Included Below: Cats / Emotional Friction / Beans / Chaos / Storytime. Click HERE for further information about this newsletter. To those from before and those who are new-
I. WELCOME
The cat came back.
This odd thing keeps happening to me.
As I’ve previously noted, I like to walk. Like, really walk. Besides the periods where we’re allowed to sit inside a restaurant, there isn’t much else to do. So, I feel fortunate that at least it’s an activity I enjoy. Even in the winter, no matter how cold, I just layer-up and head out.
This has happened to me four different times, in four different parts of the city, and with four different cats. I’ll be walking along, minding my own business, and a cat jumps out from somewhere, stops, and looks me up and down. I’m not one to kneel down and try to pet a random cat. Nothing against it, I just feel they are usually minding their own business, so I will mind my own business as well.
But, I am trying to listen to nature more. Sounds weird, I know. I mean that I’ve found such calmness in just stopping and admiring and appreciating things like trees, animals, the lake, and all that. Nature can be beautiful and brutal, boring and profound.
So, I’d usually just stare at the cat staring at me, give a nod, maybe a silent hello, and move on. But, the cat usually starts following me. And I wouldn’t even say follows, it more walks alongside me for a while. I’m talking like 15 or 20 minutes sometimes. I wouldn’t acknowledge it and it won’t acknowledge me. We just walk together until the cat gets bored and we part ways.
Then the stakes got raised a bit. I was walking along the perimeter of High Park. At night, which is probably not the best idea. It was along the road in High Park and there were streetlights. Ahead of me, I saw an animal crossing the street that looked like a medium-sized dog. I kept walking, assuming it was a dog off-leash and the owner would be along. But, when it saw me, it stopped in the middle of the road. As I got closer, I was pretty sure it was a coyote. I did feel a tremor of fear rising, but by this point I had had several cat companions. Coyotes are not cats, but still. I just didn’t do anything. Sure, I made a bit of a wide berth around it, and it watched me the entire time. But, I could feel it relax. I just did what I did with the cats - I minded my own business, and I’d like to think this encouraged it to do the same.
I don’t know what any of this means. I’d like to think that perhaps animals and nature in general are spilling on to our concrete and trying to show us how ridiculous some of our actions have been. Wishful thinking, perhaps.
Q - What’s your favourite animal?
II. TALES FROM THE DREAM ROOM
Each month welcomes an exclusive story from a parallel world.
The Dream Room is a place that where everything is interconnected. The sights and sounds and people that inhabit this world feel familiar. The tales pulled from the Dream Room are sometimes true and sometimes fiction, they may scare you or make you laugh. The Dream Room is a place not to be taken lightly and if you’re ready to enter, read the excerpt below and click on the link for the full story.
Over the last year of writing stories for this section, I’ve been working at pulling them together and building a book from this. One of the main characters driving the story is Jazmine Moon, someone that, in some ways, I have been developing for many years. Below is an excerpt from where she starts out in the story.
EMOTIONAL FRICTION: Let’s get this out of the way. As a man, in no way do I want to take up space, time, and energy with my story in spaces where it’s not appropriate. This isn’t an attempt to elbow my way into somewhere I don’t belong. But, this kind of thing is exactly why I’ve built up this newsletter, it’s my little corner of the internet, and I don’t feel as though it’s infringing on anyone’s space. You’re here because you want to be here. And I’m grateful for that. At the same time, I do think it’s important for men to be a part of these conversations, and not in the way we’re used to, by either shutting the hell up or to open up. Either way, all I’m saying is to figure out how to participate in ways that are useful. It’s not hard (speaking to the guys, here).
Q - If anything in this story resonates with you or you would like to share something, please write to me.
III. PAUL’S PICKS.
A recommendation of something watched, read, or listened to.
Based on true events, Beans is a movie about the 78-day standoff between two Mohawk communities and the Canadian government in 1990 in Quebec. The film was made by Tracey Deer, who as a child lived through the Oka Crisis at Kanesatake.
The story revolves around Tekehentahkhwa, nicknamed Beans, a young Mohawk girl who lives on a reservation in Kahnawake. Beans and her family join the protest against the expansion of a golf course into Kahnawake territory. As the crisis unfolds, Beans embarks on a personal transformation and deeper understanding of her community.
From a personal perspective, I was actually around Beans age when this terrible situation was going on. Honestly, I didn’t really understand the significance of it. In the film, the director uses archive news footage from the time, and it’s really shocking how this event was portrayed. This movie is quite incredible and does a spectacular job of mixing drama with real life situations. It certainly made me understand this crisis in a deeper way and inspired me to learn more about it.
Q - What’s something you’ve seen based on true events that has made you look into what actually happened in a deeper way?
IV. FROM THE ARCHIVES.
An old story brought to you in a new way.
CHAOS (OCTOBER 2018): Further down Queen Street, a man sitting on a bench called out to me, he said, “You are a very lucky man!” Confused, as I seldom felt lucky, I stopped. “You are lucky. You are holding an incredible amount of pain inside of you. From the outside, your friends and everyone else think you are happy, but they cannot see the inside of you.”
This gave me pause. He continued, “The last two years have been very difficult for you. Lots of ups and downs. There has been a lot of negativity in your life, and you are holding on to it. You have to get rid of that negative energy.”
“How do I do that?” I asked.
“I can show you. You are in pain right now, but you are lucky because in six months everything will be better. It will be as though you are a different person.”
“How do you know this? Where did you come from?”
“I came here from India to speak with you. I walk around and am never in the same place twice. Also, I am psychic. If you show me your palm and twenty dollars, I can tell you what will happen.”
Read the whole story at this link.
Q - When life feels out of control, what kinds of things do you do to calm down?
V. WATCH, LISTEN, READ, OR DO.
Something to take with you.
New podcast episode alert! I might’ve mentioned that I have a new book out and I haven’t really figured out what to do with it. The good news is that something exciting is in the works! Can’t say anything right now.
As I’ve also mentioned, I had a lot of time on my hands last year, and so decided to figure out how to do an audiobook. I did all the recordings and edited the stories - yeesh, listening to myself that long was probably not healthy at the time. I was excited because some of the stories originated at Stories We Don’t Tell, so I thought it could be a fun mix of in-studio stories and live performances.
I finally got around to uploading the audiobook using the Amazon platform and it is so ridiculously clunky and terrible to use that I gave up. It seems that Amazon didn’t like the live performance audio files. But, I liked them and I wanted to include them. I was planning on posting some of the stories on my podcast as excerpts as an incentive to purchase the audiobook. But, screw it, and screw Amazon, I decided to just release all the stories on my podcast.
So, I lied on the podcast. In the introduction, I reference the audiobook, but there is no audiobook. And honestly, I am just too lazy to redo all that. And really, I think it’s kind of funny to talk about an audiobook when there is no audiobook.
This part might feel familiar because I basically wrote all the same thing back a few months ago. But, there really are six new stories posted right over HERE, so check them out. And that’s it, that’s the last round of stories for this season. This means all (most) of the stories from the book can be listened to by subscribing to the podcast. You can also get more info on the podcast HERE, and listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Some people have said that I have a compelling way to present stories, and others have said I have a great voice to fall asleep to - you can decide!
Q - Always on the hunt for new podcasts - what’re you listening to?
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve included a question at the end of each section. No, this isn’t required homework. However, if you are compelled to write to me with your thoughts, I would love to hear from you. Who knows, I might even share some of the answers in future newsletters (anonymously, of course). Email me here: jpd@pauldore.com.
December 2021 Edition: Sparking Joy / Moon / Tig / No Pictures! / Stories We Don’t Tell.