BARBED WIRE webzine Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee also available in glorious technicolour at http://home.istar.ca/~paull/wire Comments are welcome. Email paull@istar.ca Barbed Wire is produced by a group of enthusiastic malcontents. This is a short- term project, a premeditated cultural blip, planned for 12 issues. Original illustrations are by Geoff Carter. ISSUE 10 - The Love, Hate and Shit Issue C O N T E N T S Message From the Editor There's an even Thicker Line The Irregulars IN BOX Readers write: impressed in Thailand, mammagraphical invitations, wire collectors, and Who's Who. Lost and Found Alex Mackenzie finds scrawled note on the street at West Broadway. The Love, Hate & Shit Issue Thematically linked stories from the Barbed Wire stable L O V E & H A T E Bar-Goers Guide to Drinking Ettiquete David Quills loves working at a local watering hole but he hates customers who don't mind their p's and q's.When dealing with a bartender, "Don't talk about micro-breweries or how cool it must be to work in a bar," he advises. Keep the Tip Paul Levine attends a rally organized by a group of men who would love their lives more if they didn't hate the fact they'd had their foreskins removed. "Circumcision's not okay. It doesn't give it takes away!" they chant. The Hymn of Hate Chuck Blade visits his local libary and discovers that there's not enough hate in the world. "Love is the lay of the land as we quickly approach the 21st century," he tells us. "Hate has been called out into the naked light of day, deemed internationally criminal". The Thin Line Kathy Paris has a love-hate relationship with independence, risk-taking and change brought about by moments of insight. "The clarity of the understanding can be euphoric, a moment to live for in the midst of catastrophe," she admits. Riot As residents of Jakarta take to the streets to riot, Meredith Low thinks of her time spent in a peaceful Indonesian town. "I couldn't have imagined, looking around me on the streets, that people would channel so much of their righteous anger over their poverty and despair towards people who have it better than they do," she tells us. S H I T Newborn Diaper Surprise Mark Redding has always had an hankering for dolls, he tells us, "specifically ones which can not only wet, but can now, thanks to advanced faeces technology, soil themselves." Shitting in the Third World Meredith Low gives us a guide to awkward rectal evacuations in developing countries. "Imagine," she asks us, " having raging diarrhoea and using scratchy locally-produced pulp product on your privates." You Don't Know Shit Local photographer X. Crement takes us on a visual tour of the shitty side of Asian travel. Inbox: MOOSE-SHAGGERS I have just discovered Barbed Wire, read issue #9, and am well impressed. You guys have done a great job. The most thought-provoking reading material I've found on the web so far. I sincerely hope you continue to put it together beyond your projected 12 issues. Would you be interested in any submissions from Thailand? I work on a food and nightlife magazine in Bangkok and know a lot of writers in this town who have material that's too non-mainstream to get published in any way, shape or form here but would probably love to have it put out there somehow. Anyway, keep up the good work. It's nice to know you have something other than moose-shaggers and lumber-jacks up there. areveirs@lox1.loxinfo.co.th WELL ENDOWED Hi, its me Katie! was it you that wanted to see pics of me?? if so.. the page is http://come.to/myhugebreasts bye! GREAT SITE AND CONTENT great site and content... laubli@canadawired.com BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE I was surfing the web and found you under barbed-wire. I am mainly interested in barbed-wire collections, or info on how to find out how much such a collection might be worth. If you can help me on this matter, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Charlotte Holt e-mail address; charholt@hpnc.com WHO'S WHO Who's Who whiswhizvv@sprynet.com Dear Candidate, You have been selected as a potentially qualified candidate for inclusion on the latest state of the art, The International Executive Guild's Who's Who CD-Rom. Our researchers gather information from many recognized sources including professional associations and societies, trade organizations, newspaper and magazine articles, web presence, and referrals from existing members. As a highly respected professional in your field of expertise, we believe your contributions merit very serious consideration for inclusion on The International Executive Guild's Who's Who CD-Rom. To maintain the highest level of accuracy we ask you to click on the web address below and fill out the brief bit of information on our application form. THERE IS NO COST OR OBLIGATION FOR INDIVIDUALS TO BE EVALUATED FOR INCLUSION AND ALL APPLICANTS WILL RECEIVE A FREE GIFT COMPLIMENTS OF THE INTERNATIONAL EXECUTIVE GUILD. http://www.executiveguild.com/apply.html My Sincere Thanks, Anthony Ingallinella Executive Director Bar Goers Guide to Drinking Ettiquete by David Quills Tired of ordering weak drinks from a slow moving waitress with come-ons as genuine as that of a Randy River sales girl? Good. Go get in that self-serve line. It's the only way to get a good drink. Bartenders underpour waitresses so they can overpour their own customers (ie. the self-serve line clientele). It's a fact. Besides, that waitress wasn't asking you to stick around so she could grab a ride back to Delta in your 5.0 litre. She was just working tips. Face it: you may be hot shit in the suburbs, but downtown there's lots of cell phones and Nash Bridges stubble. And downtown people know how to conduct themselves in a self-serve line. Do you? Dear David, What's the big deal with asking for a glass of water? The last bartender I asked gave me a plastic cup and told me to go drink out of the toilet. I mean, come on, water's free. Isn't it? Signed, Parched in PoCo Dear Parched, Ordering water is generally considered bad etiquette. Very Ralph Furly. And the fact that water's free is the big deal. You see, Parched, bartenders make their money from tips and sales. You asking for a free glass of water isn't doing anybody any good. It's economics, baby, fucking economics. Anyway, bartenders consider it a waste of time. Their sometimes brash behaviour is usually just an attempt to set the tone, as it were. So you don't come back asking all night. But if you absolutely must have a glass of water, then use a medical excuse. Medical excuses always work. Tell the bartender you have Strep Throat. I don't know. Anything. Sum up how intelligent the bartender appears and go from there. You're obviously going to get away with a lot more at Funky Winkerbean's than at the Sylvia Hotel. Don't get too fancy, though. Stick to the basics. Say you have to take your antibiotics. Or say you've got the hiccups. Something like that. (Right along the same tip, if you want a drink without ice, tell the bartender you just had some dental work done. It'll save you getting that 'no ice' attitude.) And always tip. Especially for water. Talk to the jar long enough and a bartender will you give you a glass of blood with no ice. Dear Quill-man Everytime I order I feel like I'm driving the bartender insane. What's the problem? I'm just trying to party. Signed, Bewildered in West Whalley. Dearest Bewildered, Maybe it's the way you order that's so offensive. Do you order all your drinks at once, or do you constantly keep adding to your order once the bartender has started making your drinks? Bartenders hate that. Slows them down. Time is money. They'll punish you for it. Give you the weak drink. Bartenders are angry, vengeful individuals. Stressed-out time bombs. Airtraffic controllers with a 9 a.m. call back. Careful how you treat them. Order those rye and cokes all at once, Whalley, and always remember: Bartenders are at work. You may be 'partying', but they're working. Could you imagine what it would be like trying to do your job with 300 drunk people screaming at you throughout your entire shift? It would sure make collecting U.I. and watching TV a little more difficult than usual, wouldn't it Whalley? You can make small talk, just don't talk shop. Don't talk about micro-breweries or how cool it must be to work in a bar. Ask your bartender how he's doing. Talk sport or movies, even. 'Cept don't order a White Russian while talking about 'The Big Lebowski'. I hear that's becoming a real problem. And don't call your bartender nicknames. No one likes to be called Stretch or Suds. Or Quill-man, for that matter. Dear Mr. Quill, At the last bar I went to the bartender threw my change back at me. Literally threw it. Why would he do such a thing, Mr Quill? Why? Signed, Hurt feelings in Haney. Dear Hurt, Let me answer your question with a question. How did you give the money to the bartender? When A bartender throws back change it usually means someone threw it at him in the first place. I'm not saying you threw the money, Hurt, but let's face it: you threw the money. All you steroid boys out Pitt Meadows way are always throwing money. Throwing money and never saying your 'please' and 'thank- yous'. You can't throw money at your server. It's disrespectful and degrading. If you're gonna be all macho and wing a crumpled up sawbuck at your bartender, why not go all out and just shove the twenty up the bartender's left nostril while fucking his underage sister over the oak, calling him Suds, and telling him "relax" and "you gotta learn to smile". And while you're at it, why not order a glass of water, too. No, Hurt. Enough. We must do unto others. Pay like an adult. Hand your money over nicely, or place it down softly on the bar-mat. Never pay with nickels and dimes. And never, never, attempt to throw change, even in jest, into the tip jar. Bartenders hate fishing quarters out of the ice well. They'll hold it against you, just like everything else you do wrong in the self-serve line. Remember, Hurt, it's not about making friends, it's about getting drunk. David Quill Keep the Tip (originally published as "Getting in Touch with Your Inner Foreskin" in the now defunct Euphony webzine) by Paul Levine As seagulls glide over the five sails at Canada Place, pausing only momentarily to empty yesterday's dinner on harried tourists and conventioneers, a small group of men and women have gathered outside to protest the state of penises in today's world. Many are wearing operating room attire and holding up placards painted with concise ryhming mantras designed to distill the main message of the event into a bitsize chunk. "No Excuse for Medical Abuse" hints at the theme. Specifically planned to coincide with the World Congress and Expo on Child Health running in Vancouver at the time, this protest rally is brought to you by the local chapter of the National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males, or NOHARMM for short. Their aim is simply: they want to end the practise of circumcision which they view as an entirely unnecessary and potentially dehabilitating practise. A makeshift podium housing a life-like male infant doll with its foreskin intact provides a centerpiece for the event. Stage regular Nicola Cavendish and three other local thespians begin a short performance which culminates in the mock circumcision of the plastic baby. As an actor dressed as a doctor reaches in with his cutting tool an old woman produces megaphone-enhanced blood curdling screams. Someone else jumps in, "Circumcision's not okay. It doesn't give it takes away!" A few seconds later everyone's chanting it. Now they've got our attention, we're paraded with a series of short speeches. We hear from a nurse, a doctor, and representatives from organizations with evocative acronyms like NOCIRC (National organization against infant circumcision) and RECAP (Recover A Penis). While the language is hyperbolic (babies are "mutilated", "amputated", and "deformed") the arguments are convincing. Basically it comes down to this: there is no good argument to circumsize a child. The old standbys - to prevent disease or infection, or to avoid social stigma - no longer stand up to criticism. Urinary tract infections affect only 1.5% of infant males, we're told; penile cancer is not restricted to uncircumsized men. And little Johnny will have no problems in the locker room if all his peers are uncircumsized too. Unsurprisingly, NOHARMM is an American organization and circumcision is largely an American problem. A doctor congratulates us Canadians on our progress in this area. "BC was the first province to stop paying for infant circumcision, " he says. "Paid circumcisions are now well under 10%. In the States the national average is at 60% and as high as 90% in some regions. We have the highest circumcision rate for non-religious, non-medical reasons in the world. This amounts to 3300 foreskins per day." I imagine this huge pile of accumulating foreskins and I need no further convincing. If I'm ever party to the production of a male human I'll think carefully before consenting to having him snipped. Meanwhile, living out the rest of my life not knowing the joys of owning a capped penis give me little cause for concern. The next speaker trotted out represents men who take a much less cavalier attitude to their modified members. A volunteer for NICIRC, Wayne Hampton tells us that circumcision can precipitate a lifetime trama for men who have been so mercilessly victimized. The cure, he tells us, is called "Foreskin restoration." I track Wayne down later and ask him how it all works. He tells me how his whole life centers around a moment when he was four years old when he first came to realize that "a piece of his penis had been cut off". He told me of a continuing trama that has dogged him all his life. When I asked him if it didn't help him just a little to realize that most of his peers were in the same boat he said it just made him "more depressed". "I was one of the ones who was badly psychologically damaged," he said. Close to despair in his early twenties, he stumbled upon a technique used by ancient roman slaves to "regrow" their forskins. Referring to his uncircumsized penis as "the remaining stump", he says he used a method that simultaneously stretched existing skin and slowly encouraged new skin to grow. "You pull the skin forward as much as you can," he said. "Then you apply surgical tape to hold it in position, and leave it on at night. Nightly erections cause the skin to stretch. It's a three to five year process and generates quite good results." I asked him what he had to say to someone, like me, who was quite content with his circumcised penis, who suffered no trauma to speak of, and found it more than adaquate for most uses. "I'd say that maybe you we're born with a Porsche and someone decided you should have a Volkswagon. It still gets you from point A to point B but it's not the same." He spoke with the obsessive enthusiasm of the convert about the finer points of having a restored penis. "Since I restored my sensitivity has at least doubled. Also I last longer. My wife gets twice the pleasure." Like the prowd owner of a new car, he spits out the features of his turbocharged member. As he tells me about "natural lube", "the glide effect" and "out of phase motion", I can't help thinking that I'm missing out somehow. While Wayne was forced to research reconstruction techniques on his own, nowadays there's a burgenoning cottage industry devoted to varying methods of getting men in touch with their inner foreskins. The bible of the trade is "The Joy of Uncircumsizing", a how to manual for home use. Today's consumer can choose from an endless variety of techniques and products. There's Foreballs - two stainless steel bearings welded with a stainless rod between them. Or you could try the PUD (Penis Uncircumcising Device) - a stainless steel cylinder with a hole drilled through the center. There's Second Skin (TM) Foreskin Restoration Cones or Sensi-tip - two velcro rings attached by a stripe of material (forming an H pattern). I spoke with rally organizer James Loewen who came across "The Joy of Uncircumcizing" in a local bookstore and put it to use. He too talked about a moment of awakening in his youth. "I've been frustrated about this from age seven," he said. "I talked with an intact boy and he showed me what he had and very gently said to me 'you've had part of yours cut off'. I asked him if, like Wayne, his transformation had vastly improved his sex life. He thought for a second and said, "It totally raised my consciousness". I decide I'll leave my consciousness exactly the way it is. Paul Levine The Hymn of Hate by Chuck Blade "Why is it we all write love songs? Why shouldn't we write hate songs?" [Shelley] My first reaction, when I was informed about the love/hate theme for the next issue of Barbed Wire, was one of relief. Confessionally based stories about love, whether they be cynically hip or earnestly credulous, seemed so ubiquitous a species in the low tide of today's literary flood as to be banal. Besides, if people really wanted to know, couldn't they just infer from our first fuck/worst fuck stories. No I had decided pretty quickly not to bother with this issue at all. I was definitely not going to write about love and I would save my spleen for the up and coming invective issue. Absent-mindedly one day I typed the word LOVE into the on-line catalogue at the library and 365 matches under the subject search returned. I was actually expecting more. The real surprise came when I typed in HATE. Only nine titles were retrieved. Idealistically I wondered if this drought of literature on the shelves of our main public library created the shallow top soil of ignorance from which, it is universally recognized, hate is known to sprout. Did there exist a design in the selection of materials that saved our innocence at the expense of incomprehension? Searches on EMNITY, MALEVOLANCE, and ANTIPATHY turned up zero. As quickly as I made up my mind I changed it. I still felt indifferent to write about my personal relation to the subject. Instead I decided to do what any skeptic would do when faced with a subject and unarmed with a thesis. I discarded the first person and resorted to semantics. A Very Brief History of the English Language Long before Samuel Johnson authored what is regarded as the precursor to the modern English dictionary, the language had been under siege from invading continental armies for centuries, who, having conquered vast territories of Britain, left linguistic chaos in their wake. The Scandinavians, the Dutch, the Germans, and the French can all claim lineage on the philological pedigree of the English language. Britain before the Norman Conquest must have been like Babel before the gods came down and spoiled the fun. Having brought modern civilization to the blue painted Celtic tribes of the island the Roman Empire collapsed in a startling compression of history. Subsequent settlement from the Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons, all Germanic in origin, supplanted the hapless Celts and laid the Germanic seed to the tribes and their language. Eventually the three peoples formed the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. The Jutes lost their national identity although some cultural influence seems to have survived in Kent within the ranks of The Benevolent Brotherhood of Exalted Bumdoodads. The Germanic dialect of Old English didn't appear in written form until approximately 700 AD. Beowulf, that proto-teutonic workhorse of English Literature courses across the land, is cited as the first appearance, in print, of hate as a noun. The Scandinavians had been merrily plundering the islands for about a century, enslaving the Irish, and settling down with the natives of northern Britain in Danelaw. The Vikings were a robust race compared to the anemic islanders and practiced a polytheistic religion that easily accommodated sin and salvation. The understandable stress of rape, pillage, and plunder was vented in a tradition known as Man-Matching: heroic boasting matches wherein the winner was declared he who could most entertain the gathered crowd by heaping vile and odious slander, unmatchable by his opponent. A version of this playful verbal bashing was practiced by the Negro slaves in the American South and is carried on to this day amongst the O.G.'s and flygirls of the inner city. Known as "The Dozens" the game involved orally sparring with your opponent, for example; "You're nothing but a shit stained little white boy, nigga, whose daddy done cum on a piece of doggie doo-doo and shoved it up yo' mamas ass fo' nine minutes till she shit you back out again." "Well, youse a half steppin nigga bitch, nigga, cause the best part of you dribbled down your mamas leg while she was sucking pig dick." The loser was the one who blew his cool under the barrage of insult. It functioned as a survival strategy since even worse humiliation was practiced upon these Afro-Americans by their white Massa and should the black lash out in anger at the white, far dire consequences would result. But I digress. After 1066, the Germanic Old English was relegated to an inferior position. The invaders native Old French dialect became the language of government and literature thereby imposing a new political and cultural life on the island and eliminating the influence of the Anglo-Saxon upper classes. In fact French remained as the language of the law courts until 1362. Speculating on this could uncover the deep root of antipathy felt between the English and the French that persists to this day. Synonymy Dominie Hate, detest, abhor; the emotional focus of these verbs is not blurred despite their thesaurhetorical shift in signification. Loathe, abominate, despise; synonymical word play does not miss the point these words make. Love, adore, adulate; something begins to go awry with these cognates. Worship, cherish, pine for; the relationship between the subject and its modifier is becoming confused. Around 1175 hate was the verb haten which developed from the Old English hatian. Knowing the Germanic roots of the language gives us the dubious yet provocative insight into the obstinate quality of this verb. It was during the time of the Great Vowel Shift, when long vowel sounds changed drastically resulting in thousands of two syllable words becoming monosyllabic, sometime in the 18th century that the n was dropped. After 1066 the Germanic Old English was relegated to an inferior position, according to Barnhart's Concise Dictionary of Etymology, remaining as the spoken tongue of the common people. With the iron grit of a smithy, haten was forged in the hearts of the peasentry, direct and impervious to the effete philological considerations of the bourgeois. Adapting to circumstance Old English borrowed from Old French, swelling the vocabulary and acquiring a large Romance element [love], thereby assimilating a great deal from the Classical World to become a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan language. This came at the expense of phonetic reason as in the French influence of writing the same sound many different ways-sure, nation, tissue, machine, fuschia, ocean- for the sh sound. This fickle quality fits love so well doesn't it? What about love and hate as nouns? Hate, rancor, revulsion; no dilution of the venom here. Hostility, enmity, malice; you can still taste the bile strongly. Love, fondness, liking; our desire begins to wither quickly. Cordiality, devotion, worship. The emphasis of this noun is becoming suspicious Maybe sanctimony should be added? A Few Thoughts about Feelings According to George Crabb's English Synonyms Explained in Alphabetical Order, with Copious Illustrations and Examples Drawn from the Best Writers: " Those under the influence of such feelings [hatred] derive pleasure from the misfortunes of others but the hater is not always instrumental in causing his misery or causing his unhappiness." By the 15th century English political and cultural life began to shift to London. Courtiers and Civil Servants became the "elite" and their normative fashion of speaking began to exert a new influence. Their forced attention to the written [more conservative] form of language encouraged standardization. Deprived of the means needed to acquire the educational standard, the only hope of moving beyond their caste, the final restraints were applied to the masses, insuring a secure and lower position for them in the new British society of fancy silk knickers. It's enough to get a man's ire up. In the 1700's, [Age of Reason] the Italians and French set up academies to regulate development of their languages. The English "Academy" took the form of a dictionary compiled by one man, Samuel Johnson, not a government sponsored committee. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary was adapted as a "standard of acceptable English" well into the 19th century. Later the exacting science of the Enlightenment, with its predilections for hierarchy and symmetry, divided the brain into two general brains; the Higher Brain and the Lower Brain. The seat of emotion was relegated to the Lower Brain, or "Fossil Brain" as it was coined, giving it a new evolutionary connotation, and the seat of reason was enshrined in the Higher Brain, implying that our feelings are something lesser, something prehistoric, as compared to our loftier, divine thoughts. Ultimately I Blame It All on Society The institutionalization of hate took on the masks of Justice: an effective subterfuge for mean dispositions, and Empire: the continuation of war by other means. We have, in this century, seen the grisly results of pogroms carried out under the banners of nationhood. Moral judgments are a particularly satisfying form of hatred and high principles; an ingenious disguise. Extensive research on paranoiacs revealed Jews, Freemasons, Communists, and the Roman Catholic Church as primary sources of their persecution, all of which are also prominent in the platforms of ultraconservative organizations like the John Birch Society. Neurotics feel much better when hate can be called patriotism and displayed openly. Today, of course, hate is everywhere on the cultural spectrum and a refreshing tonic it is. From the extreme misanthropy of Jim and Debbie Goad's Answer Me magazine to the well adjusted enmity of Jerry Sienfeld, hate makes good copy and gets the personality moving. It can almost be said that hate has, surreptitiously, attained a state of existence in our collective unconscious as love: it is everywhere in the air, ineffable, diffuse, transparent and blinding. Like love it has become something now best related to at a safe and ironic distance. Love is he lay of the land as we quickly approach the 21st century. Hate has been called out into the naked light of day, deemed internationally criminal, co-opted by network television, subjugated by the scorn of the righteous or the supremacy of God as is the case with our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and sentenced to a life of banality in the hearts and minds of the everyday people: the Good People. The hard edges of hate have been mined out of the psychic landscape by technocrat alchemists who appear to feel that a culture of psychotropic drugs will collectively silence any further effective moral reasoning. The advent of the home computer rendering obsolete the hard problems of social organization. Feeling real becomes a survival strategy in this bleak post-personal world: another issue of existence and yet because hate causes so much guilt we tend to steer our life's course by it. Maybe Freud was right calling goodness a contrived disguise of vileness. Maybe it's the result of having grown up with a culture offering false solutions for the experience of existence. Or maybe it's hate that we hate most of all. Chuck Blade The Thin Line by Kathy Paris I've always found that moment of change between being safe and not, fascinating. It's that agonizing moment before I hit the ground, when I have time to say, "oh, shit," or think, "this is gonna hurt." The popularity of extreme sports attests to the thrill of being on the edge. On occasion I stray into that space and time and congratulate myself for being fast enough, clever enough or lucky enough to make it back in one piece. These experiences change me. In small ways, sometimes, and in life-altering ways at other times. I'm fond of extremes-not just in sports. Black and white issues become uncomfortably grey as I get older, but I still like to hold a grudge, give my complete loyalty, judge unfairly or help friends in trouble. It's not simply the act of loving or hating, it's the moment when one turns into the other that makes life interesting. It's that moment of free fall when you know you are going to be something else or somewhere else. I went to high school in a dusty logging town. I developed the usual gamut of friends who hung out with me for various reasons. In grade nine (the year puffy down jackets were in and mine was navy blue) some enthusiastic teacher got the idea to put on a Winterfest. Where I grew up winter seems to last forever, snow is dulled by fly ash from the sawmills and the temperature hovers between deep freezer cold and just warm enough to turn everything to mud. Winterfest was a hell of an idea-a play day for high school students. To add a needed edge to Winterfest, Ted and I bribed somebody's mom to go to the liquor store and buy us a mickey of rye. We cleverly mixed it with Coke in cans from the vending machine and joined the festivities shortly after noon on a progressive, rollicking drunk. I remember bits and pieces of that day, surreptitiously mixing drinks, leaning against a white picket fence with my friend Ted, enjoying a sense of camaraderie while thumbing our noses at authority. What I remember most clearly, though, is falling down a flight of stairs. I probably had just used the washroom (seems logical, since I don't remember why I was inside the building) and was on my way out to catch the school bus home. I tripped at the top of the stairs, missed my grip on the railing, tumbled past the mural of tough loggers and majestic eagles and landed, (unhurt in the way of many drunks), at the feet of the much swooned-over French teacher. He picked me up, winced at the smell, looked as stern as possible and directed me towards to the big yellow bus. A bit shaken, I stumbled out to the bus, got on and made it about half way down the aisle before I started to throw up. The big surprise was not that I couldn't hold my rye, but that my nasty teenage nemesis took it upon herself the clean up the mess, clean up me and generally take care of the situation. What possessed her? We were definitely not friends. Later in my life I realized her efficiency might have had something to do with practice cleaning up after drunks, but at the time it was a gift of acknowledgment. In that moment I realized that I wasn't as invisible as I had felt. It wasn't a bonding experience, but it was enough to shift my view of myself. In that dizzying moment, I moved into the realm of the visible. My best friends have almost always been men. I have lots of theories about why that is, but mostly I find myself more comfortable with men. My love relationships with men are far more complex than the friendships. My first marriage was complicated by my husbands' alcoholism and we split up. I promptly moved in with Ian, a friend of mine from work. He was sweet, handsome, athletic, smart, responsible and taken. His girlfriend was none too happy about the situation, but he assured her that we were just friends. It was a great arrangement. We came and went independently but always could rely on each other to take out the trash, not drink the last beer, fill up the fridge with groceries and lock the door at night. I liked him. We could talk about anything. We laughed. He introduced me to Asian cooking and I'm not too sure what I gave him in return, but he made me feel safe, as if some of his confidence slopped over into my empty bowl. He had a talent for photography that captured the essence of the people he had met in his travels to South East Asia. He had brown hair, sparkley blue eyes and a quick smile. He played rugby with a passion, sporting injuries and game stories like a badge of honour. Eventually my husband began to say things I wanted to hear. Buy a home he said, have a family; he would stop drinking. Wavering, I sat down with Ian, who knew all the stories, and debated over a cup of coffee. Should I stay here, should I go back? In the middle of my angst attack, he reached out, seized my hand and said "I think I'm going to ask Pam to marry me, but first I wanted to ask if you thought you and I could be together." I was stunned. I didn't know. All the time it was easy and fun and uncomplicated, I didn't know what he felt. It was a moment my world could have turned, when a gift of goodness and light was offered and I foolishly shook my head. I chose the dark road I knew over a chance for happiness. It said more about my preference for dark roads and broken men than I could recognize at the time. He married Pam and I went home to my husband. I spent four weeks on the beach one year, taking a breather from retail. In between jobs, I took an August off to pursue an endless summer. Daily, I loaded up my sailboard and drove to the beach with my wetsuit, my book and my beach blanket and dragged my board down to the water. I worked on my boardsailing skills, honing my technique in fickle winds with a goal to make it out to the freighters anchored in the inlet. One morning a weather system pushed in, slanting perfectly across the dome of the sky, creating a dividing line of storm clouds invisibly held in check by the clear blue sky. The wind picked up a steady pace while the sun beat down. Excited by my first opportunity to sail in a substantial wind, I dragged my board into the water. I pulled up the sail, hooked in and skipped out to the freighters in a glorious cross wind. When the beach was a tiny line with indistinct details, I jibed to turn around, lost my balance and promptly fell in. I scrambled onto my board, pulled up the sail, got about 10 feet and fell in again. An hour later, I was still bobbing in the chop, buffeted by the whipping wind, exhausted and unable to make any headway. Boats went by and frustration turned to fear as I drifted with the tide. The moment came when a seal popped its' head above the surface and looked at me with shiny, black eyes, wrinkled its whiskery nose and then disappeared beneath the waves. I was alone. There was no one waiting for me, no one looking for me. No one was going to help me. I went from victim to rescuer in a free fall moment. I was responsible. I needed to be in control of the situation. Finally, I figured out that my dagger board was in the wrong position. With the dagger board down, I was able to sail in with no problems. I landed my board well down from my launch point and walked it back under the still blazing sun. My slog through pounding waves was permeated by the recognition that I could no longer drift and react to situations, that I needed to be proactive, to plan ahead. It was a revelation punctuated by a bitchin' sunburn. Expo 86 rolled around and I began looking for a new career. I decided that I would train to be a cook. Based on the fact I knew some men who were employed as cooks and knowing that if they could get jobs, I could, I enrolled in a three- semester course and fell in love with a profession. I could be creative, work with my hands, use my management skills and best of all, I didn't have to sell anybody anything. People enjoyed my food and admired my skill. I was a happy apprentice until I landed a job at a fancy hotel restaurant. The pay was bad but the prestige of working there promised to make up for it. The chef began to take every opportunity to squash my efforts and enthusiasm. He put me on split shifts: morning (breakfast service and lunch prep) and evening (dinner service and clean up). Then he piled on the joe-jobs-chopping carrots and onions for hours on end, lugging pots of soup to the fridge, pulling boxes of potatoes off the top shelf of the cooler. Maybe a talented woman in the kitchen was a threat to him or perhaps it was a hazing for the apprentice, but pressure was too much and my love for the work began to die. I lost weight from standing in front of a 600 degree stove and busting my ass to make sure everything was perfect. I repeatedly hitched up my pants because the sweat running down my back, legs and into my shoes dragged my clothing down with it. I started to hate the industry and one day I walked in and quit. It took me a long time to admit that this career that had started so well was not right for me. The realization came the day I came home and noticed that all my plants had died. The job had destroyed my creativity, desire and joy. I was hanging onto a dream that had died. Clearly and with a sense of relief, it was time to move on. My only regret was that the chef wasn't there the day I told the sous-chef that I'd found a better job-in a different industry. Sionara. See ya later. Like, never. It's about that moment when a lover finally leaves, when I choose to ski down a slope too steep and too bumpy, the moment when I really know what I already knew. It's about the moment I can't take back. An opportunity for change is hardly something that most people look forward to. It usually involves hardship, betrayal or a difficult road in a new direction, but the clarity of the understanding can be euphoric, a moment to live for in the midst of catastrophe. My choices of friends, work, lovers, therapists, role models and sports have all given me moments of revelation. It's a moment when I can be absolutely sure of what is going to happen next. Kathy Paris Riot by Meredith Low If you are on the road long enough, eventually you need to replace the basics. My bathing suit was hanging around my ankles, the elastic having long since given out, so I finally decided I needed a new one. This would be a challenge. I was travelling through Indonesia, where I tower over even the men, and I worried about breaking chairs. It's not that I'm a giant - it's just a petite populace. I really didn't think a swimsuit to fit me would be a piece of cake to find, especially in the drab, untouristy, northern Indonesian city I was in. But the day before I was leaving for Malaysia, the last of my local currency burning a hole in my pocket, I went past a lingerie store in one of the crowded, vertical, fire-trap hi-rise shopping malls, and spied a bathing suit. I tried it on, trying out my Indonesian language abilities ("Big enough? Are you sure? Do you have a big size?"). It actually fit just fine and even looked pretty good, a kicky little number with a Mondrian print on it. The easiest bathing suit purchase of my life, bar none. What luck. As they were wrapping it up for me, the women there, the shop owners and their clerk, asked me how it was that I was in this city in northern Indonesia all alone. Where was my husband, where was my family, what were they thinking letting me traipse around a foreign country unattended? I told them that I did in fact have a man handy, back at the hotel. They were relieved when I lied that he was my husband. They praised my grasp of Indonesian, as anyone did who heard me say even "thank you" (which translates literally to "received with love"). They asked how did I like the hot season. I said I was used to it by now. Then one of these friendly women pushed waaaaay beyond the limits of my newly acquired vocabulary by telling me to be careful since it was "......" season. Definitely a new term for me. All three women were giggling behind their hands, so clearly this was not a terribly modest question. I asked, and she mimed opening a coat up. It was flasher season! And here's me thinking Indonesians are all so modest. Go figure. I asked them "Do you have them here?" and they all laughed and said yes, they did. There seemed to be an inside joke about it, which appeared untranslatable, but I laughed with them anyhow, since they seemed to be having such a good time, with each other and with me. So I walked out of there with a great bathing suit and a good laugh, wishing everyone well. I left Indonesia the next day on a hovercraft and on a high. What nice people. What a great way to leave a country I have a love-hate relationship with. Every time I wear that suit, I think of those women and chuckle. Sometimes I bore other people with the story, and it still makes me laugh. The shop owners were ethnic Chinese, and their clerk was ethnic Indonesian. I've been watching the news a lot lately, aghast. I know a lot of Indonesians, some of them students, some of them very poor. I was worrying about whether they were eating ok, or if they could still afford cooking oil and rice. I hoped that they could still attend school, or buy shoes, or keep their jobs. Then I started cheering on the political protests in the cities, still worrying about the people who were getting caught in the crossfire. But I am most upset about the many Chinese Indonesians who helped me out, served me a meal, or were friendly to me - maybe because I just don't get it. I can understand why people were rioting in Jakarta. It was coming. When there are shantytowns next to the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood, there is fury waiting to be unleashed. But I didn't have any foreboding of the hatred that led people to set fire to buildings owned by ethnic Chinese, like that little shop. I couldn't have imagined, looking around me on the streets, that people would channel so much of their righteous anger over their poverty and despair towards people who have it better than they do. Just a bit better, in some cases. No better than a lot of people with the same ethnic background as the mobs. I hope that the Chinese woman who had a good sense of humour and the willingness to make a joke with a foreigner got out the hell out, to Singapore or Malaysia or Taiwan or wherever. I hope she can speak some Chinese dialect after so many generations in Indonesia. I hope she didn't have to spend days huddled in a police station, waiting for a rioting mobs to change its mind, or go away. But I hope, if she had to, she made it to the station, at least. I hope that their little store isn't one of the ones I saw on the news, burned and looted, with black, charred bodies strewn inside. Meredith Low Newborn Diaper Surprise by Mark Redding With spring well on its way, I thought it a perfect time to browse the deserted alleys that are toy shops in April in search of some discounted bargains well ahead of the Christmas rush. With four brats to pin down in eight months, I figured this was a boon for any cheapskate uncle. I've always had a hankering for dolls, specifically dolls which can not only wet, but can now, thanks to advanced faeces technology, soil themselves. Not having any children of my own, I've often pondered over changing a shit-filled nappy smelling not much better than my own. The joy of these man-made arses are they are substantially firmer than even the most stairmastered two-year old, and the ease with which one could clean up over the real thing just doesn't compare. No creams, no crevices, no wriggling and dropping the thing is going to cause any of the eventual parental law suit cum Enquirer "My Dad's A Baby-Bouncing Nazi" front page brouhaha. OK let's have a look. There's "Baby Darling," "Baby Born," "Choosy Baby," and "Newborn Diaper Surprise" - though why it's a surprise that you find crap in a diaper is anyone's guess. What would be a surprise is if you found a copy of The Iliad and a signed photo of Bobby Kennedy. The premise seems to be basically the same for each doll. Feed the thing either water or water with powder and either gravity or bizarrely, massaging of the legs produces the desired results downstairs. I think I'd really like to meet the person who suggested the "thigh rubbing produces crap" concept. Now, in spite of hours searching through the isles of Toys 'R' Us, there appear to be no male equivalent of these dolls, which is surely a huge gap in the market. Any well-rounded six-year old fella who's not eating shit, sure as hell loves to stand on the toilet seat and drop his guts to the enjoyment of friends and family. So where is the plaything to aid his development? To Mattel and friends, I offer up a few design models. Kelvin is the universal model, suitable for kids 5-10. He comes with cans of baby food, which after a few spoonfuls will quickly appear in his pants, ready for the clean-up operation. For the American market, Sam is an older version of Kelvin, which means you can buy a case of ale and junk food as accessories. For older kids, due to the complexity of the model, there is actually a removable panel in his back to view nature's progress; the fuel takes longer to make its passage through. Not only is this line fun, it's also educational. It's actually a fact that the lower the food gets in the digestive tract the more it gains in momentum. Clinical tests have shown that after certain combinations of food and drink, shit can travel at speeds well over 200 km/h exiting the arsehole. Further accessories to the American range are a fully functioning shopping mall, which provides Sam with shoe and CD stores, as well as a gleaming washroom to use as soon as he arrives. The usual play cycle encourages the youngster to top up Sam with God's own pop on a Friday night and arrive in the CD store on the Saturday morning. After the first five minutes on the racks Sam, would feel the call, visit the bathroom and expunge. Clean up is done in a matter of seconds with the well-equipped, pristine bathroom. For the UK market, Keith looks the same as Sam, but has different accessories. This means that on the Saturday morning, once Keith has left his house and the gatekeeper comes a-knocking on the door, he has to venture around branches of McDonald's and Burger King (if you can't afford to buy them, a shoe box will do) but finds them hopelessly short of paper or so full of teenagers that ring- clenched stumbling around the street is the only option. Ordering a pint at eleven o'clock at the optional downstairs pub is the last resort - again, any old shithole will do if you can't afford the made-for-Keith accessory. It can then take upwards of thirty minutes using what little cardboard/copy of the paper there is, eventually settling on Keith's own clothes as wipers. Luckily, Keith has more changes of outfits than Sam. In fact the range of these dolls doesn't have to stop here. What about celebrity excreting playmates? For teenage girls, you could have an Ally McBeal doll, which shits itself, cries, sees a little dancing baby swimming and shitting, and then turns into Diana Ross, just 'cos it fucking does. And then you could have a Tom Hanks doll, which is just shit period and stills shits itself. But then you get a plane with that one and every time the movie comes on, it's Tom Hanks again, and it's shit within shit. You could never get it clean, 'cos the shit would just keep repeating itself. The only thing left to do would be to buy the Jay Leno doll, then it could stick it's head up Tom Hanks' arse and the whole vicious circle of shit would come to an end. Why limit the range solely to crap? Why not fill the little bastard up with ice cream, and have a Tony Blair ejaculating prime minister doll. Provide different coloured powders and have a "Menstruating Ricki Lake," or maybe a "My piles are playing me up again Preston Manning." There really is so little choice, and all very sanitized. Kids can accept this stuff - they like shit - it's just their parents who decide that "Coochie Coo Princess White Pants" is the only suitable option. Several hours later I arrive at the checkout with three "Sleep and Shit Ernies" and, from the Spice Girl doll range, a "Sporty Spice," who can actually piss herself while doing a backflip. Just like the Labatt 50 truck, I would be a most unwelcome sight come December. Mark Redding Shitting in the Third World by Meredith Low So, you're thinking of becoming a globetrotter. Maybe you have dreams of all the places you'll go, drifting into your waking hours. Jungles of Borneo beckon, Himalayan peaks haunt you, images of Malian marketplaces mock your seemingly shallow and meaningless life here. You can hack it on the backpacker's trail - no waiting for the Five Star lifestyle for you. You want to see the real deal, before it vanishes into the McDonald's universe. So you amass your small wealth, pack your bags and head off. Maybe great adventures await you. Maybe great tribulations. Perhaps you will come back radically changed - or you may joyously embrace your former existence upon your return. Hard to say. But one thing is certain. If you travel the low-rent route far and wide, you will think and talk about shit a great deal more than you do now. (Unless your job or sexual peccadilloes require a certain fixation with it already, in which case you will truly come into your own.) Your shit will be your primary method of diagnosis as to whether you have a simple case of turista, or something more serious. It will be your measure of how well your insides are adapting to their new outside environment, and to the foodstuffs you are putting inside you on a regular basis. You will probably examine it with an attention you have rarely bestowed upon it before. You will even be prepared to control it - you will carry medication to encourage shitting, or prevent it. You will learn which foods perform these functions (bananas for the latter, papayas for the former). You will discuss your shit and theirs with perfect strangers, like you, in a strange land. But that is where most people stop, sadly enough. Travel requires having your shit together - about your shit. It's true that most travellers don't change the way they deal with their shit, but they (perhaps you?) should not be taken as role models. There are ways of dealing with shit which are quite different from those here in the West, and should you be considering a journey to the far-flung regions of the world (that phrase always assumes it's someone around here who's doing the flinging...) you should think about it. Here in the West, we style ourselves the last word on hygiene and public health. We've moved beyond the medieval, we reckon, and all is now pure and safe. Travel in a developing country, and one of the first questions you will be asked on your return is "Did you get sick?" Or, more pruriently, "What were the toilets like?" But think about what we do with our shit here. We emit it from our bodies into a little tank, which admittedly flushes clean away from us. But just before everything flows not-so-safely into some formerly pristine body of water, we take a piece of paper and smear it on our asses to wipe away whatever remains stuck to us. Maybe we take two wads of toilet paper just to be sure. Wipe, wipe, wipe.....how clean can that be leaving us? There is, however, another method, which most Westerners pall at. It's a lot cleaner, however, and more comfortable. And it's easy, if you go with the flow. Start with a good wide squat, which takes some getting used to but after a while gets to be second nature. Once all has been expelled from the body, take a cup of water, pour it down the lower back to wash over the nether regions. The non- pouring hand wipes and washes until we are sparkling clean and fresh. When women have blood to deal with as well, it involves more water to splash away all that your body is getting rid of and is currently clinging to your nether regions, but it's the same principle, and actually feels a lot cleaner. And imagine having raging diarrhoea and using scratchy locally-produced pulp product on your privates. Get yourself a nice soothing flow of water, give things the once-over to make sure you're clean, and that's it. Back to loll inside the mosquito net until your next attack - in about two minutes. But what about the business hand? How to get the shit off it? Well, first of all, this is why there is a taboo on using the left hand for anything other than dealing with shit in most of the world. Hands have specialized uses - the left for personal business, and the right for anything that involves another person (touching, passing things, giving money, cooking, etc.). The public and the private. Simple enough. As someone said after his first encounter with the practice, "You don't forget it's your left hand!" And second of all, that is why the multi-monikered Almighty, in her wisdom, created antibacterial soap. Just use a dollop of that and all of you, including your left hand, is clean as a whistle. Your privates may be somewhat damp, but you get used to that, and many of the places where you would be practicing this in are pretty humid anyhow - all of you is damp. You could also towel off, or do the squat-shake for a little while post-wash to dry yourself off. Up to you. It's a way of putting your personal stamp on the system - kind of like putting a picture of your cat up on your cubicle when you return to your boring office job after your trek in Nepal. I must confess I am taking the moral high ground here because I travelled TP- free for a half-year in Asia. However, I will freely admit it is unlikely that I would have become such an advocate of local waste treatment methods had I not been forced into it. I spent a few months in a home where the toilet out back was a platform built over a drainage ditch where all the effluent, so to speak, simply putrified. Floating blobs of sky-blue scratchy Asian toilet paper would have caused quite the stir in the little village, where many people still shat in the river, so I opted into the water system. Later as I travelled and encountered the hard-core travel set, I figured that there were other left-handers among them, given their tales of trekking from Nepal to Tibet, or their horrendous trips through Rajasthan in the hot season, or whatever. I was to be disillusioned. I was travelling through Burma with a group of cool characters, from the usual places - Australia, England, the US. This was a nightmare trip, via thoroughly unreliable transportation, encountering quite dubious characters, taking three days to travel a few hundred kilometers, only to find a major bridge linking the north of the country to the south had washed out overnight. Half of us missed international flights, most of us ran out of any currency (never mind local money), and all of us lost our cool at some point. It just sucked. But the saving grace was travelling with one of the best, most with-it, least obnoxious groups of travellers that I'd ever encountered. The only bunch to be stranded with in a Burmese village that had no food besides barbecued rats, mystery fried goods and brightly orange tea (I'm not making this up). The toilet was an outhouse contraption made of faded rickety wood, under which the pigs seemed to live. There was some kind of intermediary system between the outhouse and the pigs, but not much. So you can guess what happened to the excrement dropped within. However, given the conditions everyone was living in, this was not such a bad solution to the problem of what to do with human waste. At least it was going to a good cause, and the pigs looked nice and healthy. As we waited for our van to be fixed yet again, our faith and goodwill exhausted twelve hot and sweaty hours before, resistance was overcome and each of us had to visit the pigpen/loo. Thankfully, I had finished with my latest bout of dysentery, but eventually I had to go too. I asked my cohorts whether there was water there to wash with. None of them even knew - all these hard-core, overland from Tibet to Nepal, via Land Rover through the Sahara types. They all offered me toilet paper to take with me. They had been dropping shit-soaked toilet paper into the pig pen. Where it was probably by now roaming the streets in the snout of a pig. Which then dropped it in search of the next thing to snuffle at. Where it might be picked up by unsuspecting children who had never seen such a curiosity. All together now, ewwwwww.... So the choice is yours. You can head out on your adventure, rolls of Purexes in your pack, ready for anything, Immodium at hand. Thousands have before you, thousands more will after. Great people, intrepid travellers, cool and groovy adventurers all. But I'd encourage you to think, before you squat, about the next travellers through this place, especially if you are beating a new track through the global village. Let them find the houses without Backstreet Boys posters, the streets without Mars bars wrappers, and the kids without Nike T-shirts. Let them find the toilets (drainage ditches, pigpens...) unclogged by sodden wads of Western civilization, with our shit all over them. (Just make sure you keep your fingernails nice and short...) Meredith Low BARBED WIRE webzine Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee also available in glorious technicolour at http://home.istar.ca/~paull/wire Comments are welcome. Email paull@istar.ca