonium. “Moonlight Mile” is one of the shorter songs on this list but whenever I listen to it, I never feel fully nourished when it’s over; even a couple of extra minutes wouldn’t have hurt the best song on “Sticky Fingers”.

Van Morrison – Astral Weeks
On Van Morrison’s best record are merely 9 songs, most of them clocking well over 5 minutes; it’s the title track though, that summarizes the record’s true mood and feel; that burst of young love and its spiritual properties of rebirth and rejuvenation. Of all the songs on this list, it’s one of the only ones that made me cry the first time I heard it. It’s a song that needs no introduction. It’s typical Van Morrison material: Fearless, gorgeous, a start-to-finish sonic adventure of twists and turns and surprises. And most fascinating of all about this song is, it was recorded in just one take.

Boston – Foreplay/Long Time
Huge stadium rock groups like Boston are no strangers to the lengthy song. Boston’s best is Foreplay/Long Time, a song separated out into two parts: the first, an intro that boasts earsplitting electric hefty mass of crazy sounds, the second one of the most badass falsetto/guitar solo-laden/drum-happy rock songs of the late 1970s.

Manfred Mann – Blinded by the Light
Originally recorded by the Boss himself, I believe this song was perfected by Manfred Mann. Their version is an essential track, the kind you need to have with you on a deserted island, the song you need to listen to every once in a while because you miss it a little and it is more life-confirming than checking your pulse with two fingers. It’s a master class in production, arrangement, instrumentation. It utilizes the organ better than almost any song in history. The bridge, featuring an outbreak of “Chopsticks”, is a classic gimmick. If you like road trips, this is your song.

The Velvet Underground – Oh Sweet Nuthin’
A cool blues rocker if there ever was one, the 7 and a half-minute “Oh Sweet Nuthin’” is a true gem in a back catalogue of pure gems. One of a few songs on this list that closes the record, “Oh Sweet Nuthin’” comes straight out of the anthemic playbook: an ode to an underdog, a repetitive statement of driving force, a CRAZY – and I mean CRAZY – shredding guitar solo, and distinctive soft-hearted vocals, this time from Doug Yule. I came upon this song by accident proving some accidents are fated.

“Delete Forever”

When I go into my gmail and filter out spam, I can check a box, click ‘Delete Forever’, and the messages are gone. Forever. It always makes me laugh a little bit, however, to affiliate this phrase of ominous finality to erasing a spam message.

To me, a permanent deletion is a statement; it says, “I don’t like this and I’m going to get rid of it and ensure it never comes back”. It’s a strongly worded dismissal. It’s an admission that you are 100% finished, done, over.

Whenever I click this button, I feel the weight of certain burdens drift away. I feel myself purging badness, even if only a little bit. To me, “Deleting forever” is an elimination of badness, and any small ways you can do that are good. “Delete forever” is a state of mind. It says you wish to permanently cleanse yourself of badness with the click of a button, to no longer allow it to clog the vital organs of your universe. It demonstrates you are done with ‘that’, and onto the next thing. That you are moving on.

An Open Letter to Mike Jeffries, CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch

Dear Mr. Jeffries:

I just read an article about Abercrombie & Fitch in which you justify a lack of large sizes for girls and hiring staff based on looks because “good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that.” You were also quoted as saying, “A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong.”

At first, I had no words. Then after some thought about this article, once the anger wore down and I could focus my attention again, I came up with some.

We live in a world now where bullying is finally being recognized not as a “kids will be kids” issue, but only mere footsteps down from a full-fledged hate crime. We live in a world where bullying has caused teens who feel inadequate, unloved, and friendless to end their lives at very young ages because societal pressure and peer pressure have forced them into believing they’re “not good enough” and “don’t belong.” And people are finally taking these issues seriously.

Conversely, we live in a world where girls are surrounded by celebrities and models and pop stars who are cute and thin and have shiny hair and perfectly made-up faces and wear designer clothes and are acting in ambassadorial roles for young women. We live in a world where young girls are reading fashion magazines and viewing  ads for expensive, trendy clothing which feature tall, thin airbrushed female ideals, and when you’re 12 or 13 you don’t yet realize that these standards of beauty are just that: ideals, and cannot and will not ever be lived up to.

It’s ironic, actually, that a world so obsessed with beauty can be a world so filled with ugliness.

And then you come in, Mr. Jeffries, into this picture where cruelty from the people that, in your twisted mind, “belong” is ramped and in the forefront of people’s minds, and you come into this picture where idyllic beauty in a global society is equally ramped and in the forefront of people’s minds, and you reward both: you reward cruelty, and you reward idealized beauty, by allowing only those who fit your bill of what constitutes ‘beauty’, to wear a brand of clothing that is by all accounts ‘cool’ to 20^th and 21^st century teenagers. You are unabashed about it, making your world view, to the naïve young impressionable mind, seem like the gospel truth. In my mind, your truth is as follows: Only thin girls can be beautiful and popular.

Evidently, Mr. Jeffries, you have never been a teenage girl who doesn’t fit the standard of what society believes to be beautiful. But it seems you also have no empathy for the experience either, so please let me enlighten you. You feel constantly shunned and worthless simply based on your weight and the way you look. You keep a diary in the sixth or seventh grade in which you write about how no one wants to spend time with you because of how you look, and you feel like doing exercise to try and get in shape so you can make friends. You try on cool clothes that will never fit you. And every single time you try something on that doesn’t fit, you’re reminded that it’s not just your peers who are telling you that you don’t belong: it’s society as a whole. You are told – through forceful exclusion – that people like you are not accepted, not welcome, and designed to fit in.

What you fail to fully understand, Mr. Jeffries, is both what constitutes ‘cool’ and what constitutes ‘beautiful’. And neither of those can necessarily be boxed into the clientele you’re creating for yourself through frank, open exclusion. Because although you seem to have it in your head that beautiful people are always what you consider ‘cool’ and “ugly”, “fat” people are always friendless and alone, you’re sadly mistaken.

It makes me sick, sad and appalled that you’d even go and make the kinds of statements you made. It makes me angry that you are enforcing beliefs that, in the 21^st century, should be long stomped-out and forgotten. It breaks my heart that teenage girls who are just coming into their own and learning to love themselves might go into an Abercrombie store because their money is as green as someone 30lb lighter than them, try on an over-priced t-shirt, realize it doesn’t come in their size, then lose faith in themselves as a worthwhile human being. When the truth is, you’re not worthwhile as a human being for coming up with this sexist, prejudice, discriminatory, tasteless garbage, you sadistic, shallow old prick.

Regards,

My Top Female Rolemodels When I Was Growing Up

As a child of the 1990s, there was a healthy mix of good and bad female role models (not unlike today, I suppose). Real and fictional, animated or live action, literary or televised, what I believe despite what the media and subjugating anti-women’s groups would have you believe, are that no matter what era we grew up in, there will always be strong women to guide strong women and lead us away from the Kardashians. These were the girls and women I looked up to when I was an impressionable teenager, each to whom I own a piece of what I am today.

Kit Pearson
When I was in junior high, I read “The Daring Game”, a book about bright young women around my age who have adventures in a boarding school in Victoria, BC; they’re all misfits, yet fit together and forge a strong and unforgettable friendship. I loved the book so much, I then read “Awake and Dreaming”, a story of another misfit, nine years old, who realized through a series of both devastating and fantastical events, that she was destined to be a writer. Kit Pearson’s YA novels spoke to me; they spoke to my generation, they spoke to a myriad of “misfit” young women who rose above their struggles while grappling with growing up, and weren’t necessarily consumed with boys, makeup, clothing and weight the way girls in my class were, or girls on TV shows and in movies I watched; in fact, these girls reviled this perceived notion of what femininity means in young adulthood. Kit Pearson helped me to realize that I too was destined to be a writer. And that I was above what plagued and followed me around when I was in junior high.

Daria
Always sarcastic, smarter, awkward, intellectually superior than her cheerleading, football-playing, hair-twirling peers yet almost longing to be a part of the very peers she reviled, Daria was a lifesaver for me in high school. With her dowdy green jacket, straight face and monotone-presented points of view, Daria represented to me, everything I was thinking and feeling but too afraid to say. Yet, she was still a sympathetic character, always halfway-out but it was evidenced that at times, she wished she could give a damn. For the most part though, she shrugged off caring, she refused to punt a volleyball, and she refused to get involved in sensationalism and stupid, surfaced enthusiasm. Without Daria, my adolescence would have been spent wondering why popular culture never really embraced people like me.

Hermione Granger
I never appreciated just how much Hermione Granger represented female heroism until she clocked Slytherin’s Draco Malfoy in the face in Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban. Hermione is a typical teenage girl in that she struggles with self-esteem issues, crushes, and dates. But she is also of her trio, the smart one; equally as brave as her male counterparts; and oftentimes, it is her getting her male friends out of a jam. Hermione is carefully written to NEVER be the damsel in distress and when she is, she’s not the only one in peril. And it’s not always up to the men to help her out. I owe J.K. Rowling one for proving that female literary characters in fantasy aren’t always just archetypal useless princesses locked up in physical and metaphorical towers. In Ani DiFranco’s great and powerful song, Not a Pretty Girl, she asks the rhetorical question: “Don’t you think every kitten figures out how to get down, whether or not you ever show up?”

Bif Naked
To this day, Bif Naked is an advocate and activist for social change and sustainability. And when I was growing up her rebellious appearance, openness, and social advocacy made a HUGE difference in my teenage years. I remember her once going on Much Music and saying, “It doesn’t even matter of your breasts look like hot dogs, as long as they’re real.” Not only were Bif’s messages of peace, harmony, love and acceptance crucial to my upbringing as a girl in the Western, media-swarmed world, but she had a voice; she wasn’t this auto-tuned, made-up, scantily clad airhead pop star. She could rock the fuck out and sing about things that mattered: surviving abuse, loving yourself, family issues, and being one’s own leader. I once considered Bif Naked my favourite artist. I always wanted to be like her.

Enid Coleslaw
Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel-turned-film, Ghost World represented a Daria-like type of girl: those who want to belong but are stuck on the outside and not for lack of trying, but because they are who they are. Like Daria, Enid’s best friend is someone on the cusp who ends up wanting more than to reject everything in contemporary society and just be what she perceives as “normal”. Enid can’t, because she can’t. While the story turns dark and eerie and inconclusive, it does say that Enid stays true to herself right to the end.  

Pepper Ann
Pepper Ann is a clumsy but cool girl who didn’t dress like, or look like the other girls in her fictional animated Saturday morning cartoon world; as her theme song says, she’s a heroine who “marches in her own parade”; she has a militantly feminist mother and best friends who simply do their own thing, regardless of what social pressures surround them. Like Hermione, she never got into jams she couldn’t pull herself out of; she was the original animated hipster geek. The show Pepper Ann was the kind of cartoon you watched, and subconsciously felt was written by women.

Tamira Goldstein
Breaker High fans of the world, unite! The show was designed so every teenage viewer had someone they identified with, and someone they could crush on. All teenage archetypes are presented here: the smart girl, the geek, the jock, the brooding emo kid, the southern belle, the funny fat guy, etc. etc. etc. Tamira Goldstein was the geeky girl. She wasn’t the smartest, she wasn’t the most outgoing, she wasn’t the richest, and she wasn’t at all confident. She was, to me, the most real teenage girl on that cruise ship high school. Tamira struggled with the typical dramatic teenage girl crises of the other characters and she was by all accounts, a stereotypical ’loser’. But she was never presented so that we’d feel sorry for her. Rather, we sympathized with her. And we loved who she was, despite that she was a bit lower on the social ladder sometimes. And the end of the day, she got to kiss Ryan Gosling. Who doesn’t want to be like Tamira?

The Spice Girls
The Spice Girls are an interesting hybrid between ‘positive feminist role models’ and skanky bimbos. Did parents really want their little girls to be like the Spice Girls? Well, I remember telling my mom once that if they ever did a concert in Edmonton, I wanted to go and I was met with: “Well, that would be too racy of a show for you, I think.” My mom’s a really liberal, chill kind of person (proof: she bought the “Jagged Little Pill” cassette for my sister for her 10^th birthday), so this statement speaks volumes. But the Spice Girls really said something about female empowerment that rang truer than their show-biz outfits and those massive platform union jack-patterned hooker boots: “Girl Power”. It was a phrase none of us had ever heard before, but we all heard it: loud and clear and around the world, as soon as these five hit the music scene with the loudest bang. And it meant something. To me, it meant loving yourself for who you are, speaking your mind, not letting people push you around, valuing female friendships over boyfriends, following your dreams, and not taking shit from anyone. Through their stupid, poppy music, which featured lines like “I want a man, not a boy who thinks he can”, I was presented with a certain kind of simplistic wisdom that at the very least, gave me the illusion that by adapting the philosophy of the Spice Girls, I was a junior feminist in the making.

Nostalgia.

So much depends upon one small tangible piece of nostalgia. You can pin an entire period of time on one piece of paper, or just one mix CD or an old notebook. These objects are sacred not because of what they are and what they’re made of, but because of what they represent. And it’s these things that have too much sentimental value to let go. I don’t want to let go. I drag them with me everywhere I go because they’re all I have to remind me of what was the past. Memories fizzle and fade and distort but that one object – that tangible thing you can hold in your hand and read or listen to or touch or smell… that object feels immortal.