Thinking About Leo

Q: I was thinking about Leo the other day. How he’d have 50 supermodels on his yacht. Why does he need 50? (technical answers welcome) His life exists at a much greater amplification than mine, but whatever it is, shoes, booze, money, status, stars wars action figures, how do we know when we have enough?”

A: Well first of all, stop thinking about Leonardo DiCaprio. He wasn’t even the star of “Don’t Look Up” ffs. He was totally eclipsed, along with everybody else in that over-hyped Debbie Downer, by Jennifer Lawrence. And if you ask me (which, incredibly, only Galaxy Brain advice-seekers ever do) he was completely miscast.

Ryan Reynolds. You know it, girlfriend.

More importantly, stop comparing your acquisitions in life to those of Leonardo DiCaprio, because if one of those supermodels was Linda Evangelista, well, Linda Evangelista is famous for not getting out of bed for less than $100,000 – and that’s $100,000 in ‘90s dollars.

Supermodels are breaking Leonardo DiCaprio’s bank dammit. AND he’s being eclipsed in movies by Jennifer Lawrence, who’s young enough to be his daughter.

That’s gotta be rough on middle-aged miscast Leonardo DiCaprio. And don’t think I have anything against Leonardo DiCaprio, either, because I don’t, although I can’t think of a single movie in which he hasn’t been miscast – especially Celine Dion’s Titanic starring Kate Winslet. Cripes, if you ask me (again, incredible, but nobody recognizes talent anymore) that romance between skinny Leonardo DiCaprio and bodacious Kate Winslet didn’t just look unbelievable, it looked illegal.

Again, Ryan Reynolds.

But enough about Leonardo DiCaprio’s miscasting, it sounds like you might be reading those articles about how much money you’ll need to cover the time between working for money and death. Right? Those Saturday Globe & Mail yuk yuks at us plucky paupers featuring couples living on the Bridle Path in Toronto?

Should we continue to rent a horse for Mackenzie’s dressage lessons or just buy her a farm as an investment?

Well stop, because here’s the fact, Jack – when you’re asking “how do we know when we have enough?” – you have enough. Lucky you, hitting the middle-class Canadian jackpot whether born into it or scrabbling your way out of the fishing huts of Newfoundland and over to Alberta’s Fort Mac with its one fire escape but many GDP contributions.

But speaking of Canadian, take a page from Ryan Reynolds, who knows, unlike poor miscast American Leonardo DiCaprio, when it’s time to wind it all down, relax, have fun, stop grinding away at life to get more, more, more.

Just one Blake Lively and three daughters, James, Inez, and Betty, is enough for Ryan Reynolds, thank you very much. He doesn’t need 50 omigawd – so expensive! – supermodels for HIS yacht.

Geez Louise, Leonardo DiCaprio – get smart (stupid, as Homer Simpson would add). Supermodels are bleeding you dry. Just stay away from supermodels. And movies. You’ll only be miscast in one.

(Funny bit from an interview Ryan Reynolds did with David Letterman about the division of labour with Blake Lively re their three daughters. Letterman asks if he’d be anxious if Lively was out of town visiting her family and he was left to care for the children on his own. Reynolds answers, with perfect comic timing, “I would, first off, never let her go visit her family.” See what I mean? The perfect Dr. Mindy for Jennifer Lawrence’s “Don’t Look Up”.)

But back to you and your, let’s face it, kind of pedestrian worries when you really stop and think about it, which you clearly haven’t, and so thank goodness I’m here. Just visit a nursing home to see how pointless all this acquisitiveness is. I mean, visit a nursing home AFTER this deadly infectious virus is behind us – if it ever is. Jesus, I was in a store the other day in a line as long as a Galaxy Brain advice column, to buy I don’t even remember now it was so irrelevant to the reality of this hellscape of individual rights and freedom to spread a deadly infectious virus we live in now, when I looked up (do look up!) and realized I was the only person or pet in sight wearing a mask.

A mask! I mean, how hard is it to wear one of those pale blue pick-one-up-anywhere-off-the-ground masks to protect me from a deadly infectious disease when I’m out shopping for more crap I obviously don’t need because I can’t even remember now what I was planning to buy.

I left whatever it was neatly stacked in a cart parked discreetly out of the way of the many unmasked shoppers RIDING SCOOTERS DUE TO COMPROMISED HEALTH!

Oh the irony! Want another irony? I was only there because we had a friend’s car for the week and as soon as we did we two plucky paupers went shopping. Well, not My Blond Companion, because he’d rather dig out his own eyes with rusty spoons than go shopping, but he does the driving when we have a car.

I’d rather be a passenger so I can take my time passing informed judgement on all the inattentive drivers out there in this mindless gas guzzling hellscape of a society we’re voluntarily perpetuating as if our GDP depended on it – which it apparently does.

(If you’re tired of reading, the ending of this advice column is: Screw the GDP. Live a meaningful life instead. And when you’ve had enough of that meaningful life, pay it forward with MAID.)

But back to the nursing home. (I’m just going to ignore in this advice column our unconscionable betrayal of our elders in nursing homes, even though they’re kind of responsible for this sibling society/hellscape of individual rights and freedom in which we can so casually disregard each other’s health and well-being by not only not bothering to wear one of those ubiquitous pale blue masks when out shopping for more crap we don’t need, by abandoning them to their fate in a pandemic. I don’t know a single member of this GDP obsessed hellscape who isn’t relieved their elderly parent, instead of being in one of our care-by-the-seat-of-our-pants nursing homes, had the good fortune to die prior to March 2020.)

So, speaking of, until April 2019, when she opted for MAID, surrounded by her loved ones (well, me and my siblings and our partners) all my mother had of her acquisitions (95 years of them) in the nursing home she ended her days in, was one end table and seven outfits with her name tagged in them (or someone’s anyway, laundry sorting isn’t really a priority in nursing homes). And even though she had lots of friends and family, she really just enjoyed visits from her friend Margaret, who spoke loud enough that my mother could hear her, and was out and about enough that she had news to share.

(Well… “news”. Margaret, after all, is in her late ‘80s.)

Then, dammit, Margaret lost her driver’s licence – thanks to a betrayal by a member in her own book club, the one SHE started. Get this, she stood up too quickly, got a bit dizzy, and so, WISELY AND USING ALL HER MARBLES, sat back down again.

Well, wouldn’t Nosy Parker (who routinely recommended books Margaret couldn’t get because they had to be ordered from that unconscionable landfiller, Amazon, and Margaret can only manage to read the free Sault Today online) insist on taking Margaret to the doctor, (and who can see a doctor immediately these days except someone who doesn’t need to because she just suffered a fleeting dizzy spell, dammit, Nosy Parker!) who in turn took away Margaret’s driver’s licence. It was ass-covering bullshit in extremis but it meant Margaret’s visits to my mother went from often to seldom to never because, like my mother, Margaret had only one relative in town to drive her hither and yon and, after a while, my mother didn’t make the cut.

So, my sainted cousin Deb, who’s not even my mother’s favourite niece, never mind favourite person, and who was responsible for several people already, had to take over from Margaret.

Look, my point is, because I always have one or I wouldn’t be a Galaxy Brain advice-giver, we get old and we don’t want or need very much at all, and the people we care about at the end and who take care of us, are the people who value individual rights and freedom so much, real individual rights and freedom, that they take on the responsibility for ensuring we’re making an informed decision should we opt to shuffle off this mortal coil, then help us do it with care, kindness and prescription medication.

I refer, of course, to the physicians with MAID, one of whom turned to me after administering the sedative that put my mother to sleep, and then the drug that stopped her heart, a tear in her eye, and said, “I really liked your mother.”

And I could picture then my mother, gathering her fading marbles together, because it’s hard to stay with it when you can’t see or hear, eat properly because your teeth are falling out, feel anything with your hands or feet, and have to be strapped into a wheelchair lest you pitch forward onto the floor having fallen asleep from the sheer boredom of being alive with nothing to do or look forward to because you’re a person who lived to travel and go to parties and have fun, and assuring said physician that she was not only of sound mind, but wanted to show Canadians how it could be done, show us all there’s no shame in knowing when you’ve – not got enough – but HAD enough.

I was so proud of her, I can’t tell you. She took away my lifelong fear of death and dying in pain and alone as my father would have done way back in 1963, in a cancer hospital in another city, everybody knowing he was going to die, but MAID being unthinkable then (even though he died of a physician delivered morphine overdose, so really all we used to do was deny MAID – and the dying the comfort of having their favourite people and pets with them at the end.)

So yes, trust me, and if you can’t trust a Galaxy Brain advice-giver – who can you trust? – you HAVE enough. Time to prepare for the day – and it will come – when you realize, you’ve HAD enough. Because it takes guts to do what my mother did, face the facts of who you are and how it is, and then do your part to entrench the most basic and essential individual right we’ve granted ourselves to date, the freedom to end our life when we’ve had enough – by making an appointment with a healthcare professional.

I know, right – pressure much? Yikes! Can’t we just leave it to fate, the gods, a deadly infectious virus spreading like fire in Fort Mac because so many of us can’t be arsed to pick up one of those pale blue masks strewn about everywhere on the ground like so many cigarette butts?

No, dammit, we’ve got to be responsible, show each other the way, and make an appointment with death like a responsible citizen of one of the freest hellscapes on Earth.

Oh, I almost forgot: Screw the GDP. Live a meaningful life instead. And when you’ve had enough of that meaningful life, pay it forward with MAID.