I miss my stray cat Gigi. He’s been gone for two months now (four at the time of publication)—disappeared, the last previous record six days. The hard part of mourning him is gauging how much I should mourn him given there’s no confirmation of death or how he’s doing. Cats don’t send postcards or call home, especially an unneutered stray whose majority existence is to chase gal cat tail and not get pummeled to death by them in his quest. Not true. He loved exploring, loved chicken, loved making Mom laugh, and loved his ikea bed.
I try to not overmourn him now cause it can straight up make me depressed the entire day if not continuously depressed day-to-day. And a lot of the pain is wondering how much pain he might be in if he’s even alive. But I try to restrain myself on that too. Maybe he doesn’t feel like coming home anymore. Maybe he doesn’t remember Mom and I. Maybe he found a soulmate, family, and well-adjusted life, but he could at least send a postcard or call home. I also try to think like emotionally-detached people and imagine how he wouldn’t worry about me the way I do about him. He’s a wild, feral cat and I should remember that his time being around was always unpredictable.
Yet my feels for this wild animal are more pure than most bonds in my life.
Half my hard drive is all photos and videos of Gigi. I only really make those I open up to most look at them, otherwise I was never one to display him gratuitously on the internet. He was too pure a part of my life and I wanted to protect that feeling and his privacy. And now he’s gone and there’s nowhere and no one to receive that purity from.
Animals don’t think about taxes, or chase clout, or “plan for the future.” They don’t care about your social status, how much you make, and how all that makes them by association look in society. They ground us back to what matters most. With Gigi gone, I feel the ground beneath me lacking in meaning, and not simply cause if I don’t check the ground when I walk, I could unintentionally kick that meaning in the face. He was there when the exterior worlds and my interior worlds collapsed. He was there when Dad died, when my stupid-asslove diedbecame dead to me , when my non-existent career repeatedly died, and when my hope in this world died.
Now for the first time in almost 6 years, home is quiet in a way I’ve never had to process. And I thought about him from Toronto, from LA, and I will think of him wherever I am.
I don’t write so much now. There’s too much to do and I don’t get much done anyway if that cancels out any braggadocio. But there’s also so much bullshit going on that what I have to say feels self-centered at best. I look at the western and geopolitical world being sucked into a Cheetos hole of orange turd and keep re-asking “How The Crud are we here again?” – “How are we doing this All Over Again?” This is like if a Hollywood executive saw Spider-Man 3 and said “Oh yeah let’s start pathologically having no one keep their mask on.” This is like if someone suffered explosive diarrhea then went “You know what let’s re-try that expired milk.” This is like if your ex who for a time finally had taste and was with you then returned to their baseline habits and got back with the lowest-common-denominator white dude colonizer loser and/or loser-back-home-ex-pat fetishizing asshole – except your ex’s relapse or any of the other scenarios results in an unprovoked infantile authoritarian invasion of Los Angeles.
Meanwhile I see—and I’ve seen it this way for a while though it’s amplified exponentionally—that my artistic adversaries “succeed” because what they express is at best utterly insular or worse co-opted by/sympathetic to the new/alt/far-right.
The more I’m exposed to the sheer swarm of substance-free influencers and dopamine-rewarded content creators – and the more I get that everyone’s disproportionately somehow a celebrity, from manosphere beta-male wannabe-alpha-males, to sewer rat dimes square/dimes square-adjacent edgelords and pseudo-poets, to alternative-as-t-shirt-brand disaffectedly-seductive cynics with nothing non-nihilistic to contribute – I become more uninterested than ever at breaking out of my only-semi-self-imposed banished hellscape of inaccessible obscurity, relative to the attention and traction these in-crowds have by barely trying. I know the worth of my work, and seeing randos from every angle making influencer content to what is likely their hundreds of thousands to millions of followers has me feeling less toxically-denied the attention that I feel I deserve but that is not meant for nor eligible to me. It’s all looking like the same. Everyone’s famous for 15 minutes or whatever, and that digital currency and real-life desperation for attention has led in part to things like the insurrection and podcasters being experts at anything they read one to four conspiracy articles on.
Then again, I could be forgetting the very design of who I do manage to break through to.
I do not wish to use where the work goes to be vain or attempt to flex it into the intangible voids that cannot be filled with tangible stats. I learnt I’m not original at all when other directors go on self-anointed tours of their movies to independent venues of different sophisticated range cause not enough film festivals if any were willing to program them. But these tours are funded by private (shadowy) investors and friends from within the industry anyway, and I gotta fight for myself without a cabal, but the handful of strangers-turned-bonds who the work speaks to.
That’s why it means even more when it is this person or that person who would choose what I do. I will never take that for granted, and I will choose them every time over the in-crowds. The people and these spaces they create are who I’ve looked and waited for.
It’s worth it. Thank you for making it worth it.
Which is why it’s been hard wanting to create again. You don’t feel like what you do matters enough in context to everything else going on. You question whether the personal angle that means to stand in for the less-to-un-spoken-for still comes off as self-concerned narcissism or actually useful at all in the face of cultural apathy and maga/maga-adjacent authoritarianism. Meanwhile everyone around me is making spoiled vanity faux-transgressive self-masturbatory bullshit that gets off on performing boldness but is ultimately nihilistic fascism-acquiescing even-fascism-puppeted smokescreen distractions for disaffected brainrotted hacks, yearning to join the echelons of disgusting vile MAGAt morons, but more insidiously covert and liberal-duping than minstrels like Harmony Korine or Theo Von or unSexyy Red or Rob Schneider. And I don’t ever wanna be like any of them. The same way if I had a choice between having my stray cat or my deceased ex back that it could not be more non-existent a scientific struggle to choose my stray cat any day of the universe – similarly I would rather never make anything ever again if it meant a choice between that or being part of the culture that assassinated western democracy and expressive decency.
But by now, even the handful of youse who did show up at all have shown me what resistance and creativity for good is.
I was talking to my therapist about not wanting the negative energy in the world and my life to obstruct the good I can contribute to. I let my rage and sadness take too much space. But I can’t stop now, and moreso we’re all counting on you disparate reader not to either.
The Job you work won’t matter. Any clout and siloed vain fame you claim won’t matter. Your hedonistic relationships and spoils won’t matter. Your social and professional status won’t matter. All of this can and will be ripped away from the existential hole inside you that you use all these things and people to fill to convince yourself that your life wasn’t wasted. The only things that will matter are what you did to make the world or your personal world better, and what choices and sacrifices you made to make that change happen.
It has never made so much sense or felt so virtuous to create if it means that’s how you resist and fight.
I don’t know why going to the airport, and the airport itself makes me emo. It’s not cause I’m already broke and anytime I travel I feel it in the net worth. I almost never travel. I think everything is already said about people who travel as a privilege flex. If I’m on the supreme shallowness society they call the dating app, “travelling” and “sarcasm” are my most instantaneously fatal dealbreakers. I don’t care how hot you are, I couldn’t swipe left harder and faster. And so every time I head out to fly, I feel it, and not just in the broke-ass bank.
It feels like a labyrinth of crossed paths, lives that are glimpsed at and hypothesized by any of us onto the rest – strangers on intentional trajectories to or from something, and the most lethal thing you could do is become smitten with someone amidst the probability that you don’t even live in the same city and that your feels are only exponentialized cause of the very brief time you may have with them.
So while being seated with the sweetest-smartest-prettiest-possible half-East-Asian gal on the flight back from Los Angeles can be a low-key exhilarating experience, given I swore like an asshole that I’d never be capable of feeling new infatuation again – it still sucks ass when reality both defibrillates your ability to feel only to thunderclock kick you out of the moving ambulance cause the person actually, like, has a well-adjusted life to return to, in another connecting-flight-to city, and is wholly removed from my ruminating romanticism.
Hung out on a random bench during the layover so that she wouldn’t have to awkwardly encounter me cause our separate connection flight gates downstairs also happened to be side-by-side.
My connecting flight back was the straight up opposite, seated with a leg-vibrating hybrid-poc-fuckboi (not-East Asian), antisocial-in-the-unattractive-way, very unattractive (I’m boringly hetero but I relay this as an ally) phone-scrolling brain rotter, who I practically had to slap the buds out of his ears so he could pay some respect to the flight attendant trying to get his attention for the safety demonstration, but what a comedic way to contrast-resume reality.
Here I am again, awaiting the connecting flight from Toronto. This time I swear I believe is the last time travelling for my movie.
Upon arriving in Saskatoon’s airoort, I I look at the shops and am reminded how much friggin money I spent on my ex, especially the last plush gift I got her at the Hong Kong airport who she better be taking care of, but since she’s deceased I hope the plush has a loving home. My teacher’s wife respects me cause I’m broke but not cheap. And I’m showing up where I can for my art cause I’ve already forfeited my economic life so much on it. What’s one last ride?
Montreal’s considered one of the big league cities in Canada, if somehow the world. But it’s relatively smaller, like a Roller Coaster Tycoon version of a big city. So a small big city. By comparison, Saskatoon is considered a small league or small-town version of a big city – so a big small city. And yet, out of all the big cities I’ve been to – I’ve never seen a city where a movie theatre has cup holders on the back of the seat in front, or Buckets Of Rice served at a Chinese restaurant, or this amount of back-to-back bridges and pop culture geek stores. Heck I even saw a cybertrashtruck with anti-Musk vandalism; they’re with it here too! Maybe I haven’t experienced enough of what the big league cities have to offer re: I Don’t Travel, but through my few days in Saskatoon, I’ve seen in its down-to-earth modesty the biggest of possibilities.
Even in the handful crowd who came out to this last Open Doom Crescendo screening, I couldn’t ask for more beautiful, inspiring, and life-affirming souls.
I’m at the airport again for what I believe this time to really be the last time for this movie.
My melancholy is through the charts, and as before, it is an inexplicable sadness, borne from the fleetingness of bonds found and lost in temporality, and the question again and again of why those you finally find to connect to the most have to be provinces or states apart, and that I have to return home to where I know for a fact the grass is straight up not as green for me.
It is the paradox of creating something that could only have been created in the wastelands of Montreal, and yet most of the only people who care have to be anywhere but that place. It’s what I’ve felt yet again in Toronto, then Los Angeles, then Saskatoon.
A lone butterfly rests on the window at my eye level. I usually see them in pairs, as if the universe needs to remind-twist the knife of my loneliness every chance it gets, but this time just this one showing up next to me for a brief moment in my solitude amongst strangers felt like a comfort that my relatively ancient phone was almost too slow but thankfully still fast enough to capture as it resumed its flight to wherever it’s going.
The only way I can stay sane leaving Saskatoon is to say to these newfound loved ones that “This is only the beginning.” This, similar to saying to my loved ones in Toronto and Los Angeles: “See you soon enough.” Otherwise it’s too sad – thinking that you do a thing only to realize that what it gives back is a glimpse into bonds that aren’t meant to last. But unless I keep creating, that is exactly what will happen. And I guess that’s all right, cause that’s how I found them anyway. And it’s all I know how to do anyway. And it’s all I wanna do anyway. I just have to find any way to keep at it—even if it costs me every other bond, as it already has.
That’s the melancholy I feel. The life I’m headed back to and where I will live day-to-day, maybe until the end of time. The life where just about no one wants me but the people who aren’t around. And so I do it for myself, cause I know it’s worthwhile, and I do it for everyone who I’ll never meet, and everyone who’s not around, hoping that if I make it through this next stretch that they will be there for those new few days at a time. Until then, this is only the beginning.
Gigi’s nephew comes by now. If I was a more practicing spiritualist, I would believe part of Gigi came back through him. In ways, he did, but I still miss him.
Yet still, it’s somewhat a comfort.
OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO 