Included Below: Wind of Change / Tunnels / Stories We Tell / Grumpy / Stories We Don’t Tell. Click HERE for further information about this newsletter. To those from before and those who are new-
I. WELCOME!
Wind of Change.
Oof, it really does suck getting old, doesn’t it? Last month I talked a bit about doing things to keep my mind going. This month it’s more of the same except now I’m trying to keep my body going.
I’m a pretty active person and this combined with the people around me, I’ve usually felt a bit younger then I actually am. But this last year has really caught up with me. After a couple of health issues and finally getting the Covid, I feel a bit betrayed by my body, like I can’t quite trust it at the moment.
I’ve talked to some people a bit older than me and been told that my body is going through a change. I mean, I’m middle-aged after all, this was bound to happen. I’ve also been told that there’s an adjustment period and things will get better.
What I do know is that it’s true: I’ve started sighing when sitting down/standing up, random aches and pains appear and disappear, and my recuperating time from an injury or illness is not what it used to be. If I stop exercising, before I had a few weeks of staying in shape before it started to slip. Now, if I don’t exercise, it feels as though things immediately start to backslide.
I am glad that I have remained active for most of my life. It’s not so much of a shock to my body when I start exercising again after a period of lethargy. After this rough year of living dangerously, I am hoping to get back to some kind of consistency again in regards to activity and exercising. My body and I used to be on good terms, we used to understand each other, trust one another. I’d like to get back to that again.
For no other reason then this song/music video being so incredibly earnest in ways only achievable in the late 1980s and 1990s, and I guess because we’ve been talking about changes, here are the Scorpions with Wind of Change:
Q - You don’t have to answer me, but notice anything changing with you?
II. TALES FROM THE DREAM ROOM
Each month welcomes an exclusive excerpt of a 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.
Now it’s becoming a series of novels. Every month this section will include an excerpt from a work in progress of the first volume in the Dream Room Series. The Dream Room is a place not to be taken lightly and if you’re ready to enter, read below and click on the link for the full story.
THE DREAM ROOM SERIES - VOLUME ONE: Blair dropped down into the tunnels. A light slowly turned on as though attached to a dimmer switch. She looked to her right, to her left. As she walked into the tunnel, overhead motion lights turned on as she approached, and turned off as she receded.
Blair walked until she reached another ladder and exit to above ground. She climbed the ladder, slowly and slightly opened the manhole-like cover, scanning the area before pushing the lid up further. This opening was actually outside the perimeter of The Campsite and in the middle of wide open fields. Again, the fields were intentionally bare so sight of vision could be far reaching. A single dirt road cut through the fields from The Campsite out to a country road. They could see someone driving from a kilometre away. Blair waited, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and dropped back down into the tunnels.
There were five entrances and exits in and out of the tunnels: where she originally entered by Cabin Alley, in the basement of Pine Manor, one in the Command Centre in the Lake House, outside the perimeter in The Fields, and where she headed now, back to the Main House. In addition to the tunnels, the video cameras, and the supplies, the entire Campsite was rigged with traps. Crude in nature, they were built and integrated into the landscape, so again, at first sight, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The traps were not in use most of the time, they were designed to be easily set. Isaac looked at them as more of a backup, as needed, and they sat ready to go but not on for various safety reasons.
As Blair walked through the tunnel leading to the Main House, she thought about her life at The Campsite with Isaac. She was almost a teenager and of course was getting curious about the world around her.
Read the rest of the excerpt at this link.
III. PAUL’S PICKS
A recommendation of something watched, read, or listened to.
Sarah Polley has been a constant presence my entire life. We are about the same age and for as long as I can remember, she has been there. She started as a child actor in television and film and then went on to be a writer and filmmaker. Right up to now where you probably saw her accepting the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for her film, Women Talking. So, I was very curious to read her book of essays that form a sort of memoir called Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory. I highly recommend the book - she writes about her experiences as an actor, about the #MeToo movement, becoming a mother, and her struggles with a head injury.
Polley really has evolved into a successful and highly sophisticated filmmaker and I’ve enjoyed all of her work, from Away from Her to adapting the Margaret Atwood book, Alias Grace, into a mini-series. These are all great works but I recently revisited her 2011 documentary Stories We Tell, and I would suggest that this film can function as a companion piece to her book. She writes about her father, mother, and siblings, and since the documentary is about her family, it’s interesting to put faces to names.
What inspires me about Polley is how she seems to follow her interests and curiosities. A lot of things can be about what it will get you the next time. Say, if I do this job, it will lead to this other project. How many times are we able to do something just for the sake of doing that thing? Polley seems to do things for the sake of exploring the ideas, to see what’s there, what we could learn about ourselves.
I have not registered the weight of loss of the last few years. I have been there with my whole heart but only half my brain. I weep for how little I knew about how altered I have been. This moment of clarity passes. But there is another one two days later, and another the day after that. Then they start to come on top of each other. Several a day, lasting longer and longer. After four weeks, I never have headaches, brain fog, confusion, dizziness, or fatigue anymore. I am myself. I am back. I can do anything I did before and more. Because now that “run towards the danger” organizes my life, I find that I jump into the tasks that scare me, the ones I have always avoided. ——— Sarah Polley / Run Towards the Danger.
Q - Any movie recommendations?
IV. FROM THE ARCHIVES
An old story from my blog brought to you in a new way.
What seems like a long time ago, I released a book called Dreams of Being a Kiwi. And since this month’s newsletter has a loose theme of mental health, I figured it would be good to drop this in here. Excerpts from the book can be found on my blog starting below, audio excerpts on my podcast, and more information on the book can be found at this link.
THE GRUMPY BASTARD WHO CHANGED HIS MIND (MAY 2014): I used to have this friend who was really grumpy. It started off all cute and stuff, you know, had a smart ass comment about everything, criticized people doing earnest work, complained a lot.
A disposition cultivated in university, this friend became a pretentious bastard after watching foreign films and was almost unbearable after being introduced to The Beats. Probably, if Jack Kerouac published On the Road now, my friend would hate it. “I mean, come on, enough with the run-on sentences already.”
The pretentiousness and assholery only grew once he was released into the post-university world. Sure, he was working in his field, he knew this and felt pretty cool about it. He was discernibly a most uncool person. He would soon learn this.
My friend kept up the ruse, but as he became more grumpy, more pretentious, more of a complainer, something else seeped into the mix. Bitterness. A person complains enough, is grumpy enough, that toxic mix has the potential to turn into a thoroughly unbearable individual. Through it all, we kept our friendship up, but more out of obligation instead of anything in common. My fear being his grumpiness would rub off on me.
Read the whole story at this link.
Q - Do you notice a difference in yourself from when you were younger?
V. WATCH, LISTEN, READ, OR DO
Something to take with you.
I know it seems like all I’m doing in this section is talking about Stories We Don’t Tell, but what the hell, we only have one more event this season, so I’m going to keep mentioning it. Damn, our last event was by all accounts a smashing success, if I don’t say so myself. We had six incredible storytellers, wonderfully welcoming hosts, and an exception audience. It really was a packed house and we are humbled and so gracious over the amount of people that expressed how much they enjoyed the show.
Our next event will be in May and we’ll have more information about that soon. In the meantime, if you have a story you’d like to share at our event, please fill out this form. Even if you have only an idea about what you’d like to talk about, come and check it out. Since we have a bit of time before the next event, we’ll be doing three workshops again. Here are the dates:
Workshop 1 - Saturday, April 15th.
Workshop 2 - Thursday, April 27th.
Workshop 3 - Saturday, May 6th.
Event - Saturday, May 13.
Q - Do you have a story you’d think would fit SWDT?
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.
March 2023 Edition: Zombies / The Campsite / Undone / Kiwi / SWDT Redux.