The Cure for Depression: a melodrama of depression, madness, and the writing life

The tidal wave of darkness that totally floored me a few months back shows no sign of lifting. It lets up for a moment or two, and then floods in with a vengeance. I cannot take the weight of the sorrow. I did my best to accept my burdens with dignity and thought I’d made it. But now I’m facing something I can’t fully explain. All the years I spent ‘dealing’ like a good little girl have come undone. The depth of where I am is so incredibly far from light and hope that at some moments I wonder if I even exist, if I have finally unraveled.

Eight of Swords by L.C. Luzajic

I feel unhinged when I’m unable to pull it together and find my familiar toolkit- brash, sassy confidence, in small and sporadic but useful doses. None to be seen. I roll with the punches, more or less, I like to think, and though I seem to attract a great deal of chaos, I’ve always been kind of Tao about the whole of it, accepting my fate to bear witness to the wilderness of the human heart. I’m a rollercoaster of bipolar emotions- this is no secret so don’t call the paper! My friend Dimitri and I used to kvetch about the baggage fleet we had with us on our journey- bags, lots of ‘em, pink, frilly, cherry-scented Louis Vuitton. Garcon!

I’m unraveling these days, found myself crying on a stoop on Davenport Road today, and looking back at my impulsive seesaw life, and at myself sobbing in the street, I saw that I had more than a few things in common with Britney Spears- everything except her thighs and her money.

There was a brief light in this embarrassing public display of affliction- a woman on a bicycle stopped by, discreetly and without obtrusiveness, and asked if everything was all right. I was touched. But right after that, the tide took me in deeper, as I wondered how it is that a total stranger could see that I was hurting, but my closest friends have failed to notice? And that some of them never gave a damn about anyone but themselves and have betrayed me? And then I went right on feeling sorry for myself, wondering how it is that the dead friends call more often than the living.

Oh, trust me, I know: I analyze too much, stay awake puzzling together what went wrong. Often I come up with a big fat blank, and the truth looms impossible and stark: people just suck, really suck, even the very best of them, and in the long run, no matter how much you might care, it’s every man for himself. If I croak tonight, how long would it be before anyone noticed? How long would it be before anybody comes to feed the cats?

Good Lord, is this the mid-life crisis already? Hmm, I don’t know. Whether it’s a particularly bad flare-up of the umpteen mental diagnoses I share with my family members, unresolved grief, a brand new kind of madness, or simply defeat and despair after too many sorrows to bear, the situation is…critical.

It’s manifesting in the most irritating ways- poorly timed crying jags, temper tantrums, entire buckets of triple chocolate ice cream. Worse, “I see dead people.” I see them all the time. The other day I saw a dozen or more Zoes crossing the street all at once. I even waved. It was nicer to see her like that than to find her when I’m home alone, opening my closet to look for a shirt, and there she is, hanging among my peach-knit shawls. That’s the thing about losing someone to suicide. You can make as much damn peace as you want with it. But you can never get the macabre ending out of your head.

heading to the wake for zoe

When I was a kid, my dad used to drive for miles to avoid any passing trains. We were kids, we liked to see trains. But Dad would turn the car around and drive in the other direction, and Mom would start crying and crying. Later, I was old enough to understand why. Uncle J. jumped in front of one when he couldn’t take it anymore. Mom didn’t want to spend her whole day thinking about her brother. There were things to do. You can’t always just walk around sobbing. You have to occasionally make room for joy instead of just hurting. So you avoid the big triggers. You manage your life around them, and for the most part, you’re okay.

Thing is, lately I’m not okay, and though I know I will be- I’m a strong girl- right now I’m walking around like an open wound. More than two thirds of my support team is six feet under, and the dirt is still fresh. And practically everything I look at or see is a fucking trigger.

Regardless of how this horrible darkness happened- circumstance, or genetics, or both, I’m a person who feels everything. I could feel the pain of complete strangers. My therapist called it ‘empathic.’ Less kindly observers would call it overly sensitive. Sitting on a bus, I could feel the next person’s emotions and their life story would suddenly reveal itself. People came to me with their problems, as if I could do fat lot about it. But come they did, heaping their sorrows and crimes and chaos upon me. And I was s thin-skinned, as Mom would always say, “Toughen up, you thin-skinned ninny!” Indeed, I was practically transparent. You could see through the skin and watch my beating heart. I’m nothing but a bundle of raw nerves. Everything hurts. The only thing I could do to keep the pain at a dull roar was to write it down.

Marko, the crazy sailor I married, was one of the biggest believers I’ve ever had in my writing. I’m grateful to have a few believers, both my parents, and my childhood soul-mate Japey, who, yes, is also fucking dead. I know my dear friend Sal is out there somewhere overseas, reading this and anything else he can find, and trusting more than I do that I’ll “make it.”  And then there’s the crazy Canadian eccentric, Crad Kilodney, and we’ll get to him later.

Marko’s infamous comment- “Girl, you are a good fucking writer,” – spurred me to the name The Girl Can Write. And losing him made me certain I never wanted to waste another day working in a mall, working anywhere at all but at my desk, writing. And though I worked hard at my writing since I was five, I have never worked so hard as I have in the past three years since I found his dead body on the kitchen floor. Stephen King, one of the most prolific and amazing storytellers of all time, who also writes about ghosts, said writing is a lonely business, and you need to have support. I’m grateful that I had someone who hung on to my every word.

happy times

King also said a writer should write for four hours a day and read for four hours a day. So I’ve been pretty much writing for eight and reading for six, trying to make up for lost time, trying to stay focused, trying to cheat death by doing everything I can to keep my spirit alive. I’ve been producing like a fiend, fine-tuning, branching out, trying new things, reworking, working, playing. There are several novels on tap, another collection of poetry under way, several full-length nonfiction treatises on the backburner, and umpteen projects that think outside the book. I’ve got short stories on the go, and dozens of these inspirational, personal experiences with literature or pop culture that my fans seem to want the most. I’m writing, writing, writing.

Despite the productivity and creativity I’ve proudly embraced in recent years, learning important tasks like how to write when you don’t feel like it (and hoping one day to learn other important tasks like how to focus on one project at a time and how to alleviate stress by finishing things way before the deadline), well, for all that, I admit that a big part of my current episode of depression is fear of flying.

You see, in the beginning, it was enough. I was a league ahead of the many, many ‘writers’ around me. There was nothing to fear. So many called themselves writers. They were going to write a book some day. One day when they had time. I never had this embarrassment. Whether I was stuck in kindergarten class, or stuck in an affordable rental crack house, or stuck in retail hell, or stuck on the side of the street begging your spare change, I was writing. I never had to be shy about calling myself a writer. You could argue whether or not it was good writing, but from my first seahorse poem, age five, to my first co-produced zine in second grade, The Sunshine Peanut, to age 12, when I began publishing, I was writing. I was doing a lot of other things, too, that I should not have been doing, or that I should have been more focused on… but when Margaret Atwood was autographing my copy of The Blind Assassin, and gave me that seething, freezing look she’s famous for giving- I’d been rude enough to thank her for her inspiration on my writing- I did not have to wither away because I was ‘posing’ as a writer. I was a writer. A published one, too. Sure, not many had heard of zines like Canned Phlegm or Minus Tides. But whatever- I’d appeared alongside frigging Burroughs and Bukowski- how’s that for chick lit? Eat my shorts, you boring bastards!

Following all that was the sheer high of quitting ‘the real world’ and pounding the keyboard in real time, not stolen time. It was twin terror that forced me to quit my ten year plus reign as one of Canada’s best booksellers- yes, I have a ‘certificate’ -that’s not something I would make up! While I had to occasionally use food banks though I was working full time, I loved the bookstore. I am so grateful for all that reading. But my physical health was very bad and I had to take a medical leave of absence, and at that same time my husband passed away. Needless to say, I had a nervous breakdown and it was absolutely impossible to go back to work full-time. And so I began to work at home, harder than I’ve ever worked before, in between shitty odd jobs. My heart got a bit better, but that takes forever. My body bloomed from the rest and the retreat from stress and from finally some real and treatable diagnoses. In three years, I’ve written more than I have my whole life before.

Somewhere in the schemata, tragic though it might be, I can even fit the quatruple-duple-zuple whammy of all the close friends dying these past few years. Oh, it hurts, believe me, everywhere I look it hurts. Not just trains, but, well, everything. Every thing I look at might remind me. Hospitals. Sofas. Closets. Baby toys. Love’s Baby Soft Spray Cologne. Abba. No matter where I look, something reminds me of AIDS, of cancer, of addiction, of suicide. Cars are okay, though. So far, miraculously, I have not lost anyone to a car crash! Statistically, I’m going to, and I wonder who will be next?

And while it’s true that I mourn, I never for a second take for granted those I love left living. Every single day I pray for you, think about you, thank God for you. And I spend a great deal of time in abject fear that you will die. Morbid? Maybe. But there aren’t enough candles in my chapel to go around each week when I go in. If you die, too, I will have to start bringing my own. (I could make my own film, “Sixteen Candles,” very different from the original.)

But yeah, you see, even in this tragic deathtrap that I seem to walk about in- my first published story by the way was Meet Me at the River, a story about death by a 12 year old girl- oh, and my first literary award in grade eight was for a poem called Marching to the Grave- I’m not making this shit up-you see, my theory is that everyone dies, so it’s actually not that unusual if it happens. And for whatever reason, total strangers write to me and tell me that I give them comfort with my crazy blend of morbid yet rapier wit when I talk about grief and loss. I have long believed that writers to some extent are channelers of the worlds we cannot see. I am a scribe, an instrument, one who gives the spirits their two cents worth. I freeze in time what has happened today by making a permanent record. One day, I will be dead, and this rambling piece about my mid-life crisis will still be floating around on cyberspace. Even my dad, who does not like such vague ghostly poetry talk about spirits (unless it is securely grounded in the poetry of the King James Bible) told me that my biography will be called A Life of Death. Awww, thaaaaaaaaaaanks, Dad.

But I digress….as usual. The crisis that’s materializing now is that hellish one that every writer must go through. For some, it underlies the whole of the writer’s life. Usually it comes in chewable doses that I can masticate and move on from. Lately it’s been a tidal wave. It’s hard to explain exactly what the crisis is, but if you read the following paragraph very quickly, and let it run around in your head over and over on high speed and high volume, you’ll get the general idea:

Is this any good? Why is it even important? Does anybody really read this stuff, and if so, why does it matter? Who says your thoughts are worth the trees? Shouldn’t you be out helping people? Why didn’t you study plumbing? Will the computer bill get paid this month? Next month? How will I work if it’s unplugged? What about the rent? You can’t stand anything you wrote before 2002- who says you’ll think this is worth the while in four years today? What if carpal tunnel cripples me? Do you really have anything original to say? Does it matter? Do I matter?

Yep, for all that brazen confidence I occasionally exude, I’m truly an existential worrywart. That little tape above, the one that zooms along on fast-forward and repeat, well that’s just part of a crippling terror that grips me in the night. And it goes something like this: WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT?

Sure, I’m blessed to have a voice all over the Internet, and in so many journals and magazines you open. Whatever. SHOW ME THE MONEY. I’m thrilled that Quarry Magazine listed me as part of a stellar lineage of Canadian writers topped by Atwood and Ondaatje, a torch I’m apparently carrying forth. They featured me on the cover and never sent the cheque. And I am incredibly honoured to be lauded by my spiritual teacher, Thomas Moore.

But I’m still scared that they might cut off my cable, and I need it to work online. I’m really scared I’ll have to get this tooth pulled if I can’t come up with the reconstruction fee. I’m not sure I can even come up with the extraction fee! I’m scared of running out of cat food.

It’s all very terrifying. WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT AS A WRITER? It’s the only damn thing I’m good at…and while I thank God for my gift without false modestly, let’s face it, I’m good, but not THAT good. I’m not BLOWING the rich publishers away, evidently. What will become of me if I don’t hold out for the long haul? Reading and writing are the only skills I have!

Crad Kilodney’s book, Putrid Scum, is quite possibly the most brilliant account of these fears. His entire life was the slow-track of the writer’s crisis. Early in the book, he sagely states that the very worst thing that can happen to a writer is early publication in a national magazine. This gives that poor sod false hope, and instead of moving on to a more sensible fate- say, becoming the cable guy, or a chiropractic assistant- the writer will believe in himself. Yeah, why the hell did I have to win that damn contest for Meet Me at the River, for crying out loud?

and sometimes a scar is just a scar by L.C. Luzajic

Then Crad goes on to say that every writer has a crippling philosophical struggle he must contend with. His, as is mine, is over the negligible importance of his perspective. You see, I’m flattered, trust me, that a few of you are amused or even touched, but in the scheme of things, are my comments on the literary life or why I love Johnny Cash really of any tangible importance in a world where children are dying of starvation and war? The most important job in the world is growing, serving, and selling food or water, in my mind. That shit job at Food Basics is, well, back to basics. The real stuff. Fuck me and my fucking intellect. (Yes, yes, for the most part, I know the word is what made civilization. That the word is spirit. In the beginning was the word and all that. I’m describing to you THE CRISIS, not the whole meaning of my life.)

It’s a bit of a tragedy that Putrid Scum got panned, but Crad Kilodney was pretty used to his books getting panned. Still, this one is so brilliant that no one should call oneself a writer until they’ve read it. So that they know what they are in for, all of it’s possibilities. Not everyone writes earth-shattering, world-changing literature that makes them rich. It’s more likely going to be something like Crad describes throughout this marvel.

For example: “In any case, happy or not, we are most of us destined to go to our deathbeds stupid and bewildered about life. Each generation repeats this proves: it has learned nothing from the previous generation and will have nothing to impart to the next.”

Or this: “It’s a great mystery how a life can divagate all over the map of possibilities, and it may be my bane as well as my consolation to believe that everything in my life is meant to be.”

“Books gathering dust. Me turning to dust. A whole life destined to become dust. And I thought of tall the book warehouses I’d worked in, with stacks and stacks of books gathering dust,” Crad muses. Continuing, he really gets to the heart of the crisis I’m trying to describe. “It must be a tremendous advantage to have such control over one’s emotions, but how could I become like that without becoming an entirely different person? It seemed to me that people were ruled primarily either by their hearts or by their heads, that this trait was fixed early in life, and that one could only alter the heart/head ration a little bit, if at all, as one got older. I envied people whose intellects were in control of their emotions, because they weathered the storms of life more easily; yet at the same time I often felt annoyed or repelled by them. They seemed unnatural somehow. I put out the light and got under the blanket. What is the correct way to be? How do you change what you are? What will become of me?”

Yep, I’m definitely one of those emotional ones, though I like to think my intellect has some fortitude here and there. I laugh now to think that when Crad drifted by fate into my life- as my mentor, but I didn’t know it then- that I told him in no uncertain terms that his bitter attitude had no place at my dinner table. His jaded comments about people from other genders, orientations, countries, and age brackets were all fine and dandy within his literature, but at a time in my life where I was learning to change that heart/head ratio, that little bit, I had to surround myself with people who didn’t mumble “burn your feminist books” or “what have the poor ever done for you?”

No mumbling, I told him. I’d impressed Mr. Kilodney in a story I did about his work because, as he said, there were no typos. In a world where most Canadian writers, publishers, and editors were lowlife idiots, my article had been refreshingly free of error.

I do not want to point out, looking back, that the little Idea Factory story actually DID appear with one (not very noticeable) typo. Oops. But it’s too late. It is nothing less than ‘meant to be’ that the most eccentric writer in Canadian history is my mentor. He hates this word, bristling at it, a man who doesn’t even think he’s a good writer. His work “is what it is,” he said when I asked if he thought it was good. He says my work is at least his equal if not superior, but ….well, I can’t agree. Crad’s already weathered the storms, and he’s also written over thirty books, whether or not you or I or he thinks they are good. And in some small way, a smiling light goes off inside his bitter head when I use the word, but I only use the word ‘mentor’ because it is true. I am not one to flatter.

I postponed an intellectual dinner hobnobbing with Mr. Kilodney this week because I was critically depressed. (You see, the story does all tie together despite my digressive habits.) I confessed to him that I’m in treatment at the loony bin, that I’m crying all the time, that I see dead people, that some people have hurt me so much I can’t believe they can live with themselves, and that no one ever bloody well rescued me when I needed help. That I had to figure shit out all by myself, that I’m in pain, that I’m not sure who to trust, and also that I’m not at all certain that a current project, which is moving painfully slowly, will ever see fruition, and I just can’t face it anymore. I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

The Valium wasn’t working, needless to say, and there was nothing ‘the professionals’ or anybody out there could say to the, well, the skeletons in my closet, eating me alive. No one, that is except for my dear Crad.

His email was not very wordy. When he’s not mumbling bitter expletives, he is a man of few words. He told me that I could read the entire Bible in a year at a rate of only four pages a day. This was very practical advice to someone drenched in creative and emotional chaos. I knew right then and there that the cure for this project’s incompletion was continuing consistency, and so I was already on the right path.

As for the rest of it all, no one has a way with truth quite like Mr. Kilodney. “The cure for depression is television,” he stated frankly. And he’s expecting me for dinner and sitcoms on Wednesday.

Lorette C. Luzajic’s poetry book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, reflects on the weight of love and grief. Visit her site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net, for more cheerful selections.

The Astronaut

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chapters.indigo.ca

more grief poetry

I was sifting through some poetry files of unfinished or unpolished jottings, and found a cute little rhyming poem that I wrote for Bobby last summer. Now that he is in heaven, you can imagine how this innocuous little number made me sob.

and the whisky goes down like butter
and the tequila goes down like rain
and the vodka goes down like honey
and the gin goes down like pain
and I know I only have you for today
my brother, my love, my friend, my bobby mcgee
i know that you will always go away
but in your heart, don’t stray too far from me.

Lorette C. Luzajic
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
buy my book at indigo or amazon online

Shameless Self-Promotion: The Astronaut’s Wife by Lorette C. Luzajic

A wise man once said that the only certainties in life were death and taxes. I figured it would be incredibly boring to write a poetry collection about taxes, so I went right for the jugular. I tempered the morbidity with love, that other madness. What kind of poet doesn’t include a few love poems?

This was the official marketing blurb: Love and death have been on this poet’s mind for some time. This poetry maps a few of her most intense experiences, accentuating the positive, the unusual, and the lost. With a unique voice and lively wit, a sardonic twist, strength, and a peculiar resolve through melancholy, these words lay bare her soul. Luzajic believes in exploring the frontiers of the universe, its chaos, its beauty, its small kindnesses, its remarkable spirit. Along the way on these adventures, you sometimes have to say goodbye.

If you are one of those rare gems who constantly reads poetry, you won’t want to miss the “rapier wit” in these poems that ring with “authenticity and truth”. (Hey, I didn’t say it! Those are two of hundreds of positive comments. Not all were positive. Some called my work self-indulgent. But Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, called them “imaginative, witty, and profound.” You decide!) Many of these poems were published in literary magazines like Modern Poetry, Caffeine, White Wall Review, Rattle, Grain, The Fiddlehead and so on. On top of all this, the book looks damn cool, too, thanks to the unbelievable artwork of Iaian Greenson (www.iaiangreenson.com).

If you never read poetry, take a chance on me and treat yourself to The Astronaut’s Wife. Join me in surprising adventures, and meet some characters you won’t forget. But hey, don’t take my word for it: here’s what other people have to say!

I get poetry from readers once in a while, but I never want to read it. Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy. I like them and thank you for sending them. Looking forward to the next book.

Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Soul Mates

“This Girl Can Write indeed! The Astronaut’s Wife – Poems of Eros and Thanatos establishes Lorette Luzajic as a rising, multi-talented poet on the Canadian scene. Her insights into the heights and depths of our common human struggle to live out our own often-buried divinity hold the ring of authenticity and truth. Weep, laugh, enjoy!”

Tom Harpur, bestselling author of The Pagan Christ and Would You Believe?

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

We got the book. Thanks. I don’t know how to properly reciprocate when a writer puts that much of herself on the page. I’m not sure how to honour that. The book treads holy ground, sometimes with a holy rawness and sometimes with unholy eloquence. The last two stanzas enter a whole other realm.

Will Braun, editor, Geez Magazine, Winnipeg

Each time I feel that I’ve found a favourite poem, I turn the page to find myself tempted by another. Valium for Breakfast, A Poem for B and November keep on drawing me back for another read. Wonderful…powerful…thoughts that make me gasp out loud, laugh or blink back tears, all in a few words or stanzas. Thank you for sharing this beautiful gift with me.

Bonnie Staring, editor, www.womencandoanything.com

I am a great fan of your work. My friend used to go on and on about a line from one of your poems “the quiet raging ocean of my messed up heart” before I’d ever read it. He was actually the one that gave me your book. But I found so much beauty in your words, and I felt so inspired no matter how many times I read it. I appreciate so much what you’ve done and the way you felt…The depth in which you write is so amazing, it’s so much more than anything out there.

Through your writing I love the way you live, love the way you love, your heart is so truly unique. Reading your poems brings me the feeling I get on the days that I am in love with the world and I can feel everything.

My best friend in the entire world had the kind of beauty in his heart that I see in your poems, and it brings me back to the feeling that he gave me of someone who was meant for a better world. Unfortunately he died two years ago, and I think about your poems and other sorts of things that he would appreciate as well, and it’s so amazing. I haven’t been able to put it all into words. I would read your poems when I missed him or just felt like crying and it was sort of like a companionship like coffee and nicotine…..I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but I want to thank you for your inspiration.

Stephanie Nord, Georgia, x-ray technician

I n writing this book, the author has, like a rock through a mirror or a beer bottle on the sidewalk shattered her life. You read one of her poems and know exactly what she is writing about. Each is a part of the story of her existence.

She has experienced life like few others would dare. You picture the smells and sounds as well as the sights, but you do this shard by shard. The whole is made up of the shards, yet there is something both more and less to the ‘big picture’.

This is not really a book of poetry; it is more of a memoir. It sometimes uses a poetic form, but mostly not. A few of the poems are a little self-indulgent, but most of them have a brutal, scary honesty. I read this collection two months ago and only now understand what I think of it.

Alexander Burns, criminal lawyer, Burlington, Ontario

The Astronaut’s Wife is a complete lifetime of emotions all splashed helter-skelter across a few dozen pages by a woman who clearly understands them all. This clutch of lyrics seeks out your soul and enriches it with warm, peaceful feelings, and then rips it out with raw, unquenchable anguish. With mythic imagery and erotic undertone, the author carries you on a journey through her own experience of the unending pathos of life and death. Don’t miss it!

Stu Blyde, Threading Machine Set-up/Nipple Manufacturer, Zurich, Ontario

I knew when I was 20 years old that I was the best young writer in Canada, no – pardon me – the world. I felt this in my bones, in my marrow. I had a chip on my shoulder, greasy hair and a brand new Smith Corona on my desk. I even had a working title for the great Canadian novel I was about to write…

Suffice it to say that Lorette’s writing made me feel embarrassed by everything I had ever written. She was Jack Kerouac…I only had the cuffs of my jeans rolled up. Lorette was a blues record that I owned on CD… Novels, short stories, poetry…Lorette was the master of her domain…And I wouldn’t be lying if I told you that she was one of the people who taught me how to write.

Iaian Greenson, writer and artist, Toronto, Ontario

Few of us have had the horrid misfortune of experiencing the death of a multitude of friends, family and acquaintances at a young age. Even fewer have had the blessing and sometimes curse of encountering a lifetime of pivotal events by the time our odometer rolls past 30. Only one person has met and conquered both with the mastery, elegance and savoir-faire of the written word. This person is Lorette C. Luzajic. Lorette is of the most talented, diversified, and multi-faceted writers I have had the pleasure to read. The Astronaut’s Wife is a catharsis for all who have had to endure the loss of someone who has left this world too brave, too loved, and too young. This is a read for people like myself who often find ourselves having to ‘buck up’ when we really should be soaked in tears. It offers a confidant with whom you can find the emotions that need to be expressed, written in words that know you, sit beside you, and hold your hand as you move past pain. However, if you read closely, friends, you will find bits of rapier wit dancing below the surface of even the darkest lines. Also inside are poems that are an old friend reliving memories of times and places that perhaps you have also been to. If not before, Lorette takes you there now. Mainly, this is the kind of writing most aspire to, but never achieve. The Astronaut’s Wife reaches past heart and soul and into the place that you never reveal, sometimes even to yourself. I await Lorette’s next work and the further unveiling of this great talent to the world.

John Bennett, chef and restaurateur,Toronto

The author poignantly claims in one of these collected poems that she “looked straight into darkness to see a starry night.” Indeed, Lorette C. Luzajic has had some highs and lows and she bares them openly in The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Without lowering her gaze, she lets you look straight inside of her and you may flinch before she does.

The Astronaut’s Wife- a poetry book with one of the most amazing cover designs by painter Iaian Greenson – takes its title from a mediocre movie of the same title, but of appropriate melodrama and a good cast. Luzajic borrows to suit her whims frequently, not because she isn’t wholly original – she surely is – but because written, visual, musical and cinematic culture are mainstays of her palette in both her mixed media paintings and in her writing. Guest appearances from all walks of high and low culture may or may not be recognized by her readers, but add layers of depth at every turn. In this case, the title is a perfect fit in keeping with the poet’s grim and steady gaze into the dark skies in search of that Van Gogh-ian glory. Much of her work resonates with this balancing of dark and light, and here the intensity of irony and sorrow shines forth straight from the title. For the book is dedicated to her late husband, who lived the philosophy of psychonautism and then died from it. For the exploration of unknown frontiers can and does lead to death, but still the poet seeks in this collection to know them.

And if the borrowed cover title sums it all fittingly in the poet’s personal folklore, the last poem The Astronaut wraps it all up with a bit of an homage to Dylan Thomas. How dare you go so gently into that good night, she says last of all.

The journey through love and death is harrowing but an amazing resilience shines through creatively as the poet takes you into her psyche. She reveals the kind of betrayals in love that many of us have endured, prying apart their layers with intuition and wisdom. In Prison Blues, she laments the fall-out of a beautiful relationship ruined by control issues. “And yes it’s easy on a Sunday to miss you,” she admits, “the lonely chill of frosty daylight feels sentimental, and does not recall how we wrung each other into total emptiness.” She expresses her fears, wondering if anyone will ever “reach for me the way you reach for me.” Without holding onto anger, she acknowledges the possibility that no one’s “intention is to hurt another – love simply longs to possess another, to keep them with a jailer’s hands.”

Other works show a more cynical and bitter edge toward love and its “quiet scars and gaping maw” (Valium for Breakfast) but the poet still retains in these furious expressions a sardonic sense of humour. “Since you asked,” she writes, “I’ll tell you what has become of me…I’m fat, and work as a cashier, just as Satan promised me on Highway 61.” (That’s a somewhat obscure reference, by the way, to the great Canadian film Highway 61 – there is a scene where Satan tells a poor little girl with big dreams that she isn’t going to be famous, she’s going to be fat and work as a cashier.) But just when it appears that Luzajic might be feeling sorry for herself, (forgivable, I think, for in matters of love we all have those moments) suddenly, she is tough and beautiful and reflective: in Damage she tells us she can’t be sure “he is prepared for the life of a poet, for the rain soaked rooms her soul hides.” And in Untitled for A. she says confidently that she has been many things, from starlet to ghost to artist to lover and that she “was never all those pieces you could not pick off the ground.”

Eros is perhaps a loose interpretation because while many of the poems are erotic or about romantic partners, some of the most powerful are about family, and in fact Luzajic has dedicated the book to her husband, father and brother, the men who have, she says, made her who she is. The most stunning pieces in Love are those that open and close that section. In my brother shows me easter, she turns looking at the moon through her brother’s telescope into a visionary experience we can all share. And the piece that closes the first part of the book is a ten-part poem about family experience, bridging the themes nicely with a last line that refers to love and life as a complicated thing that can easily be simplified – in the end, it is only ashes after all.

It would be unfair to give too much away from the Death section of Luzajic’s poetry. For here, the artist’s soul is tortured by loss, and it is expressed so beautifully that the reader can’t help but cry. The poetry seems to contemplate the dead in all ways with unbelievable eloquence. There’s murder and mayhem and methamphetamine, suicide and AIDS and cancer. Yet something of that starry night shines in each poem, words that comfort and heal even as they mourn. The poems are very personal and yet one gets the feeling that they are written on behalf of everyone, for death is the only truly reliable fact of life.

Melissa Hennessy, writer, Toronto, Ontario

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

There is Nothing New Under the Sun: Britney, Babylon, and the Modern World

Like everyone else on the planet, my addiction to celebrity addictions has reached a crescendo. It’s all consuming. Picture a group of four civilized thirtysomethings gathered in the big city for a night of gourmet Thai food and a good catch-up. Two girls, two guys: could be unused Will and Grace footage. Except the hairdresser is leaning intently over a tabloid that features a close up of Michael Jackson’s latest facial bandages. The restaurant manager reaches for Ebony- it’s got the MJ makeover pics, and we decide that’s probably as good as Mikey’s ever gonna look. The actress is circling all the known addicts in Life and Style with a purple Sharpie. The writer muses out loud that even squeaky-clean Nicole K’s husband is an addict. None of that, of course, is anywhere near as important as the story of the century- the public downward spiral of Brit-Brit Spears. This week’s latest chapter has on the edge of our seats: did Brit’s mom really sleep with K-Fed and the new sinister-looking Arab hottie? Cause if it’s true, it would explain just about every damn thing that’s wrong with that poor girl.

Sure, I’ve been worried about my escalating compulsion to watch the latest breaking stories of Hollywood’s filthy fallouts on late night TV. Worse is the guilty knowledge that even the cheapest glossy rag is a waste of my hard-earned money. But I’ve already given up drugs and sugar, so I cut myself some slack- so long as I am still stopping by Book City for fresh Canadian poetry volumes, Discover Magazine, and cookbooks, so long as I am completing my non-celeb writing assignments, so long as I am eating and sleeping and taking regular baths and changing the kitty litter…

I’ve railed against a machine that drove Diana into the long tunnel from which she never emerged. I’ve lambasted a world that thinks it’s okay to take zoom shots of Britney’s panties, which prove, evidently, that the girl is not, today at least, pregnant with Adnan’s baby. But I’ve also defended the insatiable public appetite for destruction, for who wore what when and where, who took what drug at which party, and who is zooming whom. I agree with Camille Paglia, though I am not nearly so articulate as she, that the stars are the stars: humans always have a pantheon of gods and goddesses, from antiquity into the modern world, who reach unknown heights and plunge to sordid deaths. Greco-Roman mythology reads like the rags read today: Hercules was insane and murdered his wife and children. Arachne hanged herself. Zeus kills Semele while Dionysus is still in her womb. Murder, suicide, madness, incest, torture, revenge, drugs, secrets, prostitution: it’s all there, and it’s there in every mythology of the world, not just the much-studied classics. It is no mistake that Diana is another name for Artemis, Goddess of the moon, the hunter and the hunted one. Celebrity is our modern day mythology. It isn’t going to go away.

Camille said, “Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.” Whether or not it’s reprehensible, it is absolutely human. The gods are half human, and half celestial. With one foot on earth, and the other in heaven or hell, we look to them to play out the psychodramas in our own life, not, as many assume, to revel in their lives because we do not have one of our own. And perhaps this familiar tendency is not unique to humans, but to other animals. I’ve long believed my cats talk about my peeps and me when I’m not home. Surely I’m mad, but scientists have discovered that dolphins gossip- no joke. See, I told you I’m still reading some science here and there!

Perhaps at this point in history, post-Diana, where paparazzi is a household word and a lucrative career choice, where we are practically standing in gas-station bathrooms with a woman named Britney that we don’t even know, it would be a good time to stop berating ourselves for our very human hunger and see if we can create a future direction for our celebrity addiction. Can awareness of our need for this kind of theatre help us create a better world?

We feel guilty for our rabid obsessions with the mad, the mental, and the maxed-out. We shake our heads and say, ‘Why can’t they leave that poor little girl alone?” The nastier among us may think, “Crazy rich bitch, who cares.” I’m not down with that- though I might trade in my humble rental for a couple of million, I’m sure that a few good friends and a few peaceful hours to read a novel might be everything in the world that Britney Spears wants tonight. Still, if her world changed tonight, if she left her house and there was nobody outside, no cameras flashing, no headlines, the shock would kill her. We malign her for seeking out that attention, but we are all victims of our environment. The Amish children who leave go back home for the most part. People commit suicide when they lose a shitty dead-end job they’ve been grumbling about for years. We know what we know. Britney knows nothing else. It is not her fault that she has fed on the flash and the adrenaline for so long.

Regardless, the media vulture is not going to go away. If it did, Britney Spears would drop dead. It seems we are waiting with bated breath for that to happen- there is more than one contest up and running where whoever guesses the date and time of that event wins. Humans are a corrupt and bloodthirsty lot. We love a car crash; we love a bullfight, boxing, wrestling, and movies like Hostel. We love war. We are greedy and fat and neurotic and we beat our wives and children. We keep slaves and we sell our daughters. This bloodthirstiness is nothing new. It’s a given. I find it horrible and disgusting and sick and sad, but it has been true from the very beginning. While I applaud every single action anyone makes toward peace, goodwill, equality, generosity, and compassion, none of these noble gestures erase the fact that we are rotten to the core. We can’t afford to be sentimentalists: realism gives us a better foothold for change. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And even that glory, if you learn about Him in the Bible, is a vicious, savage glory, warmongering and smiting left and right.

Perhaps there is the other side to the story. The side that has to follow every anguished cry of Our Lady of Madness because her cry is ours. Perhaps we are hoping for her to ‘get help’ because it illustrates our own struggle, the fumble to find ecstasy, or just peace of mind for crying out loud. In the midst of success, we may feel isolated. In the midst of marriage, we may be terrified we made a poor choice. We may fear our parenting skills. We may be scared of our drug use. All these stories do is play out on a large screen scale the same trials and woes we all have. From what to wear to dinner, to whether or not this week’s shrink appointment is going to make a rat’s ass of difference to the astonishing emptiness we feel. Britney was crying in the chapel, and so are we.

While the narrow philosophies I was raised with would tediously refer to Hollywood as ‘glorifying sin’, perhaps instead it illuminates the best and worst of our obsessions. We sneer this week about how ‘everyone’s going to rehab since Heath jumped ship.” Did you ever think that the public travails of Anna Nicole Smith and Lindsay Lohan made it amazingly easy for the rest of the world to start tossing up the word ‘addiction’? I think it’s amazing that in the fall out of this particular tempest- the unexpected death of a very talented actor, and our fear that brilliant new songstress Amy Winehouse is at the edge of that abyss, people are looking at their own issues and saying “no more bullshit. I’m going into rehab.” We can only try. Trying is everything. Maybe rehab won’t work out for Winehouse, or for Eva Mendes, or for Delta Burke. But maybe it will. Maybe Winehouse hopes to make an even better album instead of dying. I sure hope it works out for her because I’d love to hear it.

The thing is, there is no specific solution. It’s romantic and naïve to think humans have ever had one. We are incredibly contradictory, and though solutions have been thrown around since the beginning of time, (some of these bright ideas have included exterminating the race of enemies, bringing slaves to build our countries, torturing mental patients, castrating women…) we don’t have any fucking solutions. We only have our tricky history of violence and obsession, mixed with our amazing contributions and discoveries. We will never evolve to our full potential, because, just as technology has made us into magicians who can chat over breakfast with friends across the world, our natural greed has scourged the earth. On the smaller scale, we must have witnessed in our own life that sometimes finding Jesus worked, and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes therapy or rehab worked, but sometimes we lost the fight and buried a loved one. Sometimes a new medical breakthrough saved the life of our child or gave us back mobility. Sometimes it didn’t, and helpless, we watched cancer or AIDS or diabetes take someone from us.

We can’t know how things will work out. It isn’t personal- when a hurricane sweeps through a city and demolishes it, it isn’t personal. I wasn’t a better person just because the hurricanes have not so far struck Toronto. You aren’t a better person than Britney just because you take your Prozac like a good little girl. Don’t be so sure that nobody at your church knows about your secrets. They do: if only because they share them.

It all takes us back to square one. We are going to do what we are going to do. Good and evil will always rival inside of us, a tug of war that never finds resolution. So that means we keep on striving to become better, but don’t fall off an imaginary pedestal when things- big surprise- don’t necessarily work out. We can’t stop war, but we keep trying because it’s the right thing to do. We can’t stop every violence or poverty in the world, every disease or despairing heart, but we can help one child, we can give one homeless man a banana and a coffee. We can’t win over all of our bad habits, but we can probably change a few of them. We can’t eradicate all of the darkness inside of us, but we can strive for light. After all, as Oprah said, to do less than your best is a sin.

www.thegirlcanwrite.net
Lorette C. Luzajic

I hope you will visit my site above and explore my writing. If you think your friend will like me, please pass me on! You can order my poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos online through indigo or amazon.

Mark Lindquist’s King of Methlehem

The detective novel finally has a new plot and a rich new crime background. After years of murder mysteries, cocaine trades, and oval office intrigue, the thriller has sick new lore to use as a backdrop. Mark Lindquist makes full use of the methamphetamine epidemic in the northwest and he succeeds in making his characters and the plot realistic. The formula draws on all the classics- hard drinking cop, mouthy, ego-inflated perp, desperate tweakers who have lost their way, and enough courtroom politics and legalese to move the plot along. The pages turn all by themselves: while I’m the kind of reader that plods through a dozen books at a time, this one I read cover to cover in one day. And though the plot and the sick sad life of the characters takes central stage, Lindquist doesn’t weaken his aim during the details: he never forgets small clues in the setting, descriptions of what’s on a character’s book shelf, or dialogue that shows what someone is thinking.

The King of Methlehem prides himself on being the best methamphetamine cook in Pierce County, Washington, and evading arrest. He’s a classic sleaze ball who likes his domain: he knows meth is more addictive and hence more profitable than other drugs. He also likes the risk that goes with making it; the explosions and the danger make him feel really important. While he’s a dirty bastard, playing head games with 12-year old girls to get them into his stuff, and into his pants as well, the full cast of tweakers reveals that most start out as normal people looking for a good time, for more energy at work, or looking to stay thin.

While hardly a psychological study, there are enough details to richly illustrate the interior hell of the speed freak. What struck me most was how universal some specific minutiae of madness are: the addicts all have half- dead cars in their lots that they take apart and put back together constantly. I used to see car parts and pieces of stereo with the cords cut off laying in yards, and wondered what the hell. Then a meth addict moved into my house and began taking apart the VCR and the light fixtures and tinkering around. Now when I see engine parts and electrical devices removed and piled up I know meth is not far. I still don’t know why this is universal- my roommate was looking for recording devices, and Lindquist says the speeding mind needs a mechanical mess to focus into. Either way, it’s creepy.

Wyatt is a good cop who loves his job and moved to meth enforcement to escape the stress of homicide. He was naïve then, but not now. He found the pain and madness meth caused to be a world different from any other kind of drug. He loves his job though, and notices all kinds of puzzle pieces that other cops miss, making him good at the new position. He knows that the megalomania and fearlessness meth causes are unique challenges- his perps don’t care if they die and they’re inside some other world altogether that he has to bridge. He’s not sentimental about it but he does recognize how this drug can twist a normal soul into a deranged, barely human skeleton. He also knows that years of law enforcement crying wolf is partially to blame- no one believes the “this is your brain on drugs” story when it’s been told so often and is so obviously a lie. Sadly, with crystal methamphetamine, it’s true.