The top selfie is from New Year’s Eve, and the bottom is from a few days prior – Christmas Day!
CONTENT NOTE for difficult things, including frank discussion of weight, fat, obesity, and things of that nature. If you are the sort of person who cannot abide the idea of weight loss being framed as a positive thing (which I think is a perfectly reasonable boundary to set!), you will want to skip this update, because it deals with those issues a bit.
Well, I’ll tell you what – on the eve of the arrival of the year 2024, even despite my genuine anguish at the loss of Tom Wilkinson, I am extraordinarily happy to be alive, and genuinely, unironically looking forward to the future for the first time in a very, very, very long while. There is enough ferment afoot in my life that I don’t quite feel as though I have the energy to discuss what’s going on at present, but I do want you all to know that if you are receiving this newsletter, I almost certainly love you, and I consider it a great honour that any of you value me enough to want me to be part of your lives. I’m looking forward to spending 2024 making and listening to great music, watching great films, and loving the fuck out of my friends – that is, y’all!
The main development in my life that I have moved from the basement of a house in the North York neighbourhood of Toronto into a group home in the much more vibrant Parkdale neighbourhood known as The Maynard Residence! This has turned out to be the greatest thing that has happened to me in what must probably be upwards of ten years – there are still some struggles (I’m having intermittent trouble sleeping at night and then sometimes sleeping through parts of my days), but I can’t ever remember being this happy or fulfilled before in my adult life, with the exception of the two times I’ve enjoyed meaningful romantic love relationships. (Shoutout to V. and E.!)
I’m excited to take the opportunity to promote the great rap and hip-hop music I’ve made under the name The Mighty Rhino further in 2024 (To Relieve The Sorrow-Laden Heart deserves it!), and to make some new shit that’s gonna blow y’all’s minds – perhaps especially the completely bonkers album I’m working on as a duo with my friend Skizza, who recently won an award which recognized him as the best rap artist in his native Saskatchewan. Several of the rap artists I love most – The Legend Adam Bomb, D-Sisive, Guilty Simpson, Tragedy Khadafi, Pacewon, Young Zee, Rah Digga, El Da Sensei, Big Mike, Thirstin Howl III – are getting involved with the new shit, and that’s just to name a few of many! I even managed to make a song with the late legend Tame One only a few short weeks before his departure for the realm of the Spirit! I’m so excited to share all this great music with y’all!
I’m using Apple TV and the Criterion Collection to access a wide variety of great films, about which I hope to be able to tell you more later. Counting from the middle of November until New Year’s Eve, I’ve seen a total of 31 films in recent days, all but four of which I very much liked, including films from France, Japan, Sweden, Finland, India, Thailand, Iceland, Taiwan, Senegal, Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, and the USA! More on that soon! Just because I can’t resist, let me reveal the names of the top ten films on that list – the stunning 2011 Kenneth Lonergan film Margaret, Francis Ford Coppola’s deservedly beloved The Godfather, the crackerjack Robert De Niro/Charles Grodin comedy Midnight Run (WOW!), Paul Thomas Anderson’s miraculous and panoramic Boogie Nights, Reservoir Dogs (yes, Tarantino’s an asshole for the most part, but this is one hell of a movie – even better than Pulp Fiction!), John Huston’s incredible 1941 noir The Maltese Falcon, the Coen brothers’ demented and masterful Barton Fink, the effervescent 1932 Ernst Lubitsch comedy Trouble In Paradise, PTA’s searing Magnolia, and Huston’s rip-roaring adventure tale The Treasure of the Sierra Madre!
I’ve made several friends among the other tenants at The Maynard Residence, and the building manager, Miss Monika, and I are very fond of one another as well. I’m especially fond of some women named Akeara, Laura, and Sipha and some gents called Romeo, Ali, David, Roger, Montgomery, Leo, Mike, and André. David is a delightful developmentally delayed 65-year-old white man about whom I’ll tell you more in a future post. Romeo is the new guy, and he seems to have taken a real shine to me – he’s been incredibly friendly towards me, and I find him utterly delightful. He tells me he’s having trouble adjusting to this place, and I look forward to doing whatever I can to help him. Leo is important to me too – we were born on the same day 31 years apart (his birthday is March 16, 1957), and we’re hoping to celebrate together when the time comes.
As for Akeara, she’s almost never around, because she’s in school to be a personal support worker and she’s often either at school or spending time with her boyfriend (Zachary!), but she has such a sweet and gentle and sensible way of being that being around her puts me at ease and makes me feel safe in a way that I can’t help but be grateful for and cherish. And it’s important to me to point out that one of the nicest things about living here is that the neighbourhood I live in one of the most wonderful neighbourhoods in all of Toronto – it’s called Parkdale, and it has a prominent Tibetan community, lots of nice restaurants, and a very friendly vibe that I find absolutely delicious.
One very exciting development is that, as of my most recent visit to the scale around 7:15 PM on New Year’s Eve, I weigh 285 pounds, which is the absolute lowest weight I’ve managed to attain since I started the journey to try to become less obese around seven or eight years ago – 34 pounds lighter than I was the last time I stepped on the scale before moving into the residence, and a full 45 pounds lighter than my highest-ever weight. I can’t help but be elated about this, even though it’s very important to me to support my fat friends wherever they happen to be on their journeys, whether those journeys involve weight loss or not. Body positivity is very important to me, but it’s long been a goal of mine to try to lose at least some weight, and although I’m still permitting myself to consume things such as dark chocolate, cheese, and fruit juice that are not necessarily very good for people like me, I’m doing so in much smaller quantities than ever before, and generally trying to stick to a schedule where I’m eating and sleeping at regular hours and avoiding consuming too much food at once.
It seems to be working reasonably well, not least because my A1C diabetic sugar level, which was all the way up at 8.5 this summer and which I’m trying to get down to the level of 5.5, which is where it was when I was in the middle of a period of success on the ketogenic diet back in August of 2020, is presently at 7.0, which is the goal my pharmacist and I set for it only a few weeks ago! My next goal is for it to get down to 6.0, and then hopefully back to 5.5. My doctors, Eva Tao and Sejal Doshi (who both happen to be incredibly brilliant, devastatingly lovely women I consider myself blessed to be able to interact with), are both thrilled for me! And my pharmacy team, the main members of which are called Ayman, Tiago, and Andrew, are doing an absolutely incredible job of helping take care of me, as are my personal support workers, Abel, Maritza, and Smret.
Things are not perfect (and could never possibly be perfect), but overall, I’m genuinely overjoyed to be alive, and I’m so used to suicidality and self-hatred that my newfound delight not just that my friends are wonderful but that I’m actually glad to be who I am is taking some getting used to. All that said, I’m looking forward to moving ahead into the new year, and I consider myself very profoundly blessed to be alive. I’m grateful to Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for getting me this far. To any and all of you who care about me – thank you so very much for your faith and your love! Let’s all have a wonderful year!