The brownshirts' doggone dogged dogging*

Reflections on what it feels like to be followed

Dogs! What did they ever do to get this reputation? Nothing!

At about 11:00 on Friday, I poured myself into a taxi. I had a heavy backpack on, a duffelbag and a full coffee with no lid. “Don’t let that coffee touch my seats” yells the driver. “Don’t worry — there’s no milk or sugar” I reply, hoping that he thinks it’s clever that I understand that the real threat in a spilled coffee is actually the milk and the sugar.

That coffee would be a mistake.

Oh, and I was holding my cellphone up so that the two men I was meeting with through Teams could see me.

“Vers la station GO à Burlington” I blurt out, forgetting that the taxi language is English while the call language is French. He drives and I struggle to hear the men on the call itemize all that needs to be done for a large event next week.

This felt like a bit much. I had to let something go. I downed the coffee as fast as I could and for the next 13 minutes, hammered out plans. The call ends as we pull into to the parking lot. Then, my phone rings again. Success. My license has been found.

Life on the road isn’t always this chaotic but it often has at least one or two moments that are. My trip to Hamilton and Toronto had bad vibes. The events were amazing and I saw a lot of great people but the vibes were off. I felt uneasy the whole time I was there.

Partly, it didn’t help that I managed to book the wrong plane tickets, choosing a round trip from Toronto rather than a round trip from Quebec (mistake error: 800$). I gotta tell ya, there’s nothing more alarming than pulling out your bording pass and the agent saying that it’s for a different flight. That error, in addition to the cost, changed everything about my trip: I’d arrive hours later, I wouldn’t have a car any more (even thought hotels were booked assuming I would), my Friday was suddenly free (I was supposed to see my parents to bring back their car), this 11:00 call was supposed to happen from my parents’ living room, and so on.

But the uneasiness wasn’t just that. There were other forces too. Like that coffee, the one I grabbed fast from the hotel lobby from the urn that was labelled decaf. About 45 minutes after I drank it, sensations took over my body that made me think I was going to collapse: dizziness, a feeling a doom, not getting enough air to breathe, nausea, general discomfort. I took off my way-too-hot winter boots hoping that it would make me feel better. Nope. I found some Advil at Union when I arrived thinking that I was coming down with something. Not that either.

I met a friend in the great hall and when he asked if we should grab something to eat, the thought of it made me want to throw-up and pass out all at once. I preferred to stay on that bench.

The coffee had caffeine in it, surely. It’s the only food that makes me feel like that and as a result, I gave it up four years ago. The sensations passed as I guzzled water and nibbled on a Cliff bar. But the feeling that I was going to die, or am going to die, hovered around me. Very, very bad vibes.

But there was another reason I was feeling off, and that started maybe a week before the events. Like all events I’ve done recently, they are dogged by threats. Event organizers get a glimpse into what a day in my life is like online (I had no idea, I’m so sorry).

Partly, the threats were thanks to this tweet, by a guy who used to be the editor of a magazine I wrote for regularly. I’m not "that humboldt mask lady” to him off Twitter, but it sounds better online so he went with that.

Luckily, the organizers were unphased. But still — knowing how easy it is to dog someone, and knowing that I’m on some sort of perpetual dogging list (with help from the dog shampoo fella himself), it does weigh on you. Or, it weighs on me. It’s tough.

Becuse every time i have an event, I have to tell people to expect this. From online events to in-person ones, from events with a few dozen people to larger — it always happens. And then, when the inevitable discussion happens with the venue hosts — what kind of security do we need to have? — I’m always left struggling between my real opinion (these people are shit cowards and should be ignored) and my professional opinion (hmm yes we should take it seriously, here’s what we should do for some security measures).

So this was weighing on my mind. Until, a few days later, I had the gall to tweet this.

I’m not going to explain it; I think it’s a straightforward thing that people these days might say. I know we are still in a pandemic, that’s not what I mean!. Whatever. The past versus present tense of this virus is a funny, deeply personal thing (hey when you write a book about a pandemic during a pandemic and then the book is over, your state of mind on what was a pandemic will look different!) and I shouldn’t have written the tweet like this. But I did. And people were pisssssssed.

It certainly didn’t help that, from behind an account where I couldn’t actually see it, Taylor Lorenz said that this tweet is “celebrating the exclusion of disabled people.” Taylor has never been in touch with me, ever, about COVID in Canada. Forget the fact that I’m literally one of a few of journalists in this country that has given people the tools to even understand WTF happened and is happening — it doesn’t matter because she saw a tweet where I said something that was daring to look into the future (my book will be out in Fall 2024. Maybe we’ll have a new bird flu circulating then, who knows?)

Anyway, with this tweet came another wave of harassment directed towards event organizers. I do call it harassment because I, personally, didn’t have a single person follow up with me privately about our two events looking to engage in good faith. It was all done publicly, i.e. for show. I did get a lot of “fuck yous” in my messages, a ton of public replies and people telling me that the pandemic isn’t over (I know, I know). But still — among the calls and emails from people who live nowhere near Toronto or Hamilton demanding to know what the COVID mitigation measures were for the event, a few called for the event to be cancelled.

I was feeling uneasy about it all, of course, as I headed to Hamilton for the first event. Not because I didn’t want to talk about any of this, whether from the right-wing shitheads or from the COVID-conscious folks, just because it feels *fucking weird* for so many people to have opinions on me. Like, I can’t emphasize this enough — it feels *not good at the fuck all* to know that things that I do make people so mad, so very mad that they feel personally moved to try and get things I’m involved in cancelled. Maybe I need an assistant who can carefully pour over what I write. She would have stopped me from tweeting that I was excited about next year for sure.

And, while on most days I can ignore it, sometimes I can’t. And I react, respond in kind, feel the doom — drink the proverbial caffenated coffee — let it take over.

I don’t have security. I don’t have a job or a boss or any line into anyone with power. That’s the funny thing about doing the work that I do — when I book a flight in the opposite direction, it’s all me. All me and my brain and my not paying attention and my fault. I have no parachute.

But then, but then, I see that there is a little camera crew at my event in Hamilton. The event is packed, in a little seminar room and they’ve set up at the back. They film everything I say, hoping that I might start rambling about something that would make me go viral. Hoping that they can steal something I’ve said to give them a higher profile, get $5 more for their GoFundMe, get the footage that every news outlet will want. They wait for 45 minutes after the event while I talk with people. Empty handed, they leave.

They show up the night after in Toronto and do it again. And every time I speak, an oafish fellow jumps to his feet to record what I say.

These are brownshirt tactics. These are tactics intended to provoke, discourage, frighten. Imagine I wasn’t feeling well or thinking straight and everything I said became fodder to destroy my life? Imagine I was nervous and said something unfortunate? Imagine they made me too anxious to think straight and I couldn’t present?

None of these things happened (or would happen) because I’m a professional. I’m practiced. I’ve gone through it all and they can’t shake me. But that isn’t the case for everyone. The filming, the following around, the constant attempts to have my events cancelled, the fear that people instill at the venue of security threats (and I’m not including the COVID folks in here but uhh guys, this is the context in which you’re intervening with me, with the same tactics…) it’s too much. No one should have to endure this just to talk in public.

The mental toll it takes is significant. I completely forgot to bring like six things I needed to have with me for another event I was involved in while there, fretting over all the attention the events were getting. It clutters my brain and it forces me to talk about stupid shit that I don’t want to talk about (like who tf is carima sad anyway).

It’s a major distraction and why me? Why anyone who doesn’t have a six-figure salary, a position in cabinet or who controls the lives of workers?

*I have since learned that this is slang for watching or engaging public sex in the UK