stop thinking so much

an amputee's guide to living right

[adamroper]

5 things to be thankful for

5 things I could use as a tennis racket

5 hobbies that could be misconstrued as criminal activity

5 pictures your Ex liked on Instagram

5 animal sounds you can make with a tuba

5 dogs I’ve been bitten by

5 birds I wouldn’t want to be

5 bad movies my dad and I saw in theatres

5 more interesting topics to discuss at Christian men’s retreats than sexual impurity

5 smells in my fridge I can’t identify

5 bones I’ve broken trying to lasso a cow

5 doctors I’ve incorrectly addressed as “Your Highness”

5 buildings in Vancouver I don’t know the names of

5 bad reasons to date a roommate

5 Neufelds I’ve met from Steinbach Manitoba

5 people who hate me in Regina Saskatchewan 

5 people I’ve slept with in Sacramento 

5 bridges I’d rather jump off than go clubbing on Granville Street

5 floating logs that aren’t Ogopogo

5 Dans you’ve met who weren’t that interesting

5 things you’ve tried to pickle

5 better reasons to go skiing than to impress a date

5 movies you shouldn’t have watched while drinking

5 noises your cat makes that sound like a burglar breaking in

5 buglers you’ve bought burgers for in Hamburg 

5 books you’ve thrown at anti-mask protesters

5 dubstep songs that turned out to be your neighbor mowing his lawn

5 birds that don’t taste like chicken

5 important papers you left in your jeans pocket in the laundry

5 depressing things you’ve cooked for yourself instead of Pad Thai

[adamroper]

Carmela’s Rapini White Bean Pasta

1 couple sticks of celery

1 carrot or two

1 big onion or two small onions

1 cup of a bulb of fennel

1 giant tomato or a few tomatoes or a can of chopped tomato

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 can of white beans or about 1.5 cups

1 light bulb

1 bouquet of rapini

1 bouquet of flowers

1 teaspoon of herbs de provence

Enough pasta for you and someone else or just yourself

Parmesan cheese

1 fire extinguisher

To begin with, find a lamp for your light bulb. Turn bulb clockwise in the lamp socket until it feels secure, then plug in the lamp and turn the switch to the ON position. Now you’ll be able to see your vegetables and kitchen space.

Chop up the celery, onion, carrot and fennel. Place this stuff into a pan. Actually, use a pot… a pan isn’t big enough.

Fry up the stuff that’s now in the pot at a medium heat for about 5 minutes, with the olive oil. Stir it every so often if you want so it doesn’t burn. In the meantime, wash the pan, use a clean cloth to dry it, and place it back in your cupboard.

You have to chop the tomato too. After that’s all done add the tomato into the pot with the white beans and herbs.

Cover the pot and simmer at a medium-low heat for another five minutes or so.

Ask the rapini if you may have consent to massage it. If the rapini agrees, massage it for a few minutes while playing a Kenny G song in the background. Then chop the rapini and add it to the pot and cover again. Simmer for about 10 minutes or until the rapini is tender, then add salt to your taste preferences.

Don’t forget about the pasta! With a second pot or that pan you had before bring some water to a boil and boil the heck out of the pasta until it’s “all dented” (a fancy way of saying cooked but not mushy). But don’t use the pan, it’s probably not big enough.

Place the flowers on a table in a vase, with a bowl for yourself and your guest or imaginary friend or Buddha.

Serve the pasta in the bowl with all the other stuff and a generous topping of Parmesan cheese. If you’re going vegan skip the cheese and sprinkle on nutritional yeast or sawdust or whatever.

You can also make this a soup- just add any kind of broth except fish broth to cover all the things when you’re adding the tomatoes and beans and save the pasta for when your neighbors come rapping on your door looking for food.

The fire extinguisher is in case you start a fire. Enjoy your meal with the satisfaction of knowing you could have started a fire but didn’t :)

[adamroper]

alright

This is my latest journal entry to let everybody know that everything’s gonna be alright. Which song am I thinking of? Oh that song from my former roommate Jenny Banai that she doesn't like playing as much as her other songs. 

https://jennybanai.bandcamp.com/track/alright

There’s truth in the sentiment anyway. These days I’m not as much mourning through numerous travel opportunities throughout Canada as much as I am learning. Learning Math 11, learning the basics of Aircraft Turbine engines in hopes of a career change next year, learning photography, learning the simplicity of time at home. Mourning is healthy and marvelous and life-giving when given space to breathe, but mourning is something to be saved for another year in favour of this year’s off-shoots of odd education. 

Next year or the year after I’ll learn the joy of embracing grief, and it’ll be all ok. 

I’ll see family next week for the first time since THE PANDEMIC shutdowns became a thing earlier in the spring, inconveniently demanding I either wait to mourn or mourn half-heartedly after work or on weekends. I wouldn’t suggest delaying the mourning process, but I also wouldn’t recommend mourning with only half your attention. But I’ll be forgiven to choose to wait until the time is right given the circumstances. 

And that’s where being alright comes into play, the simple thought that though it’s a rainy season you’re still going in the right direction, and the best ya can do is to keep going. Don’t credit on the idea though, I think Winston Churchhill said it first. 

[adamroper]

the part that’s missing

The trouble is it’s  not just the dishes, it’s the food you forgot about in the back of the fridge and left there since the first days of spring, 

it’s the laundry left in the basket after washing, even then in small cotton and tencel foothills  around the apartment, 

discernable by smell rather than the relative normalcy of balance  and hangers and  baskets, 

and it’s not just the social distancing,  it’s the short embraces,  the handshakes and hellos to  strangers in the post office,  it’s the walking to the beer store without the silent awkward  sidewalk shuffle, 

it’s your favorite grocer and the BBQ place you buy the eggs and milk both boarded up by murals, 

and both staffed otherwise by newcomers to Canada. 

It’s her smile in your apartment,  it’s the day before spent cleaning your apartment,

but it’s also the best reason  you’ve ever had to slow down  and rest in the city traffic  chaos

you never asked for. 

[adamroper]

mom’s favorite pasta

My mom and I shared a common love for family traditions, most of which revolving around food. A shot of limoncello on a wedding day, Sunday dinners, and tomato sauce cooked for half a day, and rapini pasta. 

It was a recipe my mom would make for me on occasion, and it’s one I still eat at least once a week. The peppery slight bitterness balanced with the starch of cannelli beans, and tomatoes for acidity. When people ask what my comfort food is, or what I cook most often, I tell them first about my mom’s white bean-rapini-tomato-asiago pasta. 

Sometimes I make it for people and they think it’s just ok, some people have flatly told me “I don’t like rapini” in spite of its rarity in stores, still others eat it quietly and blankly as if we were both standing at the same painting, me in awe and them looking at their phone. 

I still make it for myself weekly either way, and after I finish this sentence I’ll be on my way to the cupboard for a small bit of limoncello. 

[adamroper]

the part that comes after

It’s best these days if I reluctantly refer to myself as partially reluctantly agnostic. I’m not religious anymore but I still pray. Perhaps because there’s practicality to it, in the way my friends are encouraged by the spoken word, by the acknowledgement of shared fears and desires.

Perhaps by the way prayer used to make me feel- the earnest longing of being heard even in the depths of fear or loneliness. Perhaps out of guilt, at regretting my actions each year from the years previous.

With news this morning that my mother may only have a few months to live, I do pray. Not of course because I believe it will bring healing, or bring me closer to a god figure in the time of greatest concern - simply for the practicality of it.

[adamroper]

birds of strathcona

A few years back in the literal middle of recovering from my surgery, I decided to finish two small volumes of poetry and send them to all my friends who wanted a copy- mostly in parts of Vancouver and Abbotsford. I was back in Nanaimo at the time and was still months away from receiving a medical device that would allow me to walk again. I imagined the two books to be like small olive branches being sent out to communicate to large parts of my life I had to abandon in order to recover that I wanted to eventually return “home”. 

In the process of editing a new book of poems I revisited the poems with mostly regret- regretting that I didn’t take my initial recovery process more seriously, regretting my immaturity in the months book-ending my surgery, regretting that I rushed sending the poems instead of patiently waiting to edit them to a better form, and so on. 

I’d originally envisioned most of the poems being part of a narrative about my recovery process, to be titled “Fangs Mostly”, centered around a long-form poem about overcoming fear and social anxiety. As I sat down to edit the poems recently I ended up tearing apart of the the poems- cutting them down, re-editing, even deciding some of the central poem had to be taken out entirely. 

What I was left with was a majority of poems about the first neighborhood I resided in Vancouver, with countless allusions to birds, thus the title “Birds of Strathcona.” My biggest hope is to redeem the scrappy poems I sent out to my friends with the newly renovated versions, and to redeem myself of my immaturity in light of my earnest attempts to give maturity a real good chance. 

Then there’s also the hope that so many of my friends, who supported and embraced my art many years ago when I was considerably less mature, will bring the same appreciation to my newer forms of expression. Then the hope of finding a new season of creativity, after finally letting go of poems I’ve held onto for over 5 years.

The bright side of it is I'm much more grown up now than I was when I first started writing my latest collection of very humble poems, whilst acknowledging I still gotta lotta growin up to get around to, before the next book! 

[adamroper]

The Swinging Christmas Tree

A Christmas Foot Chapter 6

The oddest thing about most of the Christmas TV specials I watched growing up was that almost everything talked- animals talked, people talked, snowmen, ornaments, trees, toys, squirrels - everything seemed to have an opinion on Christmas and a desire to express it verbally.

It makes sense then that when my parents told me we were going to a singing Christmas tree I thought they were talking about an actual tree that danced and sang. For days I pictured an anthropomorphic green giant with sticks as arms, standing gleefully singing holiday tunes. My imagination even stretched into scenarios where the tree became disgruntled from years of imprisonment, breaking free of the 4-peg metal stand holding it in place then terrorizing the horrified audience of mostly attractive young parents.

I was in awe of the thing when I first beheld it at age 8, but even before the singers were ushered into its branches I was sitting in the padded seats of the church thinking “what's it going to look like when it starts dancing?”

I learned that night that the term “singing Christmas tree” is a complete misnomer. For those who have never seen one the singing tree is a large choir performance of holiday tunes accompanied by some kind of live theatre performance. Actors, a running plotline, props and scenes, the whole lot.

The tree itself is a series of podiums stacked one by one, the widest at the base with gradually narrowing levels ascending to the ceiling of the church, decorated with all manner of lights and green fabric. The choir would be lined in rows with 20 on the first layer and less as the tree progressed higher, with a few lucky individuals perched on the very top level.

It became a family tradition to see the tree every year, and as the years progressed my interests shifted from cap guns and action figures to music and performing, and so my appreciation for the performances of the tree deepened with each attendance, extending even to my first Christmas returning home from college.

You might be balking at the idea that a giant plywood tree with choir singers would have any mass appeal, but these things are wildly popular. One church in Vancouver sees around 20,000 attendees over the course of six evenings every year, with reserved seats disappearing faster than Backstreet Boys tickets in the 90s!

It wasn't like trying to see a Tyler Perry movie in theatres- if you didn't show up on time seating would be highly scarce, and being that my family was never the type to be in a hurry finding a good spot was always a bit of a crap shoot.  Quite often we’d show up minutes before the curtain call and have to be seated in various single chairs throughout the church, only seeing each other again after the performance.

This year was different because I insisted on driving, and because I lied about what time the show actually started. “6:30,” I shouted throughout the house to my parents, “It starts at 6:30! We can’t be late!” We’d leave the house at 6:38 and arrive at the church by 7pm, well ahead of the the 7:30 start time.

When it came to picking seats my parents were the most indecisive people you could ever imagine, regularly shifting seats at Nanaimo Clippers hockey games and even during movies, sometimes after the movie started! Hockey games are fair enough, but playing musical chairs during a movie was just terrible. I was always more of a settler than a nomad, content to find a good seat and sit comfortably without the anxious thought there there was always a better seat out there somewhere.

My parents started their 2 Stooges routine as soon as we arrived at the church, with “Oh, we’re really on time” and “oh, where should we sit? The balcony? I don’t want to sit too close to the stage, no not here, over there”, but I wasn’t having any of it. I strode with bold confidence into the foyer, stopping only to receive a program being passed out by the ushers, right into the auditorium, down the aisle sitting down almost immediately into the first decent enough looking seat I could find.

Twenty minutes later the director of the play approached a microphone to give his opening welcome. It was at this point I started to casually flip through the program, stopping in my reading tracks when I saw a statement in bold lettering that said “please note, there will not be an intermission for this performance”. In my rush to get a good seat I’d forgotten the golden rule of seeing plays and movies- always go to the bathroom before you sit down.

Another twenty minutes later minutes nature started calling, and calling very loudly, and I started to regret the venti peppermint latte I’d picked up on the way. The choir was singing beautifully, the acting was engaging, but I was too distracted to fully enjoy the show. At one point I looked down at the empty coffee cup sitting on the ground in front of me, thought about it for a second, then said to myself, “no, that’s a really bad idea, I should just get up”.

I shuffled down the pew awkwardly and proceeded to the exit in search of a restroom. I couldn’t see it anywhere and walked almost the entire perimeter of the foyer until I spotted a small restroom sign. When I was leaving the restroom I noticed another sign in an adjacent hallway. It had an arrow pointing left and it said “choir members, this way”.

I have to admit most of my bucket list has something to do with Christmas- celebrating the holiday in Australia for instance, or driving a Shriner car through the Santa Claus parade, or building a life sized edible gingerbread house, or proposing to my future wife by wrapping myself in a giant box with a bow, then jumping out with a ring proclaiming “marrying you is the best gift I could ever ask for babe!”

As I stood in front of the arrowed sign I felt it was a golden opportunity to cross “singing in a giant Christmas tree” off my list, and I'd be a fool to pass it up.

I followed the sign to another sign at the end of the hall, then down another another hall like a mouse in a maze. I was surprised a security guard or a spinster hasn't stopped me at this point. You know these people, there’s a few in every church- they're the self appointed vigilantes and guardians who adhere strictly to the rules and expect others to do so as well. If you look slightly out of place they’ll stop you and ask “excuse me sir, can I help you?” I’m always tempted to reply with “why yes, you can! I need a ride to the airport next week, would you mind driving me??”

At last I scurried though a tall purple curtain with another sign that said “performers entrance” into a room strewn about with jackets and purses and a rolling clothes rack full of empty wire hangers. At the very end of the rack there was a long, green sparkled gown I recognized as one of the choir uniforms.  

It was an awkward fit at first, and it smelled like hadn't been washed since Christmas 1998, but I managed to get the robe on. There was a tag on the neck that said XXXL and a zipper on the back with a long string attached to it, which I assumed was an emergency escape cord in case of a fire or an earthquake. I took 2 steps and immediately stumbled, tripping on the excess fabric. It felt like I was wearing an open parachute. As I fumbled about I sang a quick vocal warm up, “Maaaaaaaaaahh, maaaaaaaaaay, meeeeeeee, muuuuuuust be santaaaaa…”

The entrance to the tree was an obvious arched entryway, beside that a final and definitive sign- “the Lord bless and keep you” with a diagram of the tree. I searched the sign until I found “Baritones: third level” and made my way into the tree’s hallowed plywood branches.

The choir was mid-song as I shimmied onto the platform, bumping into a guy who was as tall as me but about 100 pounds bigger. He looked like he’d make a great Santa in about 20 years time if his career in the CFL didn’t pan out. I whispered to him “sorry I'm late, I forgot my sheet music.” He whispered back in the lowest bass tone I've ever heard “s'ok, borrow mine”.

The thing I wasn’t expecting was the lights- red lights, yellow lights, green lights, lights beaming in my eyes hiding the audience from view, lights beaming from the ceiling and from the stage floor.

There were even spotlights on all sections of the choir as individuals took turns preforming solos. I sang happily through three carols, partway through the 4th I heard the low voice next to me say “bub, your parts next”. I froze with fear and looked around nervously, then I noticed there was a tiny black bauble on a long black string a mere foot in front of where I was standing. With the realization this was a microphone came the realization that my voice was going to heard well and clearly by every member in the audience!

When I thought about sneaking into a singing Christmas tree I was expecting to be just a single needle in the tree, unnoticed as an individual. I thought maybe I’d blend in, and if I was off key no-one would really notice. But now I was about to become an entire branch, to be tested by the mighty winds of high expectation to see if I could stand up to the pressure.

The spotlight hit me and I belted out the solo, giving it my best with gusto, summoning courage usually only possible after a double gin & tonic. Then I heard a giant applause with hooting and whistling from one corner of the church. The Pentecostal youth group I’d volunteered with for 5 years before leaving for college was attending in almost full force, taking up an entire section! They recognized me and cheered me on in full Pentecostal fashion, laughing and buzzing long after my solo. I imagine part of their excitement may have been them thinking I was speaking in tongues, because I only knew half the words to the solo.

I stayed on for the rest of the performance, by the end sweating profusely but filled with unimaginable joy. I didn’t stay in the tree for the standing ovation, instead sneaking back through the mouse maze hearing the cheering reverberate throughout the church before returning to my seat. I sat down as the ovation continued and breathed a sigh of relief. I’d gotten away with sneaking into the tree and besides my former youth group the crowd was none the wiser.

It was then I felt a hand on my shoulder, a grip so firm I knew it could only have belonged to a police officer. I felt the same grip one year at my old high school when I was setting off fireworks in the back field. The same grip I felt on my arm after jumping into the outdoor pool in Bowen Park late at night. The same grip I felt on my shoulder when I was caught sneaking into the walk in freezer at summer camp trying to steal ice cream. The jig was up, there was a security guard after all, and I’d been caught!

I turned around and to my surprise the grip belonged to a sweet elderly woman, with glittering eyes and a cheerful smile. I leaned down towards her and she said in a kind sounding voice “my that was very well done, thank you very much”. She had recognized me from the choir because I was still wearing the giant parachute choir robe, and I responded with a very embarrassed “thank you so much”, turning as red as a Christmas poinsettia. Her grandson, and more importantly her granddaughter, were smiling at me as well saying “yeah that was great, thanks”. This was followed by more undeserved thanks from several other grandmothers and their granddaughters while I inched towards the foyer doors.

I thought I was finally in the clear when I heard a shout from the stage, as one of the members of the choir said “Hey, aren’t you coming to the afterparty?” My parents were standing at the front door holding their coats. I put my hands up in an “I dunno” position. My dad nodded at me with a smile, winked at me, and off my parents left for home while I walked down to aisle, back to the stage, through the mouse maze, to the after party happening in the church’s library with a stack of pizza boxes in the shape of a Christmas tree.

One of the choir members approached me saying, “I don’t recognize you from practice, were you part of the tree?” And the guy with the bass voice came over and said “hey of course he was, this is Daniel, he was filling in for Mike!”

And so for the remainder of the night I was Daniel, and I was Daniel again for the following three years of returning to sing in the Christmas tree. The third year I sang on the very top level, which only lasted a few songs because I’m afraid of heights. I’ve been singing on the 2nd level ever since.

[adamroper]

A Christmas Foot Chapter 5: The great year Adam almost burned down the house

As I see it the two most wonderful days in the life of owning a Christmas tree are the day you buy it and the day you burn it. I have no shame admitting that around Christmas time I take on a fairly consumerist personality, wherein the majority of my joy during the season is derived from either a new purchase or the anticipation of a purchase.

And it starts with tree shopping. There’s something vivid about the sound the car makes when you turn it on to drive to the store, the breeze on on your skin as you walk towards the fenced area where the trees are leaned against each other in droves, the smell of fresh pine needles, and the rush you feel when you find the perfect one, carrying it to the cashier. Even more vivid is the experience of going out to a tree farm to pick one out from a field of ready-to-rehome trees: the smell of freshly cut wood, the sound of the saw on the bark, birds chirping and snow falling lightly.

Eventually like every new purchase the initial feeling of satisfaction wears off, and so does the Christmas season, and then comes the season of poor unwanted trees being disposed of in all manner of unsavory ways- left on a curb, thrown in the ditch in front of your neighbor's yard, thrown off a cliff, and so on.

In my older years I now understand the most responsible way to recycle an old Christmas tree would be donating it to be mulched and used as ground cover for gardens, or pressed into wood pellets, reused instead of being abandoned in some lazy location. In 2013 however after almost a month of being scraped by the giant tree in my house while trying to walk from the living room the the kitchen, I was counting the days until December 27th when I could cut the thing down and bask in its warm glow as it heated up my chilly home.

I woke up early that morning, opening every window in the house to bring the temperature down to justify starting a fire to warm up the house. My parents had gone on an overnight skiing vacation so it would be the perfect crime- the tree would be chopped and burned before they arrived home, and they’d be none the wiser.

I got to work with my dad’s bow saw cutting the tree into manageable pieces, stacking them in the living room. Rather than do the smart thing and burn the pieces one at a time, I wanted to see the whole thing go up in one fiery fell swoop, so I stuffed all the pieces of the tree into the fireplace until it was densely packed. After I cleared a few sections out to allow airflow to sweep through every section of the former nuisance tree. Finally by 8:30 that night the fireplace was ready to ignite. I shouted “Ok it’s ready to go”, and my two brothers and sister gathered in the living room to watch.

There were two quite major certainties I chose to ignore that day before I flicked the match into the fireplace. The first being that the bundle of sticks was going to burn really hot and fast as wood often does when it’s completely dried out, and the second that I had no idea how to open the shutter in the chimney.

If you pay close attention in life you may find yourself encountering this and many other deep existential crisis’ that occur perpetually each Christmas, alongside the recurring anxiety that Christmas is just a consumerist holiday and you’re buying into it, or the guilt-ridden walks of shame from your room to the refrigerator wondering what happened to last year’s resolution to eat healthier. If we’re being honest with ourselves, can anyone ever truly know how to open or close a chimney shutter?

After I threw the match in it only took about 10 seconds for the fire to progress from a small flicker to a giant roaring flame! Waves of fire lept out of the fireplace and curled around the top of the bricks towards the ceiling, with a sooty black whoosh! I panicked and reached for the shutter lever and yanked it right, into the closed position!

My eyes stung instantly, I stepped back and shook it off and looked up to see the living room filling up with giant puffs of smoke! Nathan ran to the kitchen to fill a bucket of water and Maria screamed and darted downstairs to her room! Ben burst into laughter, and I lept bravely towards the fireplace yanking the shutter lever again, this time back into the open position, then pivoting on my right foot in one motion and darting to the sliding glass window to throw that open too. A wave of icy air hit me from the front and the heat from the fire hit me from the back as if I was trying to break up a fight between a dragon and a zamboni.

I don’t know the name of the natural phenomenon that occurs when warm air is drawn upward out of the top of a chimney, just that this occurred miraculously in that moment and started drawing the smoke out of the living room and into the atmosphere as God intended.

To my shock there was no major damage to the ceiling or the carpet, save for a few ashy patches. My eyebrows and all the hair on my arms took the brunt of the damage, and my face was covered in coal marks like Dick Van Dyke’s chimney-sweep in Mary Poppins. Mom and dad arrived home from their date an hour later, which gave Maria just enough time to paint a couple of rough looking eyebrows on my forehead and help clean up the living room. Dad asked “what happened to the tree”, to which I replied “Oh, the truck came to pick it up.” Then mom asked with a concerned tone, “hey, what happened to your eyebrows??”

I was never allowed to play with the fireplace ever again. Thankfully the next few houses we lived in didn’t have a fireplace anyway, so instead of great tree blazes my family and I were content to bask in the glowing light of the firelog on channel 3. One of my college dorm rooms did have a fireplace however. When I first moved in I wrote with a piece of white chalk on one side of the fireplace “left open, right closed” and enjoyed the warmth it brought to my first 2 Christmases alone safely and without incident.

Since then I’ve taken on the virtuous habit of renting a living tree for Christmas, which not only comes with the personal satisfaction of sparing a tree from the axe and subsequent fire every year, but also of being a climate action saint. The only challenging thing is you have to book them a year or more in advance, and for the price you pay for them you’re almost better off leasing an acre of forested land, covering all the trees on it with lights and decorating each one with a bright golden star, with actual gold.

Again I can’t say I blame the poor tree for almost burning my house, if being stolen from the mountain wasn’t bad enough it was then hastily stuffed all at once into a small fireplace. I figured this would have been an appropriate final act of retribution inflicted on me for the sins of my father, and I probably would have deserved it.

[adamroper]

A Christmas Foot part 4: The Great Tree of 2003

Everyone remembers that one great scene featured in every contemporary Christmas movie, played almost in rotation each year after November 12th rolls around. The scene is set: A lightly snowy evening in New York, the camera shows us images of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty adorned in red and green lights then finally to people skating at Rockefeller plaza and cheerful music. At the center of it all the most magnificent Christmas tree you’ve ever seen.

I imagine my dad took these movies particularly to heart in his childhood, as In the months leading up to Christmas I’d notice our hikes into the woods became more more frequent, and his demeanor during the course of the hikes seemed to be increasingly calm. At rocky bluff summits he would have a thousand-yard stare towards the outlying gulf islands on the horizon, while owls and squirrels scurried in the surrounding evergreens.

Indeed if there was any tradition that made any sense to my dad during the Christmas season, it was having the best tree in the living room money could buy- or as was the case one year, the best tree axe could chop. Each year’s tree seemed to be an improvement on the previous years, either in size or shape or shade of green, confined merely by the height of the ceiling.

They were balsam firs mostly, occasionally a dense and hardy spruce if he could afford it that year. One year it was my dad’s favorite type of tree, which would later become known in our house as “the really great tree of 2003”, depending on who you asked (my sister preferred to call it “the great year Adam almost burned down the house”).

In 2003 we’d moved into a new house for the 4th time in as many years. To this day I swear my dad had chosen the latest house not by its geographical location, not by proximity of friends and schools, views of the mountains or even the available acreage, but for the height of Christmas tree he could drag into it.

The house was high on a hill with a view of a small farmland acreage, halfway up what felt like a mountain the top of which lead to Westwood Lake and the downslope leading to a formless void of a swamp adjacent to the highway and an apple orchard, now home to the Nanaimo SPCA facility.

The prominent feature was a staircase in the foyer, ascending to 3 bedrooms and a balcony overlooking the outside deck and an open recreational space. On the other side there was the living room and the chimney. The ceiling next to the staircase reached two stories high, from one floor of the house to the next.

I was sitting at the computer playing games as I often did in those days, when there was a banging and scratching at the door, finally a kick and a pounding as the door swung open fast enough to swing the whole rotation of its hinges then hit the wall. Standing at the door was a thick, dense series of needles and branches, then my dad’s gruff half-laughing voice he only used when he was particularly proud of himself.

“Awwwright boys,” he said, “Come lookat this tree I found! Help me bring it in!” The poor beast of a tree was laid down defeatedly with its roughly sawed trunk facing inward and the leader pointing down the driveway, extending the whole length from the front door to the sidewalk.

After a good amount of struggling and arguing with the tree we stood it up in one of those cheap stands from Canadian Tire. At first it didn’t fit in the stand so my dad sent me crawling under with a crude serrated steak knife to saw slabs off the very bottom of the trunk, until the thing could fit.

Finally the thing stood up, and my brothers and I stood in awe up to our ankles in pine needles on the carpet. I think I got the worst of it, with my arms scratched as if I’d been attacked by a cat, covered with thick resinous patches of sap. Stood up to its full height the tree was too tall even for the lofty heights of our proud ceiling. The top one foot or so was hunching over as if Charlie Brown had just pinned a giant red ornament to its head. A few minutes later dad returned with a ladder half the height of the tree and sent me up with the steak knife to saw it down until it fit.

I thought I recognized the tree from a Forestry section I studied in 4th grade. “Where did you buy this thing," I said, "It’s a douglas fir! There aren’t places you can buy a douglas fir is there?”

“I didn’t buy it”, he said still in his purposely gruff voice, “I got it from Mount Benson!”

Now, Mount Benson is a beautiful place, home to acres upon acres of some of the finest dense forestry on Vancouver Island. It’s just not the first place I’d imagine when thinking about the best place to pick up a Christmas tree. A hardware store maybe, outside the Country Grocer as part of a charity fundraiser, heck even out of the back of some random dude’s backyard on the corner of a busy street but not off a mountain.

It must have been a magnificent sight to behold the first time James Douglas caught sight of the towering evergreens that would later become his namesake. Unlike my dad, I highly doubt Douglas’ first thought in seeing the fir trees standing in a rich green forest in all their glory was “man, that would make a great Christmas tree!”

I haven’t even mentioned the cost of taking a tree off a mountain yet. I’d estimate the price of buying a tree to be in a store about $30-$60. The cost of stealing a tree, if you factor in the fines and the possible jail time, to be upwards of $5000 - $10,000. My dad must have thought it was a heck of a good tree to justify such great risk! Believe me, I had a lot of time to consider these things in the 2 or so hours afterwards I’d spent in the shower washing off all that sap.

Later that afternoon I was sitting back at the computer when I heard the same scratching and rustling sound I’d heard earlier when my dad first brought the tree to the door. I turned around and my heart lept out of my chest as I saw the tree falling towards me, landing directly on my head and shoulders and pushing me out of my chair to the ground with its bristly sharp branches. As it did I felt a bump on my shin as our cat Stuffy bounded out of the trees branches with fright.

“Stuffy, you little shit”, I grunted angrily as I pushed the tree aside and crawled out, covered in a fresh new series of sap tattoos. The cat looked at me wagging her tail slightly with a playful look on her face seemingly oblivious to the consequences of her desire to climb inside and explore the tree.

I reached for a shoe to throw at the cat, tossing it towards her as she pounced into the kitchen. A patch of sap on my hand caused the shoe to stick momentarily before being launched into the air, causing it to misfire and hit a tall standing lamp which also proceeded to lean towards me and fall on my head. It was as if every freestanding object in the house was out to get me suddenly, I’m half surprised the walls of the house didn’t fall on me in that moment too.

The next day my dad came up with the genius idea to tie a rope from the top of the tree to the ceiling, cementing the tree’s month long placement in our house as well as it’s reputation as an infamous tree throughout the surrounding neighborhood. “Do you remember the tree the Ropers had that one year,” the neighbors would whisper among themselves in chuckling tones in the following years, “do you suppose they just cut it down themselves? I didn’t think the thing would even fit in the house! Oh and you should have seen it in the window! Looked like the thing had grown up from the basement through the middle of the house!”

To be honest I can’t really say I blame the poor tree for falling on me. I assume this was a final act of grand retribution, after all my dad had robbed it from a peaceful life with fresh air and a charming mountain view, home among thousands of other trees sharing in the calmness of the forest, the kind of life most anxious humans could only dream of. And I probably deserved it.

to be continued...

[adamroper]

For David Douglas, who the tree is named after

The face of the woods resides one hundred meters from the second beach you’ll see by kayak, on the windiest day seeking refuge,

carved in the trunk of a fallen fir named for David Douglas, a botanist from Scotland, who named each conifer one at a time,

gathered them in his mighty arms and introduced them to Europe,

then to the hawaiian islands where he died exploring the dormant Mauna Kea leaving his legacy concluded at the foot of the volcano by the hundred of new plants he introduced,

the locals would later honor his name with other plants in their own native language, Pandanus douglasii for the hala tree.               In the Pacific Northwest the tallest one's reach heights of 83 meters near coastlines, gathering sunlight like an Salish spirit collects every memory she sees,

every person’s name a story known by its branches, every year recorded in the rings of its trunk,

while young its bark contains a sappy resin, grey and smooth at the surface growing denser with deeper grooves and reddish brown ridges,

as for the needles, not the type one uses to sew- flat and forest green with two tiny white        lines running down their paler     underside,

twice as long as those of the hemlock and balsam fir, but only half as long as the ones you see on white fir,

in the spring lighter flower-like leaves grow on the tips of the branches, you can use to make tea, a salad or gin,

finally, growing and shedding their great brown cones with elongated arrowed bracts extending from their woody armour to drop in droves, decompose and renew the soil below,

wait long enough in the deepest woods, maybe you might see the shrews and wrens and mice, chipmunks and crossbills and voles who call the tree home and depend on its structure,

even young bears may come along scraping off some bark with their claws to eat the sap layer underneath.

[adamroper]

A Christmas Foot Chapter 3: A Moose in the Hoose

My aunt and uncle are city folk by origin, though you could hardly tell from their outdoorsy lifestyle punctuated weekly by drives to the mountains outside Banff and Canmore, excursions to Thailand and South America, and shelf upon shelf of books on skiing, mountaineering, and paddling.

It makes sense that the house they chose to live in had just the right balance of city and nature. Last year they'd bought a house in a new development in Northwest Calgary previously occupied solely by herds of moose, white tailed deer and elk. A 20 minute walk from their property reached down to the mighty bow River, fed by glaciers by way of lake Louise and winding through the busiest metropolitan areas of downtown.

“Hands over your heart for the mighty bow” my uncle was often known to say everytime we drove over a bridge from one river bank to the other, telling us stories of the Blackfoot who had settled and hunted and fished in the foothills, pointing to a few clearings where archeology students from the university of Calgary had found evidence of their habitation.

Like it or not whenever you settle down to build a place to call home something or someone is always displaced to some degree. In Vancouver when new condos are built residents in the former run down buildings are sent packing, sometimes to homelessness and other times to a cycle of one insecure housing arrangement to the next.

Further out towards suburbs and outlying bedroom communities trees and forests are the ones displaced. One day you might find yourself walking in a meadow enjoying solitude in nature, the next a mysterious sign with pictures of new houses and roads appears on the edge of the forest property, by the next year the forest is all but disappeared and replaced with scores of new single family houses, in a neighborhood named after the very forest areas demolished to accommodate them- names like “Maple Meadows”, “Eagle Mountain Ridge”, or “Aspen Grove”.

You don’t have to look too far back to realize the truth that for every settling there is an unsettling. In the case of my aunt and uncle's neighborhood it was the home of a large population of moose being redeveloped. On the bright side it meant if I wanted to see a real live moose up close I wouldn’t have to look very far, or stray too deeply away from my family to do so.

This past winter was their 3rd year on the property, and I was visiting again for Christmas. “Well, nature always finds a way,” my uncle was telling as we drove out of the airport, “When we first moved here there was a controversy because the development was built right near a forest known with hundreds of moose. But now they're starting to move back in because all the places they eat are here- see if you look to the right here, all those bushes have twigs and rosehips the the moose eat, it's amazing really a creature that big survives just eating twigs!”

We drove past rivers, natural ponds and rolling hills while he continued, “And you see those patches of aspen trees? The reason the tree trunks are all dark brown near the bottom and still white on the rest is that elk and deer come along and eat the bark, and they can only reach up the tree so far!”

The development couldn't have asked for a more respectful or appreciative couple to call it home as my aunt and uncle. At some point in every conversation we'd had since they'd moved in the topic of a new animal they'd seen or story they'd heard about the area's history would come up.

When we arrived at the house my aunt greeted us at the door with coffee. It was early in the morning and she was off to work at their post office while my uncle was on his way to his carpentry work. I rested at the house, took a long nap, and woke in the early afternoon for a walk.

It was -23 and chilly. There was daylight and full visibility but I could hardly see the road. In my mind I'd decided this was less a walk and more a mission to locate the wild moose populations and befriend them. I'd start by introducing myself from 200 metres away, the next day I'd move 180 metres away, slowly making my presence known and creating a sense of familiarity until one day like Jane Goodall's communing with chimps they would welcome me as one of their own.

I don't know why I thought this plan would work for finding moose or elk, it hadn’t worked so far with raccoons, rabbits, or coyotes, and had only marginal success with cats and dogs. I spotted a few moose but didn't get nearly close enough to be regarded as anything even close to familiar. Plus with the cold and wind chill my patience dwindled quickly. At one point I was tracking a set of hoof prints in the snow in a clearing. I walked about 10 feet into the clearing when my left foot broke into a patch of ice sinking knee deep in seconds! I caught myself and fell flat on my face with an OOOF, turned on my back and dragged myself to the shore half-soaked and muddy.

It just figures it was my real foot that fell into the ice, the foot that still feels cold and pain and stubbing and sharp pebbles in the carpet and frostbite! My fake foot meanwhile sat happy and content in a dry shoe the whole way back to the house.

I must have been walking for close to an hour before I fell in the ice because it felt like hours walking home chilly and embarrassed. Was I lost I wondered? No, it’s just over that hill… over the top of the hill there were more hills, more houses, more streets and cars and former wildlife habitats because everything in Calgary looks the same! Having learned my lesson from many previous visits and countless hours being lost I turned on my phone, opening the GPS and google maps. My heart sank as I realized I’d walked 6km in the wrong direction.

My heart sank further when I dragged my feet into the driveway when I also realized I’d forgotten to close the double doors at the rear of the house. Then I noticed there were two sets of footprints in the snow leading to the backyard. There were my footprints and what looked like ones belonging to a clown walking on stilts… with hoof marks...

Now I've heard the expression 'like letting a bull loose in a China shop’ sometimes used to describe my siblings and I in a candy store, but I'd never heard the term 'like letting a moose loose in the kitchen!’ I'd probably just assume the moose would cook brunch and watch a hockey game because I have a strange imagination.

When I walked carefully and quietly into the house and into the kitchen I did not see a moose cooking brunch or watching hockey. I saw a moose trying to open a cupboard with his nose.

The moose must have thought I was a wolf when he smelled me, because at that point he tried to find the nearest exit and use it as such, first slamming his 450 pound body against a wall then bouldering towards the living room! I ran through the kitchen down the hall and upstairs to safety secure in my hope that mooses didn’t know to climb stairs!

I knew the only way to release the moose back into the wild would be to scare him out through the back doors, but that I would probably lose my life doing so. But how do you scare a moose? I knew the way to scare a black bear was to make a ton of noise, the way to scare a cougar was to open your jacket and make yourself look big, the way to scare a cat was turning on the vacuum, and there was no way to scare a grizzly bear so the best thing to do if I saw one up close was to make peace with God.

I took off my coat and paced back and forth in the hallway upstairs trying to think of what to do. Meanwhile the moose casually sauntered back into the kitchen and went back to work on opening the cupboard.

I decided eventually the best idea would be banging a pot until I could open the double doors and scare the moose out, only I couldn’t reach a pot since the moose was occupying the kitchen... then I remembered there was a stainless steel heron ornament in the corner of the staircase I’d bought my aunt as a housewarming gift. I didn’t have a wooden spoon upstairs either, so I opted for my bamboo toothbrush instead.

I crept down with stairs with the heron in one hand and the toothbrush in the other, slowly at first, then I started stomping and yelling in a mad rush to face the forces of nature head on and prevail! Shocked and wild-eyed the moose barreled back into the living room and in a burst of energy I bolted into the hall leading to the back garage door pounding the open switch and rolling under and out into the front yard!

My pace never broke as I rounded the house to the front picture window. I looked up, huffing and puffing, and there in the window was the moose, calmly and serenely beginning to eat scraps of evergreen off the Christmas tree. I banged on the window but the moose didn't stir an inch. I tried the front door and it was locked, so I ran back to the garage door, arriving just in time to hear a wooden thud as the automatic gear had closed it. I stomped towards the double doors in time to hear them slam closed too, blown shut by the wind leaving me stranded in the cold. I reached for my keys and remembered they were in the left pocket of my coat!  

When animal control arrived I was turning almost blue except for my prosthetic leg which was a consistent silver shade from the titanium and carbon fibre. One of the neighbors had called the RCMP telling them he had seen a crazed man running out of the house yelling and waving a sharp looking metal object. At first he thought it was a domestic dispute until he saw Bullwinkle sitting in the front picture window contentedly picking away at the Christmas tree, and if mooses could smile and chuckle I was sure the moose was doing that too.

And just as you’d imagine how the aftermath of a bull in a china shop would look, the clean and meticulously tidy house looked just like a giant moose had bumbled through it, made himself breakfast and fell asleep in the living room before being lead back to the woods, complete with muddy hoof marks on the carpet and scrapes on the wall from the wild heron. My aunt eventually returned home to see me sitting in the back of a police cruiser in the driveway, trying to warm up and think of how I was going to explain this to her and my uncle.

I imagine the moose had every right to tromp through the house uninvited. In fact there's a good chance the moose was born in the very yard the house was built. Perhaps he recognized the smell of the soil, or the way the breeze rolled off the plains towards the lawn, down a certain series of hills before settling down in a location that catches a certain amount of good sunlight, where the best tasting rosehips for miles just so happened to grow well in abundance. The moose may have remembered the spot from his childhood, returning there as often as the sun rose to rest in the shade of the new house. And lucky him that day, the owner of the house left the door open inviting him in.

I felt that day I was a guest in the moose’s house instead of the other way around. I was happy to enjoy the moose’s hospitality, even happy to return to meet him again on occasion, meeting his family of other young mooses who would grow to regard my aunt and uncles’ neighborhood with the same instinctive fondness their ancestors had, before any of them had ever heard of humans or front lawns or rows and rows of nearly identical houses lined with lights on every tree.

[adamroper]

while on others thou art calling

I have to say the amount of thought I've put into the following subject, and the fact that it rests on the original purpose for me starting this new journal, warrants a longer entry. As I'm only writing at the moment to pass the time until a doctor's appointment the name of the game is brevity.

I've realized in the past months and years of my life that I belong to a generation of Christian folks who view themselves as Recovering Christians- those who find themselves in the middle point of their lives to be seeking healing from the stress and toil of belonging to a culture of perpetual sin shaming and exclusion of "secular culture" from its odd religious subculture.

It started with me in listening and watching as two artists started their careers very much immersed in Christian culture who later released albums essentially "breaking up" with their Christian roots, seeking to find healing, and make absolute peace with their decision. I saw it first with David Bazan, and watched his album become a much discussed piece in both sides of the debate. Then I saw it with Derek Webb, though in this case I saw little to no debate, although I've also seen Christan culture disown him slowly over the last 10 years or so, to the point that when he came out with his admittance to leave his Christianity behind no Christian media sources seemed at all surprised. In fact not a single one even cared to notice.

But in any case, I've felt the pain that both these artists have felt. I've felt the deep and painful effects of spiritual trauma, and I too have sought to find peace. I feel the difference is that rather that move away from my Christian roots in order to find peace and healing, I've felt a deep desire to draw myself back and closer to my former life as a person of faith.

Not once have I ever felt the fear of questioning what I believe, or holding it to fair account, and I do need to hold it to fair scrutiny as a part of healing from spiritual trauma.

I consider myself in the same conversation as the artists I have followed for years, but I also know the path I don't want to take is leaving my life of faith behind.

That's all I have for now, until my next doctors appointment/long wait with nothing to do for now. All I've said deserves to be written about again I'm sure.

[adamroper]

I'm on my way

It's not always the case with depression medication that "the cure is worse than disease," more often it's more that "the cure works great except when it doesn't". The side effects aren't my favorite either.

I'm told other depression medications other than mine have more dire side effects, the current ones on my chalkboard since starting Zoloft haven't been as bad, the worst of it drowsiness that lasts entire days and stomach pain when I don't take it with food.

For me, it works but only kind of. The trouble with medication for depression is you have to cycle through a few to figure out which ones work for you and which don't. To use a rough metaphor, say a doctor prescribed Tobey Keith for depression- it works for some people, has the absolute opposite effect for others, for me it kind of works but I'd probably fare better with Chris Stapleton.

Anyway on a doctor's suggestion I'm transitioning away from zooloft to something else I can't pronounce which will hopefully continue helping with anxiety, and with clarity of mind. I've appreciated being more cheery than usual, but since I've been cheerful mostly in spite of being depressed for so many years it's difficult to know how to conduct myself feeling more upbeat than usual. Mostly I've been trying to turn every social interaction into a series of possibilities to say or do something funny.

I can't read my psychiatrist's handwriting so I can't tell you the next medication I'm trying, I can tell you I'm staying optimistic about the process- a marked change from 2008 when the thought of being on any medication was terrifying to me, or early 2018 when the thought of trying one medication after another was too scary to think about.

[adamroper]

you're doing fine

My quote unquote struggles with depression have been well documented over the years. In the early days before I started taking medications my writings and performances about the subject were downright unpalatable, very sobering. After I started the meds 10 years ago the problem didn't go away, but I was able to start describe in a much more clear, much less 'poor me, why me' kind of way. These days when I perform its all whales and birds and fun things so that's all good now, hardly any making my audience feel sad.

Depression sucks but I'm working on it is what I'm trying to say.

Presently I'm trying a new medication, in the next few days, which is said to be a magical combination with the one I've been on this whole time. Wellbutrin and Zoloft- their names together make Them sound like they belong in the cast of a 60's sci-fi movie. It may be I have a few bad episodes at my job with a combination of being condescended by the head chef and adjusting to da drugs. Or it may be fine, all sunshine and rainbows and wishing I'd tried a new years ago. The unknowing is a little anxious either way.

But the zobot is meant to help with both depression and anxiety alongside the welbrighton, all speculation until I've passed the first few week mark and my body begins to accept the new reality of a slight change in its ever changing equilibrium.

I can't imagine drinking coffee to any degree for any reason is a good idea with an anxiety disorder, other than the fact that sometimes coffee helps me write a good poem. Jasmine tea is pretty good and all, but it just doesn't have the same soul as that old time rock and roll. That old time coffee I mean. Maybe in addition to starting a new medicine I'll start drinking more tea... and running and mindfulness and leafy greens, all that other healthy stuff.

Then there's the bothersome past trauma, which is the reason all this depression and meds foolishness started in the first place. I have a lot of past trauma and it hurts, but therapy combined with a new medication should help. With the best therapy being over $100 per week and the meds being around $80 per month the brokehouse far off in the distance starts to look bigger and bigger at an increasingly alarming rate.

In a rare showing of self advocacy I had to approach my CEO to kindly inform her I would like to start an apprenticeship, and she was incredibly helpful and supportive of the idea. Next week I'll have to be bold again and ask the CEO if I could have an actual contract and recieve benefits. Part of me being sick is I have an aversion to conflict, like my avoidance of sushi- I just don't like it. I don't like it, but I have to do it to avoid being hit by the broke train while on my way to finding healing.

Also so I can afford a kitty. I can't really afford to maintain my health and have a cat, so one of the upsides to getting benefits would be having a nice little cat to hang out at home.

I left out the parts about my chef not being very nice to me this month which is why I have to self advocate, because I'm a grown up now and part of being a grown up is realizing that complaining about people being mean to me doesn't reeeeally help solve anything. So there we go, everyday in every way I'm getting a little more better.

[adamroper]

throw those curtains wide

The thing to know about living in community is if you choose to do so your time is no longer entirely your own. Your time belongs to the community, it belongs to community meals, to saying yes to your housemate when they ask to be social, to feeding whoever stops by your door to say hello when you're cooking, to sweeping the halls and hanging decorations in the garden and being home just to be home.

It also seems to create a necessity for clear boundaries, which only exists if my personal life is balanced with my life with others. I'm one of only two or three folks in the building with an open door policy. If I'm home and doing ok and if my room is relatively tidy my door is open, and whoever passes by is free to visit. For me this is the most practical way to communicate to people I live with how available I am- door open = come on in. Door closed = in need of solitude.

As you know the days leading up to moving in were pretty sad for me, with my unsettled feeling joined with a bout of seasonal depression. I've realized it was also joined by burnout I was never able to heal from, by the job that overworked me last winter. Their benefits helped pay for a massive prosthetic bill so I can't say it was a total loss, plus I learned how to make some really fantastic soup.

Having a new home I am allowing myself to be at peace again, to feel safe enough in my home to read and take on new ideas and write them down. It's good timing because I have a laundry list of health issues that come with my circumstances- my unintended choice of a career, my unintended awkward foot thing, my unintended depression.

I have to say though, having my own little space is an incredible blessing, one which I have no intention of keeping all to myself, unless I feel like having the occasional solitude, in which case all I have to do is close the door for a little while.

[adamroper]

cabaret

I'm on to my second air bnb for the month, this one a bit more conveniently located (only one block from my former apartment) with considerably less cabaret performers, kooky musicians, and children. Not that I don't appreciate all these things, in moderation. I find for my current circumstances quiet works a bit better.

So were the two mantras I said to myself as I walked in: well this isn't so bad, and ah this is more like it.

I finally did see my new apartment at a large open house gathering. I saw my room after rushing into every other apartment in the building to see what everyone else's places looked like. Bigger. That seemed to be the common factor. They were all bigger than mine, the best and biggest of which had high ceilings with varied slanting- my first thought was how I could turn one these bigger apartments into a bouldering cave, which is why it's probably best I didn't get one of these rooms.

Size aside I like my apartment, it's a big square instead of a rectangle which is exactly what I wanted. What I want now is to know when I'm be home. The latest news is in another 5 nights.

There's a positive hope in the air, great honest expectation. At the open house I had a strange mix of joy to be a part of the house, with deep sadness at being away from home. I wrote in fact The saddest poem I've ever written, in the sense that I wanted to write a poem that embraced the feeling of sadness rather than mourning its presence. In college I'd read about befriending depression as a way of understanding it. This past week I read that sadness is not the same as depression, and I thought how lovely it would be to simply allow myself to feel sad when feeling sad was appropriate, rather than feeling only depressed all the time, and only having negative associations with sadness.

Anyway I'll post the poem later on, maaaybe when I'm on the other side of sadness looking back and saying "well that was ok, now what's next." Maybe when I'm home.