Righteous Anger of the White Knight

Ooohhhh. Spitting mad! Snake phoned me at 9:00 from work just as I was about to head out the door. He had just been given shit by the summer replacement coordinator because he used a "non-standard expression" in the classroom. For those just joining us, Snake is on a contract teaching English for Academic Purposes to foreign students hoping to attend community college or university in Canada. He is teaching the highest level course on academic writing.

On Friday, in talking about strategies for developing their essays, he said to the students, "Don't cut off the branch under your own feet". Some student wrote it down and asked this temp coordinator bitch (who teaches their class grammar two days a week) what that expression meant. The cunt whore confronts Snake all full of self-righteousness and asks where he got that expression. He says that he made it up on the spot. She informs him that he should not ever say non-standard English in the class. She maintains a level of threat and indignation until she is convinced that she has successfully compensated for all past wrongs done do to her.

She then informs him that he can't use this day (on which she is teaching the class) to mark the huge pile of mid-term essays, but must do office work all day. Snake has the largest amount of marking in the program and had been told by another administrator that he could use his off days to mark, but kurva dupa (I'm running out of English words), who outranks the other administrator, says no, he has to file papers.

Slag! Harpy! Fishwife! Slattern!

WHY ARE ALL THE TERMS OF DERISION FOR WOMEN SEX NEGATIVE?! I DON'T LIKE IT!

I told him not to be cowed when he sees her today. Look her in the eye, I said, and let her know you're pissed. Snake has already been informed that he'll be teaching the same course next semester. He should say that he won't be able to unless he is given the marking day every week. It's ridiculous -- this place is laying him off for a week in August so that he won't ever reach 90 days in a row after which they would have to review his salary. Furthermore, they pay less than any other college. He has no reason to offer them unquestioning submission. He is a teacher with 10 years of experience, including 4 at this college.

Kids, don't let this happen to you. Your employers need you as much as you need them. Demand your rights.

Ack! It's Inspiration!

No, no! I have no more time for new inspirations!

Shortly after I came out in 1988, I met an amazing young man with a diamond hard way of looking at the world. He was also a singer/songwriter and we made a lot of music in the next few years. He claims I taught him how to be a disciplined musician. (Note to barkis: we once played a gig down at the venerable Cameron House on Queen St., sharing the bill with a feisty dyke band. I was doing door for their set when Jane Siberry came in to see them.)

My friend -- oh, let's call Black Strum -- couldn't stand Toronto and moved to Vancouver where I visited him infrequently while my sister also lived there. He then moved to Tokyo where he lived for three years and where I stayed with him for three days in December of 2001. He worked as an environmental consultant, a night-school science teacher and then as an ESL teacher, the job that brought him to Japan. He moved back to Vancouver in 2002. He was one of the AIDS revolutionaries who didn't believe HIV was necessarily the sole source of AIDS and wrote many articles on the subject. But he burned out of AIDS activism and gay journalism and sharpened his dark view of the world to a cold gleam.

In e-mails and on his website, he writes angry tirades which, frankly, I can't digest. But through it all, he's written brilliant, hard, rocking songs, the recent ones peppered with Japanese expressions and soaked in angry remorse. I've been listening to low-fi MP3s of his for the last few months and really enjoying the blistering, painful, passionate music. Today he wrote me that in his quest to make his economic life viable, he may have to give up music. This broke my heart and, 40 minutes ago, inspiration hit me: I have to produce an album for him.

He has no money, so I need to make a budget, a working plan and hit up his friends in Toronto. One of them, at least, is pretty fucking rich. I wonder if they'll go for it?

I can even see the cover: Black Strum with his guitar and a scowl in a big coat that is flapping in the wind. He stands at night in an industrial wasteland while a coked-up Japanese pretty boy, dressed in very little, go-gos behind him on the rubbish-strewn concrete. In the background, the lights of Tokyo.

I've been working dilligently here at the office for the last five hours, staying mostly clear of the 'Net and now I'm obsessed again, unable to focus on anything but this idea.

Curse you, inspiration!