Balls of Rice

Tag: writing

  • Soft multigenerational anger

    I’ve always wondered, on an orthodox cross what is the top plank, and what is the bottom diagonal plank? A Renault Duster creeps by as I sit next to my bicycle, speckled in mud, near a dried-up well across from a roughed-up plastic stork and beside a three-metre orthodox cross. Before we left Canada, people told me to stay safe: they’d seen videos of undercover recruiters pushing people off of their bicycles, throwing them in the backs of vans, forcing them to the frontlines. None of them confirmed as real. Meanwhile the colonizer forces a disproportionate number of Indigenous people into the meat grinder, and lies to other racialized foreigners and/or force them to enlist. Would they take my bike with us? Would I resist, throw punches? Would I be able to call my wife? I’d try to convince them we have something in common because I have a thrifted Renault trucker vest. Instead, the Duster dusts its way to Zarvantsi / Зарванці. Is the top plank like the INRI sign? Is the bottom plank where his feet were?

    What is the deal with this stork. Who broke its legs? Two men in fatigues step out of a police cruiser. There’s no one else anywhere close. He says what I assume is “documents please” although I know how to say that and he didn’t say that. I pull the Canadian passport immunity-card from my bike bag. He doesn’t open it and says have a good day with an expressionless face (I crossed into Mexico like that once. Privilege don’t stop at borders, baby). I give my brand-new temporary residency card to the cop. He punches my digits into a tablet and says have a good day with an expressionless face, the type you see in old-timey photos.

    There’s a small tree planted behind the well with names of the dead but I don’t go look at it. Last week, a guy with his wife in Ternopil smiled at me as we walked past on the sidewalk, sun setting in the background of Love Island. A mixture of ‘pleasant greeting’ and ‘what’s his fucking deal?’ zap my neurons simultaneously like two ways of understanding the world trying to fit through the door at the same time and get stuck, all shoulders and elbows. He musta been a new foreigner. People otherwise look at me with general confusion, indifference, or soft multigenerational anger.

    The women at the sewing group and the women at the net-weaving group say it’s great to have a man, a foreigner in their ranks. I volunteer for the ‘war effort’ and iron with an iron (прасую праскою) adaptive cyber-shorts for my peers who now have fewer limbs than they used to have, than I have. Human psychology isn’t designed to understand such complexity so I tell myself that spending my meagre earnings here on deep-fried dough and steel bicycles is solidarity.

    Friend serving in Kyiv says last week was the worst week in the past three years. I bike through green pastures and blossoming orchards past cows and their tenders. Доброго дня. Добрі. I don’t even consider landmines until the time of writing.

  • Act Like You Know

    I planned a successful yet wildly overbudget kitchen renovation. Successful in the fact that the new space looks like a kitchen, and it looks like a nicer kitchen than it did before. It has yet to be used, so its functionality is still highly in question. My experience working in a commercial kitchen for one week washing dishes under the feet of thousands of Habs fans, scrubbing pots with my tears of jealousy, along with working six months in a kitchen the size of my closet, gave me obvious authority to run a commercial kitchen renovation.

    I wrote a second book. The first one received wild acclaim from my aunt in small town Saskatchewan, so I figured I owed it to the world to write a second, to be released in a matter of days. In the process of repeatedly underlining one paragraph of the 300 copies of my book with a red ball-point pen stolen from a private Christian high school, I tried to come up with an explanation for one of my stories for when Peter Mansbridge inevitably asks me about it on The National. Well Peter, this story represents the inevitable Marxist revolution coming within our generation. Peter will share the book with an aging baby-booming generation of liberals and will send it to the swoopy-haired tiger-beat of Jian who will publicize it to the slightly more liberal but slightly less informed generation of thumb communicators.

    I recently began as the Housing Coordinator at work. This position, usually held for academics with experience, was given to the best candidate, an anti-academic with zero experience. I am to guide people on the margins of society through an Orwellian world of bureaucracy and gently nudge them towards the racist, classist, stigma-soaked free enterprise rental market so that they survive another month. My experience living in suburbia and going to private school, as well as that three months of volunteering at the food bank in Montreal was all they needed. I was a shoe-in.

    Before you begin to congratulate me on how wide my knowledge base is, how successful I have become, and how multi-talented I am, please know that my recent successes have been entirely based on this:

    If you don’t know, act like you know.

    Disclaimer: If you abide by this creed but you are a visible minority, we cannot guarantee positive outcomes like those listed above. We suggest you bank on your contacts, that is, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” to bring you out of the muck.

    In daily dealings of all three of the above projects I get asked about my background. Each time I instinctively want to respond “Swedish and Irish,” but then realize I’m not at a settlers reunion. Actually, people want to know why they should give me the time of day. My publishing history. My construction experience. My participation and perseverance in systems of institutionalized education. Justify yourself in two short phrases. And while I find the request foolish, I can’t blame them, since I am the first to admit that people have zero reason to take my word for anything. I am the hack of all hacks. I do, however, I appreciate the chance to make myself look foolish.

    You didn’t get lucky, some might say, you worked hard. As true as this may be, my luck cannot be downplayed and my privilege cannot be ignored. Hard work pays off is a sentiment that attempts to justify the oppressive systems of capitalism and neocolonialism. In the cases that it is used to congratulate someone for a job well done, it often ignores the contextual advantages that actually contributed to the finished project, and fails to recognize the reasons that hard work doesn’t pay off for the majority of folks, besides the fact that they “just didn’t work hard enough, I guess.”

    After three days of a new position, clients have actually said to colleagues, “I met Nic. I like him because he really knows what he’s doing.” The illusion stands. I’ve tricked my boss, I’ve tricked clients, and now the goal is to trick you. And by the time the illusion falls I hope to be in a tropical country indulging in coconut-flavoured depressants. That is something that I am undeniably versed in. No acting necessary.