Working Town

Here's a song I wrote about twelve years ago after finding the courage to give up a lucrative I.T. career and moving back to Scooterville in order to begin a life of mindfulness, creativity, charity and guidance... so I thought. Immediately there was resistance. The song was in reflection of that, an observation; in no way a rant. At least that's how it is in my memory.

I was knocked off course, though, and never really got back on the same track. I've become better at some things and worse at others, and never regained so much focus again.

The theme for poetry club this month is transformation. So I dusted this off and compiled a proper video. Looking at the result, song and video arranged over a decade apart, I can see a difference in attitude. I look back at that time with more love and forgiveness. If I was trying to blame others before, that was unwise, and I'm not anymore.

a·cros·tic /əˈkrôstik/

When I told the Earnest Chef I was working on a collection of crossword puzzles, he looked at me funny and said, "Why?"

I don't know if crossword puzzle mags have ever come with a dedication page but this one will. I'll dedicate to the Earnest Chef and be sure to note why!

This is the first one I came up with and it's called MOP TOPS. If you give it a go, I'd love to hear if you were able to complete it.

ACROSS

1 spidery sea crawler

5 much

9 1st Taiwanese ML pitcher

13 Parachute Club anthem: ____ Up

14 world's youngest mother

15 Goldie

16 Lennon-McCartney tune: Yes ____

17 drillers club

18 1985 Camaro version

19 1964 album

22 ____! Darling

23 what up, dawg

24 Torry sanctuary (abbr)

25 magic dragon

28 Axl Rose project (abbr)

29 in which Doris gets her ____

33 Serbian tabloid

34 ad ____

35 answer to 39-across

37 surplus

39 Tell me ____

40 Heston's crowd

41 to dress up like a wizard or warrior (abbr)

42 sphere or hazard

43 B side to Paperback Writer

44 urgent care source (abbr)

46 Eagles tune ____' 55

47 Let it ____

48 1963 album

56 malbec capper

57 dregs component

58 some for____ not for better…

59 melted mushroom or cranberry accompanier

60 Red and Dead

61 Coppel and Kennedy

62 oracle

63 trained killers

64 consequence of Lennon's Jesus remark

DOWN

1 house

2 ceremony

3 site of Taj Mahal and the Great Wall

4 greatest hits collection

5 burn soother

6 word-mime

7 Musketeers' chant opener (2 wds)

8 head tilter

9 ____ wants you back again.

10 model Underwood

11 missing from duty (abbr)

12 ____ there was a way to get back homeward

20 southpaw (init)

21 solar god

25 47-across composer

26 elbow bone

27 Fab ____

28 Pan or Yahweh

30 3rd track on 48-across

31 songwriter Amos

32 The Man

34 ____Said, She Said

35 Daltry's crowd

36 ____ & Zel's

38 Ender sequel: ____ of the Dead

39 Mr. Shears Campbell

42 checked out with Valens

43 mends bone

45 percussionist (abbr)

47 sheep utterance

48 toxic coolant banned in 1977 (abbr)

49 legend

50 Ontario feeder

51 hockey's Mr. Tikkanen

52 artsy marketplace

53 six or twelve for instance

54 Thracian tribe

55 ____while

Fried: On the Beach

Perhaps Jane Stewart is too common a name for a Canadian musician trying to make it in the realm of art-pop? For whatever reason, this particular Jane took her maternal aunt's married name and began crushing it as Jane Siberry. 

in 2005 the Canadian Council for the Arts bestowed the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award upon her for "outstanding artistry in her mid-career." She responded by questioning if her career should continue: she changed her identity, both on stage and off, to Issa, a feminized version of Isaiah, and then immediately wrote thirty-three songs in thirty-three days with a process she described as slowed-down: choosing a note and then waiting patiently to discover the next one.

In 2010 she became Siberry again. 

Spotify has somewhere over half of her material available, up to 2017, under both (separate) identities. Her first two albums are missing, the second of which contained the song Mimi on the Beach, the first of her songs I ever heard, still my favourite, and number three on my Spotifried playlist:

a·crop·o·lis /əˈkräpələs/

The Acropolises were the fortified heights of Greek cities way way back before Yahweh came barging in and did away with all the cool gods who are now reduced to Marvel action movie heroes and such. How degrading, right?

A handful of years back, some plot-building exercise led me to create a fantasy world scenario for fun, where a fortified city of great import (like today's Vatican but relating to the chief Norse gods) faced a dire circumstance. Religious artifacts had been stolen by a great witch from another plane of existence in a plot to expose the city to destruction from its neighboring volcano, from which they were, til then, protected by said Norse gods, but to then concoct a scenario where a new-in-town temple saves the day and purports to expose the historical rulers as corrupt and evil. The new temple was controlled by the witch who presented herself as a god.

But how to make the good guys win? Where do the heroes come from?

I told the late Liberal Theologian about it (my then-housemate) and we agreed at once to recruit a crew and run the thing as a Dungeons and Dragons adventure. The players were an acolyte and kennel master of a good guy temple where the head priest was kidnapped, a young dwarf who's engineer father had disappeared while contracted to head a major renovation to the (ultimately evil) temple of the witch, and a Frost woman who's brother disappeared when caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. In her search for her brother she got herself unfairly pegged as a suspect by the citadel master of the guard and had to be rescued, in effect, by the others.

They won the support of the Gjall; the great leader of the citadel (like a pope) who had been brought visions of the young would-be heroes by the Norns (divine Norse messengers who do such things - kind of like the three ghosts in Dickens' Christmas Carol).

Together they discovered that the Frost brother had been killed unfortunately but they raided the evil temple and rescued the Dwarven father who'd been set aside as eventual monster food because he knew too much, and they found their way through a tower portal network to a gateway world (literally an upside down world - and this was well before Stranger Things!) where they confronted and killed the witch monster without having to go all the way to her own plane. There they also discovered the Frost Brother in living form and there the Gjall, now murdered but returned in Revnant form, was able to help them all understand that he was in a kind of purgatory and could never return to his material plane but would be going to the Nirvana; the paradise, of his own kind and soon. And one day brother and sister (and all their kin) would be reunited there.

In the process they saved the Ruling counsel of the holy citadel by stopping the witch from ascending to the Gjall position in the false form of the successor which she had covertly executed.

The adventure was a great success and I started writing the novel according to our shared blueprint.

In Part Two they would go after the remaining artifacts in a race against time to shut down the volcano. But my housemate had become sick with cancer at this time and it did not feel like any kind of priority to any of us.

The Liberal Theologian then passed away and I stopped writing the book and haven't touched it since. Her D&D character was in essence the central character of the book, and there was a lot of herself in there, and everything feels different now. Maybe one day I'll pick it up again. Who knows.  

The eyes of others

I believe I was 14 when I saw Blade Runner at the cinema and was blown away. For the first time in my life I started thinking critically. What does it really mean to be human?

I've since realized the treachery of consciousness; how we are coerced toward seeing our self through the eye of the imaginary other, instead of directly and unvarnished. But sometimes we are the other and we learn about ourselves by seeing what we are not; the foreigner; the alien. I feel that this is a function of the best science fiction. 

I've heard that Kubrick's monolith in 2001 has the same dimension ratio as a movie screen. I can't be sure that's correct, or at least correct in every scene, but the idea deeply resonates. To me, the monolith represents self-awareness. It has also been stated fairly convincingly that it is some kind of alien probe. Similar physical dimensions occur conspicuously in other great sci-fi films.

What does it mean to be human; to be sentient? Just what the hell is consciousness anyway?

Here's my sci-fi compilation tribute.