An Outlandish Journey

Prepare for my analysis. Here's father, his heart screwed on Yes, here he's got it I'm sure 'Cause he lost his life in an accident Found his heart in the man next door What exactly's gonna happen When they do transplant the brain Will my borrowed brain still compute the same Or will my daughter stop her sleeping out Here comes the girl, she's got her head screwed on But it ain't screwed on right Her ambition is to be a prostitute But the breaks just weren't right What exactly's gonna happen, tell me When her father finds out That his virgin daughter has bordello dreams And that he's the one she wants to try out Yeah There's ma, she's living dangerously It's a cinch she'll try it anything twice She thinks she can run right to the whirlpool's edge And stop herself just in time What exactly's gonna happen When she finally fizzles out The lovers will just be sucked into T...

My story cant be told in words and thats why I'm writing it in scenes for a film. called The British Invasion. Most of my life happened behind the scenes and without my knowledge while I kept busy in the foreground doing stage business. I was a small local production - born in the year of the rabbit to a Tiger dad and mother Ox. They both had plans for us but my dad's were modest while my mom imagined her twins as future stars living large. Unfortunately my twin brother and I were harebrained amateurs made for the rabbit holes. That's the scenario - we fell between the cracks. My mother was my manager and remained in the background but her attempts to thrust me onto the stage usually failed miserably. I can rhink of several examples of this but the all-time biggest disaster was her attempt to marry me off to the boy from England. To say he was larger than life is a massive understatement. Our mutual misunderstanding was also the stuff of nightmare legend. He went right whe...

THIS IS A POST-IN-PROGRESS. I MAY ADD TO IT BUT FOR NOW I'M JUST SHARING SOME PIECES OF HISTORY FROM MY TEN-YEAR ACQUAINTANCE WITH ELLEN ATKIN AKA "MKULTRA GIRL" WHOM I MET IN DUNCAN, BC IN MARCH 2014. I STAYED FOR A WEEK AT A YOGA CENTER WHERE SHE CAMPED IN HER SHINY BLACK SUV, AND I SURE WAS GLAD TO LEAVE BECAUSE IT WAS OBVIOUS SHE WAS A SOCIOPATHIC PERSONALITY. BUT LATER I SECOND GUESSED MYSELF AND INTRODUCED HER TO THE MONTREAL EXPERIMENTS CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT GROUP - A BAD DECISION AS IT TURNED OUT. SHE'S BEEN ON MY CASE EVER SINCE- ALTHOUGH I'M NOT HER ONLY TARGET, BUT SINCE HER SISTER DIED IN A SUSPICIOUS FIRE IN 2023, I BECAME A MAJOR CAUSE OF HER ONGOING RAGE AT THE WORLD. I FIND IT INTERESTING TO LOOK BACK AT THE EARLY WARNING SIGNS. SHE READ MY BOOK, STOLE THE THEME (MKULTRA CHILD EXPERIMENTS), BUILT A RUDICULOUS ONLINE MARKETING CANPAIGN AROUND A PHOTO SHE FOUND ON THE WEB AND WHEN IT FAILED AFTER GOING VIRAL FOR A YEAR, SHE BLAMED ME FOR SABOTAGING...

1II'm still tall at 74. I used to be 6'1" and I'm probably still 6'0" although I havent measured myself in a while. In third grade at Ahuntsic School I was the second tallest girl in my class, after Kathy Vandenberg who had a slight edge -- she was 5 feet plus half an inch or so, and I was 5 feet. We were class giants. We even lived on the same street, Rue Dauphin in Pont Viau, and her mom had been my kindergarten teacher in 1956. Mrs Vandenberg was also very tall, even taller than my mother Therese Bouthillier whose genes went back to 18th century France. Mrs Vandenberg and her husband had come to Canada from Holland after the war, and started having children at the same time as my parents. Kathy was tall and blonde and big-boned, and so was I. In a class photo from 1959, we're standing in the back row side by side, grinning with arms crossed, and looking gangly and awkward. Our front teeth are still growing in and look too big for our mouths. To be e...

I used to think I'd had a normal childhood because my parents were mostly kind, mature, responsible adults. There was tension in our household, sometimes, and even periods when my parents didnt speak to each other because of some deep conflict that my twin brother and I were shielded from grasping or witnessing. We lived our lives, did what we were told, followed the rules, had friends who resembled us in their simple minded willingness to just be kids. We thought we were living a Happy Days script in a happy world, built on a Disney model of the Happiest Place on Earth. We didn't know why Mom and Dad often seemed to be less than happy, or less happy than our notion of what happy was since they didnt inform us, or talk openly about whatever was eating them, and when they argued it always seemed to be about something silly, like politics. Instead of daily family dramas, we had cold periods of silence. I think our mother's grace and serenity made us feel loved and supported...

The closest I ever got to Margaret Atwood (apart from one reading that she gave in French in around 2010) was in 1992. I had just submitted my Gazette review of her poetry book Good Bones, the day before, and I was standing in line at the post office with a novel manuscript that I had packaged and was mailing off to an agent in NY. Ahead of me in line was a tall young woman with long curly black hair. She half turned and glanced at my package, probably seeing my name in the upper left corner. Then she swiveled around and from three feet away stared straight into my face. She had luminous green eyes, and looked like a younger version of Margaret Atwood. At the same time, she held up the envelope she had come to buy stamps for, so I could clearly read the handwritten names: Mr and Mrs C Atwood in Don Mills, Ontario, and the sender "J Atwood". It was the way she casually and pointedly displayed it beside her ear with a little smirk, that put me off. Normally I would have s...