All in Non-Fiction
Playing music in the street or another public place for voluntary donations is known as busking. Musicians often say this is the best musical education you can get because convincing a tough New York crowd to donate forces you to elevate your skill. A good busker may be able to earn more than they could in more traditional jobs. According to money.com they can earn anywhere from nothing to more than $30 per hour depending on many things, not least of which are talent and traffic.
My mom and dad are night and day. They have been divorced longer than either one's longest marriages have lasted, and I wonder now if they even knew they ever had the love for food in common.
At thirty-four, the same age my mom was in my memories, I’m tired of feeling orphaned by all the queer men, and I want to be angry. But there is no one to be angry with. You cannot be angry with a generation of men who lived through a plague.
I cry anytime Springsteen speaks about his father, duh, because our fathers were so alike, because we as children of broken men were so alike. I cry at both the intro and the outro to ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,’ the intro because it means Clarence has come to the party, the outro because it means it’s time for Clarence to leave.
I refused to let myself think for too long. Instead, I touched myself as cars sped by, the darkness calm and heavy. I felt endless in the most limiting way possible. What I was was afraid. Like most everyone, I saw a lonely person when I looked in the mirror. So what I did was paint my mirrors blue. Blue is calming, I’d been told. Blue will make everything better.
I continue driving along Route 50 toward Arlington, knowing Dad is right: it’s not a sacred place. I can come here alone or in my new SUV without fear that bad luck is indigenous to this spot and will somehow taint my journey every time I return.
Marginalized people. Despair on the street. She knew what she was talking about. I grew dizzy as our crazed driver swerved left and right, cutting off cars. Ms. Raincoat’s fervour rose. “You’ve got to work on transitions. You need to help people get treatment or find jobs. It’s the only way ...”
I’ve known my brother all of my life and I have no idea what he sounds like when he sings. Not even “Happy Birthday.” When you have three older siblings, they all sing “Happy Birthday” and they all blend together around the table because all you can focus on is the cake in front of you.
The doctors there, probably tired of me and my opiate-related shenanigans, decided I needed to quit my medications cold turkey and admitted me to the hospital to monitor my detox. My hospital roommate had a gastrointestinal ailment involving continuous puking. Across the hall, an elderly woman screamed regularly. I spent about a week there, dope sick and tripping balls.
Eventually, I experienced what should have been statistically obvious: that getting into an Ivy League school had been easier for me than it is for most people, and some people, even with help, just can’t make it, even if “making it” is unclearly defined; this means, if you are an artist, your inability to score well on the SAT’s could easily align your art, and your sense of authentic self-expression, with failure, or maybe worse, meaninglessness.
I had just about answered when my mother edged herself between us. She batted her eyelashes at him and began to babble, her words bubbles that burst against my eardrums. Then she shimmied her shoulders and hips like the mating dance of a desperate bird.
The kitchen, incidentally, can be found directly behind the stairs we’ve now been forbidden to ascend. On entering, we notice it seems to have succumbed to the least amount of damage.
Not for long.
Had the t-shirt said PETER BRADY IS GOD, I would have mailed in a check for several shirts without a second thought, but I didn’t believe in the cause of Greg Brady enough to part with $13.95 over it, and certainly not enough to spring for the sweatshirt at $23.95.
I stood there, glaring at my mother, wanting to tell her I wished she were dead, but I could feel my stepfather's eyes burning into the back of my head. Instead, I calmly walked to the bathroom, closed and locked the door, then put my fingers down my throat as far as I could reach.
Maybe if there was a Degrassi episode about Liberty getting injured on a school trip to the US and needing to get surgery before she could return back to Toronto, I could have been warned about how shitty it would be to have to pay out of pocket and would’ve remembered the importance of keeping my OHIP valid. Or at the very least—remember that it was possible to still seek help and pay out of pocket because my mental health was worth it.
Growing up poor, Clark Kent's hundred-acre Kansas farm might as well have been on another planet and Wayne Manor, with its caverns and butlers was always the most unbelievable part of the Batman mythology. I still don’t understand the kids that picked Batman or Superman.
The author points out that unlike the children’s world, the world of grown-ups is strikingly unjust: “Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy.” The transition to maturity is bitter. One gets betrayed. One gets broken.
How did I feel in the fall of my freshman year of college? I was lonely and lost, but posting Richard Brautigan’s “Karma Repair Kit” (the memory of reading it in a dog-eared used paperback curled up on the floor of my college town bookstore coming back to me now) and an mp3 of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” (before I wore it down from playing it on loop that first Thanksgiving back home) articulate this better than my own words ever could, let me re-experience what exact type of lonely I was, and remind me how the loneliness was mixed with other things, like twinges of excitement at the sheer newness of the experience.
The alarming similarities between the two Effies make Skins–or at least its Effy episodes- appear something akin to Stephen Moffat’s Sherlock: a plot updated to befit a contemporary audience and punctuated with objects from the text, also suitably modernised.
In pictures of “Shipoopi” from my high school’s production of The Music Man the previous spring, the other Pickalittle ladies and I—the matrons and moral arbiters of River City, Iowa—stand off to the side while the boys and girls dance. We’re very upset; the children have interrupted rehearsal for our tableau interpretation of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”