As you may remember, Ken and I recently took a trip out East. What was the purpose of the trip, you ask? To see the colours, of course. I’m not sure if people in other countries do this, but in Canada, we will literally drive hundreds of kilometres to see the fall colours and ooh and ahh over the reds, oranges, and yellows, where once it was only green. So I don’t know if it’s something peculiar to Canadians, but here, it’s considered completely normal to drive around all day taking pictures of trees in the fall. So that’s what Ken and I did a week and a half ago, having spent a lot of money to fly to another province and rent a car. Then immediately after we came back home, OUR colours had started to change, and we could see them for free. This of course means any time we go out, we have to plan a country route, and I drive so that Ken can take pictures like these:
In other news, I had to have an ultrasound guided needle biopsy on my swollen and painful collarbone joint. But I’m not going to talk about THAT as much as this:
Nurse: So I’ve just checked and these gloves and bandages are latex-free—oh my gosh, I love your boots! Me: Thanks! I just got them! Nurse: They’re adorable! Ultrasound technician (walks into the room): What’s adorable? Oh, those boots! They have embroidery on them! Me: I know! It’s the first time I’ve worn them!
And we all oohed and ahhed over my boots like they were the fall colours until the surgeon came in. He, on the other hand (or foot), was not impressed by my boots, if the way he stabbed me full of lidocaine was any indication.
In other other news, I’m currently doing a book event, sitting outside a book store with my books, smiling at people and hoping they buy one. And it would be so nice except I’m in a mall right across from a seating area, and there are these two old Muppets who’ve been there all morning and haven’t stopped loudly complaining to each other about anything and everything the entire time. Seriously, Statler and Waldorf—go the f*ck home, or at least buy a book! Maybe I should show THEM my new boots…
First of all, I’d like to take a moment to thank my wonderful publisher Jane Cornwell of Jane’s Studio Press for nominating me for a Pushcart Prize for my short story “Mr. Death Comes To Town.” It’s a real honour to be nominated, especially for a story about a character that is near and dear to my heart and has appeared not only in both my short story collections, Feasting Upon The Bones and Dark Nocturnes, but is also featured in my novel The Devil You Know. If you’d like to know more about Mr. Death, aka Mort Sterven, you can get either of my short story collections here:
And now, on with the show…in which I respond to spam comments on my website:
1) Buy Adderall online
I don’t need to. I am my own speed. Have you not met me?
2) Buy weed online
I don’t need to. I live in Canada, dumbass. I can go to the strip mall and get all the weed I want. Also, my neighbour has two weed plants that rival my quince bush in size, which explains why I keep thinking I smell skunk in the backyard.
3) Buy African grey parrots for adoption
Why am I paying to adopt a parrot? Also, does it swear? If not, I have no interest…unless I can teach it to swear.
4) Great article
Thank you, ‘Benefits of CBD’. I didn’t reference CBD in my last post, but it’s nice to know that you’re following along.
5) i am a child who lacks knowledge but i always read your website. This website is very helpful in doing various homework that i do. i like your website.
Apparently your lack of knowledge resides in the realm of capitalization. Silly child.
6) Wonderful
Thank you, ‘RVs For Sale In Your Area’. I am.
7) On Monday, my sister and I went to the market to buy cakes and it would take 1 hour to travel from home to the market. During the trip, I watched content on this site which was very useful and entertaining.
You drove an hour to buy cake?! Is this some kind of weird math problem, like if my sister drove one hour to buy cake and I spent an hour watching a blog post, who wasted the most time? Also, how did you ‘watch’ my content? I literally just write what comes into my head. Wait…are you in my head? Do you have cake?
8) when I came home from school my uncle and I went to the city and would buy clothes at the biggest clothes shop in my city, from school to the mall selling clothes it would take 3 hours, while waiting for the trip I felt bored and finally I remembered this blog which can entertain me while traveling
Dude, you put the cake girl to shame. 3 hours?! No wonder you were bored. Tell your uncle to get a dvd player for his van or whatnot. Then you can watch my favourite movie Alien Vs. Predator. That one’s a banger.
9) 1 week ago I tried to go to a lake to clean it and let the fish live in peace and comfort, and that’s when I found this blog which helped me refresh my life.
That’s me—doing my best for the environment and refreshing all the fish.
10) 3 days ago I tried to find pleasure by going to the beach and feeling the sea breeze, but then I felt very comfortable because there are several things that make life more enjoyable, namely this blog to read.
Based on the number of you who are going to the beach to feel the sea breeze and then making your life more enjoyable by reading this blog (27 of you to be exact), I really think you should start a beach volleyball club and stop bothering me.
11) I went to a city 3 days ago with my partner and there I saw an inn that was exactly the same as the blog I read, and I finally read this blog again to make sure and it turned out to be true I was very happy.
My blog is an INN?! You need to hook up with that ‘Buy weed online’ dude—you’re smoking the wrong stuff.
12) Wow, it’s really amazing, finally I found information that presents unique news and is very interesting for me to read while drinking coffee.
How dare you?! If you know anything about me at all, you know I hate coffee. Blocked!
13) 7 days ago I went to a place to get various kinds of pleasure which started from seeing this special blog
I am NOT a porn site. Get your pleasure somewhere else, you pervert.
14) 1 week ago I tried to get some inspiration by fishing in the middle of the deep and wide ocean to get lots of valuable experience, and in the end I saw this blog which is very special for my entertainment.
So you were fishing in the middle of the ocean, and then you saw my blog? Dude, who’s your cellphone provider?! I need to get in on this—I can’t even get a signal on Township Road 2.
15) In the evening my friend and I decided to go hang out with my friends at a cafe and in the middle of that I opened my cellphone and started reading this very constructive blog.
Seriously? And when you looked up, had all of your friends left for a party because they knew you were more interested in your phone than hanging out with them? JFC, get a life.
There are literally THOUSANDS of comments like these that automatically get routed to my Trash folder on a daily basis. Most of them are from someone, or many someones, named ‘bokep’ and when I looked up what that meant, it’s Indonesian for PORN. So thank you, PORNBOTS for clogging up my comments with your weird families, friends, and outings to the beach, the mall, the village, the coffeshop, the lake, and all the other places you go to read my blog. What an incredible fanbase.
This past week, Ken and I went out to the East coast of Canada. Travelling within your own country is great—no worries about currency exchanges, border security, or paying exorbitant amounts for cell phone plans. We decided to rent a car, visit friends, and then drive the Cabot Trail. It’s the perfect time of year to do it because the fall colours are just stunning. And doing so much driving gave Ken and I a lot of opportunities to have very important conversations.
Me: The other day, I got an Amazon delivery and I was about to throw away the box, but I didn’t.
Ken: Because it was a good box?
Me: Obviously. We’ve officially reached the age where we keep empty cardboard boxes because they’re good boxes, not because we actually need them.
Ken: They always end up coming in handy—that’s a guarantee.
And we realized that it’s not just boxes…
Gift bags: You know the ones I mean—not too big, not too small, holiday-neutral but fancy enough for any occasion. Even better if the gift tag hasn’t been written on.If you know anything about me at all, you’ll know I have the gift wrapping skills of a five -year-old (actually most five-year-olds can wrap a present better than I can) so gift bags and tissue paper are my go to. And anytime I get a nice one, someone else in the family gets it back.
Wood: Ken does a lot of woodworking and wood can be expensive so we have no issue grabbing a piece of wood off the side of the road to use later.
Me: Ooh, stop! There’s a lovely pallet at the end of that driveway there!
Ken: Nice! I see a coffee table in our future!
We actually did make a coffee table out of a wood pallet once which I sold it for $75 bucks pure profit. The one thing I never nagged Ken about cleaning up is his woodpile. Even if Ken has no plan for any of it at the moment, it’s still all good wood and might come in handy later. And you can scoff, but he’s almost finished the new little cabin he’s building me and he did it all with his late dad’s “good wood” as well as our own finds and offcuts. The other day, we went by a dumpster and found several pieces of good wood that I might do something with—or not, but at least I have the wood.
Bubble Wrap: Who in their right mind ever throws away a piece of bubble wrap? That stuff is like gold. If you don’t use it, you can pop it. It’s multi-purpose.
Envelopes: I don’t do it often, but I have been known to keep a good envelope. They go with the loose Christmas cards I have stored in the dining room closet. And there’s nothing like the satisfaction of matching an envelope with a card…
I’m finding it really hard to concentrate because I’m in the airport waiting at our gate and there’s a woman talking very loudly on her cell phone to someone and apparently she has 120 oat cakes in her carry-on and just got a tattoo in Halifax with “the best line work she’s ever seen” but she can’t show it to the person she’s Face-Timing with because it’s on the inside of her thigh. But we’ll be home soon, so it’s all good.Also, Happy Thanksgiving!
For the last year at least, I’ve had a swollen sternoclavicular joint, and if you don’t know what that is, it’s the joint at the end of your collarbone in the middle of your chest. No one can figure out why it’s swollen, and it’s extremely painful, so I was sent to see a rheumatologist who ordered an MRI. When the hospital called to schedule it, they told me not to wear any metal and asked me if I had any metal in my body. I ran through a mental catalogue, at which point, after having made a detour into a delightful reverie about becoming a human forklift, I determined that I was metal-free. I had carefully considered the surgeries I’d had over the years, and I assumed if a surgeon had left any metal in me, I would know it by now and therefore could enter the MRI tunnel without any worries.
I was WRONG. I am FULL OF METAL.
And how did I arrive at this horrifying conclusion? Well, I recently had an upper chest X-ray as a precursor to the MRI, and on Thursday, I was able to access the report through the radiology clinic dashboard. It was pretty humdrum, and I was getting more than a little miffed once again at the liberal use of the term “unremarkable” (although I was pleased to note that my lungs are apparently “well-aerated”) when it said this: Cholecystectomy clips noted. I was like “What the f*ck is a chole-thingy?” so I googled it, and it’s when you have your gall bladder removed, and I did that about 20 years ago. I realize I’ve just made it sound like I reached into my own abdominal cavity and pulled it out myself, and if that did indeed happen, you will note that I would have accompanied the pulling out of my gall bladder with a flourish and the words Abracadabra, but a surgeon did it, and he was a terrible magician. And I KNOW this because in the same way that a terrible magician would accidentally sit on the top hat and kill his rabbit, this person left METAL CLIPS inside my body. I’ve been setting off the airport security alarms for years and telling them it was MY BELT when, in fact, I am a human IED.
According to my research, there are different kinds of clips for this—some dissolve and some are permanent, but the issue is that no one even asked me if I wanted to become a cyborg, and normally I would have said YES, but in this case, there’s no upside—I mean, it’s nothing AT ALL like having forklift arms, and I was initially very upset (not to mention worried that an MRI might dislodge them, and then I would be slowly stabbed to death from the inside while I was in the MRI machine), but then I remembered the latest Suicide Squad movie. There was a variety of new characters, including a guy called Polka Dot Man, who could shoot polka dots out of his body and eviscerate people with them. Polka dots are a stupid weapon, but you know what’s not? METAL CLIPS. So now I’m going to write to James Gunn and suggest that, if he ever does another Suicide Squad movie (doubtful because both versions received terrible ratings), there should be a new character introduced. Her name is Heavy Metal and her superpower is shooting sharp pieces of steel out of her body:
Criminal: Who the hell are you?! Heavy Metal: My name is Heavy Metal, loser. Criminal: You look rather unremarkable to me. Heavy Metal: Prepare to die.
Ivory Towers is one of Canada’s leading drag queens. With over 18 years experience she has won many titles including Miss Gay Toronto, Crews and Tangos drag race and many more. She has been featured in commercials with Sephora, Visa debit, Molson Canadian and Ikea.
Living life with a chronic illness is definitely not easy. But I do my best to push through all the barriers this illness puts in front of me! In my heart and mind, I believe maintaining a positive outlook on all situations in life will carry us through to much better times! I hope you find the information that I provide both helpful and inspirational!
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