#BestDespinaEver!

08.02.201909.12.2024 Arvin da BrghaLeave a comment

Opening nights are always such fun… Tuesday night past, I was reminded of all the opening nights that I would attend with a slightly neurotic Merlin as some show or other that he had directed was being presented to the world… As ever, it was great to see my plus one, Lucian Mann-Chomedy as the ideal partner for these occasions. Always reserved, pleasant and just the right amount of chatter and wit.

Whilst Lucian enjoyed the pre-show lecture in the Four Seasons Centre Amphitheatre, I slipped next door into the warmth of the Sheraton Centre Hotel and warmed myself on a glass of sherry whilst finishing off 2018’s Scotiabank Giller Prize winner on my KOBO.

What an utterly stunning tour de force. It was a moment to reflect, this Black History Month on just where we blacks are in the scheme of things. God only knows, it has been bruising to watch Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex become the print media’s most reviled and hunted fugitive from justice of that most vile creature, the racial predator.

I was still smarting at the events of a week earlier during the winter season’s first major snowstorm. I had been recalling to friends how strange it now was, compared to my first winter in Canada. December 1, 1974 and it snowed that day more than 8 inches. Back then it generally was guaranteed to snow once if not twice weekly. Now at end of January, 2019 and we were finally having our first major snow. This was not like snow from years past… Now it was a dirty, sooty-looking hard mess that lingered, largely in part because the city has contracted out its snow removal services.

As there are no windows in my apartment – Sol’s too damn bright by far and besides, boarded up windows afford me more art-hanging space – I got down in the early afternoon that Monday with my bike, only to be met by falling snow and several accumulated inches. Back up I went, retired the trusty chrome steed and returned and hopped into a snazzy Audi A6 Uber ride with a Macedonian whose spirit was as smooth and elegant as matchingly was his car. The mood set the tone for my day. As I am known to work 16-hr days, I called another Uber at the end of gig one whilst hoping to get to gig 2 in good time. The snow was still coming down; it was also bitterly cold and windy.

When finally, Uber #2 arrived, cold and dark with icy pellets mixed in with the snow, the driver rolled down his passenger side window and declared, “Sorry Buddy but I am going to have to cancel this ride…” Already running late, with my wheeled suitcase at the ready, he edged along as I tried to open the door and raised his voice, his eyes almost feral-looking beneath his turbanned, narrow skull. “I said I am cancelling you. One: I never take people like you in my car. Two: you have a shitty rating… Sorry, not sorry. Fuck you Buddy.” With that, he stepped on the gas and I had to swiftly haul me and suitcase out of the way as the rear of his red older model car whose interior did have that blasted malodorous melange of curry, dirty armpit, dirty arse, smegma and whatever the fuck else that passes for immigrants of choice these days. Finally, after having struggled out onto a still-not-ploughed Bay Street, I managed to hail the fourth cab whose West African driver insisted that I call Uber and report him… Days later, I was afforded assurances that the racist Dravidian was no longer part of Uber’s fleet. Similarly, when calling a Beck Taxi with a fairly generic name as Arvin, on coming downstairs the Indo-Canadian drivers on several occasions as though staying on script would feign obsequiousness and state that they were deeply sorry but owing to a family emergency, they were having to take the cab out of service. No sooner than having refused me a ride, they would then be observed heading out to Wellesley, turning on their unoccupied light and picking up a fare off the road. As if the blasted motherfuck, the likes of your overbred arse invented Jazz.

Each and every time that one experiences racial animus, is preyed on racially, it always harks back to that first winter in Toronto. My best mate from two summers earlier, when I would come to Canada to visit with my dad during school break, had been sick. After Sunday church service at Knox Presbyterian at Harbord and Spadina before returning to our beautiful home at 122 Mortimer Avenue, I would visit – my dad and I – with Tommy who was holding up at Toronto Sick Kids Hospital on University Avenue. My father explained that Tommy was sick with the winter flu, which sometimes could last for months and well beyond winter. I was a scrawny little fourteen-year-old who looked like most ten-year-old Canadian kids as I crawled the halls at Harbord Collegiate where among my mostly Italian-Canadian chums was future lawyer, Rocco Galati. As Tommy, who was a couple of years older than me, had gladly shared books with me the two summers prior that I would take to Knox summer camp and read then have a good stroke off, lusting after my inamorato, Tommy, I readily agreed to do his newspaper route for him until he came home. My first Saturday, the cart was overflowing with the thick Toronto Star newspaper and there was a good foot of snow everywhere. It was hellish but for Tommy, I was game to go the distance – who knows what hot frottage, docking and more was in the offing for having done his route for him! When I got to the northeast corner of Floyd and Bater Avenues that first Saturday to collect the funds, the door opened to a woman whose response to me was the most hideous display of the displaced madness that is white bigotry. Screaming at the top of her lungs, the woman in her upper seventies, vituperatively cursed my black bugger arse off and laid down the law. Never again, “you dirty little nigger” was I to set foot on her verandah.., I was to put the paper between her screen and front doors, knock then return to the top of her steps and wait for her to pay the bill. That first Saturday, she ripped the paper from my hand, flung the money at me. She was terrifying, in her faded blue A-line dress, black spectacles that had those upturned pointed edges at the sides; she wore faux pearls. Most of all, she wore the most hideously terrifying eyes. I remember how much they looked like eyes of a rooster, especially so for being such puffy eyes. Like the evolved, winged and feathered reptilians that roosters are, her eyes truly did look not the least bit human. She was so consumed with racial animus that it was truly frightening. By the time I made it home, I found myself regurgitating. Thereafter, every Saturday, I would take my spot at the top of the steps and consistently she would hurl out pennies mostly at me rather than the verandah where that first winter I had to suffer the indignity of picking through inches of snow on the verandah, steps and lawn to collect my money. Naturally, without fail she called most Saturdays to the Toronto Star, complaining of either not having received her paper on time or that it was missing altogether. This would mean having to buy her a replacement at the corner store, take it and only to be fed on by the hideous-of-spirit racial predator. Like a true cockhound many an indignity I suffered in hopes of my spectacled, full-lipped and scholarly inamorato, Tommy hooking up with me for having been so loyal to him. The summer prior, I had ventured to the public pool on Broadview at Riverdale Park with him and a couple of others and thrilled beyond belief was I to spy his large pendulous balls and that hammer-headed girthsome salami that pummelled his bikinis. Indeed, for Tommy I would suffer much indignity. There was a low-rise apartment building at 1111 Broadview where on the ground floor, there was another predator, this one equally septuagenarian who lived alone, smoked incessantly and always answered the door in various stages of undress, mostly ever only wearing a soiled merino. He was always a generous tipper; a whole 2$ bill in 1974/75 was serious cash. Naturally, in the pre-Ciaslis epoch old anorexic, drunken paunched predator would sometimes tug on the old bulbous semi-flaccid/semi-tumescent, though, pendulous but perfectly useless appendage, trying to lure me in. Sitting there in all that squalor and acting as though he was sugar daddy material… indeed. He was always keen on trying to grab me when giving me the “tip” and I was ever sly and crafty enough to get away from him each time. He, too, lead me to regurgitate, which I had not done since age nine and suffering my first racial attack. Of course, to this day, neither academia nor medicine will concede that there is any such a thing as the racial predator and the effects it has on those preyed on – mostly blacks – and the psyche/mental illness of those who prey on others chiefly non-blacks in varying degrees of severity based on otherness.

Finally, the house lights went down and I was met by the whimsical vista of the COC’s production of W. A. Mozart’s glorious opera, Cosi Fan Tutte. Previously, I had caught productions of this Mozart gem in Chicago, Montréal and New York City. I was not expecting much at this rate. The Frida Kahlo connection was a bit of a stretch but the butterflies fast won me over.

From the moment that she stepped onto stage, my spirit soared aloft higher than Mozart’s glorious music to that point had spirited me. Never before had there been so captivating a Despina. My eyes teared up and I was ever on the cusp of explosive giggles. Then what made me truly come undone was the moment Tracy Dahl took to the stage as the notary… by now, I was losing tears and beginning to emit choked snorted chuckles. Each Saturday back in 1974/75 when doing Tommy’s newspaper route, I would end off taking the Saturday Star to Giovanna an octogenarian Italian, who was plump, charming and more adorable than any mere mortal ought to be. Soon, we were fast lovers and she loved fussing over me, baking me each Saturday nice, warm, oven-fresh biscotti washed down with a glass of ice-cold “gingah raleh”… her thick Italian accent was part of her charm. Hers was a large black and white cat, simply known as pussy gatto, who always sat nesting on the armchair. Each week, Giovanna sat transfixed as I read her the newspaper; her vision was to that point fairly deteriorated. As a way of better forging our bond and because most of my mates at Harbord were Italian, for three years, I studied Italian and that really impressed Giovanna, who was simply known as “Mama Mia.”

As the opera progressed, Ms. Dahl as the notary, dashed and took cover beneath the table at which point, I buried my face in the program with explosive laughter. Straight away, I was reminded of each Saturday when the ever silent pussy gatto would bolt from the armchair and take cover beneath the sofa where I sat as Giovanna began an explosion of long-winded farts. Even the singer’s voice sounded much like Giovanna’s as she sang the role of notary. Remarkably, it was as though she was channelling Giovanna. In that moment, I was healed of the bile, which the recent Uber incident had caused to surface, bile that dated as far back as 1974.

In the end, Tommy’s parents sold their house and it was not until a couple years later that I discovered from the neighbour next-door that Tommy, who had never returned to their Mortimer and Logan home, had died of Leukaemia. Indeed, the winter flu was my dad’s way of protecting me from the callousness of having to lose a friend so early in life.

Apart from the catharsis that Tracy Dahl’s performance personally effected, I don’t think that it would be biased of me to state that hers was the runaway performance in the COC’s fantastic, and fast-paced I might add, production of Cosi Fan Tutte.

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As ever, mischievously push down and melt with laughter in celebration of the joy that is life and start having yourselves a most glorious of flying dreams. Thanks for your ongoing support of this happening astral joint on this side of the astral plane. I love you more.

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Now There Was A Night In the Theatre.

01.11.201809.12.2024 Arvin da BrghaLeave a comment

Whilst Lucian Mann-Chomedy took in the pre-opera lecture, I sat on a bench in the middle of University Avenue, enjoying a rather exquisite four-cheese macaroni and cheese baked to perfection as I read a very good biography of Tudor matriarch, Margaret Beaufort. Before me was the glass palace to the city’s high arts, beautifully lit. There were no doubt in my mind that I was shortly going to be enjoying a beautiful night at the theatre.

Once inside, I got situated next to Lucian who chatted away in that way that scholar souls tend to drone on about all manner of data that others may find tedious at best but, for having a scholar task companion (Merlin), I have grown comfortably accustomed. Close by, a tall silver-haired man kept on admiring me, even none too discreetly making bodily contact as legs relaxed and splayed open wide; in years past, I would gladly have explored and indulged.

After having made the obligatory Instagram post, I turned off the phone as the house lights faded into nothingness and the magic was begun. Tchaikovsky, you say, how could one go wrong there. The curtain ascended and the most glorious lucid dream this side of the dreamtime then unfolded. The sparse set design courtesy of Michel Levin’s creative genius was both stark and beautiful. Just the right lighting and the desired mood readily effected.

Leaves leaves leaves everywhere, the lighting of which matched the set and costumes. Last week’s production lacked melody, apart from the fact that Tchaikovsky’s music was well-known, there was nothing to that soulless, dissonant affair that drew you in or proved memorable – save it was really god-awfully bad.

During intermission, I stepped outdoors into the cool autumn air to return a couple of calls and pre-order an Uber meal. On my return, Lucian rightly so remarked on what a changed vibe there was in the house to the week prior. Indeed, there was stillness that hung in the air after each aria before the house would break into applause.

The prince’s aria was especially sublime a performance. The familiarity of glorious Tchaikovsky music, melodies long associated with the world of dance were welcome in the world of opera as Alexander Pushkin’s vision was handsomely realised.

After intermission the stark scene was beautifully animated as chairs, costumes and dancing ruled during the ball scene. The ball scene was dominated by classic Tchaikovsky music that choreographers the past century have relished celebrating in dance.

In the final act, one of things that struck me was how void of emotion the opera, Hadrian, the week prior was. Watching Onegin’s love finally profess her love for him after all these years, yet, insisting that she had to carry on with her life, her comfortable life and not leave it all for the man who pined for her was truly captivating. Ahead of me, two rows, were a couple of ladies who during that duet looked at each other, one even wiped her eyes.

This duet totally captured the human condition; it was about love, passion, longing, loss and dashed dreams. We could all relate to it. The passion and emotion tugged at your heart centre. Last week, not only was the music the most irritatingly banal but there was emperor Hadrian seemingly love struck, yet there was never any passion and emotion in scenes between him and Antinous. If you had no clue that this was one of the greatest love stories in gay history, you could be forgiven in assuming that it was an emperor bereft at the loss of his only son and heir, leaving him without the will to carry on. There simply was no connection, between them and by extension the audience… no passion whatsoever. Regardless their homoerotic love, the opera failed to have aroused emotion, passion and thereby causing you to lose yourself and identify completely with Hadrian, Antinous… or both.

That’s what one goes to the theatre for. At curtain call, rather than jump up and flee the theatre horrified as last week, I shot to my feet, clapped and howled my face off. Everyone leaving the theatre was enrobed in warmth and had been inspired to believe anew in love… that’s what great art does. What a truly memorable night in the theatre, this beautiful, passionate opera is with great melodies to spirit you along, long after you headed out into the world in the cool autumnal night air.

As ever, dream with the greatest passion for it is a true love affair indulged with self each and every day. Love yourself with new abandon and push off and start flying because you really are a truly spectacular work of art. As ever, thanks for your ongoing support. I love you more than you know.

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Two Weddings, A Baby, A Gaggle of Racial Predators & Hadrian’s frightful ghost.

24.10.201809.12.2024 Arvin da BrghaLeave a comment

The recent wedding of the Duke of Huescar to his handsome bride was a stunning bit of theatre. He is, of course, the future Duke of Alba, grandson of one of the grandest nobles of the last century, the inimitable Duchess of Alba.

The cut and design of the bridge’s dress is truly elegant; apparently, it was designed by her creatively gifted mother herself. They make a truly handsome couple.

At this juncture, I have not yet found any video of their nuptials on the Internet; perhaps, it will surface at a later date. The sublime elegance of her dress deftly reflects the undeniable harmony between this couple. So good it is to see a couple of souls who after having suffered lost through death in recent times, return to find each other anew, to further explore their loving bond.

Whilst awaiting the second royal wedding, I passed much time reviewing the coverage of the royal wedding of TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex last May. I was ever intrigued at the notion of an even larger guest list for the marriage of Jack Brooksbank and HRH Princess Eugenie of York.

A simple wedding, I was moved by how vastly different it was to that of TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex’s months earlier. The most obvious difference in both ceremonies being the latter’s carriage ride; a rather simple affair. This, of course, was an affair filled with aristocrats – some of whom had attended the earlier wedding last May.

Along with Tom & Lara Inskip and Guy Pelly with a wife more noticeably pregnant, there was the ever stylish Sofia Wellesley, this time equally stunning in a Dolce & Gabbana dress.

Tom & Lara Inskip processing towards the Lower Ward and St. George’s Chapel.

Guy Pelly attending the second royal wedding of the year.

Guy’s expectant wife, Elizabeth Pelly accompanied by Astrid Harbord.

Also, attending their second royal wedding for the year, Zoe & Jake Warren.

Back for more, Pippa Matthews with her younger brother James Middleton with that Tsar Nicholas thing going on with his look. For me, a woman is most beautiful when expectant – fecund, voluptuous, primal she is then most powerful; she is then truly the creator of life. How beautiful is that Kelly green?

Perennial favourite Chelsy Davy with Melissa Percy, who wasted little time in saying, this mum don’t babysit and there went Tom van Straubenzee. Gorgeous periwinkle dress.

Cressida Bonas radiating the light magical essence of artisan souls everywhere.

Franz Albrecht & Cleopatra zu Oettingen-Spielberg, young Bavarian royals attending their second royal wedding at Windsor Chapel this year.

Holly Candy – hands down, the best dressed lady at this royal wedding. Those matching pink bow gloves took her outfit stratospherically to the next level of |über soignée. I really did not think that Amal Clooney deserved that honour at the royal wedding of TRH Duke & Duchess; for one thing, her hat was worn on the wrong side of the head – always on the right side!

Coming on strong in second place, like Secretariat was phenomenon, Naomi Campbell. Readily, so many people were carping on about what is she doing at the royal wedding; hello, how many times has Sarah, Duchess of York not been a guest of Ms. Campbell’s whilst holidaying on some yacht or other in the Mediterranean. I love the way that Ms. Campbell feigned disbelief when asked by an attendant to leave the seat in the front row of the royals’ side of the quire where she sat speaking with Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece and his family.

Made in Chelsea star, Oliver Proudlock and his fiancée Emma proved among a couple of the best-dressed men.

Admittedly, though, not the best photograph, the urbane Alexander Gilkes, Paddle8 CEO, arrived in the company of artist Tracey Emin.

Cara Delevigne – another dead-ringer for magical artisan soul with the planet’s most ubiquitous plus-one, Derek Blasberg.

Kate & Lila Moss bringing the glamour.

Poppy Delevigne sporting one of the best fascinators at the royal wedding of Jack Brooksbank and HRH Princess Eugenie of York.

Other notable royals in attendance, Princess Marie-Chantal, Crown Prince Pavlos and their daughter, Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece. Also, the Crown Prince’s younger brother, Prince Philippos of Greece attended.

Lady Gabriella Windsor and her fiancé Timothy Kingston; yet another royal wedding is on the horizon. By far, the most statuesque of the Windsor ladies.

Lady Helen & Timothy Taylor; the minor royals whom we never see enough of. Love her dress.

Ricky Martin and his artist husband.

The always witty thespian, Stephen Fry and his husband, Elliott Smith.

Holly Branson coming through.

And her brother Sam Branson

The irrepressible mother of the bride, Sarah, Duchess of York and her firstborn who seems resigned to the fact that there is always an opening for spinster lady-in-waiting. Back in the 80s when Merlin was then incarnate, I shared with him a dream had that night of ‘Fergie’. Set somewhere in east Africa, she was riding atop the roof of a Land-Rover with several others… it was a dusty, tree-lined road and they were loud, happy persons all – her husband, Lord Porchester’s offspring was not present in the dream. As the vehicle hit a bump in the road, Fergie went flying from atop the vehicle’s roof and landed on her head; it was the most startling affair – we all screamed.

There was deathly silence as her khaki-clad body remained motionless for what seemed an eternity. Suddenly, as though jolted by lightning, much as a ginger cat with a few lives yet, Fergie shot to her feet, ramrod straight then began rushing about from one side to the other of the parked Land-Rover, mugging and waving to the perfectly immobile and non-human trees. I awoke from the dream laughing, the image was so bizarre. Seated across the Cabbagetown breakfast table from me, Merlin casually declared whilst remaining focussed on the Globe and Mail in hand, “So that’s how she became unhinged…” Yet again, I was reminded of that dream as Sarah, Duchess of York bounded from the Rolls Royce and made a mad dash, mouth ajar, mugging and waving to god-only-knows whom at the foot of St. George’s Chapel’s west door the day her daughter took possession of her man. This eccentric behaviour, much as in that dream, was on display as she entered the quire at St. George Chapel at the wedding of TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex on seeing Misha Nonoo and her date, oil heir Michael Hess. These days, she always seems only too happy that she has not ended up like Diana, Princess of Wales.

Another soul who seemed spooked to be at the ball was the groom’s gin-blossomed father whose daft expression throughout was more than a tad distracting. One was reminded of how odd Thomas Markle would have looked, had he been allowed to attend the Sussexes’ nuptials.

Here’s to the lovely young couple; here’s to life indeed. Happy for them that they have found each other anew in this life experience. To paraphrase Prince Seeiso of Lesotho when speaking of the Sussexes, I wish them buckets and buckets of healthy, happy children.

Even more glorious than their beautiful wedding was the recent announcement of the pregnancy of Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex. You cannot begin to fully fathom how excited this makes me for HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex. He has always seemed so alone, so vulnerable and emotionally fragile for having suffered the tragic, violent and sudden loss of his fantastic mum at age 12. So happy to know that they will be parents, and so quickly, and am fully confident that they will make the most fantastic parents. What more than two parents truly in love does a child need on coming into this world… again.

In all of this, what has not been cool, has been watching her racially predatory white relatives act as though she is nothing but a runaway slave. There is no doubt in my mind that were the Markles a wealthy family with a net worth of more than 200$m, would any of this acrimonious dreck be taking place. How dare she, the otiose, racially impure step-sibling, Meghan, end up doing better than them in life? Not only had this runaway slave managed to have escaped capture but she had gone and married the scion at an even more wealthy plantation.

Alas, nothing was more abhorrent than having to watch the most venal racial predator interject herself into the Sussexes/Markles’ “drama” as she opined on the ABC TV documentary, The Story of the Royals. So what if a twelve-year-old Meghan Markle wrote to you about a dish detergent ad; she also did same to then First Lady, Hillary Clinton. Straight away, the puppet-master orchestrating the Markle step-family’s media campaign of slander, grudge and none-too-succinct racial predation became fully focussed. Who else but this vile racial predator, who uses the U. S. justice system to wage personal racially predatory campaigns, against blacks with heretofore impeccably clean public personae, seated there in its invisible grand wizard Klansman’s hooded costume, could be directing this media putsch to sabotage the Sussexes’ marriage? Well near the end of the 9th decade of racially obsessing over blacks, you would think that having finished off Michael Jackson, made a joke of Tiger Woods and a jailbird of Bill Cosby would be enough; no thank you, there is bigger game to prey on. Clearly, the clown knows nothing of the BRF.

Enough about those who truly do not matter.

Hier soir, as I live an almost exclusively nocturnal existence, I got into a compensatorily parfumé Uber, driven by a recent Dravidian arrival with rather pleasant overleaves. I was stunned by how much traffic gridlock there was at pushing six in an already dark, autumnal and cool, too, evening. The driver could not figure out why traffic was so bad in Toronto and as I have always been a most vocal backseat driver, I soon began educating him on why Hogtown is the only major North American city without exclusive one-way streets in the downtown core. Back in the 60s through 70s when streetcars were being removed from streets like Avenue Road, Bloor Street, Sherbourne, Parliament, the city’s old WASP guard decided that for nostalgia’s sake some streetcar lines ought to be maintained a little while longer.

Well in excess of 40 years, the city still only has the two subway lines, two million more citizens and what seems like the fungal viral growth of condos. Naturally, the city’s constabulary and the TTC (Toronto Transit Commmission) made an unwritten alliance to keep themselves gainfully profitable by maintaining the streetcar lines that were left. Hence, each summer, kilometres of tracks are ripped up and replaced with the necessity for TTC outdoor workers and police staff on hand to maintain traffic. Well into the 21st century, a woefully inadequate 19th century technology clanks away, holding up traffic and as recently was the case this past monsoon season – climate change is truly upon us – the new streetcars were caught in feet of flooded water with faecal matter afloat their flooded interiors. All this so we never end up with new subway lines, one way streets with the discontinuation of streetcars. At least, Montréal can be commended for having owned up to the crippling corruption at the municipal level of government.

Finally, after directing him along streets that he didn’t even know existed, I got to the southwest corner of University and Queen Street West, hopped out, crossed the city’s widest boulevard and made it into the lobby of the Four Season’s Centre for the Performing Arts at 1831. Lucian Mann-Chomedy who happens to be a scholar in my entity and a professor emeritus at University of Toronto, who also happens to be an unrivalled Voltaire scholar glowed as I dashed inside. We hugged and kissed and it was good to see his eyes light up; he does have more than a passing resemblance to Merlin… vibrationally. Gave him his ticket to the first opera of the season that we’ll be seeing, Hadrian. Whilst he took to the amphitheatre for the pre-opera lecture, I swiftly made it west along Queen Street West and got myself some very deliciously spiced beef teriyaki washed down with a dash of prosecco.

Returned to the theatre, Lucian shared that he found the lecture rather stimulating; heaven only knows what that meant, I was though too busy creating a post of the evening for my Instagram. What then unfolded was the most god-awful unmitigated bullshit conceivable. Look this was nothing more than effete poseurs of Toronto’s gay mafia, throwing government money around to keep their friends afloat. Watching this bit of bold-faced arts larceny was at times cruelly embarrassing. Of course, it was staged by consummate professionals, thus there were truly sublime moments when the production was marvellously realised. However, I was reminded of all those downright dogfests at Toronto Dance Theatre in the 80s – do they even exist anymore – where god-awful retro-Neanderthal movement was set to, of all things, J. S. Bach.

Act I opened with vaguely lissom dancers upstage posing overlong as Roman statuary. Naturally, they were lit such that when they finally began moving downstage on the diagonal, in movement that had been first realised by Vaslav Nijinsky (he is a mature sage, in my entity and currently reincarnated and an actor on the Portuguese stage) a century earlier, you really had to squint and try to make out if they were truly nude. Naturally, there was no such luck. That was just as lame as the opening of Act III after an intermission where there was much cruel laughter at what a dog’s breakfast we were having to slug our way through. There was the none-too-fey/verile or lissom-looking Antinous cavorting on a bed that was reminiscent of a couch I frequented in the late 70s where the city’s only queer psychiatrist and I had an ongoing affair. This bit of uninspired staging in the post-AIDS paradigm was as lame as having to watch two bored manatees going at it. Goddamn, where is the frottage! They seemed to be sleepy hobos, trying to make out which side of the bed they wanted to sleep on rather than obsessed lovers engaging in the gay world’s paedophiliacal obsession – let’s not go there just now.

Well, if you can’t hack a pop career in these parts, the next best thing is, go compose an opera. Lord Jesus… why? I am only too grateful that he didn’t set his sights on appropriating black high art and opting for a Jazz career. Last evening, Tuesday, October 23, 2018 proved without doubt that the kinder of minor Canadian celebrity should never be indulged when they elect to pursue whatever line of work mama or papa pursued. I am reminded of “Bathhouse Pierrette” as he is charitably dismissed, playing party leader in these parts and forever looking gripped by stage fright. I was much humoured this past summer as he followed the future Duke of Sussex about Buckingham Palace at the Commonwealth banquet desperately trying to score an invite to the royal wedding and being clearly snubbed by HRH Prince Henry of Wales who was gruffly dismissive of his attempts to score a pair of tickets – in the 11th hour – for him and his insufferable fag hag wife.

There were points where persons in back of Lucian and me were laughing at how embarrassingly bad the opera was. Small-time, one guy to my rear readily dismissed. Goodness, if there was one more unpleasant reference to “the Jews” in this horrid farce, I was ready to get up and walk out. The opera was frankly a reflection of the archly conservative and frankly sphinctered worldview of Toronto’s incestuous gay elites – many of whom I went through in the 70s through early 80s and who then were just as smegmaed as a can of freshly opened corned beef – those, indeed, were the pre-plague years.

Getting on the elevator to make it to the basement where I collected my pea coat, I remarked, to one woman who asked my verdict, “You know, it would truly have been great theatre if that strobe light in Act IV had suddenly flashed brighter and erased this entire madness from memory. Trust me, dreams are never this bad!” You can fool those of your tightly incestuous social crowd all of the time but never those too shrewd to give a damn about you and your BS.

As ever my darlings, dream like you’ve never dreamt before and by all means, push off and start flying for at least there, you can readily escape the madness that’s got this paradigm saturated to the gills with BS. Thanks so much for your ongoing support, I love you more!

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Ah Summer…

12.09.201809.12.2024 Arvin da BrghaLeave a comment

After having ravenously devoured this fascinating trilogy last winter, I re-read Crazy Rich Asians in anticipation of the film adaptation. Of course, no film can ever approximate the layers of nuances and breath of ideas between the covers of any book. Moreover, reading is a purely subjective experience and with someone possessed of such a rich dream life, a book is always like the most welcome lucid dream.

I was beyond wowed by this film. Nick and Rachel were beautifully cast; however, I had always envisioned Astrid to be deliciously long-necked and more reserved… I think that they ought to have gotten an exquisite beauty who is in repression mode because no one does refined hauteur like a woman in repression mode. Love the greens of Tyersall Park. This was one of the most glorious movies that I have seen in long ages.

Also this summer, I headed off to the Cineplex in Dundas Square to catch an opera production, which initially I had not when it premiered three years earlier. Lucian Mann-Chomedy a mature scholar entity mate and I have been catching movies and attending the opera together. He is a world-renowned expert on Voltaire. Sublime and strastopherically knowledgeable, he is always welcome company. Usually, we gather at my place once per fortnight and have tea, talk ideas but of late, we have naturally been looking at the recent royal wedding of TRH Duke and Duchess of Sussex. More of that later…

In any event, there were we happily settled in in our back row seats, eating popcorn and excited at being transported by Verdi’s mastery. As ever Anna Netrebko was superb and nothing was more moving whilst simultaneously sad than seeing Dmitri Hvorostovsky in glorious song. We both held hands and silently lost tears as his passing two years later, November, 2017 was highlighted at the end of the film. A truly remarkable performer with a lot of sage and king energy going on somewhere in his casting and role in essence.

So there were Lucian and I returned to Dundas Square to have yet another vicarious theatre experience. This time, it was the Royal Ballet’s new production of Swan Lake with choreography by Liam Scarlett and the most fuck-all fabulous sets designed by the gifted and visionary George Macfarlane – that gold-leaf-looking set in Act III is worth flying to London and seeing it in person at Covent Garden. Vadim Muntagirov and Marianela Nunez were the pricipal dancers. Now this is world-class dancing of the highest order. I would rather fly to London and catch a performance than time-waste and money-waste on a season of the National Ballet of Canada. If I’m honest, the only dancer in NBC I ever recognise, when onstage, is Skylar Campbell thanks to his russet afro.

Besides, I was deeply disappointed when in celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary as captured territory – let’s be real here – rather than look forward to the future, one just had to go raiding the Canada Council Grant system. I can understand that these are all friends socially but I am so tired of this “one Anglais, one Français” approach to things. God forbid that Canadians outside of Québec should ever be nationally presented on their nightly news with what goes on in Montréal each July 1, Canada Day. After a week earlier celebrating Fete National, everyone moves house rather than celebrate the country’s holiday. Of course, for the poor Anglo newcomers to Montréal, living in English enclaves, who did not secure indoor parking, they find themselves with slashed tyres and knocked off side view mirrors – all for being Anglo in god forbid supposed Canada.

Instead of saluting the fact that Indo-Canadians in the GTA (greater Toronto Area) have arrived by mounting a production of La Bayadere, instead we had to settle for two non-choreographers mounting crap that you know I had no time to waste on. I heard from friends that it was utterly dismissible fare as can well be imagined. After the opening night performance of a new production of La Bayadere, one could then cross Queen Street West to the grounds of Osgoode Hall (Law Society of Upper Canada) with a few pitched marquees and have an Indian themed party with a handful of Bollywood stars thrown in for good measure. Naturally, this would see new sponsorships for the NBC – god knows arts funding is always hard to come by – and it would be a wonderful way of being both inclusive of all Canadians and looking forward to the next 150 years. The maudlin fare staged will not be in the repertoire ten years hence, you can count on that.

Alors, enough about what might have been… this after all is Canada. Lucian and I had ourselves a fantastic time vicariously enjoying a live performance from Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. The dancing, staging and orchestration were all stellar. Vadim and Marianela were fabulous. Of course, had I flown to London to see Swan Lake, I would have opted for Natalia Osipova’s interpretation of Odette/Odile or a partnership wherein Steven McRae danced Prince Siegfried.

One of the things that Lucian and I also do when getting together for tea, entity mates as we are, is we delight in looking at the recent royal wedding of TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex. When initially her overleaves were channelled as requested by moi, she was said to have had two prior lives as a high ranking member of the British Royal Family. Naturally, as I was completely taken with the sweeping theatricality of their wedding, I had those past lives explored and was not surprised in the least.

Back in 1995 whilst living in Vancouver, I spent a glorious weekend with a friend who had moved from Toronto at least a decade earlier. A great cook and marvellous raconteur, he also happens to be an artisan entity mate. In among his stellar library was a book that he highly recommended; he devoured biographies with true relish. The book was a favourite of his, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby – it proved a most fascinating portrait of someone whom I had never before heard of. There was no doubt in my mind that this was a phenomenal woman without whom there would have been no House of Tudor.

Cousin to King Henry VI, mother of King Henry VII, grandmother to King Henry VIII and great-grandmother to Queen Elizabeth I, here was the most sweeping portrait of a life lived in full and of a truly remarkable woman. Not surprised was I then to learn that the soul now incarnate as Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex was in that past life, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby. Indeed, there sat Meghan, holding hands with her beautiful-of-spirit husband, HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex with the black marble tomb of King Henry VI behind them in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. Furthermore, like true Queen and Mother of the House of Tudor returned, Meghan on entering St. George’s Chapel was greeted by fanfare, which is reserved for the arrival of the Sovereign.

Lucian and I have spent much time, trying to spot as many persons who attended the wedding beyond the usual fare: Oprah Winfrey, Amal and George Clooney – whom I thought were both sartorially off. One does not wear a hat on the left side of the head anymore than one would a medal on the right breast as David Beckham did at the royal wedding of TRH Duke & Duchess of Cambridge in 2011. I loved every shot of Emilie van Cutsem; she looks like a real tough broad who is definitely got a goal of dominance. Of course, there she sat in the quire next to Jack Brooksbank in her ruby brooch to match her monochromatic outfit. By far the most handsome of her four sons, is Hugh van Cutsem who sat two rows in the nave behind royals, Cleopatra and Franz-Albrecht zu Oettingen-Spielberg; a baroness at birth, her husband is a Bavarian prince and friend of HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex. Hugh van Cutsem also sat two rows ahead of Chelsy Davy and her brother Shaun.

So many persons seemed to have gotten it wrong, claiming that Chelsy looked glum whilst being simply focussed and meditative – I rather suspect that she is either a scholar or warrior soul, which would give her that singleness of focus. There was a beautiful moment, one of my favourites, where whilst chatting with two ladies, she and one of the other women silently break open their faces in spirited laughter – it was one of the more memorable moments. At the time, they stood next to another troika Jake Warren father of bridesmaid Zalie Warren and HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex’s goddaughter as he chatted with Marcus Mumford and his wife the actor, Carey Mulligan.

Edward van Cutsem is, of course, married to another the late Gerald Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster’s daughters, Tamara, older sister of Dan Snow’s wife, Lady Edwina who sat directly ahead of Adam Bidwell – a man with a most sexually dynamic face – who entered the chapel’s south door in a cluster of males which included Jake Warren, Mark Dyer, Thomas and Charlie van Straubenzee, Arthur Landon, Hugh – the current Duke of Westminster – and Jack Brooksbank.

One of the more beautiful intimate moments between the Sussexes went unnoticed by 95 per cent of persons watching the ceremony. Yes there was that beautiful moment during the Kingdom Choir singing Stand by Me when the camera cuts to an adoring HRH Prince Henry as he taps on his beloved’s fingers and she turns and smiles into his familiar soul, being the only sunshine that lights his world – this is the 21st time that these two souls have met during the course of reincarnations. As he slipped the golden ring onto her finger in movement that was sexually charged, HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex then winked his left eye at his ravishing bride – sly, intimate and subtle, most persons would not have noticed the wink as it happened.

Veiled, I love this photograph of Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex as the veil represents the vision of Lady Margaret Beaufort having a lucid dream of herself into the future where she is being crowned, as it were, at a wedding in Windsor Castle’s St. George’s Chapel. How like a true queen, Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex appears as her train is carried by the Mulroney twins, who along with the other eight pages and bridesmaids beautifully fulfilled their tasks. The dark and umbra lighting also suggests the past and that soul, having been the mother of the House of Tudor coming through to claim her reward as a member of the House of Windsor, which would not have been Anglican, indeed might have gone the way of so many other monarchies were it not for the shrewdly calculating and indomitable Lady Margaret Beaufort from whose womb like an acorn indirectly passed two of the greatest of the United Kingdom’s sovereigns, King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I.

Theirs was a truly remarkable and beautiful wedding. Here’s to TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex and their tasks ahead as Commonwealth Youth Ambassadors, charter members of the Royal Foundation, the driving force behind the Invictus Games and strongly bonded entity mates who have found each other anew. Hip! Hip!

For now, I have returned from the emergency at St. Michael’s Hospital after being thrown from my chromium steed by rain-smeared steel crating. As ever, I got up and after a vituperative bouquet, I resumed singing and scatting my heart out as it is the only way to stay focussed when bike-riding in this town. Though it has done my arthritic right knee no favours, my laptop survived unscathed.

As ever, thank you for your ongoing patronage. Don’t ever forget to deeply breathe in, plié then push off because life is but a most glorious of dreams and right here is where it’s at. Sweet dreams as ever.

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In Memoriam: George F. Hawken

26.12.201607.12.2024 Arvin da Brgha2 Comments

George F. Hawken – February 5, 1999, Montréal, Québec

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This past Friday, December 23, 2016, I went to my doctor’s to get my test results for HIV. The doctor whom I had not seen in long ages was unusually engaging. When he finally cut to the chase, never had he announced that my test result was HIV negative with so much pleasure; I thought it odd at the time. Brushing past all that, I then inquired of him how George Hawken was doing; after all, George years earlier on my return to Toronto had insisted that I have the handsome Sino-Canadian for a GP as well.

Marta. Intaglio on Paper. 1974 George Hawken

As he paused, I told him that I could appreciate his patient-client confidentiality considerations; however, forging ahead, I told him that I had sent George an email more than a week earlier and had not heard back from him. Pressing on, I inquired if George was doing well of late as I had last been in touch a couple of months earlier. In that way that the good doctor had mastered, he haltingly stammered back that yes, George was doing well… We then left it at that as clearly he did not want to pursue the matter further – he had actually stood up to conclude our visit.

Pink Chair 1992 George Hawken (Arvin)

About a week earlier, I was feeling especially uneasy about not having had a reply from George to my last email; he would always answer within 36 hours at the latest. By then, it had been about a week; we hardly ever spoke by phone on my return from Montréal. Previously, when we spoke by phone our conversations back in the late 80s and through to mid 90s resulted in an invitation from George to immediately get together where our passionate physicality was intense beyond the norm.

Gordon and Janet in their Garden. Lithograph 2009 George Hawken

To still my worrisome mind, I began playing Joseph Haydn’s Paris symphonies; George favoured the Paris symphonies where I favoured the London Symphonies. George had actually introduced me to Haydn’s music; he insisted that I become better acquainted with the 18^th century composer’s works. When first I sat for George in 1986, at his Brock Avenue loft in the Queen Street West neighbourhood, he always played Haydn… I would always love the way, he would play imaginary keyboard whilst enjoying a cigarette break as I privately sat for him.

Franz Kafka – Kafka Suite. Intaglio 1982 George Hawken

One of the funniest memories of George is lying in bed with him after passionate play at the Brock Avenue loft and laughing hysterically whilst we listened to CBCFM and a Florence Foster-Jenkins performance. Afterwards, we indulged another round of Rottweiler style passion that was part Greco-Roman brawn. On my return to Toronto, George and I never resumed our physical relationship; though, I had at least hoped that I could serve as muse to him again. Alas, it was not to be.

Book Cover Illustration. 1980 George Hawken

One morning after work, with Haydn symphonies swirling about my mind as my apartment was sodden heavy with the Paris symphonies, I suddenly made a right whilst coming up Yonge Street and headed along Adelaide Street East. Then, I went one better and hung a left up Sherbourne Street for the morning ride home; never had I done this. Riding up Sherbourne, the familiar strains of Haydn’s Symphony No. 85 B flat major ‘La Reine’ spirited me along as I leisurely rode up the moderately icy, dedicated bike lane.

Fly. Etching. 1976 George Hawken

Just above Shuter Street, George suddenly fell into my mind and I crouched forward towards the handlebar to best face into the cold winds barrelling down the avenue. Whilst coasting up the bike lane opposite Allan Gardens Park, my mind as I whistled Haydn’s symphony began recalling moments of passion with George long years earlier. I thought of those glorious nights of noisy, sweaty passionate play at his McCaul Street loft; I crouched forward even more as my face warmed into a smile at pleasurable memories.

Beethoven Asleep. Etching. 1975 George Hawken

If only, I still had George’s numbers, I would call him on getting home; it was so unlike him not to have responded to the email that I had sent him on December 13, 2016. Peddling harder up the tough stretch of bike lane between Carlton and Wellesley Street East, I suddenly began slowing down as a large black hearse slowly negotiated its way from the Rosar-Morrison Funeral Home & Chapel property at 467 Sherbourne Street; it waited in the middle of the bike lane for northerly flowing traffic to ease up.

Pink Chair I/III AP. Lithograph. 1990 George Hawken (Arvin)

I rolled up and paused looking squarely into the hearse where a cardboard coffin was bound and en route to the St. James Cemetery and Crematorium over on Parliament Street. This was the same route that my father’s cadaver had taken after his funeral in August 2008 which George had attended. I was so appreciative of the fact that he had asked if he could attend my father’s funeral. After the lovely service, I had approached George and we hugged and he seemed really pleased to have made the outing.

Woman. Lithograph. 1980 George Hawken

Moments afterwards another of my lovers, Owen Hawksmoor came by to start lecturing me about the importance of having many friends; after all, said he, look at all the people who had turned out to my father’s funeral. Then said, Owen, as can ever be expected of him, “you should at least have six people who would be prepared to pall bear for you.” Brushing him and his big sex cockiness aside, I rebutted, “trust you to always make for a bitter after taste. What’s it to me, I’d be dead; it really wouldn’t matter anymore than it does now.”

Yonge Street Mask. AP Etching. 1971 George Hawken

I broke and hopped off the bike and intently looked inside at the brown cardboard coffin; it seemed an eternity waiting for the hearse to finally make it off the bike lane and into traffic. In those moments, I again thought of George and that was when it suddenly dawned on me that I was never going to hear from George again. Further, I had the distinct impression that what had prompted me to route-change for the first time, to be humming and whistling one of Haydn’s Paris symphonies: symphony No. 84 in B float major is because George’s corpse lay in the hearse before me en route to St. James Cemetery and Crematorium.

Myself (Self-portrait) AP Etching. 2008 George Hawken

Without doubt, this was why I was in this place in this moment before an austere black hearse straddling the northbound bike lane on Sherbourne which I had never used before en route home from work. With that, as the hearse slowly pulled out onto Sherbourne and then made a right turn onto Wellesley Street East, the traffic in the icy snowy street was sufficiently slow that I rode alongside the hearse along the side of the cardboard coffin and accompanied all the way to the black wrought iron gates of the cemetery on Parliament Street.

Baudelaire II. Etchin. 1975 George Hawken

After I got in, had a shower and had my lovely home infused with Hoju incense, Haydn’s symphony No. 104 in D major ‘London’ played on repeat as I grounded anew. Though it was not especially windy out, there was a loud noise on my balcony and wrapping up in my lovely woollen pea coat, I took to the balcony to investigate. The first sight that greeted me was a heavy plume of sooty black smoke from the crematorium’s chimneys as they were being swept southerly in the cold wintry morning air. I lost a tear and on returning indoors, though my Google search on coming home produced nothing for ‘George Hawken Obituary’ I still felt firmly that there was no coincidence to the sequence of events and synchronicity of the past several days which culminated in the black hearse across the bike lane.

Colin Campbell. Etching. George Hawken

As it is always tough to close shut, I gave the door to the balcony a bit of encouragement by heaving my right shoulder into it. On turning away from the door, I noticed one of George’s gifts to me “Woman” was titled off its hook on the cement wall where moments before taking to the balcony it had sat perfectly aligned. Yet another sign indeed. Finally, today at work, as I kept checking the folder which bore all George’s email correspondences, then did a Google search for ‘George Hawken Obituary’ alas there was confirmation. George had died the day before I had sent him my final email; it was one in which I offered to buy a copy of an illustration which he had done for an anthology of emerging Canadian authors.

George Hawken, 1970s.

Again, today after work, I rode up the Sherbourne Street bike lane and it all fell into place. Almost always when I went to our shared doctor, there would George be. Finally, when I saw him after a long spell of not having been in touch, he sat birdlike in the doctor’s office and he was just as stunned to have seen me walk in as I was to have seem him looking so gravely ill. George had said that it was cancer; we there and then made arrangements to get together and did. I was so pleased that he had finally met my lovely sister, Pandora and it was lovely going to George’s Camden Street penthouse suite for dinner with my lovely sister when she was in town from Ottawa.

Self Portrait 5. Etching. 1984 George Hawken
Today, whilst riding up the bike lane on Sherbourne Street, the doctor’s excitable congratulations to my testing HIV negative made so much sense. Too, his response to my query how George was doing of late and his response that he was doing well, indeed, made perfect sense. By Friday, December 23, 2016, George was doing well and in a better place no longer suffering from the wear and tear of his end-of-life monadal illness. Ours was a very private relationship and there were only two persons in George’s life with whom I enjoyed cordial relations: his son and his lover, Colin Campbell. I rather suspect that Colin is George’s task companion.

Grete. Etching. George Hawken

I will ever be proud of having been an inspiring muse to George and for having facilitated the energetic work that he did in the late ‘80s to mid ‘90s. Our passion fuelled his creativity; what’s more, our passion kept me focussed and grounded in this life as Merlin and his ravaging illness and the hideous ghouls who betrayed him in his illness made life at times more harrowing than already the illness made it. George and his compassion and support were invaluable for me and Merlin was aware of it and openly and unselfishly encouraged it; he knew that I needed that support as with his passing the vipers in his circle would readily dispense with me. Alas, all things being mutual, dispense with the ill-evolved lot I gladly did.

Hearts and Flowers. Intaglio. 1976 George Hawken

Sweet and blissful dreams my darling ennobled George; I am honoured to have fostered and enabled your creativity to have lotussed into greater flower. Yours was a most rare and beautiful spirit and yet again our love shall dance and soar to higher octaves. My heart centre is wide open to facilitate your journey in whatever capacity of our choosing in the dreamtime. Ever, will I love you more.

Hawken, George 9/2/46<O>12/12/2016, Owen Sound

This was a first level old artisan in the observation mode, with a goal of dominance, a spiritualist in the emotional part of intellectual centre.

George had a Mercury/Venus body type.

George had a primary chief feature of arrogance and a secondary of stubbornness.

He was sixth-cast in his cadence and his cadence is second in the greater cadence. He is a member of entity two, cadre four, greater cadre 7, pod 414.

He has a discarnate artisan essence twin and a scholar task companion who is alive and they do know each other but have not worked together in this life.

This fragment is an artisan with priest casting, so his art will always manifest a spiritual component no matter what the medium. This fragment was a well-known painter of placid rural landscapes in the latter part of the eighteenth century in England, and several of his works hang in noble houses.

You were once a student of this fragment’s, in a life in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and you were lovers for a short time in that life also.

Twice this fragment has illustrated books written by his task companion and he was also an illuminator of manuscripts in the twelfth century of the Common Era.

He was an architect during the reign of Augustus Caesar and several buildings he designed still stand, although one was rather badly damaged by the volcanic eruption that buried the city of Pompeii in the first century of the Common Era.

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The Racial Predator and A Fistful of Dreams. 2.0!

24.02.201504.12.2024 Arvin da BrghaLeave a comment

*After having spoken to WordPress, I was assured that they did not delete this blog post of dreams and commentary which was originally posted on February 20, 2015. Again, if you find anything herein objectionable just move along because, just so you know, apologies and obsequiousness are both foreign to me. Again, if you follow this blog and believe in an artist’s right to be free from all forms of terror and censor please do reblog this post. END.

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Dreams involving travels in consciousness to anchor point metropolises are always welcome. These next dreams represent just such travels to far-off distant worlds as transported to via the astral plane and through the expediency of the dreamtime.

At the time, it was Monday, September 4, 1995 and the dreams were audiocassette-recorded on tape number one hundred and ninety-eight. As such, they will yet be found in Volume XX of the XXV volumes of dreams. The Moon then transited both Capricorn and my eighth house.

As has been previously stated, my Saturn retrograde is posited in the eighth house which, in concert with my Venus/Uranus conjunction in Leo, afford me this commendable facility which I would trade for no amount of platinum on this or any other world!

Speaking of worlds far-flung or otherwise, what a maudlin little backwater world of a planet we’ve got here. This past Tuesday, February 17, 2015, I was well aware that it was an 8 day and with a life path of 8, there are times when on such days it is best to stay indoors and avoid it all. This past Tuesday was just such a day, nonetheless, I elected to head out into the big bad world.

As I am never late for any of the three jobs at which I income earn, I had headed out 1.5 hours before start of shift. Before leaving my Jazz saturated home, I had mapped out how best to do my banking whilst en route to work. Off I went through the icy streets of Toronto where there a few water main breaks which left spots of the route an icy mess.

Luckily, I had long weeks earlier switched to my steel-studded winter bike wheels which when partially soft make riding on ice or in snow feel as though riding on sand. Alas, no need to go slipping and crashing for no good reason. I rode along the bike lane on Wellesley Street East, hung a left and headed south down Sherbourne Street.

The major water main break just south of Dundas Street East had me abandon the bike lane for the street where the single southbound lane was an icy slushy mess. I was rather impressed at how well my steel-studded wheels navigated the thick ice without incident. The past couple of days have been the coldest, snowiest, iciest and windiest in long memory.

At Shuter Street, I hung a right and headed westward to Church Street where I made another left and headed south to Queen Street East. There, at the southwestern corner of Queen Street East and Church Street is a Scotiabank in one of those old buildings which has been around since before the start of the last century; however, this being Toronto, it is highly likely that in 1.5 decades it will have been gutted to form the podium of yet another condensation-prone glass and steel condominium; these gems are readily gobbled up by offshore investors and soon infested with parasitic parvenu dreck that have neither class nor intellect.

As all the bike stands on Church and Queen Street East close to the bank were buried in at least 1.5 feet of frozen-solid snow to make a path for pedestrians, I ventured into the large-interiored structure which I have always favoured. A few years back, when I worked in the neighbourhood fundraising for the Royal Ontario Museum where I brought in three times as much money as the second best in sales, I loved frequenting the lovely building to do my banking.

Having safely left my bike in a corner where I could clearly see it, I progressed south down the length of the narrow bank and waited in line where there were two female clerks attending to the male and female customers. I smiled and readily turned off the front light on my helmet when the teller on the left whose hair was a hennaed affair, much reminding me of Québec, dramatically frowned and covered her eyes.

Since I noticed her from time to time looking away from the dumpy Sri Lankan female before her at the counter, I made a point to avoid her and use her blonde coworker when the other customer took his leave. I had left the light on the back of my helmet on – as for that matter the lights on my bike on, one in back and front.

Even though this was a less frequented bank, I had a good view of my bike and kept on looking at it. Back in late 2011, whilst riding westerly along Carlton Street and coming up on Jarvis Street where to the right in the low-rise condo the actor, Gordon Pinsent resides, I had a man in a black Ford F-350 with monstrous tyres open his door without looking whilst talking on his phone.

I went flying and nimble soul that I am I got from the streetcar track and scurried me and my trusty bike to safety. I then watched a grown man with the softest blues eyes become a nervous wreck as he cried and profusely apologised for having opened the door on me without first looking. I had actually clearly seen him in his side view mirror and he honestly hadn’t been paying attention. Though I had cautiously rung my bell, I was just as surprised as he would be after the fact when he opened his door.

Since then, I have worn lights on my helmet and kept them on regardless the time of day – you can never be too safe; besides, vehicles sport lights all hours of the day so why not bikes.

As I can spot a racial predator from here to Times Square in a heartbeat, I elected not to go to the teller on the left as both customers simultaneously took their leave of the tellers on concluding their business. Approaching, I watched the menopausal woman with a bit of darkened fur on her upper lip leaning to her blonde coworker and say something.

At the time, the blonde was busy finishing up the paper work from her last customer. I approached and avoided the faux redhead whose looks were hostile and predatory. Leaning in, she said something to the blonde who immediately looked up as I approached her. She was both startled by what the faux redhead said and the sight of me wearing two balaclavas, a toque and earmuffs beneath my helmet – being in motion on a bike in -37° Celsius.

As I have several times over the years frequented the bank and in past winters entered said bank in my winter face bike gear, I specifically chose it as branch into which I could slip where it would not be too heavily peopled and therefore would not have to take my balaclavas off and all that head gear – the nylon balaclava is a great fit but it is the most bothering thing to both put on and even harder to take off when sweat sheened.

Though I had not paid the faux redhead any mind and was now standing before her blonde coworker who fixed me with a cautious smile, old dry-pussied, displaced lazy haus frau just had to prove my instinct for spotting racial predators to be still sharply focussed. Again, though I was not at her counter – why would I? – she spoke up stating,

“Please remove your mask, we feel threatened by you?”

Imagine that, the racial predator has now evolved to the point of being telepathic even empathetic… NOT! Of course, it does go without saying that many of the university-educated other bank employees who were comfortably seated in their offices to my rear had seen me whilst I waited and some I recognised and they too recognised me from my many visits to said branch.

However, our estrogen-challenged faux redhead just had to go proving that yet again when you assume you make an ass out of you and me. At no point did the blonde utter a word; frankly, I rather suspect that she was more in shock by having been prompted into fearfulness by her coworker faux redhead than anything else.

Meanwhile, one of the bank managers, a jovial large-bodied fellow, left his office and walked past me to go and speak to a contractor in blue uniform towards the back behind the tellers. I had seen this man before on prior visits to the bank and naturally, I should think that if he found my attire threatening, he would have approached me and said something.

In a cool but civil tone which readily betrayed my loathing for having to deal with bullshit of any kind, I graciously greeted and informed the blonde that I would like to deposit my pay cheque into my account.

“Remove your mask; we do not have to serve you. You are threatening us with your mask.”

My god, what if I were carrying a gun and intent on holding up the bank? Did this dumbass think that she would be the first to deflect a bullet with her stupid insolence?

“You have no such right to tell me to remove my balaclavas. When was the last time you asked a Muslim to remove her burqa because you found it threatening? That’s right, you don’t find that threatening but strangely enough you find me threatening.”

She began mouthing off yet again at which point I interjected, “Tell you what, I will just go to the main branch where they know me. Happy Black history month to you, too!”

I took my red Scotiabank card and cheque placed them in my red Metro Toronto Convention Centre marvellously waterproof, wind and winter jacket all-in-one and began the long stretch of the bank to my bike. I was not surprised, on turning back, to see old hirsute-lipped monster come into the aisle to approach me.

That’s right, the same one who claimed to have been so threatened by me, leaving the safety of her counter to come address me. She looked down the way at me with that vapid smugness her ilk owns so well when letting me know that she was putting out an alert on me so I would not be served anywhere.

Regardless of the fact that on the video any Legal, Human Resources, Public Relations professional at Scotiabank would readily conclude that this faux redhead did not provide their customer with good service. What could possibly have possessed this supposedly threatened woman to come from behind her counter to face down the aisle at me as I got my bike to leave the branch?

Again, whilst she called out to me that she would alert the other branch, I wished her a happy Black history month to which she callously laughed after replying, “Yeah whatever, same to you!”

I got from my bike and left the branch, headed down Church Street and made my way westerly along King Street East crossed Yonge Street and headed a block still westerly for the main branch at Scotia Plaza’s gaudy, blood-coagulated-maroon, 68 storey marble edifice. I got in line as I had many times before in the same winter gear. This time an Indo-Canadian teller turned around when free and noticed me. I could not make out if she had gestured for me to join her or not. As my bike was locked outside, I carried both bright yellow paniers in hand.

As I watched, I noticed the same teller saying something though she was alone; perhaps she was speaking via intercom to someone. Again, she gestured, this time her motion was less confusing; she really meant to invite me to join her. I walked around the circular island and said hello and placed my card in the handset and entered my PIN then signed my cheque whilst sharing that I would like to simply deposit it.

Whilst finishing my signature, along came another Indo-Canadian female. The look on her face was rude, ugly and confrontational. Right away, she launched into her racially predatory assault, “Remove your mask or leave the bank. We are not serving you until you remove your mask.”

Again, as elsewhere, I informed the ignorant boor – whose clit failed to have fully descended leaving her, for all intent and purpose, a lifelong-frustrated pussied man – that I had no intentions of inconveniencing myself by removing my balaclavas which were not a mask simply because she said so. Too, I pointed out that there was no need for me to remove my balaclavas when she would never make any such request of a burqa-wearing Muslim.

You can bet she was full of more bile as she let me know we were not talking about that but I was being threatening and she would rather I left that bank than not.

The intense racial animus from this woman was so repulsive that I simply took my card from the machine picked up my paniers off the floor and said, “Hey, Happy Black history month to you, too.”

I now got from the bank feeling more than a little bit impatient. I am never late for work… ever. By now, it was within an hour of the start of my shift which for me is late. I rode along the sidewalk and turned onto Bay Street heading north for a couple of blocks to the Scotiabank on the west side of Bay Street between Queen Street West and Richmond Street West. I managed to tie up my bike atop a two-foot frozen bank of snow to a bike rack.

Once inside, I recalled what inordinate focussed grace I had had to impart when a few weeks earlier I had been to the branch to deposit another cheque and replace my demagnetised bank card. For more than 40 minutes, I had been asked a million questions and kept waiting again and again. At the end of it, the beautiful, raven-haired Muslim teller had laughed and said in a lowered tone to me, “You are a very smart man…”

She, of course, knew that the rest of the tellers – almost exclusively White save a lone Black woman who was segregated to sit by herself at a desk in the middle of the floor where the rest of the public comes and goes – were doing their best to provoke an impatient response out of me.

To say the least, it was not going to happen and did not. I got my card replaced that day, though, they made every attempt at having me return to my home branch at Yonge and Wellesley Streets and for no good reason.

Finally, it was my turn to see a teller. A tall White male with facial hair likely in corporate security and wearing a tattoo on his right forearm proved the most remarkably human and civilised interaction that I had had that day.

He very charmingly began by letting me know that he would prefer it if I were to remove my ‘balaclavas’; I replied that though he had been the most civilised customer service representative thus far, he was not within his right to ask me to remove it anymore than he would presume to think that any Muslim woman would remove her burqa when asked.

More to the point, I asked what kind of society is this when you would never think to make any such demands of burqa-wearing Muslims as you would myself being racially profiled during Black history month.

As I like giving as good as I get, I charmingly reminded him that in this Black history month, it bears mentioning that Blacks have not flown planes into buildings, shot soldiers in their backs or stormed Parliament et al. He smiled, my balaclavas remained in tack and when he assured me that if security were to ask me to remove my mask I would have to.

Cutting to the chase, I assured him that I was well aware that he was corporate security and both he and I knew that he had no legal right to ask me to remove my balaclavas as it was not summer outdoors, it was not a mask and I was protected by Canadian laws against being treated differentially with regards to a burqa-wearing Muslim entering all three branches visited in the last hour whilst trying to make my way to work on time.

Finally, he conceded and with a smile reminiscent of the raven-haired Muslim teller of a few weeks earlier, asked me to sign the cheque which already had been. Addressing me as Mr. da Braga, he asked if I would like any cash back or just a straight deposit.

Of course, I knew he was corporate security as he appeared in the teller area soon after I entered and proceeded to call out that if anyone strictly wished to make a deposit to please see him. I was the second person so inclined of the six or seven of us in line.

Damn right, it was high time I got service that I deserved.

Of course, it goes without saying that a good one-third to forty per cent of women in the workforce are emotionally unfit to be in professional life. Period. The only cause for concern either woman at both banks should have articulated is if I had presented in balaclavas whilst it happened to have been 30° Celsius outside in July. Just so happens that it was -33° Celsius that day.

Naturally, I had switched to Scotiabank close to a decade earlier when on leaving my employ as civil servant after 15 years of what was truly no end of constant workplace harassment and strife, was then made to wait for three-plus hours at the Bank of Montréal’s 72-storeyed headquarter branch at Bay and King Street West. As part of my separation, there were two settlements one was in a cheque for several tens of thousands of dollars.

When first presenting the cheque to the teller, the little silly-looking, cumfarting twit took off to go lisp and snicker to his equally otiose coworkers. Naturally, there was much snickering and giggling as one experiences of Whites when being racially predatory towards Blacks in public. This is behaviour they exclusively engage in and reserve just for Blacks.

After 20 minutes, the little cumfart – who would probably suffer a collapsed lung of sneezing and coughing incessantly from the sight and smell of pussy for the first time – approached and thanked me for turning in the cheque and asked where I had found it. Within a femtosecond the thought of pinning his empty skull beneath my booted foot and fucking his brains silly was soon dashed aside as it would be just what the little manginaed twit would hungrily, noisily crave at any of the few bathhouses left in the city.

After several hours of being made to wait whilst their ignorant staffers made calls to god-knows-whom and passed off the cheque to several of their colleagues to shuffle about whilst dicking me around, I asked for the cheque went across Bay Street to the Scotiabank headquarters and offered to start an account with them using the cheque; they were only too happy, with one look at the cheque, to have started the account.

That cheque in 2006 was the result of my travails with the same corporation which made it possible for me to continue my employ whilst living in Vancouver and Montréal. Of course, on arriving in Vancouver from Toronto, I had finally been made fulltime and sought to buy a first home. I had been looking at condos and naturally my Bank of Montréal branch on Denman Street had had to be in touch with my employer as I investigated getting a mortgage whilst looking at condos in the West End neighbourhood.

Just like that, I was thrown out of work and when returned to work five months later did so, on the proviso that at any time whilst on probation for 24 months I could be fired. Naturally, a stipulation for my return was having to see that little Egyptian Semite who told me on my final visit that Merlin, in fact, never existed that he was all, like my dreams, a figment of my imagination.

There he sat within mere feet of me pouncing and ridding the planet of him with that little blissfully smug grin on his face known only to the fraudulent few who feel themselves chosen of a fictitious god.

From arriving to work in February 1994, to being dismissed in November 1994, I was on a daily basis harassed with glaring, alarmingly perverse intensity; I was after all the first fulltime Black male in the workplace in Vancouver. On four separate occasions, I had my cheque withheld for a day or two.

This only ever happened when a former police officer who allegedly had been kicked off the force for targeting visible minorities would hand out the cheques and let me know that my cheque had not arrived. Too, it involved being constantly name-called an ‘anti-man’ – West Indian term for Gays, by a thuggish Indo-Canadian lout from the Southern Caribbean.

One Saturday morning – November 5, 1994 – whilst I worked overtime in a bid to save towards purchasing a condo, I had the usual onslaught of racial animus as two White female coworkers next to me carped on about both the Susan Smith case and the O. J. Simpson arrest and upcoming criminal trial.

Whilst I slowly did neck rolls and deep breathe – it was my first autumn in Vancouver and the constant rains were making a mess of my back and neck injuries from a decade earlier when dancing. One woman said of Susan Smith that she at least had the perfect alibi; it was too bad that she had to be found out. Meanwhile, the other said of Black men that they were all nothing but trouble and should be all put away.

Soon, the one who had spoken of Susan Smith’s perfect alibi got up and went to get the Indo-Canadian louse for a supervisor and lied when claiming that I had been sleeping rather than working. Of course, her shift never got overtime so clearly there was some degree of grudge.

After being relocated and made to stand, I then had the Trinidadian louse claim to his Japanese-Canadian manager that I had three times been to the bathroom and when told to go home rather than do the overtime was told to fuck off and that I was not going anywhere.

I stood there not believing what I was hearing. Though I protested, the Japanese-Canadian manager claimed that being insubordinate was unacceptable and for that reason, he asked that I leave. Said he, I was free to file a grievance if I felt I ought not to have been sent home. With that, I returned to my locker, which twice I had had to move – once there was nigger scrawled across one, the other had been smeared with faeces.

As I came downstairs from the lockers, there was the fat overbred swine cackling his head off with, surprise surprise, the White ex-cop. To avoid the hideous sight of them, I elected to take an alternate route and returned to the area where I had been initially working to sign out using the electronic system.

Whilst standing with my back to them at the machine when signing out, the shorter of the two women yelled, “Go home and don’t come back!”

Turning around, I spat in their direction and told them to fuck off and go to hell. Quite the little ham, the dwarfish troll screamed out, “Oh my god! Oh my god, he spit in your face!”

She immediately began calling for the supervisor who had speciously had me sent home – just like she was speciously alleging I had spat in someone’s face who was more than ten feet away from me.

As I left the area and exited the building the portly bigoted Indo-Canadian from the southern Caribbean and his equally racially predatory White male ex-cop colleague came chasing after me as I exited the building.

I got home that Saturday, November 5, 1994 and had a good phone visit with my father who promised to make a gift towards buying my first home; it was also his birthday that day. The following Monday morning, I received a registered letter informing me that I had been suspended for having physically assaulted a coworker and then leaving work without permission.

I was dumbfounded. What proceeded for the next 4.5 months was the most soul-gnawing travel through the six million levels of hell thanks to the venal invidiousness of the union rep who can only be charitably described as a hybrid bipedal bastard of Jabba the Hutt’s.

That Monday, I met with the porcine fucker at dawn at the union offices where she informed me that since I was a member of two known high risk groups: Blacks and Queers, I needed to immediately go get an AIDS test and let her know the results because my faux accuser, in whose face I had not spat, and her family were hell-bent on pressing charges and they were fearful that I might have infected her with AIDS.

I assured her that I did not have HIV/AIDS and had no intentions of jumping any hoops of hers by going out and getting tested. What business was my medical history of hers or the faux accuser? As agreed, I provided a copy of a letter to the accused wherein I apologised for my inexcusable conduct. I made it perfectly clear in the letter that in frustration at being sent home, I had lashed out her when being profane but beyond that, I categorically refused to apologised for having spat in her face when I had not.

A couple of hours later, we met with the employer’s labour relations and human resources personnel plus the very two persons who had laughed their heads off whilst I made my way from the locker to sign out days earlier that Saturday.

Both thuggish supervisors sat across the narrow table from me whilst I was flanked by two union reps: Jabba’s offal and another female, also Jewish. The letter was proffered and though I was made to believe that it sufficed and that it was understood that my actions were isolated, I received another registered letter later that day informing me that I had shown no remorse and was indefinitely suspended.

For the first time, I truly considered suicide as I crumpled to my bathroom floor and came undone. Finally, pulling myself together, I decided instead to sacrifice my full mane of thick gorgeous hair and cut it all off. For the next several months the only thing that saved me was doing volunteer work with persons with AIDS and offering my West End home as a place where PWAs could stay overnight whilst they were in town for a battery of tests and appointments.

Too, during that time of unemployment, I discovered and became readily devoted to the sexual bacchanal in the deep woods of Stanley Park just a few blocks away.

For the next several months, Jabba’s Goy-hating offal lied, lied and lied with hungry relish about when I would be returned to work. Naturally, for being a unionised worker, there was no chance of filing a human rights complaint into the matter. Eventually, after someone from the union’s regional offices assured me that there was nothing to be done because, ‘let’s face it, she is a Jew and you are Black and she is just not going to be challenged,’ I knew that other avenues had to be explored.

Finally, when I told the porcine boor that I had been in touch with Labour Relations Board who felt that I definitely had a case, I was hastily offered a meeting with her at the union offices where the fugly scum proceeded to demand that I, in essence, submit the exact same letter of four-plus months earlier to be returned to work.

I got up and walked out of the union offices got home and proceeded to unload on her by phone the most violent verbal abuse I had to that point articulated. She had actually had the fuck-all temerity to huff and gag because this is truly how she breathed and talked, “You know, I do think that you are anti-Semitic.”

The next day, the Ides of March, 1995, I was offered to be returned to employment without a letter of apology as she refused to put in writing her demand that I take an AIDS test.

Too, before walking out, she had stated that anyone could have typed up a letter and back-dated it, then made a photocopy of it; this said of the photocopy to the original letter of contrition offered in an interview which was all about racial predators having a field day.

There was I returned to work then having to see a psychiatrist for 24 months whilst on probation for being an out-of-control, violent Black male in the workplace about whom people felt unsafe, unsure and uncomfortable.

During those 24 months, Jabba’s offal had cunningly provided work for a Jew with whom she was well-acquainted, she had shared in that none-too-charming way she had of name-dropping, when telling me of the terms for returning to employment. With that, the chance of buying a condo had taken flight.

Whilst in the workplace, I endured no end of intense harassment whilst the O. J. Simpson trial endured and most definitely thereafter, for such is the power of television to fuck with the sphinctered and well-groomed-into-somnambulance collective psyche.

This included having my return from breaks, arrival at work changed in the computer to reflect tardiness. I was spat on… surprise, surprise. I was pushed, twice got crazy-glued to my combination lock. Further, I had a rather beguiling-looking Muslim supervisor, who was featured in the corporate magazine as a sign of the company’s diversity – she with the uncanny resemblance to Benazir Bhutto – tell me with lethal calm, “Get out of my sight before I don’t kill you.”

She was being confronted on yet again having changed my time, though, she and every supervisor swore up and down that there was no way for them to change one’s time in the system. Of course, a Rhodesian-born Chinese coworker whose husband also happened to have been a supervisor told me that there were at least four plans in the works to have me terminated – one apparently involved me seemingly leap from the company’s rooftop.

Alas, somehow, I managed to have upped my frequency and spirited my way out of that hellhole. The day that I had gotten my transfer to Montréal, I took off a few days to pack and it was known that I would be returning to work for half a shift to clean out my locker and say goodbye; I never did go to my locker because who wants to be crazy-glued to a lock for a third time?

Naturally, as Jewish guilt knows no end, there was phlegmy Jabba’s hybrid offal standing outside the doors to the office on the sidewalk. She had actually had the guts to air out her bedsores by getting off her fat arse at the union offices to come by the workplace and gawk.

Naturally, Jabbette was standing there talking to someone or other whilst making sure to lock eyes with me as I exited the building. Of course, as I never miss a chance to give back, I paused whilst making for the attendant cab and hissed, “Of one thing you and I are both certain, you will rot in hell eating your god, Hitler’s arse.”

With that, I returned home, took a nap, dreamt my last dreams in Vancouver then made my way to the airport and caught an overnight flight for Montréal. Just when I thought Vancouver to have been a god-awful work experience, Montréal was hell-bent on giving it a run for its money.

Boy did Montréal prove a marathon and then some… Stay tuned, for as you shall yet see, until you have lived in Québec, you cannot truly claim to know Canada…

For now, sweet dreams as ever and may these dreams continue to richly inspire your own spiritual journey. For your support, I remain ever grateful. I love you more.

_______________________

This was a night-time dream and the first that was set in an amphitheatre. I had had to step-in for the host who had fallen ill. The crowd was large and this being at home in St. Kitts, to say the least, they were hostile.

Though nervous, all audaciousness and charm, I stepped up to the mic. Once centre stage, I began eulogising for Euleka Gumbs; Catherine Angelica Montpelier’s daughter.

Whilst speaking, I did see a woman who reminded me vaguely of her but I was not certain that it was so. I then went on to thank Juan-Carlos de Madrid for his work as host.

Whilst standing there looking over the crowd, I saw a ball of white light explode. This was the most glorious sight imaginable. From it shot the most joyous spray of white light sparks.

This was something that resonated with the soul itself. This was on the order of the uplifting essence contact experienced in that dream on Tuesday, September 22, 1992 – it is dream blog entry herein entitled A Rose Like No Other. The same degree of inspiration and sublime beauty was experienced again.

For having experienced this manifestation, there was no way that one could not have had an ecstatic moment of transcendence. For having overcome my fears, of going out onstage, here was I having the most blissful of experiences.

Funnily enough, no one else here experienced the manifestation. This was such a thoroughly grounding experience.

Once I was onstage, the audience soon became hushed; they were readily impressed by my eloquence and discernible intellect. I was really pleased to have seen Euleka Gumbs whom later I would learn was indeed Catherine Angelica Montpelier’s daughter.

_______________________

Pericles da Braga and I were together, in this the second dream, and I had to fast take control of the situation. He began insisting that I was sexually obsessed with him. Talk about taking oneself way too seriously.

We were face-to-face and, despite there being some serious bones of contention discussed, the energies were rather intimate. One had a true sense here of Pericles’s true nature.

There was a deep sense that he was fearful of me. Somehow, it was as though he knew at the level of soul that he had reincarnationally wronged me in past lives.

Thus he has been plagued with a sense of dread and fear of me that, somehow, I would get him. There has never been any such scheme in my thoughts. I have been keenly aware of this man’s manipulativeness and have always guarded myself against falling prey to his head-trips.

His eyes here were strong, clear, direct and shamanic.

______________________

Sting, the performer, was backstage waiting to go out onstage in this the third dream. Goodness, this was such a lucid experience. Sting was very real with a real puckish glint to his playful eyes.

Eventually, I ended up going out and introducing him to the stage.

_______________________

Here, in this the fourth dream, I progressed up the paved incline into a large schoolyard. There were lots of Black and Hispanic kids playing here. A large glass and steel, black tower in the style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe that was very minimalist in design looked over everything.

Sleek and nondescript it most certainly was. These were Babel-like buildings in proportion; they stretched on for some six city blocks. Easily they were, the smallest ones at least, all 100 storeys plus.

They were quite layered affairs with some storeys having an architectural theme. One to the other, the sections were vastly different. The school building had a second section that had walls which, rather than vertically, moved outwards from the base.

These sections were each ten or more storeys and maintained a single architectural theme. Even though it was an overcast day with heavy grey clouds, I could clearly detect klieg lights to the southwest.

I then asked some of the kids for directions but they were non-too-forthcoming with me. I could immediately sense that there was some danger in their being so guarded with me.

I passingly joked about gangs when next, a dark-haired guy and I were being hotly pursued by Black youths from a gang. This decidedly was astral plane an experience in its intensity.

We were then cornered on a side street before a large building. This did not at all feel as though here on Earth. What with the massiveness of these buildings, it may well have been part of an anchor point metropolis.

The Blacks here were so beauteously dark-complected that I would hazard to guess that not even Nubians closely approximate their purity of melanin intensity.

Just because they were gangsters does not imply that they were African-Americans which they certainly didn’t feel or look like. These were very strong, proud Black people who had never been enslaved nor were they dredging through life oppressed beneath the weight of that most hideous form of low psychic terror, racism – the racial predator’s birthright.

Soon, their leader stepped forward and there was no mistaking him. He turned out to have been the Rap star, Tupac Shakur. Beyond his open black leather vest, I could make out that the pock marks of his bullet wounds had been filled in with solid gold.

Seemingly, this was the fashion statement du jour, here on the astral plane, for gangsta arrivés. Throwing caution to the wind, I felt like bolting rather than having to face such hostility; I did not care whether or not I would be shot in the process.

Of course, I would not have survived. After all, this was a dream so it was not as though I would ultimately have died. I just didn’t care to be caught up in a jam like this… no how.

_______________________

A large sprawling apartment at night time, proved the focus of the fifth dream, plus a man with whom I had just become involved was getting moved in. Trying to figure out how they worked, we were playing around with the curtain rods.

Each was four to six inches thick with vary-sized grooves for different pins. Just then, Moses Znaimer walked in at which point, I went over and introduced him to my young beauteous friend.

I then asked Moses Znaimer if he knew how the bloody curtain rods worked. Not remembering his name, I introduced Moses Znaimer as Mr. Hoffmann by which, of course, I implied to my friend that he was Jewish.

Clearly, Moses Znaimer took offense but I could not have cared less anyway. I had no desire, in the first place, to go sucking up to him.

_______________________

Photo: Toronto February 2015, Queen Street East, looking north towards Yonge & Bloor Streets.

Bubble Nebula.

Sting.

Tupac Shakur.

_______________________________________________________________________

Anointed By the Exalted Mentor, Merlin!

24.02.201311.10.2024 Arvin da Brgha2 Comments

As the Moon progressed through the early degrees of Gemini, transiting my first house, I would on taking to bed slip up past the folds of restfulness. There I would awaken into the most lucid dream experiences had in long ages.

It was Saturday, July 25, 1992 – long after Merlin’s passing.

_____________________________________________

The first dream was set, at night time, in Sandy Point, St. Kitts where I had spent my childhood. I was playing in the street, well past midnight, with three local youths.

All Rastafarians, too, they were all in their twenties. I was my present age – thirty-one. They were younger.

Everything about them was very real. There was a direct focussed tenor to their gaze; they looked into you. I felt very edgy with all this probity.

We had been acrobatically playing, in the street in front of the church, in The Alley, Sandy Point, St. Kitts. Of course, that same church Harella had built twenty-two years prior in the waking state.

I tried not to outshine them, with my leaping tumbles, for fear of escalating the tension in the air. There was an edge to our interactions. It was a tension born of my having been so long off-island and their being suspicious, I thought, of my outré sexuality.

Just then, I noticed a light streaking across the star-punctured sky. In a bid to diffuse the tension between us, I drew their attention to it. However, I soon noticed that its progress was unusual.

There was also something distinctly different about this light. It caused me to recall similar icons in dreams past – each had presaged rather momentous visions.

Like all those before it, this streaking light seemed a silent observant probe. Immediately, I became open to what this comet-like streaking star could later reveal.

I began to explain to the youngest Rastafarian who was an impish, sexually-dynamic beauty – he was not the least bit self-conscious of his missing front teeth – that it was no doubt a very high geostationary satellite that had bombed and was now crashing to Earth.

Further, I speculated that it was no doubt an orbiting space shuttle presently reflecting Sol’s intense light. As I spoke, I knew that I did not really believe either explanation but I thought that the ideas were a good way to ameliorate my position in the dynamic.

The ruse failed to have done the trick. On returning my attention to the group, I was sent bolting – the leader was menacingly lunging through the air towards me, with a raptor’s ease, in eager flight.

Soon I also was in flight being chased through the streets of a Sandy Point, St. Kitts which quickly morphed and shifted becoming, more and more populous, like parts of old Havana. I was not certain which city this was but I was definitely still in the Caribbean.

I managed to escape into a house where I very energetically fought off their advance, securing the locks to the front door, thereby shutting them out. I climbed up the narrow and steep flight of stairs, in near-darkness, to the safety of the second storey.

Winded and more enraged than stunned, at their behaviour, I took the time to gather my breath. I briefly visited with my aunt Pilar do Aragão† and Pandora – the latter whom Merlin favoured the most of my siblings.

They were unaware of the tumult that I had just endured.

I took refuge in the darkened front of the house’s second storey. Next I found myself, in one of those rare dream moments, actually falling asleep whilst lucidly dreaming.

I nodded… on recovering, I found that I had come to in an apartment. It was one more opulent than the one in which I had just grown suddenly drowsy.

On a red antique chaise longue, in the most beautifully dark, wood-panelled, high-ceilinged digs that I had ever seen, I was now seated. Across the room was an open door that led out to a veranda.

A dark awning provided ample shade and allowed just the cool tropical breezes to laze in satiating the spirit. To have awakened into this new dreamspace had left my awareness more sensitised… more absorbing.

The dream became more lucid and any sense of time dissolved. This left every moment infused with a sense of mysticism – magic even. It definitely felt like the West Indies here, perhaps, old-money Haïti or Guadeloupe if not Cuba.

Slowly, I drank in every detail of the stately furnished room. There were, on both walls to my left and right, floor-to-ceiling shelves which were not untidily crammed with old leather-bound volumes – some red, some brown, most were black.

Slowly, from where I reclined, I pinpointed my vision to check the titles of some of the books. Thus I was able to see and read them, as intimately, as if I had gotten up and gone to stand before them closely peering.

They were mostly ancient volumes. However, the script was not vaguely recognisable like any of the innumerable ones on the other, more familiar side of the dreamtime.

My spirit soared, as I felt fully relaxed, in this most bucolic of dreams. Strangely, though not unusual for the realm of the dreamtime, I felt that for having looked at these laden bookshelves my mind had absorbed the library’s voluminous wealth.

Just then there was movement, to my right, across the room. I saw a cat that looked much like Whoopi. It appeared from behind one of three sofas, skulking towards another, situated opposite across the room.

Each sofa, like the chaise longue on which I reclined, had beside it a small round table. Each table was covered in either rich, dark earthy damask or actual rugs in deep though muted red. I was immediately reminded of the round table, across which sat the sibylline woman from Merlin and I, in the dreams of September 4, 1988.

I sat up calling her name,

“Whoopi! Whoopi!” at which moment, the cat shimmered and became Julio – our black cat at 20 Amelia Street in Cabbagetown who, like Whitney before him, was killed in a hit-and-run as he ran across Amelia Street on New Year’s Eve, 1987.

As I watched the cat disappear behind one of the three sofas, which accompanied my chaise longue, my mouth froze open in amazement. Whilst I assimilated that one and thought to myself that this certainly was a most unusual and lucid dream, there was utter stillness.

The cat’s metamorphosis had discernibly shifted the vibration of the dream. Now time seemed considerably measured as compared to its usual frenetic rhythm.

The door in the far right corner then opened… into the room walked Merlin.

*I can’t here relay the rapture I felt on seeing him but the ecstatic descriptive of dream audio-cassette recording, for that day, comes fairly close. END.

Overwhelmed with emotion, my body quivered throughout. I tried to rouse from my reclining position. My arms outstretched to him, I greeted him squealing with delight.

He stood, just in the entrance, raising his brows with the left familiarly arched higher. Staying me with the index and middle fingers of his raised right hand,

“No, don’t get up…” I heard Merlin direct me with the quiet familiarity that our intimacy knew.

This directive I telepathically experienced as though we were squinging up in bed, in the dark, at 20 Amelia Street in Toronto’s Cabbagetown. Our souls tickled, at such times, as we listened to some glorious thunderstorm drowning out the dog days of a too-hot-and-humid, Toronto summer.

I obliged, sitting upright on the edge of the plush chaise longue, for the first time placing my feet on the beautifully designed and predominantly red rug. His face warmed towards me in a smile.

At once my mind expanded, simultaneously processing on multiple levels, becoming even more awakened. Rapture… pure rapture – I was enthralled.

Here again, Merlin wore all the evolved energies that he had in that first dream encounter – that dream, of course, set in a Pacific west coast rainforest that was not unlike Vancouver Island’s Cathedral Grove in July 1978. A dream, of course, which occurred four years before I would physically meet him in the waking state.

Slowly, he walked the short distance of the room towards me. A breeze coming from the veranda not only cooled the place but it shifted the ambiance and made the place grow dimmer.

The dimness highlighted the definite soft yellow glow that girdled his entire form. I sat there thinking,

‘My god, I can actually see your aura Merlin.’

He smiled and I was reminded that everything that I thought was instantly being telepathically shared.

I was passive… moreover I was ripened as though I had just experienced an Alfred Brendel recital. I felt so lightheaded that I firmly pressed down both my palms, into the chaise longue’s plush red velvet, bracing myself.

Merlin came and stood before me. He was casually dressed in loose, earthen woollen clothing. A cloak he wore stylishly draped about his narrow shoulders with its cowl removed.

As I looked up into his face, besotted by the beauty of his soul’s magic, he slowly arched his left brow in the way he had always affected when he wanted to be intimate. Merlin’s magical expression was exactly as it was, that gibbous-Moon October night, when we met in Babylon – which now for him was truly a lifetime removed.

My face liquidly melted away in a smile. I was warmed by the knowledge that I was dreaming and that here before me was a man, Merlin, with whom I had shared such wonderful fortune. He had shared his grace, along with his beauty and his intellect, in the most magical combination with me.

As we made eye contact, still never having said a word, he slowly knelt into the bay of my open legs. Enthralled, my eyes slowly and unflinchingly shifted to look down into his as now he knelt before me.

He wore his glasses, his beard cropped close, his hair styled in a leonine full-bodied mane.

Moreover, I was moved by just how much this pose reflected the last night we had spent together – November 17, 1989. With an acuity rarely achieved in the waking state, my mind lucidly assimilated this rapturous encounter.

Here before me knelt Merlin. Merlin was the very embodiment of wholesome health, healing my spirit, releasing me from so much of the pain that I had endured.

Like that last night of his life, before dying of AIDS, I was overcome with emotion. However, owing to the healing that this moment affected, now I wanted to melt in tears of joy.

More than that, the moment’s poignancy rose from how uncannily it mirrored our final encounter.

About his slender long neck, Merlin wore a necklace of thick, copper-coloured coil that looked not the least bit malleable. The coil was half an inch in diameter and set with beautiful large crystals of various colours.

The coil moved through each stone’s centre and each stone was deeply etched with golden hieroglyphs. Although Mayan hieroglyphs bore the closest resemblance, the inscriptions resembled none in this planet’s long history.

The effect of the bronze-coloured coil and crystals was grounding. The crystals gave off a low rumbling hum that was felt. It was akin to the definite effect of my pyramid, in the waking state, but easily thrice as intense.

There were seven crystals in all. Principally, there was the large, smoky rough-hued quartz set at the bottom of the circular coil.

Its design slowly shifted from within but its glow seemingly originating elsewhere. It was huge and by far the most powerful.

One quarter the way around the circle, which was duplicated on the opposite side, there were three crystals. The crystal in the middle was like nothing imaginable in the waking state. It was a coppery-bronzed colour with hints of blue-lapis lazuli dust throughout which actually glistened.

With any slight movement, the dust shifted becoming copper-coloured. When the colour shifted, I experienced a correspondingly subtle shift in the serenity that I felt.

The unusual central crystal was flanked by two small and perfectly clear crystals. They were more radiant and powerful than any multiple-carat diamond yet found in the waking state.

It was actually difficult to sustain my focus on their exquisite beauty overlong. They were dynamic and seemingly made of the heaviest element imaginable.

I was so pleased to see Merlin. The necklace he wore was like a grounding conductor. Seemingly, in order to manifest from his dimension to this dimensional dreamspace, he needed the energies of the crystals to join me.

He wore an argyle sweater that was not unlike one of the pastel ones I had bought him one Christmas. This one though was an earthy brown which he had, years earlier, interestingly claimed to have preferred.

He effortlessly removed the crystal necklace placing it at my feet. The humming abruptly ceased. The crystals’ effect immediately shifted. I actually felt a cool energy, from the crystals, buzz through my entire body travelling from my feet to the crown of my head.

I watched as he detached the different crystals and made sure to leave the central one on the coil. Somehow, he was able to remove the six crystals from the coil though the coil remained a perfectly whole circle.

As he kept placing the crystals, in different circular formations at my feet, he kept looking up at me with the warmest direct stare. Each formation affected a different temporal lobe and corresponding area of my body.

I was experiencing crystals with a potency that never before had I known in the waking state. I felt splayed by the experience.

There were times that I felt as though my body and head were being stretched – elastically elongated with an ease nowhere else possible except the astral plane in the dreamtime.

I thought then how absolutely incredible this man Merlin was – how truly fortunate I was to have met him, to have known him, to love him.

The lights noticeably further dimmed in the room. Next, the central large crystal grew black changing into the most unusual design. There had been an incredible energetic drain from me – energy which I suppose was collected in the now-transformed crystal which had remained about the coil.

From his left breast pocket, Merlin retrieved a little black pouch. As he looked down at it, I said to him,

“Oh my god Merlin, you are so beautiful…”

I knew that I was dreaming and I was thinking at the time,

‘…I will never be able to meet you, again. I’ll never see you again. You’ll never be that perfect mélange of bloodlines that created the magic that was your every idiosyncrasy.’

He looked up and smiled making me again realise that everything, we said without speaking, was so very clearly, readily known to the other.

As he opened the little black pouch, my lips trembled. I looked at those utterly gentle fingers that, I thought in passing, were now ashes in the earth at Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery,

‘Oh yes… those fingers, those beautiful delicate fingers.

‘Oh my god, yes…’ I simultaneously thought,

‘…These fingers, I will never see; they’ll never touch me again in the waking state – they’ll never exist again.’

Then, as if to eclipse my melancholy, he gently took my right hand in his. Merlin’s still-sensual hands purposefully began pouring the little, black pouch’s contents into mine.

The touch of him was as intimate and as gentle, an evocative memory, as absent waves heard distantly lapping ashore on the beach in Pump Bay during childhood. How, as in the still of the night, my mind would race wondering of what new vistas I was yet to dream – when I was a child in St. Kitts.

All along, I had restrained the desire to touch him for he seemed so much more evolved. Truth be told, I was afraid that to physically reach out to touch him would only dissolve the dream.

Naturally, for becoming emotionally overwhelmed, the fear was that I would undoubtedly whiteout. However, his touch was so real and so very familiar that I let out a heavy familiar sigh.

Into my palm spilled a dozen, perhaps more, of the most beautiful tiny crystals that were quite powerful. The touch of them actually made my mind further expand.

My head seemed to contort, once again, with an élan that matched the lightning speed with which I assimilated the intense energies from the clutch of crystals into me.

They were more leaden, easily by ten times, than their small size betrayed. They glowed and they were decidedly hypnotic. They emitted a sense of music that was more experienced than heard.

In spite of the fact that they glowed, I brushed aside the beauty of them and chose instead the real magic. I took his free hand with mine and began holding it, rubbing it, squeezing it.

Even more intently, I looked overjoyed into his arrestingly soulful eyes. I began groaning, moaning, I was overcome with intense emotion.

This was, by far, the most alive and most lucid dream with Merlin since his passing some three years ago. I wanted more… I wanted no moment of this great intimacy to stop.

I asked him to remove his glasses so that I could really look at his eyes. He obliged and when he removed them his eyes weren’t their smoky grey-hazel-faded blue.

They were brown, in fact, but they were his eyes and I thought,

‘My god, you’ve got brown eyes,’ to which he slightly blushed.

He wore a beard; it was the usual bushy affair. His lips were so moist, I said,

“My darling, kiss me.”

Taking the lead, as I had when we met, I held the bottom of his ticklish beard and reached up his face to mine as I bent down. We kissed each other.

It readily became a wonderfully slow and timeless dance high up our entwined greenhouses. My spirits soared to even greater heights. It was the greatest pleasure.

It was quite simply a sensory whiteout. We did not use tongue. We just kissed each other on the mouth. Throughout, until it was no longer possible, our eyes remained perfectly glued to each other’s.

I turned my head to the right to kiss him, again. It was a soft lingering kiss; it was a kiss of complete surrender in which was communicated so much.

As though he and I were two leviathan creatures swimming together in a sensual medium of liquid blue light, our intimacy was pure movement. This aqueous light medium was immensely heavy and inhibited our progression to a slow-motioned crawl.

Progressing playfully, as though so many nanoseconds were deleted from each time-stretched moment, we effortlessly danced alone. We were together and enraptured in a universe just for two – Merlin and me.

It was such great pleasure that, in its shared intimacy, it reflected the idiosyncrasies that we had known so well. It was a continuation of the dance we familiarly had always intimately known.

It was such incredible intimacy that when the kiss was concluded the dream dissolved…

I sighed, on a deep sustained breath, besotted with the beauty of Merlin’s spirit. This was a most rare dream, a most soulful of dreams, with the dream magus.

The sound of my breath was so loud that I actually felt the weight of my high-dreamer self as I crashed back into my body from, being astral-projected, high up the astral plane.

I felt fatigued, I felt spent, as is customary with such dream travel. Whilst remaining still, I kept my lids shut.

Focussing on my weary breath, I allowed myself to drift upwards again. This time, I melted into true sleep where I could rest and recoup my energies.

I awoke, about an hour later, in the nearly dark room of my tiny Queen Street West apartment in Toronto. Rested, I was truly rejuvenated after all that astral projection in the first sleep cycle.

As is customary with reparatory sleep, there were no dreams recalled of the second sleep cycle. I cried… I cried for joy.

The realness of Merlin was so intense that after crying, for the first time since his passing, I grew aroused after dream contact. I savoured the beauty of this man, Merlin, my elfin-dream magus.

Pulling the black, satin blindfold back over my eyes, I slipped onto my stomach between the red satin bedding. Tightly holding on to a pillow, my left cheek pressed into it and the bedding drawn up over my head, I withdrew into a sweat lodge where I could continue communing with Merlin’s very soul.

My right knee drawn up, I allowed my rock-hard cock to ride up against the bedding and away from my tummy. Slowly, kneadingly, I ground my winding pelvis into the luxury of the bedding.

Ploughing away, beyond its wet folds, I massaged my lusty thoughts deep and high up into the magical greenhouse. Whispering his name, my lips, my abs and body quivered.

From time to time, I managed my way up onto my toes. This allowed the exquisite play of cock and bedding to draw out greater pleasure.

My abs ached. Whilst sweat sheened throughout my shivering body, I shuddered as the inside of my thighs violently tremoured. Merlin still knew how to work his magic on me.

Losing myself, my breath collapsed in repeated noisy, exhausted, shuddered grunts and groans. I whispered his name proclaiming my love to that point.

In no other way could I have celebrated this truly profound astral plane encounter with Merlin in the dreamtime. As ever, hands-free auto-eroticism resulted in a most profuse and exquisitely pleasurable orgasm.

So richly deserving was I to have lost myself this way – beyond the usual daily auto-erotic ritual. I needed to savour this momentous dream encounter by making a solemn ritual of pleasurable thanksgiving.

I had been moved anew by Merlin’s magic.

*Regardless your combination, there is no greater gift to receive than the love of another whom one has chosen to completely give of self. There is no greater validation of love’s superiority than to experience love from another, who has transitioned onto the next octave in that soul’s maturation, in a lucidly awakened dream as this shared between Merlin and me.

We have all loved and been loved and may you dear dreamer, by opening yourself up, experience your own moments of rapture as I did in this rhapsodic astral plane encounter with the one, the man, the elfin, the fuck-all fabulous, the ganja-smoking, groovy shaman from Babylon, Merlin!

The mark of a truly great love affair is the fruit it bears… dreams.

Sweet dreams you, I love you more! END.

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Photo: Merlin & Arvin Niagara-on-the-Lake, autumn ’87, photo by actor, Wayne Robson.

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Dreams are the poetic expression of the soul.

Tag: Queen Street West

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