Rose's Cantina

My son has been very upset about the passing of Jennette. He saw her on Christmas Day, frail, a whisper of a human being with her head taped up like a mummy. He saw her, but he couldn't see her. By that time, the oral cancer had enveloped her like a thermal blanket. Even I, the person who had spent the most time with her, could only see a glimmer of my friend peeking out of her rheumy eyes. Stef was a little freaked, encountering a person who looked vaguely like Jennette who was being consumed by an alien. His normal little auntie blew us off on Christmas Day; she couldn't talk much, didn't want to talk much. "I don't understand it, mum," he told me after a few drinks on his birthday. "I couldn't live like that. If I was sick like that I'd want to end it all." She had had that discussion with her friend Gudrun who was the only one to raise the subject when not in front of medical professionals. Jennette had been given the spe...

#82635875 / gettyimages.com A lot of people were making fun of Stephen Harper hiding in a broom closet being guarded by MPs with hand-fashioned sticks last week. There are memes all over the Internet about it. Where was he supposed to go? Have you been in that room? There are no windows to jump out of, like in the Parliamentary Press Gallery's hot room. There isn't even a bathroom. This was not a cowardly act, as some have suggested. You know what the flight attendants say. The big person should always put the mask on first in order to save the country. That's what Harper was doing, making sure the big person would still be alive if his loyal foot soldiers with sticks had been unable to protect him. Most of us would do the same thing. He's our Prime Minister, for Goodness Sake, one of our great symbols of democracy. So stifle yourself, Harper haters. There was no need for him to come out of the closet. Besides, I have no doubt the caucus would h...

  Update: This post was written earlier in the week before Philip Seymour Hoffman died tragically of an overdose. I think it makes it even more poignant given the fact that Hoffman had a life long struggle with an opium addiction. RIP, young man. Hey parents! Remember when your kid came up to you when he was 16 and said this? I can do whatever I want. I'm 16. That's when he stopped going to school and started smoking weed and fornicating in the bushes. What's that you say? Your kid never did that? That's because your kid was the one in my basement dealing the weed. Justin Bieber is just going through a phase. The difference between Justin Bieber and your kid is about 30 million buckaroos. So chill. The kid's not going to be found with needles sticking out of his arm with a strangely accented doctor singing over his dead body. He's not Michael Jackson. He's Corey Feldman. The trouble with Justin is he wants to be cool, and he's just ...

I got a call yesterday from Doris, one of my oldest friends, the person who has stood by me through thick and thin, the woman who has always been there for us, to lend us a few bucks when times were rough, and offer herself up to the Masterchef as a guinea pig at our tasting table. Doris may be the only person I talk with on the telephone anymore; in this age of texting, she hasn't quite got the touch. So the phone rings at least twice a week with news about doctors' appointments, new medication and her strong-like-bull 85-year-old dad. But yesterday's call took on a different tone. It was ominous. Her husband Bob is what a gerontologist would call "young elderly," a man who spent most of his life grabbing life by the tits and squeezing them. David Sedaris would call him a man "with good time teeth," though he has few of them left in his head thanks to his daily consumption of rum and coke over a four decade drinking career. Is Bob an alcoholic? Doe...

"There are all kinds of pictures of the RCMP Musical Ride . Just use one of them and just say you went there." -- my husband Scott Look, if this blog is to work, I have to be perfectly honest. I was going to the RCMP Musical Ride tonight as one of my first Rose Experience Blogs. But I'm not going to. It's going to rain and I don't sit in the rain. For anybody. So here's the link http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/mr-ce/sunset-crepuscule-eng.htm . Knock yourself out. I don't mind walking in the rain. I'll walk the dogs in the rain. I'll walk to something, but I'm not, not, not going to sit in the mud and watch the Musical Ride, much as I'd like to. It's not how I roll. I feel the same way about festivals or any other event that says "rain or shine". I'm a shine-only type of girl. Scott and I did a pair of documentaries at the Bluesfest and the Folkfest about ten years ago and I couldn't get over the number of people ...

The first thing you must do, when recovering from a life-threatening and career-ending addiction, is to try to gain insight into your own life. This is not terribly easy and even people who have successfully rehabbed often don't have the capacity to gain insight. You see these guys in lots of AA meetings. They've successfully won the battle against addiction but they haven't won the war. They're still dysfunctional schlubs and idiots who have traded one addiction -- booze, pills, sex -- for another (AA). Acquiring insight doesn't mean listening to what friends and family have to say. Friends and family are working their own agendas. Rather, it means looking at yourself frankly, digging deep into the root causes of your addiction and pulling up those roots and planting new flowers. People who aren't addicts don't have a clue. Even with years of training and observing addicted rats, the medical professionals are not any closer to finding a cure for ...

I read in the Globe and Mail this morning that Doug Ford was a hash dealer back in 1980. A refrain of an old song went through my head. Those were the days my friend, I thought they'd never end. We'd sing and dance for ever and a day. I didn't smoke a lot of hash in 1980 but I did smoke my share. It was during my rock and roll days when I was a music reviewer for the Ottawa Citizen and I was tooling around in my bright white bowling alley car, sometimes ferrying musicians over to Hull where we would get wasted, then roll home to sleep for 12 hours. I only got arrested for drunk driving once -- another story entirely -- and I only snorted cocaine once, but I did do it. I remember vividly being high on coke, sitting on a Go Train and feeling my throat swell up. I also spent six hours at a Tim Horton's. For a time during that period, I might have been fashioned as a drug dealer, though I like to think of it as being a purveyor of organic substances that wer...

Okay, so it's #BellLetsTalk day and I'd like to get some things off my chest. I can't put them in a text message and send them around to my friends, so unfortunately, mental health initiatives will get no help from me today. But it's still worth having a dialog. Here's what we need to talk about. We need more mental health resources for parents in our community. We need better education about mental illness for teachers and doctors. We need more appropriate resources in our emergency rooms to identify burgeoning problems. Who do we get instead? The police. When my son was having suicidal ideation ten years ago, I called the Youth Services Bureau for help. They called the police. The cops hauled both of my sons out onto the front lawn and frisked them in front of the neighbors. A few days later, my son went onto the street. It was only when he was sleeping in parking garages that I was finally able to get him the help he needed -- from the Youth Services...