Drugs @ Osheaga OR How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Crowd

Wow, guys.

It’s been a long time, I know, but the last time you guys heard from me I was woefully unemployed, single, balancing on the precipice of alcoholism and beginning the embarrassing descent into self-pity that only leads to internet dating. NOW – a few shining, sweaty months later, I can confirm that I am successfully employed, still… yeah, ok, still single…  Still drinking, but like, less during the week, I guess? …but yeah, man, single as fuck.

BUT I did get the chance to rock out at some truly singular music festivals this summer, an opportunity I haven’t been able to take advantage of in the past due to work engagements that I will go over in more detail in a future article entitled ‘Treeplanting Ruined My Life (But Also Kind of Saved It)’.

So I saw some pretty awesome acts this summer, including but not limited to Jack White, John Mayall, Procol Harum, Outkast, Arctic Monkeys, Foreigner, Old Crow Medicine Show, Queens of the Stone Age, Gary Clark Jr., The Replacements and about a hundred more.

Music festivals really are the tits – show up, grab a violently overpriced beer, and meander from stage to stage, hoping the sound bleed isn’t too bad and the acts don't behave like pricks. I saw Neil Young a couple years ago at the Austin City Limits festival and left halfway through his set because he was acting like such an asshole to the crowd. I was drunk and maybe a bit sensitive, but the dude didn’t acknowledge the audience once and just faced his bass player the whole time. Not even a ‘hey, how are yah?’, just churning out Crazyhorse tunes until his hour was up. I stumbled across the field to where Jack White was co-headlining and had my mind blown. I hugged a dozen random strangers when he closed the show with ‘Seven Nation Army’ and brought the house down.    

So the festival I was most excited for this summer was definitely Osheaga. Three days of rock and electro held in Montreal’s Jean Drapeau Park: you can barely tell you’re in the middle of a major city – you’re surrounded by trees and river and kids dressed as neon flower children drenched in bodypaint and so ripped on zoomers you start thinking you’ve been transported to another planet’s Woodstock.

My gal Lauren and I drive up on the Friday, and get there just in time to catch some smaller indie acts I’ve been aching to see, like July Talk and Montreal’s own Sam Roberts Band. Both awesome, and after semi-suffering through Ottawa’s Bluesfest a month before – ten days of gray hair, lawn chairs, apathetic crowds and Blake fucking Shelton fans, I’m loving Osheaga and it’s young, jazzed up hipsters. Who cares if every girl there is channelling this weird, Lana-Del-Rey-meets-90’s-grunge aesthetic, and you couldn’t walk five feet without being caught in six thousand selfies? People were excited to be there, and for the most part were really into the music, so I was pumped. On Friday the headliners were Outkast, reunited and it feels so good, but playing right before them was Chromeo, a band I vaguely like but really really wanted to see because I had brought drugs with me and wanted to Just. Get. Messy.  And who better to start the fun off with than two Canadian techno-hipster punks with light-up ladies legs as keyboard stands?

Am I Right!?

Chromeo was amazing, if you ever get a chance to see them, take it. Same with Outkast. If they ever do a second reunion tour, I am there. Dancing to ‘Hey Ya!’ live should be on everyone’s bucket list.

I was so high, I thought this was the sagest advice I'd ever heard.

The second day was rough, the drugs had gotten on top of us a bit at the end of the previous night and it was a slow rolling start in the morning, but we dragged our asses to Reuben and the Dark’s show and after a couple beers were flying at full mast by the time HAIM took the stage. HAIM (I’m told it’s pronounced HRRRRRRRRggggkkk-AIM) are three sisters from Studio City, California who dress like boho-hipster messiahs but play a dozen instruments each and rock every single one of them. Their debut album ‘Days are Gone’ was kinda unremarkable the first time I heard it, besides the first single ‘The Wire’ blatantly stealing the opening riff from the Eagles’ ‘Heartache Tonight’, but after seeing these gals live I am fully, fully sold. They jammed, had long instrumental breaks, engaged the crowd like seasoned vets and the fact that they were obviously having a great time performing for us poured out of them and enveloped us all and made for one the best shows of the festival. But seriously, check this out:

Also, the bass player sister, Este Haim, pulls some of the best faces while playing. I love it.

These are my three-stages-of-sex faces! What a coinkidink!

The headliner that night was Jack White, my second time seeing him, but the real showstopper was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, who played right before Jack. If you’re unfamiliar with him do a quick google search and you’ll realize that he is the original goth kid. He probably showed Edgar Allan Poe how it was done. Also, his song ‘Red Right Hand’ gives me awesome chills every single time I hear it. Now, Nick is not a young man, and yet he spent 80% of his set balancing on the rail of the stage barricades, arms flung wide like some tent revival evangelist, groaning and cawing at his scores of older fans and the legion of terrified twenty-somethings caught in his crossfire. Lauren stood enraptured for his whole show, staring up at him with her drug-addled mouth open, swearing every minute or so that he was a vampire. It’s not a stretch of the imagination.

The Original Gothster.

The third day was more relaxed, there were only a few shows I really wanted to see so everything else was a bonus. We laid on the grass and watched The Temper Trap from afar – they threw in a cover of ‘Rock the Kasbah’ that was really well done.

The most exciting shows were the last ones, though. We squirmed and strong-armed our way to the front for Lorde’s set and I was pretty fucking impressed. The stage was pitch black, full of smoke, and nearly empty – her drummer and synth player hidden at the back – but her lightshow was mesmerizing to my fizzling brain and she strutted and herky-jerked her way all over the stage with insane confidence for a seventeen year old. The only disappointment had to be her telling a ten-minute story about the inspiration behind one of her song’s lyrics:

It’s about not fitting in and feeling apart.

Cool, got it.

It’s about being different and feeling left out and being lonely.

Yeah, nice, we got it.

It’s about being a loner and feelings being unreciprocated and being the black sheep.

Yeah, high school is rough! Get on with it!

That being said, she closed the show with ‘Royals', and that shit really is an amazing song. With only a synth beat and Lorde’s full-throated vocals, the song has a surprisingly huge sound behind it that had everyone singing along like they were alone in the car.

Lykke Li closed out the festival for us. The Swedish witch was at a smaller stage, was dressed all in black and loved the crowd. She did her old hit ‘Dance Dance Dance’ telling the crowd “You’ve gotta do it with me, I’m too shy” – but she really made everyone fall in love with her during the creepy, intense ‘I Follow Rivers’ and especially the slow-burn ‘Never Gonna Love Again’. Seemingly embarrassed, she admitted: “This is a fucking power ballad… but sometimes you need a power ballad moment! Raise your phones and lighters!”

I was wrecked after the three days. But elated, too. The uptight, defensive and impatient persona I’d inhabited at Ottawa’s Bluesfest was dead and replaced with a freewheeling, flower headband wearing, lover-not-a-fighter. It’s amazing what a good crowd can bring out of you – sing your heart out, don’t just sway back and forth - fucking dance if you like the music, joints should be passed and beer should be shared – no man is an island, life is a song and music will save us all.  

That Time I Died But Then Felt Fine: What They Don’t Tell You About Brain Surgery

       In November of 2007 I had just turned 21, had just learned how to surf, and had just been epically dumped while travelling with my horrible boyfriend in Central America. So there I was, backpack in one hand, second hand surfboard in the other, with nothing but a tenuous grasp of the Spanish language and a growing sense of dread to keep me afloat. The dread came from the fact that over the past few months I’d been having some increasingly serious headaches. I was hesitant to call them headaches, however, and I’d had migraines before, but what I was experiencing was so axe-to-the-eyeballs painful they left me curled up in a ball, whimpering on the floor. They would come without warning - I’d be walking down the street and all of a sudden feel like someone had hit me in the eyes with the narrow edge of a 2x4. I’d have to limp back to my hotel and just ride out the pain while screaming my head off. It was seriously that bad. Tylenol, Ibuprofen, alcohol, weed, even the legally obtained Nicaraguan diazepam (Valium) didn’t have any effect at all. My ex, before he so graciously left, used to get so mad when I would get them, saying how it was because I was dehydrated and I was ruining everyone’s time by not taking care of myself. What a charmer!

By the end of October the headaches were getting worse, and more frequent, so I cut my trip short and caught a flight home a couple weeks before Christmas. I was so scared of getting a headache on the flight and freaking everyone out and having the stewardesses think I was turning into a werewolf or something with all the screaming and thrashing around, that I took six valium beforehand in order to sleep through the 9 hour flight. Thank GOD I slept, because the only thing I can think of that would be worse than getting a headache on a plane would be being so god-almighty high on valium on a plane that the air marshal shoots me cause they think the drooling, staggering, babbling woman is a fucking zombie.

I just wanted the whole can of coke!

So I found myself home again, and by this point, I was having ten to fifteen of these headaches A DAY – I couldn’t go to the movies, go out for drinks, visit friends, I couldn’t leave the house in fear of getting one of these vicious headaches in public. So I break down one day and call my sister, sobbing, and she took me to the emergency room where after eighteen hours of drugging me to no effect, a CAT scan, a spinal tap, an MRI and buckets of blood work, they tell me I have a brain tumour. 

Seriously, it was a relief to get that news. I wasn’t scared or upset, I was elated to finally figure out what the fuck was wrong with me, and now we had a plan, and that plan was brain surgery. The tumour wasn’t on my brain proper, it was actually on my pituitary gland which lives right behind your eyeballs in it’s own little cave of wonders which also houses your optic nerve, which is why my ‘headaches’ felt like someone Freddy Kruegering their way out of my peepers. The tumour was about the size of a quarter and they were apparently going to rip that little fucker out through my nose, which I was 100% cool with because it wouldn’t involve shaving my head and I had just finished growing my bangs out.

I giggle every time I read 'third ventricle' and I'm not sure why.

Your Body Will Fuck With Everyone’s Plans

So I go under, and the surgery is supposed to take a breezy four hours (it ended up being ten), and involves a neurosurgeon and an ear, nose and throat specialist shoving two large tubes up both nostrils, one of which contains the instruments (scalpel, scissors, forceps, bone drill… no, seriously, bone drill) and one of which is a big old suction hose coupled with a endoscopic camera and a light, so they can see what they’re cutting out or into or off. They cram these tubes that look waaaay bigger than what could feasibly fit up someone’s honker into your head, cut through your sinuses until they hit the outside wall of your skull, drill into that, cut through ANOTHER sinus and then boom! Pituitary town.  Unfortunately for all involved my sinuses decided that homie don’t play that, and started to bleed like a motherfucker. MORE unfortunate for everyone but most especially me, is no one noticed. That is, not until my blood pressure dropped so fast that my anesthesiologist, the guy in charge of monitoring my heart and level of consciousness, finally realized that they had pumped almost all of my blood out of my body.

General Anesthetic Is Whackadoo-Crazy

This is where events take a fairly serious turn, for everyone except me, really, because I was crazily unconscious. If you’ve never been given a general anesthetic let me tell you the craziest thing about it is the fact that it’s the exact opposite of sleeping. If you, say, take a nap, when you wake up you have a keen sense of time having passed, you wake up wondering how long you were out. Under anesthetic you wake up with the sensation that NO time, whatsoever, has passed, and you wake up wondering why the fuck you’re in a different room and different clothes and why you feel like a bag of shit all of a sudden.

Only 10-20% Of Near Death Experiences See A “White Light”

So I died. At least that’s what they tell me. For 2 minutes and 14 seconds I had no pulse, no respiration, and had CPR performed. When they regained a bit of a heartbeat they defibrillated – the thing with the paddles - which is where the electrical current stops your heart so that it can get it’s shit together and start beating regularly again. So I’m dead, then not so dead, then not at all dead, but still fucked up. They don’t know why I started bleeding so heavily to begin with, but more importantly they don’t know where I started bleeding. If it was my sinuses or nasal cavity, no big deal, but if it was my brain, well brain hemorrhages cause all sorts of fucking trouble, scary stuff like losing motor function, memory loss, basically brain damage. So, while still unconscious, I get whisked away to a big MRI machine where they perform something called a contrast MRI. They do this by cutting into my femoral artery, I’m talking inches away from my lady parts, and feeding a big metal catheter up the vein until it hits my brain, then they release a dye that shows up on the MRI. If my brain is bleeding, the dye will pool there and give it away – turns out my brain was fine, except for the fact that it belonged to me, and my sinuses were the ones to blame and they were easily dealt with.

The hilarious thing, in hindsight, was the fact that in order to get to my femoral artery, they had to shave half of my pubic hair off, which wasn’t exactly part of the checklist of things they told me to expect, post-surgery. So when I wake up, and am on so much morphine I think I can see into the future, and start checking out all the tubes and stitches and bandages I’m covered with only to discover that someone has gone to the trouble of giving my vagina a Skrillex haircut, well, I freaked out a fair bit.

It looked just like this, but less of a pussy.

Morphine Makes You A Better Person  

So, now we’re getting into the good bit, which is the recovery. They give you morphine when you’re in recovery for brain surgery. And I don’t mean they give you a pump where you can control your dose until a certain point, I mean they give you a steady 24-7 drip of sweet, silly morphine. God that stuff is good. I know it makes a lot of people sick, but all it made me was fucking awesome. I was in such a good place on that stuff, I was the life of the party. My friend Lauren came to see me every day and every day I’d act like it’d been years. Scream her name when she came in – give her a huge hug - tell her about my pubes - all while having fifteen different tubes running in and out of me and having two giant tampons shoved up each nostril. I felt great. My favourite part was my catheter – you never felt like you needed to pee, the catheter just took care of it, shunting it through a huge tube that ran the length of my bed into a bag they hung off the end of it. Morphine made it an amazing and hilarious event, every time:

‘Mom! Dad! Look at the tube! I’M PEEEEEING!!!’

Morphine Makes You A Paranoid Schizophrenic

Morphine also took me down some strange and terrifying paths, usually in the middle of the night. I remember waking up once and having the distinct and clear idea that I needed to leave, leave the room, leave the hospital, I just had to go home, that very instant - so the nurses caught me ripping, and I mean RIPPING all my lines out while trying to stand up. They had to actually tie me to the bed until they could get my lines back in and dose me with a sedative.

I also have a very clear memory of a nurse explaining what all the pills they were giving me each day were. Hospitals give these pills to everyone, and they’re mostly antibiotics to stave off infection, but there are also laxatives and stool softeners, because all the narcotics tend to create a bit of a logjam. So the nurse explains that two of the pills are to help me take a shit eventually, and the morphine nudges my brain and tells it that these pills are probably gonna make me shit the bed, and won’t that be embarrassing? So I start hiding the pills in my cheek when the nurses give them to me, and then cramming them under my pillow, which works for about twenty minutes before a nurse finds them and tries to explain to my morphine addled brain that the pills are to help me, but I just can’t understand, all I hear is that she wants me to shit myself. So when she makes me take them again, I pretend to swallow, and as she’s walking out of my curtained cubicle, I spat them at her retreating back, where one of them stuck.

Nurses Run the Show

Here’s something you don’t realize about nurses – they don’t put up with fucking shenanigans, lemme tell yah. I was on a ward of people waking up from brain surgery, the majority of which were over the age of 65, and the majority of which had no fucking idea what was going on. There were about twenty-five beds on this ward, and every single on them was occupied by some old, confused bastard who doesn’t know where they are. And then there was me – 21 year old, ‘having a great time eating jello’ me. The two men on either side of me constantly confused me for either their wives or one of their children and would talk to me incessantly about stuff I couldn’t understand with or without the morphine. They’d get angry I wouldn’t respond, and start yelling and then the nurses would have to step in, and I’d get to watch nurses Get. Shit. Done. There was no quiet shushing and cool cloths to the forehead, there was ‘Mr Sanderson, you better lie back down RIGHT NOW!’ and ‘Don’t you grab me again, Arthur, I mean it!’.  It was an awesome spectator sport, but not so nice when you’re on the receiving end of a tiny blond woman in pink scrubs telling you in no uncertain terms that if you don’t take your poop pills she’s gonna MAKE you take your poop pills. Morphine didn’t help make that any less frightening.

Whattaya gonna do if I don't, hey? -Oh...

You Will Be The Filthiest You’ve Ever Been

Morphine did help for situations that I’d normally avoid at all costs. Like bath time with strangers! My first week in recovery they wouldn’t let me out of bed, seeing as how my legs didn’t really understand the concept of ‘standing’ or ‘walking’ just yet, so I was a stinking hot mess after a couple days. My mom helped me wash my hair with a plastic basin and some ineffectual splashing, but it didn’t really help, I was gross. But lo and behold – the hospital has a wicked awesome strategy for patients who can’t bathe themselves – candy stripers!!! Seriously, I was minding my own business, watching my hands flex and unflex as the morphine did it’s thing one day, when a girl about my age pokes her head around my curtain and asks if I’m ready for my bath. I was so drugged up and dirty that I got super excited and tried to hug her as she started undressing me. I’m not a prude, by any standards, but someone I could potentially go have a beer with giving my dirty, starved, pale, tube-ridden body a wipe down – front and back – is not something I would soberly agree to, but man, did I love every second of that shit. Thanks morphine!

In my second week, I was allowed to walk around but never by myself, in case I ate shit and bonked my head off something or ripped all my leads out again (which I did anyway, while my mom was watching but was too grossed out to stop me). So I got to the point, again, where my stink was keeping people awake at night, so the nurses told me that I could take a shower. A supervised shower. Now you’d think that this means that someone is just outside the room, or maybe in the room but just on the other side of the curtain, ready to pick your naked ass up if you pop a rivet and go down, but no. Nononononono – there is no ‘just outside’, there is no ‘curtain’, there is a room, with a shower in it, and there is you, and there is your three hundred pound African nurse standing three feet away, just… watching you. I guess the idea is that they want to actively try and catch you if you start to fall, and normally the idea of someone making eye contact with me while I soaped up my butt would give me the shivers, but morphine made it awesome because now there was someone I could babble incessantly at:

‘Hey Trudy! I’m in the shower! Do you have a dog? I wanna go to the desert! Look! Bubbles!!’

Like this but less sexy.

The Food They Give You Is Inedible, The Food In The Cafeteria Is Manna From Heaven

Ever had Salisbury steak? Did you enjoy that experience? If you did, then you probably grew up locked in a cold war bomb shelter and were only recently released. If you didn’t, then just imagine how horrible that experience would be if the steak in question had been frozen for an indiscernible amount of time, then not reheated but thawed, and placed on a heated tray. I had meals so bad that even while sailing on the U.S.S Morphine Drip I could tell they were disgusting. Vegetables so water-logged they had lost all colour, so tastelessly foul I couldn’t actively tell what they were. Mashed potatoes with the consistency of toothpaste, roast beef that looked like particle board and tasted like salt and brown.

Enjoy your food-like shapes!

Meal times were never something to be looked forward to, especially when they’re weaning you off the painkillers, which was unfortunate because that’s exactly when you start to get your appetite back. Instead, the best part of my day became when visiting hours started, because that’s when my parents could wheel me down to the cafeteria. A place free of boiled vegetables and mystery meat and filled with Philly cheese steaks, banana cream pie, cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes, all made either right in front of you or in house. I swear I almost bankrupted my parents with those cafeteria visits. I was so under-weight and starved that in one sitting I remember eating two cheese steaks with two sides of fries, two pieces of pizza, three pieces of pie with whipped cream and two sundaes. My dad high-fived me, my mom looked like she wanted to barf, I felt euphoric until I started thinking about the last time I pooped.

Bowel Movements Become a Very Big Deal

        Before my surgery, I was on Percocet for almost two months, and then a steady course of morphine for two weeks after that. The Percocet not only made me constipated, they stole my appetite entirely. I dropped almost twenty pounds in those two months alone, and probably ten more during the hospital stay. I was not a healthy looking lady. So once I started getting ready to leave the hospital, the nurses started asking for more details about the last time I had a real bowel movement. And the only thing I could answer was, ‘maybe in January?’, which was not exactly good news. Everyone started talking really quietly for a couple of minutes before they informed me that as desperate I was to get out of that plague hotel, I wouldn’t be able to unless I pooped – not like, in front of them, thank god, but you know, while they were around. This became a nightmare. I was so sick of the hospital, so tired of being hooked up to shit, having my blood taken every hour, hearing other sick people being sick, seeing other people’s families peering at me, smelling that hospital smell. All I had to do was shit, and I could go. And I couldn’t. I seriously couldn’t. They gave me a few laxatives and I went into the bathroom and stayed there for two hours, and nothing happened. I wanted to cry. I pushed like I was in labour and sweated and swore and was warned by the nurses that if I strained too hard I could rupture something. I ended up having a bit of a nervous breakdown and incurring so much sympathy from my medical team that they decided to let me go as long as I promised to call them as soon as I managed a poop.

"She did it!"

       I wish this whole sequence of events had a moral. I wish I had gone through this and come out the other side with some sort of insight, or perspective. Like, I’ve now dedicated my life to building schools in Africa or training seeing-eye dogs. But truth be told I’m still the marginally terrible person I was before my near death experience, I still have the same bad habits, the same propensity to date assholes, the same unshakeable thirst for bourbon cocktails. All I can really say that I learned from this whole messy business is that no one should ever mess with nurses, cause they control your pain meds, I could do the backstroke in a septic tank and still feel cleaner than I did just lying in a bed for a week, and if you roll French fries up in a pizza slice like a burrito, then cram that into a Philly cheese steak, you will not be sorry, my friend.

Valentine's Day: Rub It In, Why Don't You?

If there’s one thing worse than New Year’s Eve, my birthday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, weddings, prom, every Friday night, and every Sunday morning to really drive home the lost and lonely notion that I am SUPER single, it’s goddamn Valentine’s Day.

Straight from the heart.

Here’s an idea: why don’t we invent a day solely for people who are in stable and loving relationships, arguably the happiest people our society could puke out - except for Stanley Cup winners and people who find money on the street – and let’s just shower these people in candy and beautiful flowers and great food, and at the same time shame and shun the fuck out of those hideous losers who can’t have a conversation with a man last longer than five minutes without watching his eyes glaze over when you inexplicably start talking about how underrated Billy Joel is.

Ahem.

That may be just me, but you know what the fuck I’m talking about.

And I KNOW that Valentine’s Day is just some bullshit cooked up by Hallmark and Hershey’s to sell crap to dumb men whose bitchy wives or girlfriends expect relationships to play out like a Nora Ephron movie – but wouldn’t it be SO much better if we flipped that shit on its ass and instead, Valentine’s Day was about couples showing the single people in their lives that no man is an island and giving them chocolates and cards with hearts and maybe a quick backrub?

Valentine’s is ‘supposed’ to be about buying your girlfriend/boyfriend shit showing that special person in your life how much you love them– but correct me if I’m wrong, don’t people in healthy, supportive relationships do that every goddamn day? And I don’t mean grand gestures like fancy dinners or flowers, or standing outside their house with a boombox over your head, I’m talking about the teeny tiny little things that I couldn’t get enough of when I was dating someone. The smallest things that meant the most, for instance - I had a boyfriend who would bring me something every time he went to the store, we’d be putting groceries away and he’d be like, ‘Here, I got you this…’ and he’d hand me something small, like a bag of wine gums or a peach or something. It was never something big, sometimes it was something I had talked about recently, like I had been craving pistachios or something like that, but what I loved about it was the fact that I had been on his mind. Even while doing something inane or routine, he’d thought of me, and wanted to get me something. It was the tiniest expression of love, and it made me so happy I wanted to fucking explode. Relationships should be filled with these little acts, and they can be as simple as making coffee for someone in the morning, but it’s only when you have to make your own damn coffee when you realize how fucking amazing that lovely little deed is.

So if Valentine’s Day is all about love, how about showing some to the people in your life who are maybe not getting a healthy dose? Let those single bums you call friends know that while you may have a significant other who blows your hair back in all the right ways, on this day of forced endearment, you’re thinking of those lonely fuckers. I don’t care how jaded or bitter you are (I’m the queen of both) – if you’re single on Valentine’s Day it always twinges a bit, deep down. So reach out to the unmarried masses, you happy glowing couples, and send a bit of love their way.

You may get a threesome out of it, who knows?

Happy Valentine’s Day, you beauties.