Our History is Shit (And Gord Downie is Going to Die)

By Illian Rain

Looking back is a dangerous thing.

Our history is shit, you know.

Yet I survived it, as have you. Seeing how you’re reading this and all.

My head has remained intact, above my shoulders, despite riding in the back of trucks. Without cabs. Sometimes even with boys. Sometimes even with grown-ass men who tucked suspiciously tinted thermoses of water between their legs; men who never looked back long enough to reckon what us children were doing.

That’s not a brag, just a fact.

I have survived strong licks of sugar salting my tongue, skimmed from the lid of a cake—vanilla probably, but only on the outside, like so many of us back home.

Sarah Lee cake

Kool-aid

Mr. Freezies

Dogs licking our faces

Sucking on pennies

Sucking on much, much worse

Unanchored swingsets and waterfalls and white water currents

Batteries on my tongue

Stitches on my tongue

My lip

My chin

The corner of my eye

Packing a bag and running away to the city, any fucking city

I survived without a helmet, tracking device, or cell phone. And later, without a mother too.

Running away to another country when that country had borders as porous as nothing else I am familiar with. Running away to mint julep and crocodiles and a stinking bayou that might have been the death of me.

Might still be.

This was my world, and I learned to navigate it. I cannot tell where home ended and the glamour began.

I still suck the icing off spoons and put wrong things in my mouth.

And it is shit you know, all of it. Because then isn’t now, and now takes precedence over all, just as it always has. Just as it always will.

So why tell you this?

Why bother reminiscing?

Because, the world was my wilderness before it was our prison.

Because the world was my wilderness even as it was being paved over with good-bad ideas and political correctness and helicopter parents and dumb-ass safety warnings too dumb to save the bottom feeders and the headed-for-extinction-anyway…

Is Darwin still relevant or is he too a sinner of a different century, a dinosaur rendered irrelevant and shameful with time?

Fuck you all anyway. I don’t mean YOU personally, I mean the people who shit on Darwin, and Tolkien, and even on poor old Arvo Pärt. I mean the people who shit on running through the forest at night (too dangerous), hitching rides with rednecks to get where you need to go (too dangerous), laughing out loud at something that’s not being transmitted through a cell phone (exceedingly suspect, especially whilst solo.)

Yeah, not everyone survived. But not everyone is surviving now.

There are no good old days, either. Everything costs. Everything. Yesterday cost and tomorrow will cost too. I’m just aware of counting for inflation now.

Maybe it isn’t the criticism that gets to me but the snark. I am guilty, you are guilty, fuck the word guilty. No really, fuck it. Scratch that word from my life because public shaming is the ass-end of the wagging tongue called sanctimony, and right now the only things that is sacred is the ‘authentic self.’

Let’s just hang that one on the cross as well, shall we? Just do away with it all together so we are free if the burden of ranking the lifestyles of others, wholesale.

Let’s just put down our pointers and run through the forest together, at night, and laugh ourselves silly one last time.

Because shit has gotten dark and it’s only getting darker. My hipster neighbours leaned over the fence to discourse on bug-out bags and guns.

That would have been amusing a couple of years ago. Now I just answer their questions.

Fuck this shit. I want to return to the forest, to the rednecks, to mint julep on suspiciously rotting porches, when I could stand by the side of the road, thumb cocked, too young to drive, and get where I needed to go.

Alive.

And no, not everyone was so lucky—I watch Discovery ID, sure I do. And Lieutenant Kenda is still looking all kinds of fine, IMHO.

I don’t want the world to go backwards; I am sentimental some days, not fucking stupid.

We aren’t going back again because there is no going back again. But sometimes I look out the window of the train we’re all riding and have battle my urge to jump.

And why the FUCK does Gord Downie have to die? Yeah I get it smartasses of the world—we’re all going to die, but maybe not at 52 years of age, and almost certainly not after creating some of the most astonishing music made.

You either get it, or you don’t.

And if you don’t get it, well, my apologies but it’s something that I just can’t fucking explain…

About Illian Rain

I write things. Lots of things.

28 Responses

  3. Hélène Montpetit

    Raw. Wisdom.
    I savour all, but mostly this “the world was my wilderness before it was our prison,” like I savour the taste of chocolate and good wine, the scent of lilacs on the Verdun air, the warmth of sun on my skin.
    Feel like the real thing, Illian?… You ARE.

    Liked by 1 person

      2. Illian Rain

        I hear you Lisa! I’m so behind on blogging–and reading blogs, which is sad. I always get that excited feeling in my chest when I log into my reader. But alas, those moments have been far and few between for me these days as well. We will get there (one day!)

        Liked by 1 person

  8. jholmgren2

    Okay, this is just great work Illian. So nostalgic! And cathartic! Truth from your words-with-out-borders…smile. I just love red-necks, real men/women and kids, etc, having decended from some real life ones and pretty much am one (in the closet sense now-a-days). Brave makers with food and often drink, and courageous while driving (no seat belts, esp in the back of pickups (with or without the dogs sitting on your lap licking you in the face. or blantantly perched even higher up on hay bales or wood piles being brought home) and they/we did it all while having quite a bit of common sense! Geez, love that, thanks for this word-smith coated big-toe-dipping-tirade back into the real past. I love your work, so BIG and Erudite as you/we all reading it barrel along in cattle car #4-18-15-16-23-42. Keep writing! X0, Jacks

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Illian Rain

      Love you Jacks! You are one of the toughest, funniest, most sensible women I know. This comment means a great deal to me. I love the ‘in the closet sense’ comment as well–I am exactly the same and people are often surprised when I tell them where I come from (unless they are similar, in which case we find trouble together ASAP). I guess we’ve both wandered pretty far, but you never, never forget. 🙂

      Like

      2. Illian Rain

        We are most definitely not the only ones, but it sure felt like it last night. I haven’t listened to any news conferences yet either. Slowly, slowly…

        Like

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