A dead calm.
Existing just outside of time, lives hang suspended there as people wait to discover the toll they must pay to continue their passage.
Sitting across from me an older, Indian woman reclined in her chair, drifting. Beautiful in sleep, her third eye combed unknown realms before she returned to her mortal body and woke into the hospital lights, tired and disappointed.
A man, his eyes closed, breathed carefully while listening to his iPhone. He was so concentrated, so brittle and alone, and his lips moved almost imperceptibly as he repeated the words he was listening to.
An incantation.
A mantra.
A prayer.
And as if in response, a tired nurse coming off shift– her jacket already on– approached him and gently placed her hand on his shoulder. His eyes flashed open in alarm, and she smiled, asking if there was anything she could do for him. He quickly, reflexively, shook his head no, but she stayed, and growing more beautiful by the word, she spoke with him until something inside the man softly dissolved and the rigidity passed from his body.
Later, a cab pulled up at one of the hospital’s entranceways and a man on oxygen support and his wife got out of the car. They were excited, moving quickly, as if on a game show or late for their vacation cruise of a lifetime. I got inside the car they just left and the cabbie was a happy and talkative. He told me that the guy who just got out, after years of waiting, after countless false starts and failed matches, had just received the phone call that he was going to get a lung transplant and to come in NOW! The man, the driver said, was going to be able to breath again, he was going to be able to go to the family cottage and once again, just like when he was a boy, go swimming in the lake at night.
And as we pulled away from the hospital we passed by a couple of petite Asian women in vividly coloured bubble jackets waiting at the crosswalk. Smiling, they leaned in toward the traffic, swaying slightly, like brightly-lit balloons just about to lift off into the sky.
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Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s most recent film, had this kind of “cottage effect” on me. Shot intermittently over 12 years, it depicts the unhurried, unremarkable metamorphosis of a boy as he ages from 6 to 18. Nothing really happens in the film, at least not as we’ve come to expect from the conventional, action-packed narratives that are part of our typical entertainment diet. Studiously avoiding exaggeration, Linklater employs a quiet, understated realism. Instead of getting to know the people on screen through defining acts of high drama, they’re revealed to us through ordinary, low-key repetitions. We get to know Mason, the boy in the film, before his personality is formed, and this makes for an unusually intimate and sympathetic portrait. We’ve been watching his pain and hope since he was a child, and like a parent, we cannot but help love him for that, even if we might not actually like him all the time.
Linklater repeatedly foreshadows catastrophe in Boyhood, and I kept waiting for something to happen, some tragic and intense vector to come sparking out of the story, but no, life plods along its ordinary trajectory. This, of course, is the way that it works in most of our lives, too. When we distractedly check our phones while driving, most of the time we don’t crash, and so it is in this movie, but each time that alarm signal is given, we remember just how fragile and beyond our control life is, and how at any moment, it can explode in tragic directions.
For me, a middle-aged man, the movie took place in the immediate, blurred past (last 12 years) where everything feels like it was yesterday, but simultaneously, the movie also took me to my distant past. Mason’s experiences, although set to a different backdrop of music, technology, etcetera, were my experiences growing up, too, and this gave the movie a circular, timeless feel. Getting to know Mason was like getting to know somebody at a cottage, proximal rather than directly communicated. All of our lives, for all the plot and ambition we stack upon it, unfold along the same lines. Nothing that happens to us is singularly unique, and in the end we’re all small, and there’s a beauty and melancholy in this shared humility, I think, something that Boyhood manages to bring out. And although the movie might not fully engage you throughout its three-hour journey, it will stay with you.
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Day 1
“Describe how you’re feeling right now.”
I feel good, like I’m ready to dominate. I’m in the zone, just like I was when I attended the Washington Redskins fantasy football camp as a kid. It makes me mad that people think that the name Redskins is somehow racist! It’s an honour to be a Redskin, not an insult! 
Jesus Christ!! It really burns me, that. Makes me want to punch something in the face really hard. Going to go do some lifting, channel my feelings into a “positive stream” instead of getting sucked into a “self-destructive negativity spiral.
Day 2, 2014
“Describe a recent situation where you felt the urge to take drugs or alcohol.”
“The Situation.”
At breakfast when my eggs were runny.
“Moods”
“1. What did you feel?”
“2. Rate each mood (0-100%)”
I felt really pissed off. I’m paying a shit-ton of good money to be in this facility and I’m not even an addict, so the least you could do is get the fucking eggs right! Is it that hard to scramble some eggs? Fuck! (100%)
I also felt frustrated, like one hundred fucking percent frustrated. Just make the goddamn eggs, okay? (120%!!)
“Automatic Thoughts”
“What was going through your mind just before you started to feel this way? Any other thoughts? Images?”
I was thinking that I was fucking hungry and looking forward to some eggs. In my mind, I saw fluffy eggs, cheesy, fluffy eggs and they were being served by a hot chick who was totally impressed that I was mayor of Toronto. We were going get messed-up and then have sex, maybe with one of her friends, too, and I was going to wear my Redskins football helmet. It was going to be totally awesome, and then I saw my cock-blocking brother Doug laughing at me in front of the chicks, and I couldn’t get it going, you know, and I then I got served some runny fucking eggs!
Day 3
“What are you looking forward to right now?”
I’m looking forward to my first rehab setback. That’s going to be fucking epic.
Day 4
“What is the most positive experience you’ve had through rehab so far?”
I’ve really gotten to look deeply into who Rob Ford is and I think I’ve achieved an inner peace, a tranquility, even, that I’ve never known except on the football field. I’ve learned that some days the eggs are runny, and that’s okay, you just have to deal with it. Also, I had sex with that lush real estate agent from Brampton.
Twice.
That was pretty awesome.
Need to get my suit dry cleaned though.
]]>What follows are the text messages that I sent to Rachelle.
*******************************************
Me: Is Angus still gaying it up in there?
Me: Can’t believe he was married.
Me: Really, who did he think he was fooling?
Me: I could tell from the first time we went bowling that he was gay. Way too much follow through.
Me: Rachelle?
Me: Rachelle?
Me: Remember what our therapist said about you ignoring me?
Me: I feel invalidated.
Me: That’s why I drink so much. You invalidate me.
Me: Rachelle?
Me: Door to outhouse seems to be locked.
Me: Door is locked.
Me: I AM TRAPPED IN THE OUTHOUSE!!!
Me: HELP!!
Me: I THINK THERE IS AN EVIL GHOST ON THE ISLAND!!
Me: IT LOCKS PEOPLE IN OUTHOUSES AND WATCHES AS THEY GO INSANE AND DIE OF HEART ATTACKS!!
ME: IT’S PROBABY AN INDIAN GHOST MAD ABOUT US STEALING LAND!!
Me: I HATE EVIL GHOSTS!!!
Me: Must calm down and breathe deeply.
Me: Sweet Jesus!
Me: Breathing deeply was a very bad idea.
Me: Now very dizzy. Could vomit.
Me: Must be 1000 degrees in this coffin.
Me: Fuck global warming.
Me: I’m going to bang on the door and yell.
Me: Listen for me!
Me: Dizzy again, now with splinters.
Me: Pretty sure I’m going to die here.
Me: In my poo coffin.
Me: Amazing how strong outhouse is and how weak I am.
Me: Feel like a girl.
Me: Going to die feeling like a girl.
Me: Going to die never having seen a UFO or discovered my spirit guide.
Me: Never got to go to Japan.
Me: So sorry I never got to take you to kinky Japan.
Me: I love you Rachelle.
Me: I loved you with everything I had.
Me: Never really cheated on you.
Me: I want you to go on and live a beautiful life without me– like that speech in Titanic.
Me: I’m Jack and you’re Rose.
Me: Watch that and think of me swimming around in the water.
Me: But DO NOT hook-up with Armand.
Me: Yeah, don’t think I don’t notice the way you light up around him.
Me: Armand. Stupid name.
Me: Like a perfume.
Me: How could you like him???
Me: Would haunt the hell out of you if you hooked-up with him.
Me: HE IS A DICK.
Me: Getting darker in here.
Me: Oxygen must be getting low.
Me: Don’t know how much longer can last.
Me: Would like Sigur Ros played at my funeral and that scene from Armageddon when Bruce Willis is saying good-bye from space projected as backdrop.
Me: My love, you were always the best part of me.
Me: I will be with you always.
Me: You were my everything.
Me: Waiting now for the chariot to swing low.
Me: When the light comes for me I will go to it.
Me: I am ready.
Me: NO!!!
Me: I will fight for you!
Me: I’m not going to give up!!
Me: Splinters be damned!!
Me: Oh.
Me: Just spotted little clasp under handle.
Me: WOW!!
Me: The clasp releases the external lock!!
Me: The world is an explosion of sunlight!
Me: Electrolytes dangerously low, but will stagger to cottage.
Me: Realize how precious life is now.
Me: Hate abortion!
Me: Just stubbed toe on rock!
Me: Hate abortion, rocks and global warming!
Me: I’m coming for you, my love, I’m coming.
Me: If you get this, please save croissant for me, feeling peaked.
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