When people stop me on the street to ask me to autograph their dog or stay away from their small children, they’ve started to ask me, “Ira, what makes you so darn cynical? Don’t you take anything seriously?” I usually suggest that they have me confused with Carson McCullers, but those who have actually read any of her works insist: “Ha ha. But, seriously, don’t you take anything, umm, you know, seriously?”
No, I don’t. If you had seen some of the things I have seen, you probably wouldn’t, either.
Recently, less than an hour after a heavy rainfall, a city vehicle washed the street in front of my house. I couldn’t help but wonder why: could the rainwater have made the street too clean? If the acid content in the rain wasn’t high enough, was the city afraid it wouldn’t hasten the deterioration of the road, slowing construction next summer?
The only reasonable explanation for this perceived behaviour that I can come up with is that it would take too much planning and paperwork to send the street cleaner to a street that actually needed cleaning. Any world where it is more expensive not to receive a service than it is to receive that service is a world I refuse to take seriously.
(After the storm, I noticed an elderly woman walking along the side of the road, picking up worms that had fled the wet soil. So, that’s where those booths along the highway get their worms to sell to fishermen, I thought. It’s so much easier than digging them up! I took the woman as a sign, a la Shakespeare, that the gods had finally gone senile.)
One of the tellers in my bank looks like pop star Madonna. If that’s not enough to make you lose faith in the nation’s financial institutions, she recently managed somehow, possibly through divine intervention, to get herself pregnant. Having a pregnant Madonna tell you that updating your comic book collection is not a good enough reason for a loan would, I submit, make the most reasonable among us cynical.
I used to have a lot of contact with members of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). Not, I assure you, by choice. Members of the CPC (ML) believed that Russia and China had diverged from true Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and that the only pure Communist state was, of all places, Albania. Yes, lovely and scenic Albania, Envher Hoxha’s blighted peach on the Mediterranean. Their favourite activity was endlessly debating issues that didn’t matter, which, I have come to believe, had long ago replaced sex as the most important drive in their lives.
Soon after I stopped having contact with the group, several of its members started one of the first and, I presume, most financially successful video magazines in Canada. (No causal relationship is implied.) As I write this, several years later, the magazine still exists. The best way I can reconcile their beliefs with their actions is to assume that they reasoned that supporting a mindless culture would hasten the decay of our bourgeois capitalist system; and, if they were forced to make money in the process, well, that was a sacrifice they would just have to learn to accept. Or, maybe they really did love Pauly Shore movies.
In any case, the whole episode destroyed what little shred of sympathy I may have had for radical politics.
I was walking home one afternoon more recently when I noticed a young girl playing on the front lawn of her home. Her mother was working in the garage. The girl fell down and started to bawl. After a few seconds, she stopped, looked around and realized that her mother was not going to come out and look after her. The girl then picked herself up, ran to the garage and started bawling again.
So much for childhood innocence.
While shopping downtown, my sister and I noticed an unattended ladder in front of Old City Hall. Although it was fully extended, the ladder didn’t actually go anywhere. “The government obviously thought that piece of sky needed to be fixed,” I commented.
People often mistake me for the Irish Republican Army. Not any single member of the IRA, mind you, but the entire organization. What still amazes me, even though I’ve heard the jokes for many years, is that the teller invariably assumes that his or her version is as new to me as it is to him or her. In self-defense, I sometimes pull out a 72 point headline I’ve taken from a local newspaper that reads “IRA KILLERS” and tell the person that what makes us most dangerous is jokes about our name.
This is not the only time that my name has caused me consternation. (Consternated me?) I once had a year’s subscription to National Geographic addressed to “Miss Ira Nayman.” Needless to say, I did not renew.
My name has also contributed to my generally aggravated sense of paranoia. People often call me I, as if my name isn’t already short enough. To discourage this practice – would you like being reduced to a single letter? – I started responding by calling them by their initials, but, so far, few people have taken the hint. Thus, whenever I’m in public and hear anybody saying a word the letter “I” (I ran, irascible, eyesore), I think they’re talking about me. I’ve learned to cope with this problem, though: now, I assume that everybody is talking about me, but there’s not a thing I can do about it.
Just the other day, I saw four elephants being led trunk to tail through Nathan Phillips Square. “Aha,” I quietly said to myself, “the rumours that the Premier is about to call an election must be true.”
The thing is, the world doesn’t need me to look ridiculous. It manages to look that way quite well on its own, thank you very much. If I perhaps see this more clearly than most, be thankful I use this vision for entertainment, and not some more nefarious purpose.