It’s hard to know where to start.

Leah McLaren is a well known Canadian who writes a weekly column for the Globe and Mail (likely the country’s most influential and prestigious newspaper.) She was hired young and beautiful, roughly 20 years ago, supported not just by her ability, but also her impeccable connections within the Toronto media and downtown culture. Her columns have always been highly personal, dealing first with being single in the city, and then morphing into whatever stage of life she had entered.

It’s been easy enough to dislike, or at the very least, resent her.

Attractive, affluent and sophisticated, she was the kind of WASP archetype that hovered above the rest, and each week as she unearthed some small epiphany buried within her culture of privilege, the column managed to read like an invitation to a party you would never be asked to attend. As such, she’s always been a lightning rod for reader discontent, and this week it flared up again.

The column which sparked it was a weird one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170322214423/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/leah-mclaren-the-joy-and-politics-of-breastfeeding-someone-elses-baby/article34386363/

In short, when she was about 25 she was at a house party where everybody was little bit older than her. They had children and spouses, these people, and Leah, single and childless, probably felt unusually peripheral. Out of sorts, she found herself drifting through a sort of Lost in Translation remove,

ending up alone in a bedroom where a baby was strapped into a car seat. At this point, an invincible curiosity about breast feeding overtook her, and in spite of the fact that she was not lactating and had no idea whose child it was, she reached into her bra to remove her breast for the infant, at which point the startled father walked in and politely took his child away.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

The first thing I see is blind privilege– the unexamined belief that the world is full of things for the author to act upon. But I also get her curiosity. I understand having a weird thought and nearly acting on it. I mean, Christ, everybody has to understand that, don’t they? But still, the story really caught fire. It was taken as evidence that breast feeding is still seen as something shameful and perverse. That men had to attack a successful public woman just for being a woman. That the patriarchy must be broken. That women had to support other women. It went like this, and so from the real story, which was just a dimly remembered non-event, all sorts of other stories caught fire and burned through social media.

Funny that.

Regardless, the Globe and Mail immediately retracted the story and Leah McLaren was suspended for a week. What this shows us, as if we needed to see it again, is that newspapers care more about their readers than their writers, which is another way of valuing the advertiser over the consumer. As far as I’m concerned, the newspaper, which is responsible for vetting, editing, shaping and publishing the story, should have had McLaren’s back, they should have supported a weird, potentially very interesting story, but they did not. And so, writers need not bother themselves to look out to the oceans of comments for enemies, but can just take a quick glance at their own offices, instead. Your column, as I was once told by an editor, is the thing we put between the ads.

It hasn’t been going particularly well, as I’m not really qualified for much, but recently I came upon a truly interesting and exciting possibility. A new company called Cudlers is opening up in Toronto, and they offer—for a price of $80 an hour—a platonic snuggling service for its clients, and are currently looking for a diverse array of Cuddlers to make house calls throughout the Greater Toronto Area.

I think I could do this.

I wrote the agency expressing my interest and they requested that I send them a photograph of myself, including my age and height, and a short essay on why I’d like to be a Cuddler.

This is what I sent:

Marcus Agincourt

Age: Younger than Tom Cruise

Height: Taller than Tom Cruise

I have been told that I have an extremely warm and reassuring manner. In fact, during group, I was once told, “Marcus, holding you is like stepping inside of a calming, Brian Eno composition.” I have participated in extensive Hug Therapy (HT) for my PTSD over the years, and the result of this training is that I am a very, very empathetic, sensitive and patient person.

You should know that I am an excellent listener and a natural conversationalist whom people feel very comfortable confiding in. I am, as they say, an old soul, and even if I have a slightly jittery manner and often knock things over, such as drinks, ashtrays and lamps, I’ve been told that I really know how to put people at ease. (I am a Pisces, and although many of this star sign are drinkers, I swore off the hard stuff years ago and now restrict myself to just wine in the evening.)

I dress well, in soft and reliable fabrics, and as I have very little muscle tone, my build, although slim, is very soft to the touch. I am proud to say that I have been compared favourably to Wagyu beef. Also, I do not sweat, so I emit no body odour whatsoever, and out of respect for others, have always kept my nails trim.

The truth is that I just want to help. I understand that in this modern world it’s sometimes easy to feel isolated and disconnected, and that people yearn for some simple, platonic human contact. It may sound corny, but I just want to help people heal, and if I can do that by wrapping myself around them in a non-sexual way for an hour, then I would consider it a privilege to do so.

Hugs,

Marcus Agincourt

PS: I prefer to cuddle to the music of Blondie but would defer to the wishes of the client.

PPS: A short list of dream clients:

Vintage Raquel Welch

An Asian

Jennifer Love Hewitt

Salma Hayek

Tom Hardy

Madonna (I would snuggle the mean right out of her)

Natalie Portman

Janet Gretzky

Paulina Gretzky (I would like to cuddle the three Gretzky’s all at once)

Wayne Gretzky

Stephen Hawking (I think it would be interesting and a possible learning experience, understanding that the cuddler will learn as much from the cuddlee, as the other way around!)

The future in which the Spike Jonze directed movie is set is suggested rather than primary visual architecture. It’s familiar but slightly dislocating, men wear High-Waisted pants, such as you might see in the Civil War, the technology is just a little smaller and swifter, and the city in which the film takes place drifts back and forth between a smoggy LA and a smoggy Shanghai.

Saturated in lyrical oranges and ambers, a dreamy, narcotic ambience presides, as if one of remembrance rather than projection, if that makes any sense. Even in the heavy, coarse fabrics of the clothes people wear, or in the forest imagery existing as backdrop in an elevator, you can feel a yearning for something authentic amidst the increasingly spacious and abstract world of technology.

Joaquin Phoenix, sporting the melancholy moustache of another, somehow European era, falls in love with an operating system played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson. He’s probably in every scene in the movie and he’s simply terrific. Gentle, nuanced and empathetic, his performance is the very opposite of the kind of grand scale acting we’ve come to expect from the likes of Christian Bale, and this dose of humble realism is immensely appealing.

The entire movie was appealing, actually, and it felt like relaxing into the lives of friends who were easy to be around. It was intimate but not needy, and it evoked our shared feelings of falling in love, of tumbling into one another and living in those times when everything is golden and funny and precious and even the colour of your partner’s sweater spoke to a greater truth. This was accomplished deftly, in small, perfect ways, and in spite of it being an abstracted, artificial relationship, it was still the most familiar and convincing depiction of love that I’d seen in years, including, of course, the awkward, tender and melancholic drift apart.

Sweet, charming and a little bit sad, it was a fun film to be a part of and it stayed with us, remaining a companionable presence, like an absent friend, as we shared drinks across the street—each one of our minds drifting off to a different point in time, and then happily returning to our present company.

Based on the old New York Times Photo series, What They Were Thinking, I came up with an idea to post the unflattering picture of Ford before it made a splash, and have the Mayor, in his own words, tell the public exactly what he was thinking the moment the photograph was snapped. This way, we would be ahead of the envelope and we could see the inner, vulnerable Mayor.

This photograph, taken late Thursday night at a CJPAC event, shows the Mayor kindly posing for a photograph with a fan.

What The Mayor Was Thinking:

“Well, it was International Woman’s Day, so I was thinking about all the amazing contributions women have made to the world. If it weren’t for women, I don’t think that there would be any cookies, babies, or lingerie football, and I bet Cute Overload would have tanked. There’s tons of other stuff, too, and I was thinking about that, also. I mean, women have written books and starred in movies, there have even been lady Mayors! It’s amazing, when you think about it, and I was considering all of it, the sorts of make-out music they like and how they’re scared of spiders. I was really feeling the lady vibe right then. Like, the way that they smell, the way they feel, and the way that their voices are higher and softer than your own—it’s just so cool. You know, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Aniston, The Kardashians, Jennifer Lawrence, Pamela Anderson, hell, even Lindsay Lohan, and Scarlett Johansson, yeah, her big time…The list just goes on and on. Women are fucking awesome, and I really like it when they’re around, especially when I’m feeling a little lonely, and believe me, even a big, cool Mayor like me gets lonely from time to time.”

*Late on Thursday night while at a CJPAC event, Sarah Thomson, a former candidate for Mayor, posted the photograph of Rob and her at the function, stating that he said she should have been in Florida with him last week because his wife wasn’t there and then grabbed her ass.