When Shunning Is No Fun

I begin this meditation with a heavy heart. No, I’m not talking about cardiomegaly. Rather, it’s ... it’s that under this grease-stained wife-beater T-shirt lurks a sensitive thumper, one given to fluttering like a nun’s uvula during the elongated high note in “Amazing Grace” when, with friends at the local gaslamp bar,  spontaneous outbursts of Shelley recitation overtake me in the middle of  convivial belching contests, mooning displays (of the anterior variety), and pitching peanuts into the stagnant pool of  ale belonging to the effete college kids slumming it before their bedtimes. Thing is, my colleagues in spirit, I’ve sometimes ... not always ... detected a faint whiff of superiority in the grizzled countenances of my social set. How so? The blue-skinned galvanizer, neck a block of pounded dough cut like compressed switchbacks, raises a Vincent Price brow as if he wanted to try out a newly-purchased pendulum on my nutsack. I stew and fret that it’s not all in my head, that these social faux pas (paes?, pae? et I’m not so comfortable avec les Canadiens qui se présentent au bar aprés minuit, soit) are causes for shunning, or perhaps I’ve just got a bad case of confessionalitis, the condition, as the term makes plain, an efflorescence of talking about oneself that would be OH (not the state abbr., Ms. or Mr. Editor, please)-so much more easeful if my compatriots, brothers, workmates, satsang, horizontally-structured aides-de-camp (Thackeray would scoff) just let their feelings be made plain, and in soothing tones.

But that’s not the half of it. No. Because I hide my closet literary preoccupations from the rough-and-tumble of the not infrequent social rites of log-burling (the winner is always an André the Giant lookalike with the feet of a hampster) and gas-siphoning the foreman’s nephew’s Prius with a party straw during company picnics, it sometimes emerges as a strangled blurt during those poetry open-mics when I profess my love of Pennzoil, wood alcohol, (briefly) cohabiting divorcées from (and to) Prince George, and cheroots. The mildly sleepy or mildly astonished faces of the candlelit crowd hide oceanic vagaries when I try to placate by fusing (scribbled notes on podium at wood and at that sheet of  foolish secrets near the screaming cars on Dundas) backloaded theories with honouring our shared space. In short, I get it both ways. And as a white male of ancient (second gen) residency with the manners of a turbojägered rhino at a tea party, I realize the preconceptions I face going into these literary soirées, when a blank slate is a ridiculous Rousseauean fantasy, are a fait accompli. Nevertheless, I mean to navigate somehow, through Parnassian decree (or perhaps just a more amenable bureaucratic community ... or gig! can’t we dream) a more sympathetic space for those minority headscapes to exist in, and thrive.