Recovered Items

Last Sunday we finished moving my family out of the remains of their old home. The house had been padlocked shut and there was a guard stationed there to hand over a key for it on request. Boring job I imagine.

One of my coworkers helped ferry a load over on Friday, we had some help from neighbours on Sunday, and a friend of the family helped us on all three days. They were able to move everything that they'd listed as important, most of it going into a storage unit. 

My coworkers made us some meals to relieve the stress of making dinner when more pressing issues are at hand. As of now we've been gifted a chicken, broccoli and rice casserole, a tray of homemade mac and cheese, fusilli bolognese with garlic bread, and shepherd's pie. 

My brother also received a significant amount in donations to help replace what couldn't be moved. Lots of people we knew gave, as well as a lot of people whose names none of us recognized. My brother's friends reached out to their broader network and someone I know forwarded our story, so maybe we micro-trended.

Apparently the storage place they used has a pet cat named Cherry.

We didn't see her but we did see a cat house with a litter box. Looks like a situation where they took in a stray figuring that the unorthodox housing is still preferable to living on the street. After the reception I got when I published skepticism about Brandy, the Dementia Floor Cat, I'll refrain from complaining too much.  I just wonder how they ensure Cherry doesn't get trapped in a storage unit... 

I took a pic of their 14 years of accumulation compacted but I don't think I'll put it here, just in case there's something sensitive visible that I failed to notice. Instead, I'll just show my own belongings that I recovered from the house.

I wasn't the first to spot this. My mom showed me two figures like this and asked if I wanted to keep them. I don't think I ever would have missed them or thought of them again. At the same time, I instantly recognized them and knew that one was mine and one my brother's. My mom asked if that meant I didn't want them, and I impulsively said I wanted the one that belonged to me. My brother individually took his figure from the house as well, so they were both recovered.

I don't remember the name of the series they came from. I remember early Internet Flash videos featuring them. I think my character was supposed to be stoic. The orb in his chest spins.

Here is a DVD of Mr. T's short-lived reality TV show, I Pity The Fool. I took a youth self-development program where a lot of love was shown for Mr. T and we watched a few episodes of this, leading me to get my own copy. If I recall, Mr. T basically shows up on request to mend damaged relationships, be they between parents and children, coworkers or anyone. He mostly does this by making them do team-building exercises.

I also have Attack of the Gryphon. I got this with my dad at a DVD store in my early twenties. Of course, the reason we got it was because my name is Gryphon. If I recall, it's a low budget film about a villain who acquires a magical pike with the power to summon a gryphon that can level armies. I remember being disappointed that the gryphon itself didn't get much screentime.

One loss that we've seen in the age of streaming services is that these companies need to pay third parties continually for access to their content. If views dip beneath a certain point, it stops making sense to platform it. No one's going to pay for Attack of the Gryphon, and there's plenty of other niche, weird, hyper-specific content that has similarly fallen by the wayside. A DVD is a one-off fee and you can keep it until you break it.

I got the portrait paintings I made of the three of us. Guests to the house would often hone in on my self-portrait with its awkward expression. Weird to display something like that so proudly. Hey, at least it accurately portrays my character.

Here are a couple of early still life's that I did and gave to them. Later, I made another rendition of four peppers to keep at my own place. Bell pepper and bananas are two of my favourite foods to paint. I like their clean lines and grooves.

Here are a couple paintings I did in Guelph and just left behind. I'm not particularly proud of either of them. I failed to get the effect I was going for with the one on the left but my mom still liked it. The one on the right is of the batch of sunflowers I managed to grow the year I started dating Lee-Anne. It was the first time I'd managed to grow sunflowers at that location and took it as a symbol of good tidings for the relationship. Not knowing how to do bushes, I went for an impressionistic look that didn't really work. The paneling on the ground doesn't really give a sense of distance either.

These are paintings that my aunt made for my mom. I think Mom would have taken them, but I found them first. The one on the left is of their three previous cats, all now passed. The black cat is Thor, the brown one is Blackavar, and I'm not sure if the grey one is Cassidy or Luna. The painting on the right is pretty clearly a phoenix, but I can't speak to the inspiration behind it.

I got some of my Malian stuff. At the top is a hat that I bargained for from a merchant in Bamako near the end of my trip after my counterpart, Ousmane had returned to his home city of Segu. I got it with an elephant-print shirt and scarf. I've got that shirt framed in our bedroom alongside some others. It occurs to me that I must have lost the scarf, as it isn't here and I didn't recover it

The one on the bottom is a sand print. It depicts a worker tilling a field using a daba. He's wearing a conical hat like the one I was just talking about, and he's backed by cattle. I think the species name might be watuzi?

Last time I was in Guelph, I brought home a sand print of some elephants because their cats had knocked down the image of the worker and we couldn't find it. After I learned of the fire, I thought it was pretty remarkable that the elephant print managed to survive by such a slim margine. When we went back to the house I found the worker print wedged into the back of a couch. Because it uses sand and there was so much water damage, I thought the image would peal right off its frame. But it's relatively undamaged. I'm grateful, but I guess the symbolism behind the elephant print surviving is lost.

I also got the sand prints near the end of my journey. The merchant was taller than me, which wasn't common, and I remember him being very observational, soft-spoken and informative about his various works. He was the only person selling art in this format, so I don't know if it was his invention.

I got a bunch of books. We got to stack the local Little Library with the stuff we couldn't bring with us. I got a shot at the collection after Mom had taken her fill. I'll go through them here:

Shogun: As a teenager, I had a blog called Lair of the Rat Sage on Livejournal. At the time I was hyperfixated on books and most of my updates were reviews. I referred to my top picks as the Sage Awards. I can't decide how much I should be cringing at this recollection, but I think I should be at least a little bit. At any rate, Shogun was either a Sage Award or an honourable mention. Would be interesting to reread and see if it holds up.

It's a story about a fleet from England crashing into the coast of Japan. The pilot of the ship gets absorbed into the culture, learning their politics and working his way into the system. I think Clavell wrote six books in what is known as his Asian Saga. I've read Shogun and Tai-Pan which seem to be regarded as his best work, so I'm not really tempted to read the rest. The only one I'm a little interested in is King Rat because it's semi-autobiographical and the tone looks different than the others. The dude fell in love with Asia because he himself had been a prisoner of war. Would be interesting to learn how that happens.

The Little Prince: A Quebec classic about a little prince who loves a flower that he lives with on a tiny planet. One day, he gets lost in the galaxy and he needs to quest back to his home. The story teaches about how relationships and love are formed. This one isn't too personal to me, but it's a solid read.

Things Fall Apart: This might be the most globally recognized book about Africa written by an African novelist. It takes place in a location before Europeans drew national borders, but which would be seen as within modern-day Nigeria. I'd heard it compared to Heart of Darkness for it's take on colonization, so I remember being surprised that about two thirds of the book are not about that at all. Most of it is about the life of a man dealing with various trials working within traditional African systems, and then near-ish the end it addresses the process of colonization.

Segu: I've already mentioned the name of my counterpart from Canada World Youth's home city, and yes this book is named for it. I remember seeing it in a Value Village and being shocked. The story is about the adventures of various members of the Traore family. This held significance to me, as my host family in Mali were Traores.

There is a sequel called Children of Segu which I owned but couldn't find and so failed to recover. Over the two books, there are two characters named Ali Traore, which was my Malian name. The whole saga seemed weirdly applicable to me.

It's less well known but between it and Things Fall Apart, I think Segu is the superior piece of literature. It feels like you really get inside the heads of the various characters. You barely feel the presence of the author and instead it's like you're just living alongside the people in the book.

My Side of the Mountain: This was a childhood favourite of mine. It's about a kid that runs away from home and learns to live in the wilderness on his own. Maybe a slightly dangerous thing to teach children in retrospect. He carves out the log of a giant tree and lives in it, and he tames a hawk. At the time, it really made me feel like I could do anything if I put my mind to it. 

If elementary school me were handing out Sage Awards, this book would definitely have got one. I think it's a little light for reading as an adult but its probably still good. 

I remember it had at least one really disappointing sequel where I think his sister comes and lives with him. They get rid of the log and start living in a treehouse. It felt a little too built up, lost some of the appeal of the wilderness.

Black Like Me: This is a non-fiction account of a White man who undergoes a medical procedure to change his appearance to appear Black in segregationist America. It was a social experiment to see if one could succeed based on merit regardless of their race. His first goal was to see if he could land a job in his field with his own credentials, but it becomes more of an experiment to see if he can survive at all.

I've seen people in Black communities criticize White people for doing similar social experiments in the modern day, but the book still feels impactful.

Frankenstein: I've been on record saying that I think contemporary authors are generally better than classics. I stand by this, the reason being that there are just more people now, and more people with the resources to produce. Newer literature is also more relevant to current worldviews.

Frankenstein is an exception to the rule though. I really think it has stood the test of time. Apparently one of the inspirations for it was that electric technology was just beginning to get mainstream. There was a lot of existential dread about what it might eventually be able to do, similar to the effects that Generative AI is having on people right now. So Dr. Frankenstein learning to create some living aberration with the power of electricity was playing into a fear that people had of the future.

 I also think a lot of Russian classics hold their own in today's literary climate, by the way.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: This one is kind of chick lit, but I really liked it. The story is divided between a modern-day woman with mental health struggles and the stories of an elderly woman that she visits. The Whistle Stop Cafe is the location that the elderly woman's stories revolve around.

I thought the writing had a similar quality to what I described in Segu. It feels like you're living alongside the characters, and you don't sense the author trying to guide circumstance toward any conclusions. Reading this, I first conceptualized the idea that there are characters that can have qualities that are likeable but not necessarily virtuaous, and that sometimes a bad person can do something good when an otherwise good person wouldn't. Basically, I learned character complexity.

I should mention that while I thought the story was in general quite good, there were things about the end that I found a little rough.

Most exciting though, is that this book has a list of recipes at the back for menu items sold at The Whistle Stop Cafe. I haven't been able to find them anywhere online so I'm happy to have found this copy.

One Hundred Years of Solitude: A book about a family in South America that spans 100 years. The story seems to break every literary rule. The names of all the characters are remixes of each other which is very confusing, the writing style is incredibly dry and it feels like there's no consistency about the rules of the world they live in. It's mostly realist, but wades into fantasy at strange and unpredictable intervals. It's incredibly difficult to read.

...But for some reason, I like it. After slogging through it, you reach the end and realize you're sad that it's over. You get invested in the story but you don't know why or how. I wrote a review of this book that I'm particularly fond of.

Hyperbole and a Half, and Solutions and Other Problems: Ali Brosch is a former blogger who wrote stories of her life interspersed with crude but expressive drawings. When I was doing graphic facilitation training, the person whose life I was illustrating said that my style reminded him of this woman's. If you're familiar with her material, you'd know that while at first glance that might seem like an insult, no one who knows her well enough to name would mean it as such. Despite being crude, her drawings capture emotion in a way that is unique and incredibly effective.

She dropped out of the public eye suddenly and without explanation. Then, just as out of the blue she published her first book, named after her blog. It's done in the same style and mostly covers her experience with depression. 

My mother holds this work in high regard and has recommended it to people. I think she would have rescued it if she'd seen it. I haven't read the sequel yet, which is the only piece that I went out of my way to grab that I can say that for.

I'm on record saying that it's more fun to do negative reviews than positive, but it's been cool to talk on here about some works that I appreciate. If I were going by my old system, all of these would at least be Honourable Mentions, with Segu being a Sage Award. Well, I'm not sure that My Side of the Mountain or Hyperbole and a Half would qualify as belonging to the same medium. Also, maybe The Little Prince might not make it, or Things Fall Apart. Maybe Black Like Me wouldn't age well.

Bah. I'm too negative, but for old time's sake I'm granting Segu a Sage Award, I'm letting Shogun retain one, and I'm giving Fried Green Tomatoes, Frankenstein, and One Hundred Years of Solitude Honourable Mentions. I didn't allow My Side of the Mountain or Hyperbole and a Half  to compete for being too different, but they deserve some kind of equivalent accolades. Screw it, give them Honourable Mentions too.