New Day Rising

The negative dialectics of poodle cuisine

2012-02-15T20:02:00.005-05:00

It didn't bother me that someone left my bathroom door open nor that Ezri the Poodle had been in there making mischief as she is wont to do. It did not bother me to have to pick up the garbage and refill the can.

What unsettled me was finding that the dirty ends to the Q-tips had all been bitten off and were none to be found.

Ew.

Typical Sunday Night

2012-02-14T11:47:00.003-05:00

On Sunday I tracked my time at my weekly 12-hour gig at the Big Empty Warehouse so as to measure a sampling of my productivity. It was not the best of shifts. I became tired later in the shift and thus my creative endeavors were given more to passive music listening (though not entirely un-poetic) and less to writing.

Results in minutes:

120 explored music
90 watched DVD - comedian Louis CK
85 security patrols
75 composed music. No significant results
70 correspondence
65 writing
45 visited with good friend/co-worker
35 young writers group preparation
25 meals
20 pack/unpack
20 editing
20 played chess
10 updated personal budget
5 phone call

More significantly, by category:

315 create/explore (too low)
155 liesure/entertainment (too high)
130 mundane details of life (too high)
85 security work (oh well. Must earn a paycheque)

That was a boring post but useful for me. Sorry about that.

Pulp fiction

2012-02-07T16:05:00.004-05:00

Fairly regularly someone will be talking to me and refer to some news event or another; local, national or global. Usually it sounds like this: "Isn't it terrible that [insert personality] did [insert misdeed]?" or else "Isn't it sad what happened to [insert victim]?"

Then I reply that this is not a matter in which I've been involved.

Then I get looked at funny. "Oh but it's in the news." This usually sounds accusatory, as if I am an irresponsible citizen if I do not keep up with the news. And I might even find a shred of legitimacy in that judgement if only I had a shred of confidence in the media machine for being either fair, honest, thorough, intelligent, useful or in line with properly noble interests.

Unfortunately, the opposites to these ideals are the rule according to my observations which I make rarely, but regularly enough to keep my understandings of the matter hopefully current and legitimate!

While major newspapers and news radio programs offer bit pieces designed to extend good advice to readers, which can be often quite useful, their coverage of events is their bread and butter and is woeful by any angle I look at it. And sure, there may be many limitations, financial, logistical and otherwise, behind the woefulness, but excuses for being useless, as good as they may be, does not change the quality of being useless. There are no points for effort.

The problems:

Material which is political or with political applicability is slanted in favor of the party of choice of the media entity's ownership. This has always been obvious. So has their penchant for spinning everything to appear as sensational and controversial as possible.

If you've ever been present at a newsworthy event you've probably watched it later on the news and been horrified how the newscaster's angle is utterly foreign to your own experience.

And if you've ever watched CNN or Fox News cover any matter Canadian, you know how completely idiotic and laughable their messed up ideas are. Are we sure their more local reporting is any purer?

There is a complete lack of usefulness with regards to learning from the news event so as to garner wisdom or to service endeavors toward prevention of bad events from happening again.

The most obvious intelligent questions which should arise from a given report are so often absent without explanation or apology.

The journalism process leaves itself prone to inadvertent reporting of lies. Worse is the creation of its own deliberate lies as Fox News has been caught doing and without the slightest repercussion for reporting complete fiction. They were literally taken to court where the judge ruled that news agencies are not legally required to tell the truth. In short, just because something is in the news does not mean it is true.

The media is corrupt in that it quietly tows the line of the ruling power while reporting inconsequential items to the contrary in order to come off as government watchdogs and earn undeserved trust. The ruling media are corporations prone to the same pervasive corruption uniformly plaguing all the ruling structures of our society and is as much to blame as any of them for keeping this mindless economic machine grinding away; this system of economic and mental slavery in drag as freedom.

Note that much of that corruption is evident in what newspapers choose NOT to report. But this is invisible to people who trust main stream news as their only source. There are more independent; more trustworthy sources on the Internet.

The media limits its capacity for enlightenment to that of the average jerk. It asks few if any questions from a global context and accesses no perspectives outside the lame social prejudices of the day. It knows its average purchaser is basically dull, if not outright stupid, and lives in that realm, encouraging potentially intelligent people not to bother thinking critically.

The main reason I no longer have any interest in so-called news is because what we call news is rarely, if ever, new. Event after event, it's just the same principal manifestations of human instinct that have been happening over and over and over again since humans first evolved into the world-plundering sweethearts we are.

Using media to learn the scant particulars of these latest manifestations accomplishes what? Mostly, I see that it helps us service our tribal instincts which is very detrimental to the evolution of consciousness that we, as a race, desperately require. Why do I say this? Because people read the news and immediately blame the badness in the world on the perpetrators of the day and feel all happy with themselves for being a good guy. And this, to me is complete crap.

I don't see the average newspaper reader as being any better than the average criminal. The average newspaper reader is committing harmful acts against the world and its inhabitants daily but most of those are socially approved and overlooked. The blame for these detrimental acts lies with the very same illusions of consciousness and the very same domination instincts which cause so-called criminals to commit so-called (non-society-approved) criminal offenses. The only difference I see between we and the villains-du-jour is circumstantial. Cause and effect have put them in a more dire cocktail of situations than we.

If you deny this by saying, "Hey, no way! If I was in that circumstance I would not have committed that act!" it is only because you do not grasp the all-pervasive and staggeringly incremental natures of cause and effect; a common and crippling human condition caused largely, I assume, by our completely false feeling that actions stem from conscious choices.

Here's my actual point: Reading the news, for most people, does not make them responsible. The key learning available from troubling news events can really only occur by looking at the behavior of the humans in front of our own face and by looking inward at our own personal susceptibilities to evil. Newspapers do nothing to encourage this. I personally work at this daily and I don't need arbitrary newspaper stories to make this happen. I already know what the human being is capable of. I know with fine clarity the whole morbid roster of it and I know there is no usefulness in blaming nations or individuals. The blame is right here in our DNA; yours and mine. We all need to evolve.

Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.
- Georges Bernanos

Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true.
- William Blake

...You're watching television. You're watching the news. You're being pumped full of fear. There's floods. There's AIDS. There's murder. Cut to commercial. Buy the Acura. Buy the Colgate. If you have bad breath they're not going to talk to you. If you have pimples the girl's not going to fuck you. It's a campaign of fear and consumption and that's what I think it's all based on, is the whole idea: Keep everyone afraid and they'll consume.
- Marilyn Manson

I laugh for the newsprint nightmare; A world that never was, where the questions are all 'why', and the answers are all 'because'.
- Bruce Cockburn

Obi Wan, You're my only hope!

2012-02-06T07:58:00.004-05:00

I'm straddling residences for a couple weeks while Pan vacations leaving two psychotic Dobermanns in my care. Juggling core possessions gets tricky. Got separated from my coffee pot (oh and my toothpaste too. Don't get too close). Thus I stopped at the Evil Tim Horton's Empire on the way to my Sunday night security gig at the Big Empty Warehouse for to buy me some drive thru coffees.

I dodge an array of extraneous curbs and roll up to the Squawk Box.

Storm Trouperette: Welcome to Tim Hortons... [evil empire]... How may I help you?

Moi: Hi, I'd like a large coffee with double cream please, and another large coffee with double cream and two sweeteners please.

Storm Trouperette: Sorry, double cream in the second one as well?

Moi: Yes please and two sweetener.

Storm Trouperette: Anything else?

Moi: No thanks.

Storm Trouperette: That'll be three fifty-nine. Please have your money ready at the window!

Puzzled, I mosey forward to the window of doom, lowering my own drivers door window as I go. The window of doom slides open as I dig out my wallet.

Storm Trouperette: Three fifty-nine.

Moi, cheerfully and polite: You know, it's kind of hard to fiddle with money while driving a car at the same time.

I pull out a fiver and surrender it.

Storm Trouperette: Well, most people have their money ready before they get to the window!

Unsaid but implied was this: LOOK HERE, YOU LITTLE INSIGNIFICANT BITCH PEON CANADIAN! I WORK FOR TIM FUCKING HORTONS! I AM THE AUTHORITY HERE! YOU WILL HAVE YOUR FUCKING MONEY READY WHEN I TELL YOU TO OR I WILL PERSONALLY CALL LORD VADER AT OUR NEW YORK OFFICE AND HE WILL ASPHYXIATE YOUR SORRY ASS WITHOUT EVEN LEAVING HIS DESK! AND THEN HE'LL BLOW THE PLANET OF YOUR CHOICE TO SMITHER-FUCKING-REENS!

[Editor's Note: She didn't say any of that.]

I know! But it was implied! It was in her eyes! Her dull
soulless Imperial eyes!

[Editor's Note: Whatever.]

So what am I supposed to do? I don't order the same thing at Tim Hortons regularly. I don't have their prices memorized and I'm not a human calculator. I usually pay with coins which must be wrestled from my front pocket.

I don't want to get Tatoonie all blowed up. Am I supposed to order and then remain at the squawk box getting my coins together while the driver behind me pulls his hair out or do I fish my money out while coasting forward and probably driving into the car in front of me or veering into a wall?

Or should I make the window lady wait for five to ten seconds while I put my coins together with the auto safely in park and risk having her dine on my cranium as punishment for making her wait?

I'm at a loss. What is the appropriate pop culture/matrix thing to do? Please help.

"Hurry up! Where's your money!"

FWG's first and last motivational poster

2012-01-25T09:34:00.001-05:00

Insert word here --->

2012-01-23T12:02:00.002-05:00

Why is there no word that means "special person in your life"? We have friends, family, loved ones and close associates. Why is there no word that lumps these together? There is surely good use for such a word. There are so many special people in my life. I want a way to refer to this group of people without having to laboriously break it down to explain it.

I want a word that means, "one of whom I am fond" or "one whom I cherish". Is there a word? Am I forgetting about it?

loved one (too intimate)
peer
friend
contact
associate (this is close but far too formal)
connection
ally
accomplice

None of these words will do. Think you know the word I'm looking for? I'll pay top dollar for the right word.
.

The most important meal of the day

2012-01-22T12:40:00.001-05:00

"YOU ARE CAPABLE OF VERY HARD WORK AND DEDICATION."

Huh? Who, me?

I guess when you eat a pile of fortune cookies for breakfast you get jokes instead of fortunes. Who knew?

Illusion - part one

2012-01-19T08:08:00.004-05:00

Well. Here we go. I did warn that the topic of illusion would be a doozy. I don't know if this exercise will ultimately be useful to anyone but people who hear me talk about our lives of illusion or the matrix of illusion, sometimes ask what I mean by illusion and so... they deserve an answer.

All of the following understandings shall be either first-hand observations or else careful logical extrapolations from them, and they are consolidated, to some degree or another, by the subsequent testimony of many poets and scientists according to my own interpretation of their words.

Illusion... It is not a mirage. It is something that exists but not in the form that we view or interpret it. When a society is built on heaps and heaps of nested illusions, then that society is no more than an illusion in its sum. That is where we are and I will attempt to tell you why. But it will be very difficult to do so because there are so many unfamiliar understandings built on multiple components themselves unfamiliar understandings. There is no way to explain such an entire pyramidal structure either fully or in a convenient linear method within a single article.

"God made man in his own image." These may very well be the most tragically harmful seven words ever spoken. They may be the most significant reason why the human race - as we know it - is almost certainly driving itself out of existence while there might never be another race like us again in the remaining life of the universe. Why? because that divine idea supports our deeply misguided intuitions and distracts us from the truth about what we really are. And what we really are is not built to last. We must rebuild ourselves or perish.

I personally know only a minority of practicing religious people and many of those I do, tend either to confide in me that they do it for the social aspect, to please someone else, or else they do it, very nobly, for its charitable opportunities. Granted this is particular to my personal circle of associates. I make no claims with regards to societal norms on this matter. But yet, we are almost all of us still living and thinking in the Christian tradition whether we attend church or not. To what degree it is your parents or grandparents who attended church and propagated this mode of thinking which you have inherited, versus the education system versus cultural habit - no matter. We all go around behaving as if we are mini-me gods; as if we are ultimately sentient; as if our lives are the products of our thought-out choices. This is illusion. While choice and consequence is one legitimate perspective of how our lives are arranged, choice itself is not what we think it is. Choices are made by the overwhelming dominant part of your brain; the instinctive side; the dark side; the side that is not accessible to your comparatively pitiful conscious awareness.

Who are we? Who am I? Who are you? We are only consciousnesses and no more. The feeling of "self" that we hold onto is not directly connected to our human body. It is a dead-end off-chute from the brain. We are only stow-aways on ships waving to each other through portholes and thinking that we are the captains of the ships and that the ships are going where we tell them to. As counter intuitive as it seems, I know this is so. I experience it every day because I once had the courage to dare to contemplate it and I started paying much more attention to myself until I came to know.

Will each of us, if he turns his head, see behind him his shadow, his double, the beast that resembles him, silently watching him?
- Georges Bernanos (1888-1948)

And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
- Luke 23:33-34

Consciously we rationalize our instinctive choices and we believe the illusion that we consciously made those choices and further, that we made them for honorable reasons and not selfish ones. Some scientists interpret that they have proven this to be true. A human being is not very different from a robot who mistakenly thinks it is alive. We are only consciousness and consciousness is little more than a witness; not a decision-maker.

We're talking about the core illusion; the illusion of consciousness which perhaps spawns all other illusions though I haven't fully consolidated that.

Can our consciousness (you and I) at least inform our instinctive mind and thus help influence choices? It certainly appears so. It appears that my instinctive mind makes more and more conscious-friendly, harmonic, evolutionary, non-survival-instinct choices now, as a result of an apparently strengthened consciousness - i.e.: one that has gained more influence over the dark side of the mind apparently due simply to the practice of regular contemplation of this and related explorations and the resulting enlightenment, something I've had the rare luxury to pursue given the absence of dedication to children, marriage, career and reputation-building; the cornerstones of our society.

The church says that we are captains of our ship and we are naturally good; xeroxes of God, but we are tempted by the devil. The devil is the source of evil. We must resist this temptation or you won't experience the paradise of post-mortal heaven.

I suspect we must give up on this ass-backwards notion of reality or we are truly screwed. The Christian religion is chock full of perfect beautiful metaphors for the critical conditions of the human society of mind and full of poetic wisdom but if we take it literally we will not learn reality (become enlightened); we will only be goaded into playing along as if we had learned. The Christian religion, as it is preached today, does not lead us to evolve into a creature of harmony, something otherwise very possible. It only bribes us to fake it.

The paradise is here and now! The miracles of our existence are truly euphoric, truly sensational. Earth is heaven. But we are held apart from these realities by illusions. I know this from valid experience. I pull back those curtains of illusion all the time; every day and the uncloaked world of mankind is truly wondrous and awe-inspiring and wildly joyful. I promise you. I can not lie about this. I will attempt to bring together the explanations for this in a subsequent article.

The "Devil" or "evil" is nothing more than life itself. It is the dominant mind. It is "survival instinct" which is a very unfortunate label. "Domination instinct" makes much more sense. This primitive urge that we call evil is perfectly normal and inevitable. It is simply the will to live the only way we could possibly know how.

The petunia is altogether fully evil. The magnolia tree is altogether perfectly evil. The rascally bunny rabbit is entirely - from twitchy nose to cotton ball tail - 100% evil. Evil is fine. It doesn't come equipped with horns and forked tails and pitchforks, so let's not freak out about it. But yes, it keeps us from the paradise; the paradise of joyful empathy and true happiness, peace and freedom. Freedom from loneliness, grief, sadness, shame, guilt, anger, frustration, jealousy and twenty more standard human mental illnesses which we think are necessary to human existence but are not; which go untreated by the psychology community because the psychology community still has a hell of a lot to learn. Psychologists are great at sorting out observations and labelling them. They are the closest thing we have to experts at navigating the great web of illusions. The poet doesn't need to navigate this web. The poet sees through the illusions and the way is clear.

Survival instinct, domination instinct, evil. Perfect selfishness. It's all the same thing and it is the basis for life. It is the kind of life that evolved on this planet because what other kind was possible? Who can guess? Life needed diversity. A uniform solitary species would obviously have eaten itself into immediate extinction. Life of diversity means competition, survival of the (many) fittest; inevitable eventual balance of diverse life revolving, eating each other. How else is this possible without that primitive domination instinct present in all surviving species; the sub-DNA code that orders "This species must survive at any cost"? Again, who can guess?

Evil, or domination instinct, is normal but the human alone is the first species with the opportunity to evolve beyond it! We've already begun. And the beauty is that this kind of evolution can be intentionally manifested in no time at all! It requires no generational reproductive stages. This is the stunning reality of our existence. This is what all of our lives are about while we go around pretending that miniature castles and cars and personal electronic devices are what our lives are all about.

While we're sitting around thinking that the Jets beating the Patriots is some kind of high drama we're looking incredibly silly. The human being is either going to evolve beyond the domination instinct just in time to save itself or else its domination mission will continue to drive it to becoming the singular dominant species that will eat itself (or eat the earth). This is the only real drama on planet earth while we're all distracted being drama queens, inventing false dramas. Is the miraculous human flower about to wither or will it bloom all over a previously dead universe? Those are the only two possibilities. There is nothing in between. Earth is a dying planet whether we collapse the biosphere soon or the dying sun does it later. This is the real drama and we are participating in that drama every day though outwardly, we seem not to have a clue.

Man has no greater enemy than himself.
- Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374)

There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Somewhere a man must rise And slumber no more. For sunset nears And to the darkness there is no end.
- attribution unknown

I can't see how obeying Jesus can get you to heaven, in my experience. I have learned one way to get to the paradise and every human on earth can call me a liar should it comfort you to do so (almost assuredly it would) and it will still be true. In my experience it is understanding; it is intelligence; true intelligence, not rationalization, that breaches illusions and avails the paradise. Experiencing the paradise makes you more like the Jesus. It has the potential to make us all evolve into Jesuses. I have every confidence in that. But the overwhelming matrix of illusions is standing in the way. Is my way the only way to arrive at the paradise? Probably not. In fact I hope not.

This all must not seem very convincing. Every paragraph I've written demands explanation and I have the explanations but they are exponentially tangential. I suppose that readers will have the choice to have some trust and absorb a more whole story over multiple articles or else they will not. Either way, I am doing my duty.

Illusion... Have I digressed?

I have to tell you, I'm having second thoughts about this. It is not my mandate to run around slapping everyone in the face. It is my mandate to be gentle, to nudge and not sensationalize but I don't see a gentle way to do this which I have promised to do.

Illusion: Communication

I called us stow-aways waving to each other through portholes. Surely we communicate better than that, right? Not really. Our consciousness thinks it knows what ideas we wish to convey. We open our mouths and then we believe we've communicated the ideas. Big problem with that. Our ideas go through a translation process and get turned into words. The words absorbed by the audience are translated back into ideas. Things go wildly astray through a dual translation process. Add the spin that the dark mind plays against the consciousness. Add the spins we deliberately play against each other, both consciously and non-consciously. Add the wiggle room built into the English language. Almost every word has multiple meanings. Add the problem that we share high-level ideas trusting the assumption that the listener shares the same dogmatic structures which the shared idea evolves from, when in reality we all have different (and variously flawed) dogma. Add the problem that so many listeners spend half of their listening moments not listening but planning what they're going to say next. When you talk to someone you think you know what you told them but you never know what they heard.

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.
- Georges Bernanos

Illusion: Context

If you are reading this, it means that you have the Internet and you speak English. Right there I know that you are almost certainly part of the blindly privileged class. You think you don't have enough money. But I know damn well you have too much. Twenty per cent of the world's population have eighty per cent of the wealth. There is no real excuse for this. Only greed. Two per cent of the population have fifty per cent of the wealth. These are the elites. There is no excuse for that either. The fairness of competition each class imagines only seems real within a confined self-serving context. From a global context our excuses fall apart.

I asked the young readers group to comment on the theme of have/have-not in the novel The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch. They thought the theme was relevant to their lives as they - every one of them - saw themselves in a have-not circumstance. You probably do too. Because you are likely absorbed in your own culture. From that standpoint you glimpse the elite and feel poor in comparison. And if you forget to fast forward through the C.A.R.E. commercial then your glimpse of impoverished Africans is just some weird aberration. They just need to get their shit together. But you are in the 18% of the population who holds 30% of the wealth. You are likely near twice as rich as you deserve and are working less hard for this privilege than 80% of the population works just to survive. Life on planet Earth has not essentially changed. Mammals must spend the vast majority of their energy attempting to feed and protect themselves which most humans still do. It's reality. You and I are the aberration and there's nothing nice about it.

Our society of constant recreation is an economic illusion. It can not last. The global marketplace is another system of slavery. The "Canadian" government spends money on international aid while dullards drag their feeble minds away from the Cosby Show or whatever it is these days long enough to complain that they ought to spend this money "at home". This isn't aid money. It's an investment. They spend a dollar to help keep a market afloat so that we can rape it for two dollars later. It is a matter of excellent comedy the degree that closet racists everywhere have poor countries and immigrants to thank for their wealth and have not a clue of this circumstance. We are the oil society. We have the magic elixir: We harnessed liquid super-condensed sunshine, which we have no right to possess, to do our work for us and leverage our standing in the global marketplace. You and I are oil barons at the expense of the biosphere. There is no legitimate avoidance of this ugly reality yet we all do it. We do it by ignoring the greater context. This is just one example of how we never come close to understanding truths without the rare occasion of first seeking the greatest context.

[We must not] prescribe curricula or pedagogic practices that require or strongly invite students to become skeptical or critical of their way of life.
- William Galston, political theorist and advisor to Bill Clinton and other political leaders, unknowingly recorded.

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Illusion: Livelihood

The reality is that we need a roof, clothes and food to survive. As long as this current western civilization fantasy persists these necessities can be taken for granted. But the domination instinct knows no sense of moderation or redundancy and we are ever pushed to fight to "survive". We are forced to play a constant redundant survival charade. The manifestations of this in a massively "social" environment have centered this constant survival game on reputation. Everything is reputation. You reveal this to me in everything you say to me. It is a massive preoccupation; your domination instinct at work. You have some dark suspicion of yourself, I know; with regards to what degree you spin and posture and position yourself and manipulate other's perception of you but I assure you, it's a drop in the bucket. It is not survival-domination-friendly for our instinctive mind to reveal to our consciousness just how phony we really are.

The world is governed more by appearances than by realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

You are only what you are when no one is looking
- Robert C. Edwards
.
.
Our society is utterly revolved around reputation. It's everything. Money is just a ledger of reputation. Here's the cash. Here's me showing that I am reputed to be deserving of this luxury you peddle. Houses, cars, careers and vacation paradises are wildly overblown. We chase these things, convinced by our instincts that they are the keys to happiness but the happiness does not come. Instead we get temporary feelings that say "I guess I must be happy. I'm doing what I'm supposed to." No matter how much you have, you "need" more.

The richest person I personally know well, happens to be the most stressed-out neurotic person I know, full of secrets and fears and convoluted circumstances. He's constantly trying to manage perception and cover things up. The poorest person I personally know well, happens to be the most genuinely happy and well-adjusted person I know. My friend who volunteers in Haiti knows the poorest kids in the world. He is blown away by how constantly happy they are. Well of course they're happy. They are alive, they are human, they love and are loved and they have no possessions to covet. They are relatively free of charade and social illness, free to appreciate the best things in life. Yes, I know that serious poverty is no picnic especially in terms of health care and nutrition. I don't mean to celebrate extreme poverty.

I think all the people I know would, if cornered, say that the best things in life are free. They would all say that money can't buy happiness, but actions speak louder than words, and how many of them behave as if they truly believe any of it? I would say three. Less than a single per cent of people I've known. And I'm a fortunate one. Most people probably know zero. Instinct won't let most people believe all that. Instead they will rationalize their greed.

Run, run rabbit run, Dig that hole, forget the sun, And when at last the work is done, Don't sit down it's time to dig another one.
- Pink Floyd (1973)

We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t care about.
- Tim Jackson (Economist)

The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contemptible.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Freedom tastes of reality
- Pete Townshend (1969)

Illusion: Nations

We have a fundamental problem in that we treat nouns as if they're all created equal. But some nouns represent realities while others only represent ideas. Are nations real? Most certainly not. Nations are nothing but complicated sets of ideas. They only appear real because so many of us agree to pretend that they are real. I don't. I am not "Canadian" whatsoever. That is someone's dull idea of me; not mine. I am entirely unique in the universe and so are you. Ideas can be useful or not useful. As a man who looks at everything in terms of its capacity for harmony, I see that nations are a system of ideas where the great majority of those ideas are either fictional, opposed to harmony or both. Nations are grotesque to me. Nationalism strikes me as vulgar, ugly and stupid. It makes me queasy to stand up for "Oh Canada" just to keep others in my proximity comfortable. Nations exist to keep the fear-mongering rich and powerful rich and powerful. Slavery is alive and well but there is no need for shackles or swords. It is now slavery of the mind.

But we are a democracy. This is government by the people, right? I'm not convinced. The convoluted riding system serves to dissolve non-conformist votes making it almost impossible for new movements to gain momentum. Our illusion-of-democracy system is designed to keep the same circle of elites in perpetual rotating power. Only politicians with a whole lot of money and the stomache to deal in high-stakes nepotism have any chance of success in our system. This is government by the rich. We look at the elite parties and assume the differences between them are meaningful. It doesn't take much legitimate contemplation to realize that in the global realm of possibility (the larger context), our monopolizing political parties are virtually identical. Communism also touts itself government by the people and is just as corrupt in its practical manifestations.

In general the powerful and influential in our society shape the laws and have a great influence on the legislature and on the congress and this creates a reluctance to change because the powerful and influential have carved out for themselves, or have inherited, a privileged position in society.
- Jimmy Carter (Law Day, University of Georgia, 1974)

Let the world retain in memory: Mighty tongues tell mighty lies.
- Bruce Cockburn (1971)

The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

So is anyone still reading this? I think it may be past time for a break. Let's continue this a bit later, shall we?

There are many reasons (mostly your instincts and the limits of linear communication) why you will be resistant to accepting much of this testimony and why you will cherry-pick apparent evidence against my claims from less-than-global perspectives and that is fine. I never ask people to believe me anyway. That would go against poetic principles. Belief is not sane. It is soft thinking. Same with that other deplorable idea; faith. They are crutches. Belief and faith are the only things truly pretensious. Testimony is testimony and a healthy person will proceed with life dealing with the uncertaintly of testimony still unproven to him. Pretending that factoids are known to be true when they are not yet known, is reckless and harmful. My hope is that my testimony will be considered and that on the occasions it becomes applicable, you might explore it and test it in a courageous manner in the virtual labratory of your own living experience.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth is what stands the test of experience.
- Albert Einstein

Please don't think I present these ideas from the perspective (or delusion) of being angelic, saintly or superior. I am certainly none of the above. Cause and effect provided certain accesses to me. It is my duty to pass them on. Meanwhile I have my own dark demons to fight.

More on the subject of illusions soon...

Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not.
- Elias Root Beadle

We are at liberty to be real or to be unreal. We may be true or false. The choice is ours. We may wear now one mask, and now another and never, should we desire appear with our own true face. But we can not make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects. And if we lie to ourselves and to others then we can not expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them.
- Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

The magic of false alarms

2012-01-07T13:00:00.002-05:00

I rarely choose comedies when going to the movies or renting/borrowing DVD's. They usually are not useful stories except for the chance to laugh, while I find you can get more laugh-out-loud moments just by hooking up with friends for 90 minutes and shooting the bull.

Those comedy films I do love: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Bird Cage, Road to Wellsville, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, they are infinitely re-watchable because they do not laboriously build toward cheap punchlines; the Hollywood standard. Instead, they are genuinely funny because they are off-beat throughout. They are stylishly funny.

And I think I finally know why this is. My own first attempts at written humour, in the form of short stories, failed, I must presume. They were read by friends and no one offered any feedback which itself, is valuable feedback! But the novel I just completed; I suspect it will succeed because I think I stumbled quite innocently upon the secret. I did not set up any punchlines. I necessitated comedy because I set up characters and environments that would necessarily react chaotically when they mixed. All I had to do then, was write with enough integrity to allow the characters' own voices to emerge freely.

I didn't build any jokes, you see. I built a humour-machine and sat back and watched the jokes manufacture themselves.

Several years back, I went on the Youtube web site for my very first time, with no particular agenda in mind and clicked on a random video which featured three teenagers; two girls and a boy, hamming it up with some ridiculous skit. It was under-produced. The acting was sloppy and more than half improvised. Costumes and lighting were each given little-to-no consideration. The budget must have been under five dollars and the duration under five minutes. And yet I laughed more at that than I have at any multi-million dollar Jim Carey movie before or since. What the hell was going on here? These kids seemed to totally understand the essence of humorous storytelling! They weren't even setting up punchlines. They were adapting humorous styles. They were, I now realize, building humour-machines.

Over time I watched a great many of their skits, each having attracted a couple hundred hits. So they weren't Internet stars by any means but they'd certainly gathered a following. Myself not grasping yet, the unwritten rules around adult-child Internet interaction, I naively began commenting and messaging them about the theories of humour, and praising them for their fine work. They certainly gave the impression that they all appreciated our exchanges and found them motivating and useful. I was intrigued they'd never engaged in humour theories or training of any kind. They just had brilliant instincts. I've since discovered that this is not so unusual. It seems many kids have brilliant humorous instincts which generally appear to dissolve as they age and, I suppose, become inhibited by societal calculation and reputation-guarding.

The Youtube "channel" was called JKL Productions; each letter the first initial for each of its members. The boy eventually left the group and became a solo Youtube hit by running full time with one of his JKL-born characters, the chipmunk-voiced "Fred." I have not followed him in this endeavor. He has much support now, globally. I prefer to give my support to little-known creators, be they in comedy, music or what not. I'll decline to go on too much a tangent here today but some day in this space I will explain the great harm in our global habit of fame-worship while we go out of our way to ignore our local creators. The phenomenon is linked, in the poetic view, with all of mankind's problems from murder to global warming but later for that.

What is more pleasant than laughter? I find it is a fundamental joy, like music; a fundamentally good and useful thing. I would say that humour has a legitimate place in all human endeavors although with different guidelines in terms of tactfulness for different situations.

I once shared a harmless chuckle with a dear friend while at his mother's funeral. My friend was later venomously chastised by his sister for it. Must funerals have a strict no-humour policy? I don't see why.

With the reading/writing groups I run at the Princess of Schools, there are rules. There are consequences should a student choose to be disruptive and derail a group endeavor. But the rule has a loophole. Where the interruption is humorous enough to make me laugh, there is no "consequence." Even school has a place for humour. We talk about the use of humour in novels and have yet to find a novel, no matter how serious, we believe to have no room for humour.

The first time I ever coined a phrase and liked it enough to record it as a quotation of my own origin, it was this:

Of all the wonders in the known universe, it is music and laughter that most enchant. And they are human creations.

It was in essence a crack against god and religion but it was naively flawed.

Recently I came upon this quote by the very wise Friedrich Nietzsche of the later nineteenth century:

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Oops. How dull were each of us at those moments when we thought of laughter as a human creation or human invention? Obviously no man ever sat down and drafted a blueprint for his eureka idea of a thing called laughter. It is clearly an instinctive thing and yet, in terms of evolution, how could that make sense?

Easy apparently. And I tip my hat to the science community who appear to have totally beat the poets to the punch on this one: The testimony I absorbed in longer form than that with which I will now summarize it, struck me as quite useful. Apparently the roots of human-style laughter are believed to be quite present in other mammals! It is a type of communication, it's audible nature varying by species, which basically means "false alarm." It is widely accepted that animals have an "alarm" communication device; a sound which that particular species will make when an individual spots a possible sign of danger; evidence of a nearby predator. It is instinctive that this message is contagious. This way the message spreads rapidly through the community.

The laughter theory keys upon the exact same phenomenon for a subsequent "false alarm" message. A chimpanzee discovers that the apparent tiger was only a trick of the eye; grasses moving in the wind. He ceases the alarm message and "laughs" instead. The contagious laughter message then spreads through the community.

It makes an awful lot of sense to me. We've all observed the contagious nature of laughter. A man enters a room too late to hear the great joke but chuckles as he observes everyone else splitting a gut. And what is human humour if not false alarms? Jokes contain apparently serious matter which inevitably dissolve into nothing.

Interesting stuff.

Nope. Not delusional.

2012-01-04T07:28:00.001-05:00

Tranportation update

2012-01-04T07:11:00.001-05:00

I've now learned to take an umbrella with me for my bus stop hikes in the rain, clever adaptable bastard that I am. That didn't stop me from getting a pair of moderate soakers the other night, however, and spending twelve hours at work with wet feet.

The next night was colder and featured nice dry ice everywhere. People in Dundas show little interest in clearing their ice despite that old public information campaign where Brit cartoonist Ben Wicks chants, "Be nice! Clear your ice!". The problem with that, of course, is that no one is looking for ways to become nice. Everyone thinks they're already nice because their instincts force them to believe it. Everyone thinks that their own particular little detours from the rules and laws and ethics of our society are precisely the sum of perfectly acceptable ones. Instinct at work again. And motorists don't think about the dangers of their sidewalk because they don't use sidewalks and anyone who's not like them can't really matter, can they?

Well I can tell you: those sidewalks are dangerous. I basically had to walk for a kilometer and a half down the centre of the road in order not to fall on my ass, while hoping to not get run over.

Public Transportation 2
Doomsday 5

New Years eve the bus was free. Cool! I presume this is the municipal government's way of demonstrating its commitment to the battle against drunk drivers, terrorists, pedophiles and witches. Well. Mostly the drunk drivers, I guess.

Public Transportation 3
Doomsday 5

Wait a minute? Did Ben Wicks really do public service commercials, chanting, Be nice, clear your ice? I confess I may be delusional.

Seasons Greetings from the SHL

2011-12-30T14:22:00.004-05:00

This is what my friends and I at the Strat-o-Matic Hockey League were up to over the holidays. Neil, Dave and Phil are not featured in the video because they were busy with the filming, music recording and post-production.

Hooray for pills

2011-12-28T16:30:00.001-05:00

On my way to work, a man, younger than I, gets on the bus and sits nearby. He's huffing and puffing and soons starts to lay his hand on his chest.

"Does anyone have a cell phone?" he asks. "Can someone call me a cab? I think I need to get to the hospital."

"May I ask what's wrong?" I asked. I'm first-aid trained but I prefer not to say so. It doesn't make me Marcus Welby. No sense getting people's hopes up.

He muttered something about an operation he'd had recently, said he had to run for the bus and now he had terrible heartburn.

"Would Rolaids help, do you think?"

"Yeah. I'm sure it would."

I produced the roll I keep in my breast pocket, suggested he take two and hang on to a third just in case.

Five minutes later he was feeling fine.

Public Transportation 2
Doomsday 4

2011-12-23T14:57:00.001-05:00

Busing into St. Catharines Wednesday the HSR is so hopelessly off schedule that I can not make the connections recommended by the web site route planner -- as usual. So I have to abandon the Hamilton buses and blow money I can't afford on a cab in order to get to the very special pole in the ground known as the Stoney Creek Go Station in time for the GO bus.

It's raining of course and it rains again the next day when I travel home from Welland:

Five different transit systems.
Six different buses.
Seven hours duration.
One soaked body.

The GO driver distracting himself the entire way with constant animated conversation with passengers at the front of the coach while barreling through rain and darkness with two dozen mortals on board and no seat belts: Priceless.

And the Niagara Region driver ducking out the front door for a cigarette while all his smoke blows directly into the bus and up my nose: Also priceless.

Public Transportation 1
Doomsday 4

Time is cruel

2011-12-18T19:27:00.001-05:00

The last time I was taking the city bus regularly was when I was in high school. Sometimes I sat at the front of the bus where, on occasion, I would stand up and offer my seat to an old person.

Last night I got on the city bus. A kid stood up and offered me his seat.

Time...

Is...

Cruel.

But score one for buses.

Public transportation 1
Doomsday 2

I took the seat by the way.

To buy or not to buy

2011-12-17T12:42:00.008-05:00

I was very confident that my trooper of an old truck would be my last vehicle; that I would keep it repaired and running until I succeeded in organizing my life in such a way that I did not require a vehicle for the purpose of employment and other regular commutes.

But I found myself in the rare situation where the vehicle remained operable right up until a moment where the list of upcoming repairs gathered a price tag far in excess of the value of the vehicle.

It was a no-brainer to sell it to a parts outfit for a few hundred bucks. No question about it. And what a relief not to find one's self in the all-to-common circumstance of over-repairing an old car just to discover too late that it should have been scrapped.

The problem is that I am not quite ready for post-vehicle life. And there are honestly only two barriers.

One. I promised the Liberal Theologian that when I moved my belongings into her fine home that I would provide some transportation to her as part of the deal. She has some pain and mobility issues and gave up driving. Based on her comments I'm confident that she would let me off the hook were I to ask. It would not please me though, to break a commitment. Ah? But what about my commitment to the environment? Good point.

If I still need a car for a while, I might at least vow to make it a more ecologically responsible choice than the previous beast. And I might vow to do my errands on foot when the weather is kind and vow to take the bus to work at least when conditions are favorable.

And the other barrier is the volunteer work at the Princess of Schools. Every summer I feel fond of, and committed to, the returning grade seven-come-eights. It's hard to imagine giving it up, and the commute from Dundas to Wellend by bus is strictly implausible. I will buy a car I think, basically because, as Pere Athol Murray says, to close my favorite Canadian film; The Hounds of Notre Dame: "I love those little muckers."

My latest music "video": Working Town

2011-12-17T12:12:00.001-05:00

Public transportation

2011-12-15T22:26:00.002-05:00

Saturday

I'm coasting along rather slowly in the Truck of Prominent Yellowness when the light ahead turns red. Naturally I step on the break pedal and naturally I expect this action to have some effect on the vehicle. The pedal thudding against the floor without resistance was not the effect I'd been hoping for.

I had a barrier on the left, cars on the right and one old grey car with lone driver ahead of me, stopped at the light. He and I were about to get to know each other real well.

I pounded the horn a few times. He saw me coming and had the idea I wasn't going to be stopping however their were cars crossing his path and he had no escape route either. The inevitable collision left his bumper dented and left my spoiler and fog lamps discombobulated. Add to that the absence of brakes, the need for new tires, the pending repair to the front suspension, the warning signs of transmission troubles, the engine's new habit of stalling during turns, the gratuitously peeling clear-coat layer, accumulation of rust and the non-functioning speedometer and odometer on a twelve-year-old vehicle and the choice was clear. I called, not for a tow, but for a wrecker to come and get it.

You did well, banana barge. So long and goodbye.

Sunday

I throw on a backpack and hit the streets of Dundas. I walk to the Winchester Arms for a cheap breakfast and watch the Jets demolish their dysfunctional opponent until half-time when it has become unbearable to watch.

I do some banking, then hit the library where I gather my holds and read a few chapters before the long hike home.

At this time I feel great. I'm getting valuable exercise. My feet are green transportation. That's important to me. I've been promising myself for years now that this truck would be my last vehicle for the purpose of regular commuting. Though a vehicle for the purpose of nomadic migration; the hunt for further poetic exploration and charitable opportunity, has always been forecasted with a sense of legitimacy. Though I'm not ready for that yet.

I can not overstate how joyful I felt on Sunday. A very significant measure of guilt had been lifted. The knowledge that I must cease this contribution to the grand pollution game goes back to the time when I still saw global warming as an interesting natural phenomena, less dire than our problems with cancer and asthma for instance. Unfortunately, honest observation over the last few years has left me with little doubt that our natural domination instincts in the hands of blindly mega-selfish North Americans have brought this still infantile human race to the premature brink of catastrophic and irreversible environmental and societal meltdowns.

I know this sounds bleak but there is a certainty that arises from successful poetic exploration: One does not need to save the world to find joy. Saving the world is a great idea but one needs only to accept the inevitable while excusing one's self from the process to garner a significant portion of joyful freedom. People who truly understand Buddhism will understand what I'm saying.

Tuesday

I spend an hour online planning my travel arrangements. Two Hamilton buses, one GO bus and one St. Catharines bus will get me where I'm going. The total cost is comparable to the cost of gas were I to drive, or half the price if I calculate depreciation etcetera.

Unfortunately the hour was misspent. The planning went for nought. The Hamilton buses prove to be ludicrously behind schedule. I have to sprint across an intersection to make my first connection and the GO bus connection is hopeless. I wait for an hour and a half for the next Niagara GO bus at the so called Stoney Creek station which consists of a pole in the ground. By the time the next bus arrives I am uncomfortably cold, choking on exhaust from all the idling trucks that frequent this intersection, and suffering severe back pain. There is not even a single bench on which to sit down here.

I'm severely dehydrated by the eventual end of the trip as there are bathrooms on none of the buses so I dared not drink anything. My first significant public transportation experience of the era of environmental quasi-awareness ranks somewhere between Harmful and Disastrous. The score:

Public transportation 0
Doomsday 1

Wednesday

There is little legitimacy in the idea of "faith in the human race" anymore, but my admiration for the human race is restored as I embark on my charitable endeavors while the people around me treat me also with kind charity. I score meals, rides and a fine bed for two nights from excellent friends. One fine secretary at the Princess of Schools even arranges for delivery of her medication from home so to lend me an important pill of the ilk I have forgotten at my own home far away.

Thursday

Another hour online planning my voyage home. The first bus passes through the intersection as I am still approaching. I manage to draw the driver's attention but he goes on by. As I settle in for a thirty minute wait for the next bus, the clouds open up and I am drenched and cold in no time and again there is no bench of course.

On the Hamilton side I wander and squander for about forever looking for the mysterious route 5 bus, coincidentally the 5th of this trip. Who knew that on the bus itself they label it "52" instead of 5? Not the HSR online trip planner apparently.

What would amount to 90 minutes in car rides has taken the better of two full days and left me exhausted. How is one to feel motivated to choose green when our governments do so painfully little to make the choice palatable?

Public transportation 0
Doomsday 2

I'm not feeling good about our chances, humans.

RSA Animate - The Empathic Civilisation

2011-12-11T00:08:00.003-05:00

Though, to my lasting regret, the excellent Skeeter Willis declines to leave much writing here, he has at least sent us this little jewel. There is much I would applaud here and much I would be skeptical about. I am inclined perhaps to break this down into areas and comment on them in separate posts. We'll see about that. In the mean time I would suggest that this is some good testimony as far as getting us thinking about some very critical subjects.

More later.

A Fondness for the Pondness

2011-12-10T22:46:00.004-05:00

From age 7 to 17 I was a regular player with three separate surrounding street-hockey neighbourhoods and on the rare evenings that all three were simultaneously dormant, I was out in front of my house with my net and targets, practicing with Gretzky-like dedication. Spending far more time at the game than anyone else, it’s no surprise that I developed into a street-hockey star. As a teenager I never met a more skilled player. Whichever side I played for almost always won. I remember being encouraging to other kids. “Nice shot” or “Nice pass,” I’d say, with a clap on the back.

My dominance did not translate to the ice though. I had no skating skills and what worked with a tennis ball did not work with a puck. Whenever we moved the game to a frozen pond I went from king of the hill to one of the players of least impact. The guys who looked up to me on the street were now the ones nurturing me on the ice. “Nice shot” or “Nice pass,” they’d say and clap me on the back!

Obviously I preferred to play on the street then, right?

No. While street hockey was a constant joy, pond hockey was utopia. On the street I’d collect a stack of goals every game. Business as usual. But on the ice, scoring one goal took hard work and good fortune and was cause for great celebration. There is no sense of accomplishment without a challenge.

My friends were better than I at ice hockey because in addition to our pond games they all played “organized” ice hockey in arenas with uniforms to declare who the good guys and bad guys were, and referees to blow the whistle and stop the play, and comfortable wooden benches to sit on during all the shifts they were missing. Because with organized hockey you have to share the puck with 29 other kids so you only play twelve on the ice at a time. With pond hockey you have maybe ten kids total. Everyone plays the whole game and everyone gets the puck a lot.

Organized hockey has stiff boards used for cycling systems and dump-and-chase systems and occasionally you hit the boards the wrong way and you get injured and everyone claps for you when you finally limp back to the bench.

Pond hockey has snow banks which don’t facilitate systems. They merely compose a frame, and what is framed on that icy canvas of imagination is an artwork of creativity; skating, deeking, passing and improvising. And when you get knocked into the snow bank, everyone laughs, you most of all, and no one gets hurt.

Organized hockey has helmets and cages that make it harder to see things.

Pond hockey has toques with pompoms. And if someone laughs at your pompom you knock him in the snow bank.

Organized hockey has a lot of rules to keep everyone safe and reasons to stop what you’re doing and go back to the face-off circle and start over.

Pond hockey has friends on both teams who don’t want to hurt each other.

Organized hockey has red and blue lines so the refs have even more reasons to blow the whistle and stop everything.

Pond hockey says, Really? What the hell is that all about?

Organized hockey costs more money than many families can begin to contemplate.

Pond hockey is free. Sometimes you need a dad to create the pond so you need to buy or scavenge a few boards and some water.

Organized hockey has parents who behave like incorrigible maniacs whose very lives seem to depend on you defeating the evil boys on the other team.

Pond hockey has Dave’s dad who sometimes comes out and plays a game or two, watches another one and then goes home happy.

Organized hockey has stressed out coaches telling you what to do, helping you develop skills or systems and either praising you or giving you shit.

Pond hockey has freedom.

Organized hockey labels you winners and losers. You either go home relieved not to be the loser, or else resigned to being the loser.

Pond hockey has games up to five and then you switch the teams. Everybody wins some and loses some and by the time you get home you don’t remember. And there is no press waiting for the results so they can inform your municipality or your school community whether they too should feel like winners or losers.

Organized hockey has parents giving up lives of their own to drive you to arenas; sometimes in other cities. Lots of cars. Lots of pollution to choke on.

Pond hockey has Scott getting too close to the stream to fetch an errant puck and plunging through the ice, knee-deep in water, and everyone else rolling on the ice, just about asphyxiating from uncontrollable laughter.

Pond hockey also has frozen toes, illegal stick dimensions and brothers playing with brothers despite their age difference. Pond hockey has thousands of kids who will not make the NHL and one kid who stays behind in the gloomy dusk after the others go home, practicing his skating and knowing he’s getting better and pretending, just for a moment that he is Guy Lafleur.

Organized hockey has thousands of kids who will not make the NHL and too many parents who don’t seem to know it.

As I was driving to Strat-o the other night; an enterprise of abject hockey lunacy which I can not possibly defend in this space, I was thinking about organized sports for kids and trying to come up with one good reason why we have them.

I’m still trying.

Homework

2011-12-07T01:42:00.005-05:00

In my "past life" I was like pretty much everyone. When a conversation arose and I believed myself to hold relevant information or experience concerning the subject, I would be eager to get my two cents in. It was a very normal ego thing.

These days it's interesting that I usually feel no compulsion to do that around most people. I normally expect that my perspectives are now so different from the norm that there is little point in trying to sell them to confirmed matrix-dwellers. I'm in the regular habit of remaining meek and quiet and letting people trust their feelings and their acquired misinformation and remain comfortably unchallenged. It's one of the very joyful and freeing manifestations of an ego that has been diminished by a strengthened consciousness.

Today though, at the Princess of Schools I decided to speak out to a teacher about my view of homework despite the likelihood that it would not be well received.

I told her that never would any theoretical child of mine be permitted to do homework. I explained that I couldn't imagine viewing a school system as my child's primary educator rather than myself, and that, as a secondary educator, it is ludicrous that a school system be privileged to dictate what my child will do on MY time!

And no, I'm not naively thinking that as a parent I would have all the free time in the world to spend every evening with my kids poring over a set of encyclopedias. Whether I was with my kid at any given time or not, I would approve of a tremendous number of useful activities that would be valuable to their intellectual, physical and/or emotional growth while being properly compatible with my own child's particular interests and talents and prefer him doing such activities rather than memorizing so-called-facts and formulas to be regurgitated at exams and then promptly forgotten.

Memories of my own school experiences are of limited relevance, yes, given the time lapse and the inherent dysfunction of human memory, however those memories are dismal enough in terms of what I now regard as an unenlightened misguided curriculum that I can not possibly today generate enough confidence in the Ontario Board of Education to surrender a young human being to their clutches for any more than the 6-hour-per-day sentence imposed by law. What's that? About 15,000 hours through to grade 12? That's somewhere in the neighborhood of a multiple murder conviction, isn't it?

I was surprised at the teacher's reaction. Her own kids, considered "good" kids and disciplined kids by any normal standards, habitually arrive home from school and promptly complete their homework without being asked. Despite that pleasant fact, she is not a fan of homework herself. In her view, as a teacher, homework is a way to give better grades to the students whose parents do their homework for them and punish those whose parents don't. Apparently the cheaters get away with it but without fooling anyone.

As a child and teenager myself, I almost never did my homework and almost never studied for exams. Thus in high school I scored terrible marks for projects and exams but still scored decent grades by acing quizzes and tests. I had all kinds of difficult issues growing up and I got through it all by playing sports, reading novels and engaging myself in a great host of imaginative pursuits. Had I given up a lot of those experiences by doing homework instead I have no doubt I'd have grown up a sadder, less intelligent, less enlightened human being and certainly more selfish and less caring; no doubt whatsoever. I also might have grown up less lazy. Oh well. Can't win 'em all.

Granted, all people are unique. My experience may not have been common.

I wonder what "normal" parents do? Do you question this whole idea of homework or do you just assume it is legitimate because you had to do it when you were a kid? I wonder what percentage of parents have gone to visit a school principal and said, "Sorry, dude. But six hours a day is all you get with my kid. I suggest you make the most of it."

I look at kids who are making their way to school carrying giant textbooks and binders in addition to their lunch, musical instrument, gym clothes and what-not and I imagine they're going to live to be 90 given the medical advancements of their generation but spend their last 60 years with broken backs.

Here's an idea for schools: Why don't you teach kids how to carry things without risking bodily harm?

Want another? How about you teach kids how to not let credit cards ruin their lives?

How about you teach them the realities of the global marketplace and how diabolically greedy our society is for mortgaging the earth out from under the feet of the majority of earth's peoples as well as our own doomed descendants?

How about you teach them the difference between truth (experience) and testimony (traditional schooling?)

How about you teach them the most significant of realities; the stunning miraculous rarities of this planet, life itself and the human imagination?

How about you teach them about the most absolutely vital two criteria for finding any truth in life whatsoever: The omnipresence and omnipotence of cause-and-effect and the absolute necessity of the universal perspective (context) in all legitimate thought?

How about you teach them how to think for themselves instead of what to think?

I got a hundred more ideas if you're interested.

And if you are in fact teaching them these things, than I apologize and applaud you. But if not, you're not qualified to be dishing out homework in any household of mine.*

This said, I hope that none of the teachers and principals I know personally will take offence should they read this. They're all thoughtful and caring people who do the best they can given a hell of a challenging task! I don't know how they even find time to sleep.

*The above writer does not actually possess any households. It's the thought that counts!

Poets versus scientists

2011-12-03T12:22:00.002-05:00

With people who I much respect for their courage and intelligence, I sometimes allow subject matter to slip into conversations which I would otherwise keep to myself for the reason that it is useless to introduce testimony which your audience (generally due to strong instincts and weak consciousnesses) will not possibly be open-minded to considering, except just to show off, which I must despise as I know how mortally hopeless it is to be enslaved by ego.

One of these "priveleged" topics is my observation that since the new millenium has arrived, scientists are starting to make discoveries which were already claimed by poets up to 1700 years ago which makes this a potentially epoch-changing time; a time of significant evolution of consciousnes but only if enough people would take notice of it that a succesful movement is generated. So far, there's me.

Some of my cherished associates have asked about this phenomena and deserve a decent answer. The following shall hopefully constitue a good start at the least:

Firstly: By poets I mean, as always, certain individuals, mostly long-dead who in general practiced multiple pursuits, commonly some combination from the pool of poetry, writing, journalism, philosophy, painting, teaching and politics. They are those in particular who have a healthy respect for the power and predominence of humans' "dark side"; that side of our minds which are not known to us consciously, and also for the illusions, flaws and illegitimacies in almost all "normal" thought. And they are those who adhere to strict discipline and integrity and a process of strict logic and reasoning.

Those integral poets I am so far aware of lived anywhere from 50 to 1700 years ago but for one who is still alive today as far as I know and who became my own mentor for a year until I could no longer overlook what I considered problematic flaws in his otherwise excellent work. In my opinion they would include Francesco Petrarch, Dante, St. Augustine, El Greco, Blake, William Cowper, Georges Bernanos and probably Nietzsche and Goethe and certainly Einstein even though he was primarily a theoretical physicist.

Are there more alive today? Almost certainly I predict, but I have so far been unable to discover who and where they are. As for myself, I will not be falsely humble. I consider my own work consistent with that which I've described though without a satisfactory tenacity at least until now. Inherent laziness is something which I currently battle and with significant optimism about the outcome given recent happenings in my life.

What was that? Einstein a poet? In essence, I say yes. In fact, in my view, the nature of the scientist and the true poet are almost precisely the same. They both are in the business of isolating pure truths and by very similar process; the difference in methods being only physical and logistical but having the same purposes and effects.

The fact that poets and scientists seem to have held each other in enmity for many generations; likely only an unfortunate product of ego, seems to have fooled a lot of people into thinking them opposites and left few people around these days who have a healthy respect and keen interest in both contemporary science and ancient poetry.

What have these poets been saying for more than a thousand years that scientists; for the most part neuroligists, are finally able to consolidate (or to discover in their own immodest view)? A full explanation would be impractical here in blog country. I am inclined to summarize:

- That human beings are not what they think they are.
- That human consciousness is largely, if not wholly, illusion. (Let's remember the core meaning of illusion. Not a 'mirage' but a thing seen that is truly there but not in the form which is believed to be seen.)
- That humans are almost entirely enslaved by a superpower.
- That human "feelings" are unworthy of trust; almost always misleading or wrong though we are not prone to discovering them so.
- That societal organizations (governmental, corporate etc.), the way we construct them, are unsustainable; doomed to corruption and failure.
- That almost all human thought and activity are in no way consistent with reality or truth.

Off the top of my head, I'd say those are the highlights.

As one who has explored these issues and many others - all from completely organic exploration and not from subscribing to anyone else's ideas, I can tell you with pristine honesty that the effects of such exploration are vastly life-changing; beyond what you are ready to believe, frankly.

And I can tell you that the problems which arise from just the short list of disguised realities above are profoundly relevant to every corner of human life and arouse extremely real concerns regarding the nature of human life and human society and the prospects for their continued existence in the forms that we know them.

I have explored a tremendous amount of undocumented material over the last six years or so and I adamantly intend to start revealing more of it on this blog with as much regularity, depth and organizational prudence as I can muster. I intend to let the questions of both personal associates and blog-readers help dictate future subject material as was the case above. Thus I should soon tackle a subject that has generated many questions lately; that of illusion. Boy, will that be a doozy...

The Office of Letters and Light

2011-12-01T00:43:00.002-05:00

First win in five years

2011-11-25T15:17:00.004-05:00

I made the 50k word count on the 24th of November with a rather staggering 5567 word day. The challenge is not over though. I need to finish the novel by November 30th. There's only about four chapters to go.

November is National Novel Writing Month

2011-11-21T21:52:00.000-05:00

Wonderin' where the lions are

2011-10-25T23:58:00.003-04:00

Life is really good right now. Sorry, life is cellular organization. My circumstances are really good right now. The news flashes:

New Residence
I'm now living in Dundas Ontario. Very cute place. Great arrangement. Renting a room - well - a room and a half - in a large townhouse; I have a ground floor bedroom that walks on to the yard. My newish pal-slash-landlord is a supremely cool woman of substance; a writer, counsellor, theologian and someone who defies my immediate attempt at assigning her a meaningful blog-friendly nickname. Apparently some thought is required here. The main thing is - I'm now in an environment of significant peace.

New Job
I think I mentioned that I'm now working security at a minimum security correctional centre where the security truly is minimal and the writing is maximal. I'm now working straight nights on weekends with extra gigs here and there. I'm making great progress on the current novel. Hurray. Soon I will be finished the first draft and be looking for volunteers to give it a read and provide some basic feedback.

New Haircut
My head is now asymmetrical thanks to the spectacular work of Magicuts at Ancaster Meadowlands. I came home, found scissors and a mirror and made significant improvements.

New Outlook
I'm getting more exercise. I'm eating more healthy. I need more improvement still on these fronts but I'm getting there. There are certainly no more excuses. And I must blog more. Too many useful explorations are going through my head and then being forgotten. This blog is supposed to be a catch-all for useful stuff that doesn't fit into current projects. I need to be here much more often.

The volunteer gig; the young reading and writing groups are on again this year. I'm spending almost all of my time being creative and/or useful with regards to the pursuit of harmony and evolution of consciousness. With everything going so well, one wonders - as Cockburn sang, where the lions are. I thought for the period of a day that I'd found out, when young Neo announced he was pulling back from the poetic mentoring we'd been engaged in for some time now. This is something of profound importance to me.

But I came to realize that this was almost inevitable given the nature of a high-schooler's schedule and priorities and general lack of freedom. I had to remind myself that there was a time when I doubted he could succeed, poetically, at such a young age and that the best I could do was leave him with significant clues, and to look him up again when he became an adult and make myself available at that time if he were interested.

As it turns out, his talents are far greater than he seems to realize but I'm comfortable returning my head to that previous space and to wait. In the mean time I'm confident we will remain creative consultants to one another with regards to music (he is an astounding composer), and that the time will come when he's ready - and able - to revisit our noble aspirations.

And in the mean time I must not stagnate. I must do the work.

"If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing."
- Saint Augustine

"Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street."
- William Blake

"I had another dream about lions at the door. They weren't half as frightening as they were before and I'm thinking about eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me."
- Bruce Cockburn

Muskokaville

2011-09-16T17:28:00.003-04:00

My little video slide-show from our cottage vacations over the last five years:

Change of Name Notice

2011-09-08T18:10:00.003-04:00

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The figure formally known on this blog as Peter Pan shall hereafter be referred to as Whitetrashpornopartyfiend and within about a month will probably never be referred to again.

In other news, I shall be moving out of my tower cell at the Palace Of Grim Insanity just as soon as possible. I assume my tenantship will then be replaced by someone more appropriate to the environment such as - I don't know - Pee Wee Herman or maybe Doctor Ruth's evil twin. Or Satan. Or maybe just a massive quivering lump of brain matter injected with 800 kilograms of amphetamines and Viagra who just sits up there in the attic oozing puss-of-anarchy through the walls and floors - into the neighborhood, hypnotizing its minions and plotting the apocalypse and never showing up at work.

Yeah, I think some creature like that would get along real peachy with Whitetrashpornopartyfiend and his little fiend friends. I wish them luck together.

Oh - Speaking of roommates from some new-and-improved hell, I was reading about Social Anxiety Disorder, and wouldn't you know - it's the life story of my very own biodad. It's bang-on. No question about it. So I mentioned this to my best psychology friend only to be told that biodad is too old for help... Right... So what do I do with this now? Where was Wikipedia forty-five years ago? Moving on...

In still other news, I am now doing my security gigs at a special corrections centre; a half-way house for two dozen emerging convicts not welcome at other traditional half-way houses. It's an excellent gig. Love it. And it's so awesome to have somewhere to go for a little peace and harmony and people who are nice to you. Yes. At a half-way house. I trust you appreciate the irony.

Strange disappearances plague Hamilton Man

2011-09-06T09:00:00.005-04:00

September 4, 2011. Hamilton, ON -- Forty-two year-old security guard Rich Landriault, resident of Hamilton's famed London Avenue South; soon to be renamed Interesting People Avenue, is publicly voicing displeasure with Hamilton Wentworth Police Service after alleging that an "inexplicable entity" has been methodically stealing all his bath towels from the basement laundry room of the house in which he rents the attic space.

Landriault claims to have moved into the unit in October 2010 with no less than seven mid-quality bath towels ranging in condition from newish to fair, of which only one remains. He describes police response to the crisis as "apathetic and uninterested." When asked if he was putting all of his security training to work to guard his last remaining towel, Landriault responded, "No. It's clipped to my attic skylight in order to block out the sun. I work night shifts. The towels only disappear from the basement, either while waiting to be laundered or after being laundered and waiting to be taken back upstairs." He responded to suggestions that vampires also work night shifts and seek refuge from the sun, with a long silent stare followed by a deep sigh.

Sgt. Big Mac of HPS defended police inaction, stating, "This is clearly a domestic matter to be worked out between roommates. And for the last time: No, I'm in no way related to Sheriff Big Mac of MacDonalds restaurant fame. Now _ _ _ _ off."

Landriault shakes his head emphatically at this suggestion. "No. My roommate is a solid citizen. He would never touch another person's belongings. No way." When asked if the roommate could have mistaken the towels as his own and disposed of them due to to some as yet diagnosed psychotic delusion, Landriault became defensive, declaring, "Hey! He's a good guy! Sharp as a tack, smart as a whip and not at all deluded or suffering from intense Peter Pan Syndrome marked by various uncontrollable addictions. No way man. Not at all. This is clearly the work of demonic towel-eating fairies." This reporter responded with a long silent stare followed by a deep sigh.

Will Landriault be replacing these towels out of pocket? "No," he insists. "I'd rather walk around wet. Though if anyone had a ridiculous stock of old towels lying around, I'm not fussy or opposed to a little charity."

Hamilton city planners announced the name change to Interesting People Avenue upon growing public discussion around the exessive numbers of misfits and outcasts currently living on London Avenue South, the most recent addition being Queen of Brooms, also known as Broom Hilda, Broomzilla, Broomtilla the Hunn and Psychosweepingwacknut Lady, who seems bent on sweeping the entire planet Earth into oblivion beginning with the entirety of her London Avenue property exterior including lawns which she noisily attacks with whisk brooms multiple times daily. Planners have also announced that a canal will be built, to be completed August 2018, joining Interesting People Avenue to Hamilton Harbour in order to better service Chinese ocean liners delivering monthly broom supplies.

Oh look, it's the TV Guy

2011-08-09T10:30:00.005-04:00

So while I'm waiting for the ghouls at Canadian Tire to finish greasing me for 440 unearned dollars, I get trapped in a waiting room with a woman buried in her personal texting device but who can't possibly tolerate the occasional glimpse of a television set not turned on. Thus I'm forced to listen to the latest sad dull-minded patronizing baloney to seep from the lips of one Barack Obama. Just when did that particular dream fizzle down the tubes?

Why doesn't he just go on and say, "Uh, yeah. President here. Just wanted to say: Keep buying shit. Keep the wheels turning. And I'll work on a bill to keep the Wal-Marts open late on Saturdays and closed on God's Day. Oh - and a big shout-out to all the American boys and girls out there in Iraq and Afghanistan shitting their pants and crying for their moms while they're getting killed and mutilated. We call you heroes here because it makes us feel better."

Oh well. What are his choices really? I guess it's either do what he's supposed to, or else steal the Heart of Gold and make a run for it.

Once Upon a Time...

2011-07-26T08:59:00.003-04:00

Once upon a time there was a very ordinary man who for the first time in his life did something courageous. He dared to confront every dark accusation he could make of himself. He chased the spectre of his instinctive mind through a hell of self-realization. He dared to perceive then, that he knew nothing for sure. He dared to begin learning all over again with a most tenacious questing for truth. And this journey over several years time, changed him entirely. He allowed new perceptions to be built slowly and solidly from sound foundations. And having shed the capacity to take anything for granted, he absorbed the profundity of the miracles in his life and in the lives of all those around him. He learned to see through all the illusions of human mind and society and to understand their nature. He found himself less and less affected by all the societal ills that plagued seemingly each and every human every day, and he began to see how these ills had all been products of those illusions to begin with. He was overwhelmed with pity for these monumental realms of needless suffering still going on all around him. And as he absorbed awareness of the multitude of connection he was a part of, he became overwhelmed by love.

But he also felt very alone in his circumstance. He knew that the story of his experiences would not be believed, just as he learned the great harm in the practice of belief itself. But he had little now to achieve for his own benefit. He'd become largely, though not perfectly, free of ills; free of slavery to society's ruling forces and slavery to instinctive mind; free of illusions. He was joyful. There was nothing now to do but try to help free others. He struggled to find useful ways to reach out to others; to identify individuals who seemed to be moving in parallel directions to the course he had taken, and to offer them the right advice at the right time to help them along; to nudge their own courses on to useful paths.

But this was slow uncertain work and he found himself unsatisfied. Without a means to leverage his knowledge, he knew he would only accomplish so much usefulness during the remainder of his life. Many old friends and family wanted his time and they saw him as still the same man he used to be before his journey began but he understood that. He expected it and did not fight it. But he began to mourn the time he spent with them to some degree. Though he loved them, his time with them was time not being useful enough. It was time wasted in a large sense. And more wasted time would mean less useful knowledge passed on to others by the time he would depart from the world.

While his newer friends and associates saw him as the more enlightened man he had become, and dealt with him more on that level, this time spent with old loved ones seemed wasted because they had little or no perspectives to share with regard to the things that now interested him, while he had no more interest at all in most "normal" things. Normal things were all buried in layers of illusion. They left him mired in conversations that depended on illusion while he meanwhile knew that there was no simple, linear, succinct way to demonstrate the falseness of the particular illusion at hand, so he would just nod and play along, not wishing to upset them.

One particular normal fascination began to wear on him especially; their fascination with bad behaviour stories. Everyone wanted to tell him the particular details concerning the failings of other particular individuals. Everyone wanted to complain about the specific little wrongdoings of those around them; their particular little instances of victimhood. This became a very unfortunate bore. Sometimes the stories were funny and that was fine because it was always good to laugh! But usually it was just a way for people to feel superior to other people, and the man could not perceive this as legitimate. The man saw with certainty that they were all, including himself, in the regular habit of harming others, but also in the regular habit of helping others. Everyone, without exception, participated in both harmony and selfishness. He saw with certainty how blind everyone was to their own failings; how useless it was to complain about others; how the only way to be useful in the world was to examine one's own actions and motivations with courage and the will to improve; how every single person was a hypocrite in that way. But what was the use in telling people this? They only had ears for his approval; for his assurance that they were being mistreated; that they were better than the other guy.

Sometimes he would let himself fall into this game; this recreation, and tell a bad-behaviour story of his own, and then go home - not so much ashamed; but laughing at himself for his own fallibility. It was easy to hand himself back over to the illusions of the instinctive mind and be taken along for a ride for a while. He knew he was no better than anyone else despite his grand and earnest intentions. He was perhaps worse than others, because he could not claim innocence through ignorance. He knew better. And though his own behaviour had generally improved as he participated more in harmony and less in chaos, he there too felt he was more guilty, in a way, than others, because he knew better. He could not feign ignorance of his crimes. He could not plead victim to illusion.

But did he want to keep evolving? Did he want to become a perfect agent of harmony - if this was even possible? He felt the gap, more and more, between his circumstance and that of others. He found it more and more challenging to craft useful ways of communicating these many layers of uncommon understandings because of that gap.

What he did know, is that he needed to be more useful. He knew that he would have to be more bold; be truer to his understandings. Perhaps then some old friends and family would surprise him and demonstrate some capacity to entertain his ideas. And perhaps others would find him intolerable, and no longer ask for his company. Both scenarios would increase his usefulness!

"Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it." - Georges Bernanos

"Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not."
- Elias Root Beadle

"The matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. When you're inside, you look around. What do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, those people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand: Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And most of them are so inert; so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."
- Morpheus (from film, The Matrix)

Full Moon Fever

2011-07-16T07:38:00.004-04:00

So Ye Olde Security Company is treating me like gold lately; giving me exactly what I want: Plenty of night shifts in comfortable quiet places. I'm literally getting paid to do my own writing while in perfect environments - better than home even; air-conditioned and with fewer interruptions - as in - zero interruptions. They probably don't realize that what they're paying me to do, I would otherwise happily do for free! I've actually been receiving overtime paychecks while I feel like I've been on vacation!

But last night I sort of earned my pay for a short while. Here's what happened:

I'm on duty all alone at a big old factory full of big old machines where they manufacture tractor tillage. It's way down by the harbor, nestled between steel plants - far from any housing. Frost fencing and padlocked gates bar the perimeter although there are bottom gaps where meddling teenagers venturing far from home could crawl through if they really wanted to. All the factory doors are locked but everywhere big low screenless windows are open for ventilation. If anyone really wanted to hop in, it would be a breeze. Never do I think anyone would though.

I make my regular call to another manned guard location; standard practice - so they know that I'm okay, alive and awake. My call-in associate tells me he has been watching coloured lights moving in the sky in strange patterns not akin to any human aircraft he's personally aware of. Well, there is a full moon tonight. Ha ha! Spooky!

So I go on patrol; a twenty-minute affair done once every two hours. First I stop in the middle of the plant to throw a Flaming Lips CD on a stereo. I place the CD case on top of a speaker, crank the volume and do my patrol to the sound of the very catchy tune Race For The Prize which repeats four times. Okay, so someone must have left the stereo on repeat mode, right?

I leave very few lights on in the plant. I figure it's my job to protect the client's financial assets and I'm not afraid of the dark. Toward the end of the patrol, the light directly above me suddenly goes on.

What the f-?

I stop, turn and look around. Is someone messing with me? I know for sure there are no motion sensors of any kind here and I've never known any lights here to turn on or off on their own before. I stand still there for a while looking across the gloomy plant, through and between all the big machines, toward all the locations where I know there to be circuit breakers. But why on earth would any guard or employee slip in here at 1:00 AM just to mess with my head? And no intruder would possibly know which switch would activate which light. The light suddenly turns off again and I remain there looking around and thinking about it. I figure there must be a ballast problem or some other defect with the light or what-not and so I carry on.

Patrol complete, I return to the stereo, lower the volume, remove the CD and -- well fuck a duck. The CD case is missing. I know with perfect certainty that I placed it right here on top of the speaker. It's gone. I check the floor. It must have fallen off. It's not on the floor. It's gone.

Fuck.

Me.

Silly.

This is so not cool.

I'm standing there looking around, trying to spot an intruder and trying to figure out what the logical explanation is. Gradually I move toward the far back corner of the plant. I have one hand on the duty cell phone considering whether to call back my UFO-watching friend - or 9-1-1 for that matter. I decline and instead slip out a back door to check the lots. If there's an unauthorized vehicle on site I will call the police. Outside the full moon looks down on me.

Great. A werewolf with a playful sense of humour. This is definitely not in the security procedures manual. I circle the factory. No suspicious cars. The main gate is way too far away for me to see whether it is still locked or even closed or not. A long hike does not appeal while meanwhile my car keys are still inside at my desk - and oh - so is my wallet with $495.00 cash inside. That thought bolsters my courage. I find a nearby unlockable exit and make straight for the office. The wallet, car-keys and cash are present. I pocket them. I think about the speaker on which I placed the CD case.

It was one of three speakers and it was the largest. Okay. So it must be a sub woofer, right? So it would vibrate like a sonofagun, wouldn't it? The case must have vibrated its way off and took a funny bounce and landed somewhere out of sight; like underneath something. So I grab a big big wrench - no not as a weapon but to use to drag the case out from under its presumed hiding place [Editor's note: Yes, as a weapon] and I march back to the stereo.

And of course - a proper search reveals that the CD case is on the floor and in behind some tricky gadgetry that masked it earlier. I shake my head, laugh at myself and go about clawing at the CD case with my weapon - I mean - tool.

"Lose something?"

The voice was inhumanly deep. I scrambled to my feet. He had to be seven feet tall with long fur hanging off of him in every direction. Yellow eyes. Huge teeth. He crouched down. I was literally paralyzed with fear. He reached past me with his enormous arm and pulled the CD case free. "Here you go."

The CD case was covered in grease and something else - something red.

"Is that blood?" I asked.

"No," said the beast. "I've been drinking cosmopolitans. I'm kinda sloppy."

Okay. Sorry. I'm just kidding. There was no werewolf. I dug the case out myself, brought it back to the office, washed the grease off of it and spent the rest of the shift writing the Eye Of Atchooah heroic adventure parody novel, drinking coffee, eating canned beans and farting. But everything else was true and I admit I was spooked for a bit. So there.

Bye now.

The Olympia

2011-07-15T00:24:00.004-04:00

Oh Captain Vino. Where were you when I needed you? You would have had a hay-day with this one:

So young Neo and I cut school for an hour today and hit The Olympia for fries and cokes. I wish I could tell you that the Olympia lived up to its name; that its spires transcended the clouds. Alas it is a wilting crapstand of a joint that has perhaps been cleaned since it was built - oh perhaps the same day they invented cigarrettes - which is perhaps why the aging regulars still feel entitled to smoke them.

We were the only patrons in the dining area. Our hostess emerged from some back area, moved behind the bar and shouted to me, "What do you want?"

"Um... lunch?"

"Yeah."

I nod my head to reinforce the idea that we would like lunch.

"So what do you want?"

"Um... a menu?"

She turns and grabs a menu. One menu. I go to the bar and get it from her. I return to the table and Neo and I share it. In a fit of profound generosity, the Grim Hostess comes around to the table. We order. The food comes quickly and is good and it is cheap. Afterward I approach the bar, settle the tab and hand over a 50% tip for which she remains silently thankful (I presume).

She' sprobably a really nice person. She probably just mistook me for the local cat murderer.

The experience was so sociopathically entertaining that I actually can't wait to go back.

Novel: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

2011-07-09T18:06:00.003-04:00

Madeleine L'engle (1978)

Nice story. Nice idea. Sort of along the lines of the "we're all connected" idea that has grown in popularity since this work; one of the follow-ups to the Newberry Medal winning A Wrinkle In Time was written.

L'Engle, who passed away in 2007, was probably a gentle grandmotherly soul. Her narrative suggests such. Unfortunately most of her main characters come across as gentle and grandmotherly, be they man, woman or child. I struggle with any book where the characters do not seem to have independent voices.

Though touted a keener of modern science, she here makes the most pedestrian blunder in missing the most primary relationship between time and space, in effect, placing planet Earth at the very centre of the universe.

The greatest challenge though is this partial cast of characters: Gwen, Gwynedd, Gwydyr, Gedder, Gaudior, Matthew Maddox, Madoc, Madog, Mad Dog, Bran, Branwen, Branzillo, Zillo, Zillie, Zyll, Zillah.

It's probably a way better story than I could have appreciated given there was almost nil hope for keeping the characters straight.

Not much to say

2011-06-29T00:36:00.004-04:00

Conversation ten minutes ago:

Cleaner #1: "Good evening!"

Me: "Good evening. How are you tonight?"

"Yes!"

"What time are guys here until tonight?"

"Yes!"

"Do you understand what I'm asking?"

"Yes. Good evening!"

"Good evening."

Conversation two minutes ago:

Me: "Good evening!"

Cleaner #2: "Aaeeehhhy!"

"Right then."

Employing my remarkable analytical skills, I hereby deduce that the cleaning staff and I do not speak the same language.

Chicken Soup

2011-06-27T04:34:00.002-04:00

This is my own recipe for chicken soup. It's none of your business but I just couldn't think of where else to store this information without it getting lost. I don't have a recipe box nor do I want one.

red onions, sauteed
chicken broth
tapiocca
mushrooms, sliced
BBQ chicken, skinned and whittled
half-n-half cream
sage, thyme, oregano,
celery salt, pepper,
tobasco, worchestershire
Labatt 50

Drink the Labatt 50, eat the chicken skin and dump the remaining ingredients in a pot. Simmer all afternoon. Inflict on unsuspecting guests.

Documentary: Food Inc.

2011-06-27T02:00:00.006-04:00

Imagination

2011-06-22T02:26:00.003-04:00

"Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality."

I stumbled upon this quote from French philosopher Jules de Gaultier and was immediately put off. How morbidly unwise. But in learning that de Gaultier was an afficianado of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, We must interpret that he is referring to escapist imagination and the war against circumstance. As always, with our language of duality, what is true is also false - and vice versa - as you alter the context. This is why, when I find myself in a conversation bearing some hope for usefulness, I attempt to take it to the most universal of perspectives.

In my undeniable living experience I look at all that I once thought was reality and see that it is all illusion. All that I now experience to be true, I never would have discovered without imagination.

Imagination is absolutley key in the war of reality. But it is on reality's side; not against.

Self-fulfilling Prophecies

2011-06-20T23:29:00.003-04:00

As I ponder the spectre of terrorism and the wildly intangible idea that it is threatening to steal our freedom; as I ponder the ludicrousness of speeches from the mouths of presidents and political leaders and how the quotient of propaganda and fear-mongering becomes ever-more obvious and detectable with the passage of time and the opportunity for informed reflection; as I ponder the mounting incontrovertible evidence of torture committed by the American military machine in Bagram, Abu Grayb and Guantanamo Bay; as I ponder the inconceivable numbers: 83,000 "suspected terrorists" abducted. Zero brought to trial for terrorist acts; as I ponder the joke in that idea that torture and the trampling of privacy and constitutional rights are somewhat okay as a temporary war time measure - oh - oh my sides - as if a war against ghosts is temporary - as if it will ever - ever - end; and as I ponder the incredible volume of hatred, outrage and the conviction that America is evil, surely held by the friends and families of each of those 83,000 detainees, not to mention those of all the dead who were at the wrong place at the wrong time when the war on terror came to town - I must ask myself:

Is the American military complex - so hugely financially profitable to all those individuals behind it, really out there hunting for terrorists? Or are they just manufacturing them?

Just asking.

Seeing anybody?

2011-06-20T17:08:00.003-04:00

I am endlessly amused by every one's fascination with my relationship status.

"Seeing anybody?" is one of the first questions I get whenever I encounter a friend for the first time in a while. To me, it's a silly question. How can you think you know me and yet ask something so inappropriate?

But I know why. People ask me this because they care about me and are locked into the assumption that this is some significantly relevant factor toward my personal happiness. People believe in their fundamental normalcies. In a society where things are labelled legitimate not because they are sane, logical and truthful but because they are the norm, few question the legitimacy of the Western world's marriage/relationship model, which truly, can not be said to be legitimate or not. To be truthful, you have to break it down into its many components and judge them individually.

I can not support this all-pervading relationship model for many reasons. The mandatory reciprocity component goes against my personal instincts. Some components create flawed expectations and demand phony behaviour to compensate. Some demand exclusivity which become barriers to maximizing the other relationships in my life. And mostly, it fails to incorporate what is to me the most profound kind of love in existence that I know of - the state of radiating lovingness.

Surely there are useful components to the standard model: Financial security; stability; a useful framework within which children can be raised; the promise that you will not be left alone. And perhaps most notably: The feeling of having someone or something special.

But allow me to play devil's advocate:

Unfortunately all these good things above are to varying degrees tainted when I view them from outside the matrix of illusions. The level of financial circumstance we think we need is unnecessary, greedy, corrupt and undeserved when viewed from the global, not national, perspective. Stability is a solution to a problem that is largely illusory to begin with, and on the balance, one that stems from the very mindset that suppresses organic love and promotes marriage to begin with. There have been cultures in which children were raised more by communities then parents. Akin to the superior health of cross-bred dogs, might not such children emerge healthier mentally; freer from the particular biases and derelict views of the biological parents and exposed to greater volumes of ideas and with a capacity for choice? No matter. The biochemical programming that binds parents to children is currently far too powerful to mess with. Let's not even discuss the illusions that stem from it.
With regards to the remainder of the pro-marriage list, let me offer my own living experience; that from a marriage-type relationship that failed in its thirteenth year. Yes it failed ultimately but it was a successful, non-failing relationship for twelve years; full of good times and bad times; loving, fighting, negotiating and compromising.

Yet these days I am less alone. I'm surrounded by special people. And I am more guaranteed to not be alone precisely because I do not put all my eggs in one basket. I do not live in fear that divorce will topple my life. And there is no jealousy present within my home to temper my adorations with-out.

People in healthy marriages feel they are so lucky, their partner so special, partly because - well maybe those partners are! But partly because of the barren emotional landscape they were accustomed to prior. We come from an ass-backward society that says No, you can't love her. She's not the correct age. No, you can't love him, He's not the correct gender. No, you can't love her because she's already obligated to a relationship contract. No, You can't love her because you're already bound to a relationship contract. No, she's too rich. No, she's too poor. No. Wrong race. Wrong religion. Wrong social class.

No! You can't love her because she doesn't love you back!

How much organic love is suppressed because of our mandatory reciprocity model? 95%? 99%? And where it isn't, where someone brave speaks out - well, they're just creepy. You're a creep if you love when you're not supposed to. Shame on you.

Well, I don't listen to those rules anymore. If you know me personally, you might just want to watch the hell out. I might just say I love you any time now!

Am I saying marriage is wrong? No. If you feel marriage is right for you and yours, go for it. I will gladly come to the ceremony and celebrate your love. I'll even surrender a wad of cash and be oddly touched by your in-laws' goofy speeches. But if you dare to put me on the podium you will receive from me a healthy dose of loving sincerity; not an embarrassing good-time anecdote.

What I'm saying is that marriage should be understood for what it is and what the sacrifices are and most importantly - that your marriage is yours to custom design. Allow for organic legitimacy. Don't demand to be the number-one partner for all of a hundred categories every day. Don't redeem your contractual promise to be loved every day. Instead, earn it.

Novel: Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

2011-05-21T07:57:00.002-04:00

Despite a single mystical element this work is solid literary fiction with a special appeal for youth. At forty-two, I found it meaningful and thoroughly worthwhile. Kids as young as twelve find it compelling and appropriate although some of their parents may unfortunately not be ready for the abundant street language and sexual references, all of which, Proulx handles responsibly, tastefully and with a healthy respect for genuine reality. How she captures the voice of one rough-around-the-edges teenage boy so convincingly is a marvel and to her significant credit. This itself becomes the style of the book.

Like so many of the best stories this one tracks a character with clear flaws through a period of crisis; a period of transition in life. Will 17-year-old Luke ovecome his significant obstacles; so many of his own creation, and emerge a better person?

Startlingly real characters, heart-wrenching moments, sharp humour, and some very useful wisdom around the legitimacy of death and the profound miraculousness of life. It's one of those great and noble books that is finally noticed as such when you get to the end. Great read. Valuable experience. Thank you Joanne!

Book: Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge

2011-05-17T13:44:00.007-04:00

(2008, editor Damien Broderick)

Here are fourteen essays by leading scientists and science writers who were asked to predict the look of human existence come the year one-million. Their responses are consistent: The task is impossible but the exercise in trying provides a remarkable wealth of material to ponder for those more interested in the question, who are we, than who will win American Idol. They write with generous restraint, allowing the reader to ponder ramifications and ask the big questions for themselves.

Dougal Dixon's non-partisan perspectives on carbon dioxide cycles bring some clarity to the contentious global warming arena. Wil McCarthy's handling of matters concerning the rarity of life and of intelligent life and the scope of cosmic time and distance are of critical relevance to the alien question. Journalist Jim Holt delves into the nature of mathematics. Fundamental reality or human invention?

Amara D. Angelica explores the digital and analog natures of all things and probes the inherent compatibility of computers, human beings and galaxies while Robert Bradbury and Rudy Rucker "debate" the eventual restructuring of star systems into inhabitable super computers versus the eventual rejection of computers as humans meld with the computation of nature itself.

For those with a view to the parasitic nature of mankind's dominance over the earth, beware of Robin Hanson's treatment on the plausibility and rapidity of space colonization.

Dr. Steven B. Harris's insights into evolution leave apparent the gaping flaws in any notion of grand design theory while he, Pamela Sargent and Anne Corwin delve into biological science and technology, promoting an inevitable confrontation with polymorphability and immortality. Meanwhile Sean M. Carroll, Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski arouse the greatest life-or-death question of all, exploring the troubling matter of entropy and the fate of the universe.

A brilliant collection.

My Roger Weekend

2011-05-14T12:02:00.003-04:00

In October 2009, Roger of Rogers WoodWorks created what I call, the Roger's Weekend. He took on a hefty to-do list and surprised himself by getting through 75% of it. I vowed I would emulate him and dedicate a weekend to getting caught up on my own list of life's annoying little chores (along with some properly useful projects).

Being one of the premier lazy bastards of the entire worldwide community of lazy bastards, it took me only a year and a half to get around to this.

And being one of the premier lazy bastards of the worldwide community of lazy bastards, it took me only half of day one to get around just to announcing my intention, which is this:

My list:

- clean bedroom
- clean bathroom
- clean out truck
- replace spare tire
- laundry
- return library materials
- reserve cargo van
- download borrowed music
- settle "herb and wine" arrangements
- settle cottage arrangements
- email study materials to Neo
- required reading and prep for young readers club
- editing and lesson plan for young writers group
- vacuum and sweep house
- shampoo carpet
- write review for book Year Million
- recreate lost outline for novel-in-progress The One
- create budget spreadsheet
- blog (Saturday - this not included!)
- blog (Sunday)
- walk (Saturday)
- walk (Sunday)
- post another song on the web
- organize and backup writing and music files
- check blood pressure
- finish mind-mapping the poetic compendium (don't ask)
- update resume
- create online questionnaire
- order a SCENE card
- update song journal
- finish lyrics, arrangement for song Indescribable
- finish composing Down Slide and give it a better title
- finish composing He's All Right Now
- Learn to play fave Beetles tunes Strawberry Fields, Ticket to Ride and Day in the Life

Oh yeah - So why now after 19 months?

'Cause the three shifts I was scheduled to work this weekend got cancelled because of my request to drop from full-time back onto the spare-board finally going through yesterday and I found myself with a wide open schedule and no socializing to do on account of having a cold I don't want to share and having, all day yesterday, accomplished absolutely nothing other than a long series of naps and the watching of a couple really dumb movies. I was starting to feel kind of useless.

Okay. Got to go. Got stuff to do.

What if there was never anything?

2011-05-08T12:26:00.003-04:00

I have no idea where I'm going with this. Just a dumb question in my head.

So we live in this thing called a universe which is so freaking big it's beyond our comprehension to grasp just how mind-blowingly big it is. It's so big it's just stupid.

And whether it exploded from God's hand or because that's just what universes do; both perfectly equal mysteries if you think about it, it's pretty obvious that we live in the aftermath of an explosion.

But what if it had never happened?

Well that's easy. If it hadn't happened we wouldn't be here. Simple. But is it? If there were no gods, no explosions, no universe or universes - what would there be?

Well there'd be nothing. Ever. Simple.

Why does this not work?

I can not, no matter how I try - imagine a reality that is utterly vacant of time and space and matter. It is strictly unimaginable. I can not admit such a scenario possible yet I can not offer a shred of explanation. It's like I'm a robot programmed not to question it's prime directive. There's just a blank wall. I try to process the idea of there never existing anything and I'm left with a disctinct impression that such a concept is strictly impossible. But I haven't the first idea how to prove it nor the notion that it's a correct presumption to start with. Surely anything that can exist can also not exist. But take away everything and what are you left with?

Nothing.

It makes sense and yet it just can't be imagined. Is that how everyone feels?

For that matter, what happens at the perimeter of the universe? WHat's after that? Nothing? Well what does that mean? What if you drill a hole into the nothing? Do you even get a hole?

Frankly, it's hard to imagine a perimeter to the universe.

I guess you'd never get close to the universe's perimeter given how fast it expands. But what if it's going to collapse again? What happens after the Big Crunch? Another explosion? What exists between the moment of final contraction and the next bang? Nothing?

It's a popular theory - that the universe continually bangs and crunches; cyclically expanding and contracting, almost like a beating heart, locked in a constant battle against the nothingness.

Postscript: I wrote this some time ago before I realized that the big crunch theory is swiftly losing popularity as evidence mounts that the universe is expanding at an accellerating rate. This news struck me as hard as any news ever has, including the death of loved ones. It was comforting to think of a renewable cosmos where life, human or otherwise, could exist, if intermittantly, at least eternally. An eternity of equillibrium however, with every particle of matter isolated by light-years of darkness - is the coldest thing I've ever contemplated.

March of the Pines

2011-04-25T12:32:00.003-04:00

I really don't have any use for Easter or for birthdays but I gave mom a card with an astronaut on the front, congratulating her on her successful mission to Pluto, and spent two days at the parents' place to celebrate. It had once been my grandparents' place and I'd spent portions of my childhood summer holidays there. Today mom and I went for a walk around the property but I suppose I was not entirely present.

Of the six-paned window of the spring house, one pane remains. I remember when they'd built that raised hut to shelter the old bathtub that received the fresh spring water piped in from it's remote source. I'd used the remaining materials, and more scavenged from the barn, to build a ridiculous little fort of my own. It's any one's guess now, which bits of debris might once have been part of that little endeavor.

Inside the hut, old Uncle Ernie's mug still hangs from a nail above the outlet pipe. I remember his 96th birthday party at the village recreation hall. He'd looked down at me and couldn't remember who I was.

I've never seen the old tub before, not brimming with water, the constant overflow splashing into the pond of its own making; source of a winding stream that turned the non-tilled low-elevation north-west field into a myriad wetland; home of ducks, frogs and fireflies. Now the White Pines have taken over. They grow and proliferate like weeds, turning the scrub field into a little forest home for coyotes. The tub sits empty but for a dark layer of sediment. Staring at the pipe I finally catch the fall of a single drip.

From the doorway I look down at the dry bed outside. I used to pry large rocks from the ground and hurl them in to the little pond. The splash they'd made was nothing compared to the one that followed. Cocoa would leap in after them, submerge his head and bound joyfully out again with the slimy rock clamped in his jaws. We'd do it again and again. Later we'd return to the house, wet and green and smelling like algae and grandma would give the dog hell for going in the "crick" but he didn't care after all the fun we'd had.

One wing of the two-storey bank barn is gone now; collapsed and hauled away after too many years of wind and rain. The remainder is a patch-work of expensive repairs. Inside I spy a few remaining relics from childhood memory but we don't stray too far. It's dangerous with the floor rotting away. The warnings have come. The barn's days are numbered. It is just a facade now; something to block the view of the suburban style housing development that now looms on one horizon; something to preserve the feeling of a country sanctuary that is starting to become an illusion.

Returning to the house we pass the row of maples that have matched Uncle Ernie in their longevity. They're beginning to fall apart. My favorite one; the one I once climbed religiously; the one we'd fixed with rope and bucket so I could eat my lunch in the sky - is the first to go. Even the stump has been burned away.

For the moment I feel like a boy made old too suddenly.

Inside the house, the only man who deserves to be called my father is thinking about hawks and turkey vultures. "Did you see anything?" he asks.

"Just the sobering passage of time," I say.

Food Glorious Food

2011-04-21T03:37:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow I'll receive my first paycheque in well over a month. Well - it'll be half a paycheque strictly speaking but it'll feel like a fortune.

Through the last week and a half I expected to finally be testing the weight-loss effectiveness of the good old-fashioned starvation diet but it never quite evolved as such. Two different co-workers each invited me over to dinner and one sent me home again with a bucket of delicious leftovers. Another slipped me a box of crackers for no apparent reason. Another dumped a handful of winning Tim Hortons food prize tabs into my hands along with the lame excuse he wouldn't use them. And coworker number five asked me frankly if I needed to borrow some cash and then handed over a tidy stack of twenties.

As I see us all coveting our jobs, fearing unemployment, belittling ourselves before our so-called superiors, working overtime (itself a significant contributor to unemployment if you think about it), distancing ourselves from our children, etc., in order to "make a living" or some overblown facsimile thereof - it's interesting to me, speaking cautiously and subjectively of course, in the wake of my own personal experience: that it's pretty hard to actually starve to death around here.

song: The Line

2011-03-29T21:08:00.004-04:00

Not my newest song but a recent one. Like the many primary stages in life and life's endeavors that I have initially skipped but later returned to, experiencing them from an atypically mature standpoint, I missed the whole major G-C-D chord phase through my first two years of songwriting exploration. Lately I have been enjoying its lively simplicity. After catching a little flack for using 'I walk the line' as the song's chorus, I considered changing the title to "Johnny Cash Can Kiss My Ass" but settled finally on simply "The Line." I have a proper USB mic now which improves the sound quality very much and reveals the ample imperfections of my sorry excuse for a singing voice quite sufficiently. ...................... ................................. ............................. ..................................

FWG is still alive...

2011-03-23T14:49:00.004-04:00

... just hasn't had proper internet access since November 2010, making blog-posting rather a pain in the butt. Articles have been piling up on my own computer while I borrow others' every once in a while to access the net, all the while ignoring the existence of jump drives, flash drives, USB sticks and USB keys - which I suspect are all precisely the same thing. Can someone please pick a term and lets stick with it? Honestly, you elite tech developers are coming dangerously close to joining the lawyers, politicians, auto mechanics and white rappers who will have their corpses dragged through the streets on the Glorious Day Of Purification.

Anyhoo... this is my promise that I shall somehow persevere and start posting regularly again - yes, as if I have any credibility on that matter and as if anyone was actually around to read this.

And that's all I'll say for now because one of the dobermans that comes with the laptop I'm currently using, won't stop playing "Look-I'm-a-Rubber-Chicken" and trying to flop on my head. I'm not even kidding. He's a complete freak.

Oh - but I was kidding about Purification Day. No such thing as far as I know. And I don't support the practice of corpse dragging at all. I also don't support use of the word anyhoo but I thought I should try it once just to be sure.

Later,

NDR

Novel: The Convicts

2010-12-24T17:29:00.004-05:00

2005 (Iain Lawrence)

Captivating. Starts out at a breakneck pace, leaping from one improbable Dickensian circumstance to another before settling into a sustained bout of ever more depressing downturns.

A grilling emotional swamp-ride of a book that took me by surprise when it ended with so few questions being answered. I hadn't realized it is "part one" of a self-proclaimed trilogy. In fact it is not a trilogy by any respectful use of the English language but is one-third a story published in separate slim books as our greedy shallow marketplace-driven society produces so much of.

Lawrence proves a very competent storyteller though, with vibrant characters and much more engaging subtlety than you usually find in tween fic. I am forced to read "book two" whether the young readers group wishes to or not!

Novel: Farewell Summer

2010-10-27T02:42:00.007-04:00

(2006) Ray Bradbury

Pure unmistakably-Bradburian magic!

His genius stems from his constant cognizance of childhood curiosity and sense of wonder. Most eventual writers lose all this through adolescence and later must unearth it - or some new version of it. But Bradbury in his life, never lost it.

A re-fermentation of his novel Dandelion Wine (1951), Farewell Summer looks at the mysteries of time and age and human connection through the eyes of boys who know that the end of boyhood is near. He doesn't only make you feel like a kid again; he makes you feel something much dearer, I think: like the world is big again.

The Gate

2010-10-25T11:19:00.002-04:00

I stand at the gate
Strong at this moment
Having long faltered
Regressing in fits
Asking
Is this my time to enter

Looking back I see my loved ones;
Family I label friends;
Friends I label family
It has grown so difficult to touch them
I am forgetting how it was
Having lingered so long
Regressing in fits

Will I ever touch them again
When strong at this moment
I stand at the gate

On a cold and windy morning, said goodbye to all my friends. They were hanging 'round the corner. They were staying 'til the end.
- E.L.O. (song: The Stranger)

Novel: The Boy From The Basement

2010-09-17T14:59:00.002-04:00

Whoa. This is a very heavy emotional ride but we're perfectly safe in Susan Shaw's hands throughout. Frightening, haunting, joyful and funny, the story is very well-written and well-told, drawing you fully into the head of it's struggling hero and stripping bare the wires that connect people together, for better and for worse.

I read the first two pages of each of a bunch of 'teen' books, looking for potential reading group candidates. But this one, I could not put down until the end.

Duality

2010-09-09T23:06:00.002-04:00

My volunteer schedule happened to coincide with the first day of school on September 7th.

It's odd to see how seemingly fast my young friends have changed. Faded freckles. New shoes. Longer hair. And they seemed quieter; more mature than they'd seemed as of our last meeting in June. But then, the first day of school is perhaps simply a more sombre affair than the last day of school.

I must wonder how parents perceive such observations. What is it like to have your child constantly disappear on you and re-emerge as someone else? It sounds vaguely frightening.

I stopped in Thorold on the route home to spend an evening with Skeeter Willis, kicking off the Strat-o-Matic season with a pair of one-goal losses for the Ybor City Tabaqueros. On the up-side this technically makes us the statistically most likely team to acquire Sydney Crosby in the 2011 entry draft. Always a silver lining in our world of dual perspective.

Back at the place I've never thought of as home, it's late and the man some people refer to as my dad is sitting motionless in the dark out back. He's drunk naturally and everything stinks of whatever horrifically putrid chemical concoction forms cigarettes. My presence triggers the motion-sensor spotlights.

Rather than flee to my room this night, I linger. It weighs on me that our time is almost up. Soon our colossal failure of each other shall be official. Three loads of the truck some afternoon soon and I quietly slip out of his life or lack thereof.

"Nice night," I say.

"It's cool," he says. "The way you like it." And there it is. The one and only thing he knows about me. I owe him some explanation.

I wish neither to talk nor to leave him. I step out of the light and and look up for stars. It's as good a night as you can get for it around here. No clouds. No moon. Immediately I catch a shooting star.

"Meteorite," I say.

Venus sparkles fiercely, accompanied by just a few dozen pale companions to penetrate Hammertown's hefty film of light pollution.

Eventually I give in. "I'll be right back."

I grab my cigars and a couple Guinnesses and do what one does if you can't beat 'em.

At the patio table I clip, light and pour and study the stout's hypnotic cascade. I already know that I will not be emboldened. I will not coach or lecture. I will not reveal myself and have rare truth be thought a lie. Because it's pointless. Because he's confused by things outside his little shell and he's deeply unpleasant when confused.

"I want to do things but then I don't do them," he suddenly says.

This is new.

"Like what?"

"Like stop this." He holds up his cigarette. Quit smoking, he means. "Like pulling those weeds."

The poets would say it's the devil holding you back. Or God. Same thing, I refrain from saying. Nor do I say, Your brain is managed by a floating hierarchy. The agent in charge one moment is demoted the next, in response to a laughably redundant roster of survival instincts.

"I'm losing things," I say instead. "Bit by bit. Like the capacity to perceive which are weeds and which are plants. I see green stuff fenced in the garden and green stuff coming up between the flagstones. But which are the weeds and why? Weeds are the things that evade our control?"

"Weeds are the things we don't want," he says.

Speak for yourself.

We smoke and drink and talk intermittently. I dumb myself down to avoid confusion and unpleasantness and come off sounding absurd. Just when I'm sure he can't make one more visit to the fridge without falling down he says, "Time for bed, Charlie." The little ball of fur and teeth looks up at him from his basket lounger. I stand to leave.

"Thank you," he says.

I remain motionless a long time. Finally I say, "The reason I always stay in my room; why I don't join you out here, is that I can't stand the smell of cigarette smoke. I just thought you should know that."

He brushes his fingers through the air at me. "Go to bed," he says, which means, I know that already.

"Well something's lost and something's gained in living every day."
- Judy Collins (song: Both Sides Now)

Death

2010-08-11T00:18:00.004-04:00

Death.

Why do we mourn death when it is inevitable? Why do we treat it like a tragedy when dead is without doubt, the natural state of all things? Life, whether from a spiritual or scientific view is almost universally regarded as miraculous. And given the age of the world, life is as brief as it is miraculous. Nothing lives for long. Nothing.

From a selfish standpoint I think an other's death reminds us of our own mortality which is something we're programmed to ignore by the "great union" or the "matrix"; terms I like to use for that overwhelming system of forces acted upon us by the symmetrical ruling structures of society and instinct. And with regards to those departed special loved ones who touch our lives in meaningful ways, we mourn our own loss of something we cherished and foolishly counted on; their magic touch.

But for those not-so-special people who go through life transparently selfish, sadly the larger contingent I suspect: I think we don't so much mourn their death as we mourn their official failure to ever live. We mourn the expiry of their last chance to do something with their life. I suspect that many of those who die slowly and with mind intact, experience toward the end a profound sense of failure and devastating regret over this.

Poets of old talk about the living death and this has resonated with me for a long time. Drawing breath; existing, is not the same as "living" in the poetic language.

To "work our job and collect our pay and glide down the highway" in the slightly-paraphrased words of Paul Simon is not in itself to live. Collecting possessions and coveting them is not to live, nor is building and coveting our reputations; something a vast majority of all our energies and resources are dedicated to daily, directly or indirectly whether we realize it or not. To vegetate in front of the television set, that most vacuous sedative; false art for the dull masses - that is not to live. Pursuing sex is not to live. Can you really live and still participate in some of these things? Of course. Though it depends upon the manner in which you participate; to what degree you make it an exploration.

Paul Simon says we're all slip-sliding away. The poets say we are "forever hurled into the pit." Certain Hindu-based offerings suggest that the dull masses are just animals and I perceive the same. Animals have no, or very very little consciousness, say neurologists. They are utterly slave to instincts. And though people need not be slave to instincts, we mostly are. Consciousness is a very new evolution on the grand scale of things - and as early evolutionary stages of any manner tend to go - consciousness is tragically ineffective in this infantile state. Consciousness absorbs a horribly small range of our actual experience. Just enough to confuse the holy crap out of us. Just enough that we invent such inept concepts as belief, and to then believe in the most self-evidently preposterous of ideas. It is just evolved enough that we perceive our own existence but in a terribly flawed way. Though consciousness seems our only link to perception of self, we can only see the product of our self as through the "eye of the other"; that image we seem to portray through our own manipulation of others' perception of our self - which does not actually exist because we really only conceive of our intentions while others only see our outward results. So we are doubly removed from reality. The self we see is an isolated phantom. Does that sound vaguely horrifying? I can tell you it is starkly horrifying when you first truly grasp it. But that's okay. You don't believe me right now because your instincts won't let you.

Yuck. I've taken us on a gloomy tangent, haven't I? If by some miracle you haven't completely dismissed all the above because it's too depressing to contemplate and you are actually finding some usefulness or consolidation in these understandings - please do not despair. There is a wonderful upside to all of this and I will treat it very briefly because the title up there says "death" and I've fallen off topic.

The matrix invites entitlement. There is much legitimate joy in stock for you when you defeat that entitlement and come to objectively appreciate the miracle of your own existence. And then again when you come to appreciate the power of the evolution of consciousness and it's tremendous rewards and tremendous accessibility. For evolution truly happens in individuals. It is only the very slow pattern of evolution that scientists measure and refer to as simply "evolution." As an individual you have the power to evolve your consciousness immensely if you're prepared to be courageous and to do the work. Why is it so accessible? Because mutation of bodily things require a reproductive generation per stage while your brain is literally re-wired with every thought, perception and observation!

To practice at evolving your consciousness is to separate yourself from the animals in the poetic view. I don't know how many ways there are to make this happen but I know how it works for me and for some others before me. It is through the arts. The genuine arts. Reading and writing. Absorbing music and composing it. It's in cinema and art galleries. It is in creation and imagination. It is in the blank page. It is in solitude. These pursuits enable understanding. They enable true learning. There is a fearsome hurdle along this path unfortunately but it's the only path I know so far. I'll talk about the hurdle another time. These pursuits above; it is in them that we live, in truth that we live, in loving kindness, in charity, in honest conversation, in the pursuit to improve our lives and that of others. We live through the products of consciousness because consciousness is the only thing separating us from the animals. And it is where harmony is conceived.

Do you grasp what I mean about living and living death in the poetic language?

I do not mourn death or the dying. I really don't. I only mourn the failure of breathing people to wake up and really live.

If my failure to mouth the typical words at times of bereavement puts you off, it is not that I am heartless. At funerals I am always in tears or just on the verge; just not for the presumed reasons.

Back to consciousness for just a moment. The scary question on my mind is this: In what direction is consciousness - as a pattern of evolution - currently evolving? Forward toward harmony (and joy and freedom) or backward toward chaos? Societal structures are born of instinct, arts from the consciousness. Which side is winning? Which brand of humans are breeding like rabbits? Evolution implies natural selection through random mutation; a virtual process of the underlying domination instinct which spawns all other instincts. The hitch: The evolved consciousness does not support the domination parent-instinct. In other words - is this as good as it's going to get for us? I hope not. Because as one who's discovered a bit late in life that kids are actually decent people after all - rather lovable in fact - I'd really like to see them craft a better community for themselves out of the rather dumb one we've provided.

Welland Ontario

2010-07-22T22:19:00.009-04:00

I took my time driving down to Welland today, accompanied by a live acoustic Jackson Browne CD full of Browne's typical little-us-under-a-big-sky kind of songs.

Welland looked, to me, as it always does; smaller than it really is, with small houses (though more than big enough).

In the little school with little classrooms and little chairs, in the little library, I catalogued books. Big books. With big pictures; windows into worlds as vivid, rich and imaginary as our own, but each one different. At 3 the cleaning staff departed and left me in perfect quiet solitude.

I finished the cataloguing project but I will return one more day over the summer for more mundane cataloguing maintenance. There are older books requiring attention of various types.

I adore this little library and this "little" town. I sense a good-hearted simplicity here; an air of guilelessness with just a hint of melancholy. All stemming from highly subjective personal interpretation of course. My own recollections of grade-school experience are a blend of sweet and solemn.

I look forward to September; to the return of the staff - a most warm, sincere and dedicated crew. And of course it will be excellent to see again the returning grade-seven-come-eights who I worked with last year. This time around they will have a superior experience given my own learning from last year. The coming year will feature a writing group and I'm cooking up some very special surprises for them!

Leaving town I left the stereo off before hitting the highway because the truck is just developing an exhaust leak so if I must subject the locals to its grumbles, the least I can do is subject myself as well. I accelerated slowly out of each turn; zig-zagging through the neighborhood. Every street is a shelf; every house a collection of stories. People sit on porches, some of them in groups, smiling and talking; some of them alone and still-faced. To those I almost have the urge to wave.

Any town we spend some time in develops a personality it seems, and this one suits me verily. But I maintain this is mostly illusion; subjective experience. In the end every town is built of the very same components; streets and bricks and pipes and wires and human beings of every possible ilk.

It would be nice to move to Welland but in reality Grimsby and St. Catharines are more probable. Welland will likely remain a very nice place to visit.

Cause Number One and the Number One Cause

2010-07-03T23:56:00.003-04:00

Once upon a time there occurred an event;
A singularity; the biggest bang for the buck
Or the snap of fingers if you prefer, of a great creator;
For it all works out the very same!

And this event would be Cause #1
For billions of billions of billions of billions
Of effects
Over billions of years;
Every effect born of millions of causes combined;
Every effect also a cause
For billions of billions more effects;
Causes and effects uncountable.
Every element of reality an effect-cause;
Every one of them natural;
Every one inevitable;
Every one of them owing to Cause #1 at its root.
Every one connected.

Effect-causes spelled unstoppable change.
Effect-causes organized a sea of chaos
Into sets and subsets; formatted a universe
Made of super clusters
Made of clusters
Made of galaxies
Made of systems
Made of spheres
Made of elements
Made of molecules
Made of atoms.

A world of binding attractions great and small
Revolving; everything revolving,
Expanding, contracting.
Dust to dust.
Cause and effect.

Somewhere a sphere
Bearing critical ratio of elements,
A phenomenal collision of molecules,
At a critical distance from a vast hot central sphere,
Through inevitable cause and effect,
Became a blue and white place.

And there it happened.
A miracle of life
At the meeting of layers;
Rock and air,
Pooling water.
A splitting cell.
Cause and effect.

Cellular organization.
Random mutation.
A cause-effect process of natural selection.
A diversity of species; lives of kind.
DNA and sub-code.

Survival instinct knowing no bounds.
Those with domination instinct the great winners,
Those without it, dead, strangled, swallowed.
Survival of the vicious; the parasitic.
Vines creeping; Roots warring,
Fish eating fish; bugs eating bugs,
Herbivores; Carnivores; Dog eat dog.
Viruses and bacteria eating from within.
Thus life: The process of ultimate thievery.
Cause and effect.

Evolution.
Mammals; Brain cells; Intelligence.
Automatons with limited awareness.
Instinctive response.
Cause and effect.

Evolution.
These beasts emerging;
Bipedal; clever.
With greater awareness,
Though still far from complete;
Still so very far.
Perceiving in their limited awareness
That their limited awareness
Is all there is; some full awareness;
Some ultimate evolution or design.

They’re the greatest pretenders.
The great labelers,
Grouping and labeling everything;
The fantasy of generalization making everything seem easy;
The reality of uniqueness dismissed.
Cooperation; strength in numbers;
Ghastly overwhelming strength in numbers!
Victory through cooperation.
Dominance; the ultimate prize
For their kind, they label human.

And then what?
In the face of victory,
Privileged exclusion from the realities
Of the domination quest;
Exclusion from the hunt;
Exclusion from the fight and the flight;
Food and shelter handed down.
The paradox of isolation.
What oh what then does survival mean?
The forces born of instincts need to know!

Instincts turning inward.
Cause and effect.
Individual survival.
Survival within the society.
Ledgers of contribution;
Money the new survival;
Food and shelter a privilege.
Man eat man.

The paradox of cooperation/competition;
However to do both?
Instinctive forces perverting.
Cause and effect.
Necessary duplicity.
Puppets born of reputation and ego;
Pure charade.

The rise of the matrix;
The superstructures that overwhelm
And tell them what things to pretend.
Labels labels labels!
Tribes tribes tribes!
Nations,
Corporations,
Races,
Ideologies,
Religions;
Arbitrary categories
Pretended to be real,
Make everyone a friend;
Make everyone an enemy.

Such pure fantasy can only be pretended
When the reality of uniqueness is dismissed.
Oh the confusion;
Now to navigate?
The domination instincts still thrive,
Looking for victims.
They label them sins,
Pretend the sins are not to thank for their existence,
Pretend the sins do not dominate their living moments,
They ascribe them to a scapegoat and call him the Devil.
They teach this to their children and let the children
Suffer, ever suffer for they each think they are each the devil.
The survival instincts have it covered.
Fight to disallow such crippling despair
Duplicity solves all.
Cause and effect.

Confine it to the greater brain;
The non-awareness.
But oh the self-loathing!
They must ignore those terrifying glimpses;
Suppress the confusion.
For they must navigate the matrix
One way or another
And win their bread;
Oh but not just bread,
But win their almighty material trophies,
For survival instinct knows no mercy;
Only domination.

The structures all demand from them
The appearance of subscription to the rules
And hidden contrariety,
Because in the matrix angels are trodden on
And cheaters prosper.

The dual duplicities:
The lies they tell on purpose
And the lies of the sub-awareness
Tragically mistaken for golden truth.
They think it a matrix of lies and truth,
This matrix of lies and more lies.
Cause and effect.
Puppets tricking puppets.
The matrix weaving layers and layers of illusion
So tightly woven, the pinpricks of truth
Sparkle so rarely just as the tiny volume of light
Out of all stars in the universe
To penetrate a smoggy Toronto night sky.
When finally the young have aged;
Developed sufficient senses,
It is too late; the matrix has snatched them
Through the TV’s and the institutions
And the things you will not hear said;
The endless bullshit eaten and eaten;
The investment in illusions signed and sealed.
Cause and effect.
There’s no turning back.

But wait, there is a second miracle!
Not intelligence but the boon of it;
Imagination! Creativity!
The regard for unvarnished truth.
The capacity to evolve beyond the domination instinct
Simply because they dreamed of it!

Such a phenomenal departure from the nature of life.
A celebration of that idea called love;
That Bordeaux blend of attractions and addictions
Just another label,
But so useful when applied:
Loving kindness; generosity; harmony.

They each participate to some degree; great or small
In living without harming and for that
Every human is beautiful; Hear this, you human!
For that, you are beautiful in this universe!
So fascinating, this evolution, to some.
Some of them scientists; some of them poets, musicians, artists,
Those who engage in true learning; an act of solitude,
Some are the sufferers; forced to bear reality,
Some of them the ancient champions
Of beautifully intentioned religions
Before the inevitable corruptions.
Cause and effect.

They are those who escape the unmerciful web
Of the matrix’ mighty structures
Through rare unexpected circumstance;
Rare causes; rare effects.
Those who embrace the reality of cause and effect,
The reality of uniqueness,
The reality of nature; of inevitability,
The reality that all of one’s frustration is one’s own cause;
All hate, all stress, all fear, all rage,
All intolerance;
All of it the result of one’s own flawed expectations
And flawed perceptions;
The result of all the blaming when in truth
There is no one to blame but the blamer.

For those who fully escape the matrix
There is no confusion but only peace,
No illusion but only freedom,
No sadness but only joy,
No rage but only love; real love;
Not addictive, not of lust,
Not directional but all-directional;
The love that is a state of being;
So awesome; so shockingly euphoric
It is at first devastating
In all but the smallest doses.

And above all there is desire for harmony;
That everyone would give care for all others
And mercy for the less evolved,
Not in the hopes that what goes around comes around
But damn it, for the sheer joy of it!
For that is the ultimate destiny.
All evidence points there; scripture; poetry; science.
Cause and effect.

But where is the road map to that complete evolution;
That ultimate humanity for all?
This imperfect author; flawed poet does not know.
This is the quest; the number one cause.
Flawed versions are written here and there
In the works of poets long dead or just,
In the temples, mosques and churches
So vulgarly and inexpertly taught
By the pawns of old cold organizations.
But while poets survive on the fringe of welfare society
Outside the matrix but privy to its comforts,
Not with false nobility!
Knowing they are cheaters!
But looking to be useful,
Looking to nurture harmony,
Looking for the rare candidate for escape; the next Neo,
They leave their calling cards;
Their hints in these places
Because if just one more can be freed,
By god, It’s all worth it.

Biography: Marley and Me

2010-06-07T01:57:00.004-04:00

(2005, John Grogan)

The biography of a simple man who clearly loves his dog and presumably his wife and kids too, is told clearly and without subtlety or style. It abounds with very common relatable perspectives and some decent moments of useful insight.

We had to know how it was going to end but that didn't sway the tears from falling. So familiar is that final drama to myself and a multitude of other dog lovers.

I thought much of Blue, my own special companion who departed a few years ago and of a dear friend who lost his canine pal, Simon, just days ago at too early an age. I read the last few chapters with Blue's old training collar wrapped around my hand and now find myself unwilling to let it go. I think I shall have to sneak it into my wardrobe somehow.

The book has been edited into different versions including teen and adult. Definitely go with the mature version.

Novel: Little Brother

2010-05-31T00:43:00.005-04:00

(2008) Cory Doctorow

The early techno-babble load is a bit of a chore to wade through for those who aren't so techno-curious but the reward is worth it. The back half is a hell-raising blood-boiling roller coaster ride with a distinct and relevant cautionary message.

The boys reading group chose this piece of fiction. None are old enough to remember 9/11 yet they found this very similar material compelling.

To what degree should a government be entitled to restrict freedom and liberty in the supposed interest of protecting said freedom and liberty - or the illusion thereof - from that spectre we call terrorism?

Says the self-sacrificing hero, seventeen year-old Marcus: A democratic government is empowered to serve the interests of its peoples and when it fails to do so - it is the peoples' right to dismantle it, according to the Declaration of Independence.

Well done, Doc.

Song: Working Town

2010-05-30T22:38:00.005-04:00

I'll put a little video (music-slide-show) together soon for this song. But for now:

I'm underground in a working town

Seeds of wonder all around

But every hand and every sound

Is holding them down

They're asking me what I want to be

But they don't really want the truth

I don't want to be anything

I just want to do

(instr.)

They're asking me where I'm gonna go

Where am I gonna live

But living's not about a place to own

It's what do you give

Working town

It's a working town

It's smokin' towers in the sky

Working town

It's a working town

Smoke and mirrors, never asking why

They're asking me what I'm gonna do

What kind of wage am I gonna earn

But there's no gold in what you make

It's what do you learn

Working town
It's a working town
It's smokin' towers in the sky
Working town
It's a working town
Smoke and mirrors, never asking why

(instr.)

Working town

It's a working town

Smoke and towers in the sky

Working town

It's a working town

Smoke and mirrors, never asking,

Never asking why

Amazing Kids

2010-05-26T21:06:00.000-04:00

When I was young I always wanted to be around older kids. The ultimate experience for me was when older cousins would visit and let me hang out with them.

As a young adult I wanted adult things and adult pursuits. I wanted sex and booze and sophisticated conversation. And aside from that I wanted peace and quiet. I never wanted to be in the company of children. Ever. They were noisy and unpredictable and beyond my comprehension. I was always sure I'd never want kids of my own.

Forty-one years into this experiment called life, I had a conversation with an excellent friend who happens to be a very conscientious and free-thinking educator about my desire to re-enter the volunteer community but working with people with special needs.

Super-condensed version of conversation:

"We have kids with special needs in the schools. Come volunteer with us."

"No," says I. "I don't get on well with kids." Okay, so I'd actually never once made any effort to, but it was a safe assumption.

"You like books."

"I love books."

"So you could start out by volunteering in the library, cataloguing our great collection of new books."

"I couldn't do that. It sounds like too much fun. I wouldn't feel like a proper volunteer."

"But you could see how you feel being in a school environment and find out if you might be comfortable working with kids." He then proceeded to tell me stories about some of his former students with special needs which broke my heart in about eight places.

"Okay. Let's do it."

The great cataloguing project took up close to half the school year. The kids and I got along fabulously. I couldn't believe how many of them loved books. That shared love of literature finally bridged the gap between me and youngsters. Then it was time to make the move to the special needs community. And here my principal friend played the trump card.

"You have no experience working with special needs kids. It's not easy. Why don't you run a reading group for advanced readers instead. We don't have the library material nor curriculum to support them."

And once again: "I couldn't do that. It sounds like too much fun. I wouldn't feel like a proper volunteer."

"It's a much needed service and it would be right up your alley."

"Okay. Let's do it."

Well.

The experience has been - the bomb.

I'm running three groups which takes up the entire school day once a week. I work with eleven young people; seven girls, four boys, aged 12-14 I guess; grades seven and eight but for one grade sixer who is in a special situation. They're all amazing. Bright. Curious. Sincere.

They're seriously more intelligent than half the adults I know, perhaps to some degree because they simply haven't collected as much detrimental false learning as adults have. They've collected less fears than adults. They've constructed less walls that ostensibly guide people along paths but really serve to block out possibilities in their lives. They're not clinging to societal investments that shut down realms of perception. They're open.

Among them are musicians and singer-songwriters! Some are visual artists, sound-collage artists, photographers and at least one junior videographer! And of course writers and poets. They have socially conscious, enlightened voices that I never heard from my peers when I was that age, at least that I remember.

While ostensibly helping them learn to get more out of their reading and to increase their love of reading, my not-very-hidden hidden agenda is to turn them all into permanent writers and creators. Because the only path I know of thus far to find real joy, peace and harmony in life starts with the contemplation of the blank page and so it is my duty - and joy - in life to propagate the creative and poetic lifestyles.

They still have the possibility of joy and harmony for their futures but of course high school and college will exercise their massive powers to destroy all that, and that knowledge is a needle in my heart because I really do love them. I'd like to take them all home and be their dad and protector but I'm guessing they already have parents who probably would rather keep them! Oh well.

I'm already mourning the approaching closure of the school year and the loss of participation of the five eighth-graders. I hope we'll stay in touch somehow. I hope all the younger ones will return next year.

So what is the deal here? Are these the eleven most amazing kids in the world or are all kids amazing and I'm just the last dull idiot to figure that out?

FWG

Oneness

2010-05-24T15:53:00.006-04:00

From time to time I read about the concept of oneness - most prominently in novel Siddhartha and in the Gita. I don't connect to the idea, either because I'm not clear what they mean about oneness or else it's something I just haven't thus far experienced.

It always comes up in a context where everything surrounding it rings familiar to me but just what are they trying to say about oneness?

I know what it's like to contemplate (and be moved to peacefulness by) connectedness; how every single element and action in the history of the world is inevitably and unarguably connected through the omnipotence and omnipresence of causality - something every human reliably witnesses - what? - a million times a day? Why this is pristinely obvious to some people while other brains apparently lack the functionality for this to register is a matter of some dismay. But I digress.

I know what it's like to feel bonded to every sentient creature on the planet by a state of lovingness (a legitimate word, yes); a state of love that is so overwhelming one must pull onto the shoulder of the road to recover because it is so powerful. It seizes like I imagine a heart attack would and it incapacitates. I imagine that the experience becomes more tolerable with practice.

I know what it's like to fully discover the horror of one's own duplicity; that there really is a devil lurking within us, but finally then to discover that no, we are really the angel lurking within the devil, waiting to fulfil the tide of human evolution which proposes a full and proper mutiny; a unity of consciousness and non-consciousness; of angel and devil; where we, currently the conscious angels, finally inherit the drivers' seat.

And I know what it is to feel drowned in in the eternal, to sense that the dust that is mistaken for "me" has been so for others before me and will be again for others still, when the illusion of me is gone.

Causal connectedness. Global lovingness. Unity of mind. The eternal. Do I know oneness? Or is there something else?

"You'll be in me and I'll be in you together in eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me."
- Bruce Cockburn

Purple and Green

2010-05-22T08:21:00.002-04:00

Very late last night I met a curious young man in purple hoodie and green shoes. I was only helping search for a lost dog. He was lost too. Boy was he ever.

He was wildly drunk and wildly friendly. I took him to his home but his bigger twin brother was there, waiting to beat him up. So we left again.

We talked. He cried. I held him. I'm no saint. I had to fight selfish instincts. He's only seventeen. I held him and nothing more, until it was safe for him to sneak back in and go to bed.

I never told him that I live nearby, nor gave him any manner in which to contact me. I would have liked to remain a source of support; a role-model even. But I don't know that I can trust myself. There will be no end of men who will take advantage of him but I will not be one of them. I'm no saint but I'm decent enough.

The dog too, got home safe. I went to the harbour and watched the sun come up and worked through some feelings and twiddled with the guitar. Thought about writing a song about purple hoodies and green shoes and then didn't. I'm no saint. But I'm decent enough.

This blog

2010-05-21T20:43:00.000-04:00

So I did this blog re-launch thing and then proceeded to ignore it.

Given it's been stripped of comedy and altogether latent of late, it's likely hosting very few visitors - which is fine. It's probably a good time to finally get its new gears turning while no one is around scratching their heads.

In essence its purpose remains the same: To act as a diary and to give life to the writable explorations that don't fit into current writing projects. The difference is that I won't be moved by pressure to be entertaining. In other words - by pressure to be popular.

Under the new rules I have had much blogworthy thoughts daily but I've been thinking them unappealing to the established audience. Not a very useful thought. I'm now keeping in mind the future audience: chiefly ME. And those who will care to stay in touch once I go mobile. I'm planning to move to the St. Catharines/Welland area and I'm confident that will be my last stable residence before the road becomes home.

So there.

Onward! (as Doc Lock would say.)

Update

2010-05-01T10:25:00.000-04:00

Regarding the suicide attempt and the distraught friend: I'm delighted to report that the injured party is recovering from multiple injuries, having graduated from Intensive care to a ward and that the boys are still friends and visiting every other day. Hurdles remain but the biggest have been cleared.

Love is not something to fear

2010-04-09T08:42:00.005-04:00

I was on duty last night around 4 AM when the police called. "We have a frantic mother trying to reach her son at the residence. Can you look up his room number for us?"

"At the residence? No. But I can transfer you to the receptionist there." And I did so.

Soon after, I got the call from the residence receptionist. "The police are here. They're looking for a student."

"Why?"

After a short pause: "Self-harm."

We sent a guard over to the residence and while she and the police were looking for the student, the boy was elsewhere. He had made one phone call to say only, "I love you, mom." and now he was speeding his car through a low brick wall to plunge over the lip of the escarpment.

Today his injuries were downgraded from life-threatening to non-life-threatening.

What I loved about the patrol guard position was my ability to interact with people who were in bad circumstances and to make a positive difference in their lives; from the little things like helping them get to their exam on time to the bigger things, like first-aid situations; or like the time I helped two former lovers gain perspective and settle peaceably after a strained break-up led to stalking charges. I accepted the promotion to sergeant in order to get more free time to write on the job - because writing is my best way to potentially help people. Right?

So I was enjoying my free time in the control room while other guards were present at the pub earlier that night, as a tiff broke out between friends. These other guards intervened, learned the nature of the quarrel, and sent them on their way to resolve it on their own.

A friend had admitted the feelings in his heart, you see, and the other friend, to which the feelings were directed, did not respond in kind, but with hostility instead. It might surprise you: which of these two friends got the notion to end his life. All while I was not present; no longer available to seek to make a difference through personal connection.

Now one boy is a mess from the waist down and the state of his mind remains to be seen.

The other, mentally, is a wreck. He blames himself. And he's terrified that his dear friend will not wish to see him upon emergence from the Intensive Care Unit; perhaps ever again.

Love is not something to fear. However did we start thinking it can be? That is just one simple piece of advice out of a great many that I would offer were I not handcuffed by policy from interfering. My heart aches for them both and for the mother. I'm deeply compelled to act. So many perspectives I could share. I know how instincts cage the mind in these circumstances, enslaving it to one's fears, stripping one's field of vision.

He lived. He lived!

And now there is opportunity - for many kinds of healing and many kinds of learning and for new appreciation of the miracle of life and the miracle of love. Because critical life events breed new perspectives, new intelligence, new capacities. Sometimes people just need a gentle nudge or two from someone who cares and who understands some things.

And I don't think I give a damn about policy.

Novel: Siddhartha

2010-04-03T04:16:00.003-04:00

(1922, Hermann Hesse)

Two different people who were relative strangers to me at the time, immediately recommended this book to me upon hearing from me a summary of my current "poetic life journey." The telling of my journey in each of these cases, was told rather effectively by the way; something much more difficult to achieve when speaking to my old friends and family; a phenomena which happens to be addressed around the climax of the novel, by the way.

Almost immediately I began to connect thoroughly to the Siddhartha character. Every encounter, every perception, every reaction to his experiences almost precisely mirrors my own. Add to that comforting symmetry the simple, gentle, almost lyrical prose and this reading experience is by far the deepest, most endearing of any I've had.

But the character and I did not go through our mirrored experiences in the same order and as we finally crossed paths - that is - the moment in the book when Siddhartha had gathered the same set of perceptions that I currently hold - we were moving in different directions. Not that this matters much. I read the remainder with rapt attention of course, wondering whether Hesse was about to reveal my future to me.

What I read then, through to the end, contained more perceptions that Siddhartha gathered in his lifelong pursuit of enlightenment, harmony and unity. I could not have predicted the conclusion. He finds subtle error in some of his previous positions; positions that I still currently hold, and a key component of his final core enveloping understanding; that which makes him at par with Buddha, according to Hesse, is one that I would have much trouble consolidating with my own understandings because the beauty of my own understandings as they currently sit, at least so far as all my critical auditing so far reveals, is that they all support each other and are all in symmetry with the basic poetic origins of the main religions (as I perceive them), in symmetry with the sciences as far as I understand them, in symmetry with the purest application of logic, and in symmetry with all honest observation through our five senses.

But this one core component upon which Siddhartha's final answers depend upon - does not conform with honest observation of the five senses. Not mine, anyway, and doubtfully anyone else I know. Though it does conform with some theoretical scientific testimony concerning the nature of space and time - as far as I grasp it.

But no matter. The core idea which initially sent both Siddhartha and I on our respective unbeaten paths was our perception that knowledge and wisdom can not be taught but must be experienced. And so I put this dear book aside and despite the deep deep trust I have for it, I leave its climactic testimony as testimony and I go on with experiencing and learning, but now with a little more strength and motivation; a little more validation; a little more confidence that I am not alone in my place in life.

Though the book has left me breathing a little shallow, my eyes a little watery, I can't say if I recommend it to anyone I know. Those who have been through the things I have been through - you would want to read this, undoubtedly. And I know you're out there somewhere. But sadly, we have not met.

Book: Ella Minnow Pea

2010-03-21T12:33:00.003-04:00

This book clearly demonstrates that Mark Dunn has an incredible knack for words and probably marks his first and last thin excuse to utilize that knack so indulgently.

This book was very powerful in that it had the power to make me forever $18 poorer - to my lasting regret.

The characters are dimensionless and speak with much the same voice. Good laugh at the end. A quick read but still too long for the mediocre punchline.

A Thousand Loves

2010-02-27T17:04:00.001-05:00

I posted this poem here a long time ago, then a year ago I turned it into a song. The quality is poor. You'll have to crank the volume.

Julie, Julia, Me and You

2010-02-23T23:48:00.005-05:00

The writing life is a constant bout of amnesia. Each time I return to it after too long an absence I am shocked to discover how joyful it is; how rewarding.

How is it that I keep forgetting how integral writing is to my vitality? Each time the habit derails upon collision with a busy schedule or laziness or a pursuit of some addiction (but really, always some combination of those things), how quickly I forget that writing is my truest companion. Then we're reunited finally and yet again the blank page surprises me, revealing that only here upon this endless white field am I - at home.

And just as this certain knowledge is repeatedly stolen from my wretched consciousness, so is this piece: That the thoughts which spur me to write at any given time are never the meat of the story but only the doorway. Always as I struggle to convert those thoughts to meaningful words, so the real questions emerge and the real ideas follow.

These twin crimes constantly dull the urge to write and I dare not suggest their origin - because I am not a poet of enough merit to slander those ancients before me by denouncing the beast or the pit, nor am I scientist enough to test the tale of genetic sub-code; of a dedication to species, not self, lying at the heart of the master non-consciousness. As I strive to acquire discipline, my only weapon against that ruling force (as mirrored in the messages of poets and Buddhists), I go against the interests of speciesism; I pervert our ruthless core programming.

Yet I sense with almost certainty that both claims, poetic and scientific, are versions of the same truth but written in different languages.

I look at my neighbors and they show me no indication of awareness of this harsh reality. They seem only to circle this great monopoly board that we dare label life and seem only to see through the eyes of their token. They seem to skitter in a constant panic on the surface of life, like those squat little waterbugs. Do they ever stop and peer below?

You have to slow down to see beneath things. But that is what art is all about, isn't it? Literature, music, theatre, film and the visual arts. They are reflection. They are components of real life but rearranged and concentrated. In them we seek to understand the nature of humanity by looking at our communal selves through other perspectives.

Of course there is an endless swarm of "false art." The bulk of action movie material for instance, which is fast and shallow and appeases the dedicated surface-skimmers by speeding them faster and faster along the surface. "What happens next!" is the constant question, never "What is really happening?." And the answer is bullets and fast cars. Things that appease the base instincts but at least let you explore them in the safety of the cinema; not on the streets.

But for those occasions when we bear a little courage; a little bit of respect for our innate complexity of mind, there is the literary fiction and its counterparts in film and other mediums, there is that patient contemplation; that exploration of fragile human diverseness. Here our empathy is awakened and we become someone else for a while and we laugh with them and we hurt for them and we feel connected and we get just a little closer to understanding ourselves and our kind; an infinitely greater adventure, I suggest, than any bank heist.

I just watched Julie and Julia, a true-ish film about a couple of writers with a passion for food (How could I possibly relate?). I quite liked it. Meryl Streep's performance was of Oscar quality in my humble opinion and Amy Adams was perfectly cast. I shed a couple tears in places where no man should be expected to and not because anyone got cancer or anything, but because the human spirit is miraculous and fragile and because it is at once inspiring and pitiable to watch - nay feel - someone clinging to their dreams.

Empathy. I feel it is at the core of our imagination, our creativity, our love. our connectedness. It is the hinge upon which the human being's unique evolution swings. I am in stunned awe of it.

Terry Anne (You'll need to crank the volume!)

2010-01-29T15:52:00.003-05:00

This is one of the earliest songs I wrote - just a couple months after I started learning the guitar. Today I'm learning how to make videos.

If it sounds like I'm playing a three-stringed banjo that's because my equipment sucks as much as my skills! But all things take time - and money - to improve.

Can't wait for the next bash?

2010-01-11T01:13:00.005-05:00

Interesting the dominant recreation of our society; a sport really. This endless tournament where the prize is reputation. Points are scored by claiming opinions; by seeming knowledgeable. The more opinions the better and the less thought-out they are, the better - for they are established quicker thus we collect more. More and more nuggets of fool's gold which we treat as real gold, for fool's gold is just as valuable when the buyer doesn't know the difference.

But oh, how much quicker; how easier it is to dismiss those people and things which we yet have no fondness for, then to have to explain why you are fond of those which you are - so dominant are the instinctual criteria of which our consciousness is not fully informed.

So why give anything a second chance? With such a massive wealth of humans and their endeavors available to explore in this troublesomely uninhibited global marketplace, why waste more than a minute on any one thing? So much swifter to write stuff off when the first possible connection fails. Throw it on the scoreboard. Score another point. Appear to climb the ladder by throwing down those around you.

On the balance: A sea of negativity. Everyone's a jerk for one reason; everyone a bastard for another. Every book, film and song and every creator sucks for one lonely little reason or another.

"I hate Blues...", I heard today.

Ah, but you've never witnessed the raw, honest, solid rhythyms of the Madd Scientists singing themselves hoarse for love; not money, have you? And what else haven't you heard?

"Oh, I can't stand R&B," says he who's never heard the creative explorations and fuzions of the open-hearted "The Show" while they still believed in their dreams. And what else has he not heard?

"...that Newfie kitchen fiddle music..."

But what about Quagmyre? That delicate frenzy of fiddle precision, jumping and popping with more electricity than a lightning storm. Fit that into your kitchen with a hundred more East coast bands you've never heard.

Conversations not mired in pointless negativity are the exception and so rare. Well, I've long been painfully bored with the game. It's far too easy. As interesting and challenging as Tic-Tac-Toe. Whoever you are: It's long past time I confess: I do not give a damn what things you don't like. Why won't you tell me what you like instead?

Why won't you tell me about the song that makes you have to get up and dance despite your usual self-consciousness? How about the songs you can't help but sing in the shower? What music was on the radio when you lost your cherry in the back-seat of a car and how do you feel when you hear it now? What song was playing at your wedding? What band's music do you get lost in when you listen by headphones in the dark with a joint or a six-pack? What songs remind you of you; remind you of who you used to be; remind you of who you once wanted to be?

What songs make you cry?

How about we try to cut back on the bullshit, and I mean bullshit in its most primary meanings; claims both counterfeit and trivial. Why don't we lose the bullshit and share a little more life instead? And be a little more alive?

"The only way to win is not to play."
- Joshua (Film: Wargames)
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To all who wished me a great weekend:

2009-11-16T20:36:00.005-05:00

Wasn't going to touch the blog during November Nanowrimo but this is my only form of diary and I must record the following!

Saturday I spent the entire day with another fine cousin: Renaissance Kid, his girlfriend and their buddies. Renaissance Kid shares a house with five other university students, two budgies, six chickens and three quail.

We built a new quail coop. Seems a hungry skunk got in to the last one and cut the home's quail contingent in half. Now the survivors have a pretty significant upgrade. I was on the door committee and sawed the wood for the door and door frame. Also helped out a little with the trench refillage, a little chicken wire stapling and the munching of apple walnut muffins and very leafy mustardy gai choy.

I was served two outragously delicious vegan meals, engaged in several useful discussions with very kind humanitarian and environmentally conscious kids and played a wildy funny game they call telephone pictionary. Can't remember the last time I laughed so hard.

Sunday I met with my excellent Nano friends, pumped out a few thousand words for the Eye of Atchooah piece and had a nice visit from the Illicit Sweetheart. It had been a while. We talked about the future, acknowledged that our paths lie in different directions, and it was all comfortable; all good.

So to all those who on Friday wished me a great weekend... Done!
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A new friend. New strength.

2009-10-22T03:48:00.006-04:00

I spent this past Sunday with my cousin, World Citizen, on the eve of his 30th birthday. I had not seen him in many years; ten perhaps. He was probably between missions to Nepal and Ecuador at the time. This spring he moved to Toronto after a long stint in India, home of an experiential environmental education centre of which he remains "the impetus" and a central stakeholder.

He spoke of challenges, of opposition, of earthquakes and masked gunmen and the difficult internal reconciliation when the offering of love evokes a response of hate.

He spoke of activism and a plan under which every motorist in the world might trade in their cars for investment into the environment and the future.

He mentioned that he too, writes, and like an ass, I never got around to asking him about the nature of his writing, and now I'm dying to know.

He spoke of meditation and how it ceased to be a prison and became the greatest ever experience of self-discovery. Traditional meditation, that is; not simply the solitary ardent contemplation which I have made an indulgent habit of labelling meditation.

He spoke of his humble introduction to international charity when the cutest girl in his high school raised her hand to volunteer and his own hand couldn't help but follow.

He spoke of time management and in an off-hand way, as if saying shave or pick up mail he listed among his daily agenda items: "beneficence."

He spoke of that yearning for pilgrimage common to many of us.

He spoke of seeing that which he was not, so to glimpse of that which he is.

He spoke in a voice quiet and firm; one softened, I perceive, by confidence, integrity and - I dare say - love. Love as a state of being, that is.

As we watched the departing sun turn the trees on the too-close horizon into black lacy silhouettes, he spoke of the city and the omnipresent trade of absurdities between its' peoples and he mourned his separation from those natural landscapes he'd made home, and the logistical barriers that isolate his dreams and goals from one another; a dilemma that I, and many, know well.

And concerning his previous home; a place to which I must decide if I will journey, he gave me solid advice; concise, direct and very insightful - not just in terms of his knowledge but in terms of understanding the root of my inquiries.

I do not state this lightly: I perceived our long conversation as being one of perfect honesty and openness and trust; an experience shatteringly rare.

Without a doubt the specifics of his priorities and mine currently differ, but so far seem entirely compatible. I sense we may each have found a valuable associate. From my perspective, he is easy to trust and put faith in, because in terms of promoting harmony, he has accomplished more than I might ever - and all prior to an age at which I was still a dull idiot, consumed within my own greed, lust and reputation, and a host of petty dramas.

I look forward to making my self of use to his endeavors. I look forward to talking to him again soon. There is still so much to discuss.
.

My Interview

2009-10-10T05:09:00.004-04:00

This is an interview meme. Suki has asked me these questions:

1. What is the greatest change you see taking place in your life right now?

Change is abundant right now. On the surface it may seem that change of residense and workplace are the most significant, but not so. My perception of residense and my perception of workplace are the greater changes. Where I sleep on a given night and where I contribute rent are meaningless details to me. This planet is my home and all my instincts are nomadic. Where and how I earn some money for bread is another trivial detail. My work is my purpose in life. It is my meditation, writing, research and my vigiliance; in short, the poetic process.

2. Which is your favourite among the comics you've made?

I guess the one about the blackberry because I suspect I'm the only one who finds it funny. I don't know if anyone else even gets it.

3. If you could sum up the philosophy of your life in fifty words, what would they be?
I'm a unique entity in the universe; miraculously fortunate to be alive on an earthly paradise, shielded from a universe of hydrogen and radiation; a creature blessed with "the illusion of consciousness"; to have survived the horror of self realization and found access to unlimited sources of peace, freedom and harmony and with a consolidated joyful purpose to my existence.

4. On a scale of -10(he'll be worse than Bush) to 10(he'll raise America to its zenith), how high are your hopes for Obama as President?

Zero.

That perhaps millions of people who think of themselves as black or as some racial minority and think likewise of Obama and think of American presidency as the ultimate position of power and who may now feel empowered; a sense of legitimacy; a new belief that their skin need not limit their social potential despite the white man's insanity - for them, I am tearfully joyful. My highest expectations were already met.

Other than that, I am entirely uninterested. People seem to assume that one's nationality is a primary factor of their living experience. My observations dictate otherwise. When is the last time I read something in the newspaper; heard something on the radio or from a friend that concerns nations or politics that isn't absurd or illogical or that has any connection to an unvarnished truth?

Never. Not one legitimate word that I can recall. Nations and political systems are built entirely of fictions. I realize that no one will accept what I've just said. But rare perspectives born of rare experiences dictate it so.

I took in Obama's induction speech (if that's the correct term). He seemed to me, genuinely likeable, yet he spoke some things that are dreadfully flawed, indicating he is either duped by particular illusions or else is wilfully propogating them for his own purposes or else is slave to the system or to his political associates. Whichever way, I have no interest in participating in the charade. But given the charade is firmly entrenched in our society - I'm content that he's in and not another Bush.

5. If you had to sing a single line from a song to woo a woman you've never spoken to before, what would it be?

I have no interest in wooing any woman or anyone else for that matter. I'm firmly content in being entirely honest in my feelings and motives but here's a line from a song that I would gladly sing for anyone:

Imagine all the people sharing all the world.

You know which song.
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Okay, reader! Who would like to be interviewed? Drop your name in the comment section and I will forward you five questions!

What's happening?

2009-10-09T17:05:00.005-04:00

I mentioned in my September 14th post, Re-Launch, that "things are happening." In no particular order, here are the reasons I sense I am at a critical crossroads:

1. Biodad announced that he is ready to quit smoking, and proposed that we make a pact. He'll give up the smokes. I'll give up eating like Jabba the Hut (and presumably, start looking less like him). We would rely on each other for inspiration - and in essence - police each other. I agreed in principal. The pact has yet to take effect but I believe it will and soon. Because the cold weather is coming - and there's no smoking allowed in the house, and the only thing biodad hates more than not smoking, is the cold. He's a skinny little runt. Cold is Kryptonite to this Supersmoker.

2. I have met an Imam - a Muslim spiritual leader. And he is keen to get together to speak with me. This is huge. Nothing ever boosted my writing capacity like my participation in a writing group did. The support; the affirmation; the grasping that you are not alone in your circumstance and your dreams. Very powerful.

But there are other ways now in which I am very alone. My perspectives on human life have grown so different from anyone around me that they are almost incommunicable and frankly, not to be believed. My resulting evolution now seems simple, obvious and unremarkable but yet it must seem remarkable because I look around and all the side-effects of my former circumstance - seemingly universal ills - are still being suffered by everyone around me. I see it in nearly every action; hear it in nearly every word. Who among them wants to believe that all their ills are merely the symptoms of mental, societal and instinctual disarray and can be shed as I have done (to perhaps a 99% degree). Who wants to believe I might hold the key? Certainly they don't. In some matters, only strangers might be trusted.

But I have long suspected that there are those who would understand me; priests and the like. Because, like me, they have a powerful source of wisdom/knowledge/testimony - call it what you will - in which they find all their answers, all their solutions; all their comfort - leaving them at peace; joyful; with no other aim but to help the less fortunate; to help them manifest the same freedom they themselves experience. And by a source, I mean, of course, their Bible, Koran, Gita or what not. Regardless the specifics or merits of any religious or philosophical program, we share the same paradigm; a consolidated body of knowledge which guides us unfailingly through any course.

This is what I yearn to talk about - with one who might understand. I've ducked into churches and into Hindu and Buddhist temples but nowhere was a man of the cloth available to me. Funny, it is a Muslim fellow who turns up; the last faith I would have expected to make company with, so widespread is the sad mistrust of their faith among so many voices in my community.

3. For many days I have meditated on the subject of lust, intimate love and specifically, the Illicit Sweetheart. By intimate love, I mean the singular directional kind - in which I've long mistrusted my capabilities and maturity. There are other forms of love in which I would seem vastly evolved but later for that!

In this intimate regard, I am pleased to now perceive that I have defeated the addictive components. I am at ease. Regardless what happens now between us - and how often - is no worry to me. It's rather clear to me now that physical intimacy is almost solely my motive for getting together. I do not mourn this. There is no shame. But I have done as honest an accounting as I can and am now free in this regard. Should further intimacy occur I will continue to enjoy it and if not, I will always cherish these last six years, and remain, as always, open to all forms of relationships, and all forms of loving, with all people, and without the conditions and restrictions of the society-standard marriage relationship. It was never meant for I, nor I for it.

With the lust addiction apparently behind me - and I say apparently because this state is new to me and not thoroughly tested as yet - there leaves one major battlefield at hand; food addiction. I pray I can gather all forces now to that front and defeat it too. To do so would pave the path to health and to the opportunity for vegetarianism or veganism and the harmonic rewards available to those who do not kill to live.

4. My cousin, World Citizen, has moved from India to Toronto and we'll be getting together very soon. I have high hopes for this meeting. India, Hinduism and the philosopher, Aurobindo are all of keen interest to me and my goals. I predict he will have many useful perspectives on these subjects as well as the experience in designing a life around charitable causes.

5. I'm back in the volunteer community. For now I'm working at a primary school to catalogue several hundred new books and get them into the hands of the kids. I've long been passionate about the benefits for kids who love to read. The effects can be profoundly life-altering. Upon that project's completion, I hope to be working on behalf of kids (or adults, for that matter) with, as they say, special needs. This is all very rewarding; a way to manifest harmony in an immediate way, whereas the writing endeavors are speculative; only seeds, in terms of their usefulness in serving harmony and evolution.

6. I seem to have summoned the will to part with my new 'job' with security at the college despite how much I love it. The people are great, the work rewarding, the opportunities to help people in need; to promote harmony. The exercise, the down-time with which to read and conduct my research, the company of students radiant with youthful vitality and possibility. It is a marvelous environment but I have reminded myself the purpose in going into security. I need that night watchman job where I can literally sit and write all night. It is necessary. I must make this happen. As excellent pal Doc Lock says: Onward!

Song: One Lane Bridge

2009-09-23T22:21:00.005-04:00

Idling on a one lane bridge
Unmindful of the race
I tripped upon your whisper
Dissolved in your embrace
And then you served me seconds
Though I only begged a taste
Now I wonder where I'd wandered
Had I never seen your face

Idling on a one lane bridge
Too weary for the chase
I contemplate the river
A path to some far place
And the shackles of my own design
That bind me to this base
While I wonder where I'd wandered
Had I never shared your space

And I won't say those words
And you will let me know

Is this structure solid
And does the river flow
Or is it me who's drifting
How can I really know

Idling on a one lane bridge
Just gazing into space
And the shadows on your features
The firelight displaced
This dire infatuation
Is anything but chaste
Still I wonder where I'd wandered
Had I never known your grace

And I won't say those words
And you will let me know

Is this structure solid
And does the river flow
Or is it me who's drifting
How can I really know

(instr.)

Is this structure solid
And does the river flow
Or is it we who're drifting
Who could really know

Idling on a one lane bridge
A crippling lack of haste
Won't serve to span the chasm
Revelation won't erase
Oh to find that golden land
And leave without a trace
To weave the light and darkness
And blanket this disgrace

And I won't fall in love with you
Unless you wish it so
And I won't say those words to you
Until you let me know

(Instr.)

And I won't say those words
And you will let me know

Just down the road

2009-09-21T15:32:00.006-04:00

I have not seen my illicit sweetheart for many weeks. Since I Barbecued a fine dinner and we bobbed in an absent host's hot tub before reclining on the deck. I re-dressed of course but hid the other's clothing. I can be devilish that way.

We had planned to get together yesterday, finally. I phoned in the morning as instructed, left a message and endured long anticipation. Perhaps I have not evolved much, in the realm of love, since my first high-school infatuation. Perhaps not much at all.

The call was not returned until close to midnight.

"Hey! I'm just down the road from you! At [the friend's]!"

Drunk.

"Come on over! Bring some drinks. You have something to drink, no?"

So I had been forgotten about. Until the liquor ran dry. And why should that surprise? I'm not young. I'm not fun. I don't dance; not really. I am just the quiet stable one. Earnest and kind; generous; grateful; worshipful. Always there when needed but no party animal.

"No. I have no booze."

"You must have something! Bring it over. Come now. I won't be here long. I must go home soon!"

"Stop here, then, On your way home." I don't want to see you there, in front of others, where I'm forbidden to touch you.

"No. I can't. When I leave I'm going straight home."

"You could stop here for five minutes." Long enough for kisses and hugs. And wandering fingers on that bewitching youthful skin.

"No. I'm going straight home." Just like that.

That same old dark suspicion, rarely dragged into the light. Dare I say it - Am I being used? And then of course the still darker suspicion. Am I the user? What interest would I ever have taken if not for that gorgeous smile and gorgeous... everything else?
Using.

Making use of people. Isn't that the hallmark of society; our strength as a species? Leveraging one another? Cooperation, give and take, mutual parasitism. Such different connotations but might one propose they are different flavours of the same dish?

What might set such perspectives apart? Honesty, perhaps? To give and to take without false motive; without a rosy film; without posturing. Is that what makes it good and not evil? Makes it love and not... usage?

If so then what a hurdle. For honesty is a lovely idea but a phantom. The filters between instinct and consciousness are so hopelessly unnavigable and wickedly invisible and to know this is to ever mistrust myself.

If I'm to be disillusioned in this matter, let it be now! I might be happier to disengage from this infatuation; even more free.

If my love were 'true' perhaps I would have walked over there last night. But I did not go.

Perhaps the process has begun.

Re-launch!

2009-09-14T17:34:00.002-04:00

Why the new look?

Because much has changed since January 2006 and I need the licence to reinvent this space's focus; it's priorities, in order to make it vital again.

Because I'm rarely inclined to wear the cynic's hat anymore and I don't have the heart to force it.

Because things are happening and the time has come to promote this space from it's catch-all status; a bottom drawer of a too-tall chest of writing outlets. It shall begin taking on the specific purposes intended for it for some time now.

Because I can not bear another moment of procrastination. There have always been excuses; doors just on the next horizon; but these will always be. To hell with them. No more tough talk without action. I will fight this war on every front and win or fail and account it honestly. And to those who call yourself my friend, be true by judging me harshly. Kind excuses are no help to me in the long run.

Because I am a new day rising and so are you.

Do or do not. There is no try.
- Yoda (film: The Empire Strikes Back)

Don't you see you are the Universe to yourself. You carry your fortunes in your own hand.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Become the man you were born to be.
- Lord Elrond (Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkien)

Shit or get off the pot.
- Crazy Bernie

Not the Steve-o

2009-08-05T13:13:00.000-04:00

Random quotes, without context, recently spoken (or sang) in my presence:

I always prefer the Bob Dylan performances where he remembers to bring his consonants.

I bet she's got a nice little toaster oven.

I sleep good. I have one-two beers and sleep like monkey.

Oh, I like the usual girl things. Hop scotch, dress-up dolls. Getting my patch pounded every Friday night.

Incense peckermints la la la la. Incense peckermints la la la la.

I like to start my day with the newspaper and a bowl of bran flakes. Then I spend the rest of the day just hoping for a good BM.

Beauty is only skin deep. Ugly goes right to the bone.

Oh no! My moustache is on the floor and it's running away!

What a country eh? Where even the poor can be decadent.

Royal Meats? What kind of place is that? Ah, yes I'll have the Prince Andrew on toast please. But leave out the stringy bits.

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This article brought to you by the Matt LeBlanc Anti-Virus Society.

Hi, this is Matt Leblanc reminding you to cover and cough. Don't let the godless Russians - I mean - flu virus - destroy the human race.

More fun things about being a security guard

2009-08-04T16:53:00.005-04:00

1. Working with a crew who prefers to use nicknames rather than real names. My co-workers:

Big Bill
Little Bill
Big John
Little John
Striker
No-Ass
Brain
Stan-the-Man
Killer
Frodo
Alphabet
Baloo

2. Conversations with clever teenagers, like this:

"How many did you give out today?"

"How many what?"

"Tickets."

"I don't give out tickets."

"You don't give out parking tickets?"

"Nope."

"But you're security. What are you doing out here, then?"

"I'm making sure everyone is having a safe and happy day."

"Well - I'm not happy!"

"Okay. I'll put that in my report."

3. Attacks by the Phantom Dumper

Squad Leader was eating her salad while we followed the intruder via surveillance camera when the intruder suddenly dropped his pants, squatted on the sidewalk and... did... his... business.

The remaining salad went uneaten.

Please enjoy this totally unrelated complimentary photo of melted chocolate ice cream:

Summer is for kids and kids-at-heart.

2009-07-30T21:59:00.006-04:00

The ever excellent Fumadiddle has published the following advice: 20 things to do this summer to be a kid again. I support it whole-heartedly but I must add some clarifications:

1. Catch lightning bugs.

Is that the same thing as fireflies?

2. Play hopscotch.

Sounds like a recipe for broken ankles. Can I just draw chalk pictures in public places instead?

3. Chase down the ice cream truck.

Did that once. Turned out to be a knife-sharpener guy instead. Luckily I had a knife on me. I hadn't been planning to pay for the ice cream, you see.

4. Blow soap bubbles.

Saw him the other day. He says Hi.

5. Hula hoop.

Not a chance in hell.

6. Swing.

I've heard about those parties. No thanks.

7. Have friends over to play hide and go seek.

We thought Ollie was a welfare case. Turns out that "Ollie-Ollie income-free" was supposed to be "All ye, all ye in, come free."

8. Cloud watch.

Ah, yes. And try it at night too. Especially if there's snow on the ground and a fullish moon.

9. Camp out in the back yard.

Best done a couple yards away from another batch of campers. Launch crab apples at them all night. Great fun.

10. Jump off a rope swing over a river.

We call that water skiing now.

11. Play in the sprinkler.

That's what Mom always said when declining a request to go swimming, which always infuriated me but in hindsight, it was better than "Go play in traffic" I suppose.

12. Have a mud fight.

Might eating a Mile-High Mud Pie dessert count?

13. Build an indoor fort with chairs and sheets.

Add a couple card tables for a fort-mansion.

14. Eat watermelon on the back porch and spit the seeds.

The goal is to land them in your friend’s hair, of course.

15. Have a water balloon or squirt gun war.

Have you seen the weapons of watery mass destruction they manufacture these days?

16. Climb a tree.

My childhood climbing-tree finally got cut down in the last year. There can never be another.

17. Skip stones.

And hold hands. And get an old gold Chevy and a place of your own.

18. Go wading in a creek.

Does the hot tub count?

19. Create a masterpiece with sidewalk chalk.

I see the end of the list is coming and you haven’t yet said, clip a hockey card to your spokes to make your bike a motorbike. I guess that was strictly a boy thing.

20. Laugh until your sides hurt.

That's why I visit your blog, Flumadiddle.

Star Drek

2009-07-30T18:27:00.003-04:00

I'm watching Star Trek, the original motion picture. It's hard to believe I've actually avoided this for a full thirty years.

So far, every male in this movie is wearing a toupee.

And everyone in Star Fleet wears a miniature money belt around their abdomens. The lengths they went to just to disguise Shatner's girdle...

Every external shot has an immobile space-suited guy floating around.

Everyone's over-acting a little bit. It's like every element of wardrobe and direction is designed to mask Shatner's idiosyncrasies.

Kirk: "I need you! Dammit Bones! I need you! Badly!"

Wow! Love the engineering crew uniforms. They're Imperial Storm Trooper suits with giant Reese's peanut butter cup wrappers for collars.

Spock in black cape is looking more Dracula-ish than ever.

McCoy has yet to report to sick bay. He's apparently been promoted to Kirk's personal therapist and follows him everywhere he goes, telling him off.

Spock: "I suspect there is an object at the centre of that cloud." Well, I'm no Vulcan brainiac but I concur, Sherlock. We wouldn't have a movie,otherwise.

Checkov burns his hand and falls down wailing as if his genitals have been cut off. Oddly, McCoy is finally absent.

Well, lo and behold. An object at the centre of the giant cloud.

Uh oh. Intruder on board. A plasma-energy combination according to Spock.

The security guy in helmet and cockpiece does nothing to protect the officers while the plasma guy goes around zapping them. That's right. I said cockpiece.

Spock: "I believe the closed orifice leads to another chamber."

Return of the bald girl; starkers, apparently. Does the carpet match the drapes?

"Within you," says the usurped commander, Decker to bald girl, "Are the memory patterns of a certain carbon unit. I can help you to revive those patterns! Then you could understand our functions better!" Boom chickka wow-wow. Best pick-up line ever.

Okay they've taken the old Spock Dilemma - that absurd simple-minded notion that logic and emotion are somehow two ends of a single scale - and extended it to this omnipotent space-predator VGER and his hunt for the creator. He's Pinocchio and Zardoz rolled into one.

VGER, Decker and bald girl have a space orgy and VGER has his first space-orgasm (talk about shooting stars) which leaves him fulfilled and no longer interested in purging Earth of its carbon units. Mankind lives another day. Hoo Haw.

I have now seen two of the eleven Star Trek movies; the first and last. They're pretty silly but I'm game to continue. Perhaps you'll join me next time for Wrath of Khan.

Live long and prosper,
FWG

Fun things about being a security guard

2009-07-19T05:38:00.004-04:00

So I'm on duty at my employer's national annual general meeting - at a hotel - just basically hanging out in the hallway between the meeting rooms and making sure to look spiffy whenever the big-shot delegates are moving between meeting rooms.

They've contracted a facilitator to organize all the details - both official and extracurricular - of the week-long event. She's busy on her lap top and phone at the long table set up in the wide hallway for herself and her brochures and name tags and lanyards and various goodies and trinket trash. I offer to grab her a snack from the buffet just down the hall. She accepts.

Later, as I'm passing by, she suddenly pushes her dirty dishes and coffee cup toward me and states, "I'm done with these."

There's a prize if you can guess what my response was:

1. Yep, you sure are.

2. Well, it's about time!

3. Good girl! Now you can have some pudding and then it's bed time for you, punkin.

4. Oh, well let me get that for you. So how DID your husband die? Oh, wait. wait. Never mind. I just figured it out.

5. Okay. Shall I summon some loser to take them away for you?

6. Very good. Shall I bring you a dessert menu?

7. So you are. But I only handle other people's dirty dishes at my own initiative or when I'm asked nicely.

8. Are you sure you're done? You couldn't have got that plump skipping seconds.

9. Excellent, and as security guard clearly falls below busboy on the evolutionary scale - it would be my privilege to take them away for you.

10. Oh goodie. May I lick them clean now?

11. That's nice.

12. Very nice. Are you ready to make poopies?

13. Holy shit, you ate it ALL! Oink oink oink oink!

14. Oh no you're not. You didn't eat the invisible pickle.

15. Yeah, I'm done with mine, too. I'll just leave them here with yours.

16. Even the fork? But you're not done sucking the chrome off it.

17. Well, fuck a duck! That's amazing!

18. You don't say?

19. Excellent. Shall I rinse them off for you before you hide them in your purse?

20. (None of the above)

Movies movies movies

2009-07-07T15:20:00.004-04:00

The Wackness ***
(2008) Entertaining performance by Ben Kingsley in a sort-of feel-good movie perfect for the kind of ass holes who appreciate drugs being glorified and ugly-boy/hot-girl sex. If you're an ass hole you'll like it. Others may too. Just try not to fall for all the simple-mided crap that tries to sound like wisdom. It. Aint.

No Country for Old Men ***
(2007) I was so much hoping to like this movie that I've either fooled myself into thinking I liked it or else I actually liked it but just can't figure out why. I would hope that a story that engages for so long would leave some kind of mark; a point, a message; something. What did I miss? Something tells me I should have read the book first.

Gran Torino *
(2008) Sweet Jesus. Sweet sweet suffering Jesus. Clint Eastwood, what horrible trauma befell your brain? What a colossal train wreck of a movie. The experiment to see if Eastwood's mystique can carry a disfunctional movie with nothing else going for it but the most atrocious writing and acting imaginable, yielded a surprising result. Yes. The Eastwood threat-of-revenge mystique is enough to keep viewers from walking out of the theater on a film that in every way amounts to an ABC After-School Special that editors forgot to edit. Has to go on the list of all-time lemons.

Ali Zaoua ****
(2000) Another sad, touching, elbeit unlikely story about poor kids and the mean people who exploit them. I'm always a sucker for these.

Two Soldiers **
(2003) It took about 39 minutes to get through the introductory phase of the movie. At that point, as the lead characters parted ways and one began to cry, I found myself finally settling in and anticipating a good epic war film ahead. Abruptly the credits fell like a brick, as did my jaw - in disbelief. I grabbed the movie jacket. Yup. Forty minutes. It's the movie that almost was.

Star Trek Origins ***
(2009) Nice special effects for those who go out for that sort of thing. So much silliness and hokey plotlines I wasn't sure if it was a comedy or not. Clever casting though, has turned familiar faces into young people again. I'll give the next installment a chance.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine **
(2009) All action. No substance. I'm probably a fool for having hoped for more. Why is Hugh Jackman not the current James Bond? I swear he'd be the best since Connery. I swear it.

The Happening *
(2008) Perhaps M. Night Shamalamadingdong's worst ever. Had the feel of a spontanious weekend project. But Marky Mark Walberg showed up and that's all I ask of him! Hoo Haw!

Righteous Kill **
(2008) Former Heavyweights Al Pacino and The-Guy-Who's-Name-I-Can-Never-Remember are miscast as a couple of unintentional lightweight geeks in a movie written by some joker who doesn't know how to make cop movies with any more resonance than a cereal commercial. God help us all. Oh yeah. Robert DeNiro. Why can I never remember his name?

88 Minutes *
(2007) It's the longest 88 minutes ever. Al Pacino in an another embarassing cop flop, this time with inexplicable giant blue hair. Can we schedule poor Al's funeral already? His career is apparently dead. Cell phones, taxi-cabs, more cell phones and the worst Marg Simpson impression ever.

Off The Map ****
(2003) Was this based on a true story? I think it must have been. It had that feel. Characters genuine but too stark, as if eroded with the passage from old childhood memory. A useful study of human nature. A film, you might say, rather than a movie.

Where The Day Takes You *
(1992) In an enormous cast of millionaire actors, how many are actually talented enough to believably portray wretchedly poor street people? Um. Zero. And why did the make-up people cover every actor with a thin layer of grime but give them flattering hairstyles and no scars or blemishes of any kind? 'Cause they suck at their jobs too, I assume. This is actually negative-one star, not one star. I would have given it a zero if not for the extended scene where Sean Astin is covered in his own vomit. Cheque please.

Where the Eagles Dare **
(1968) Early Bond-style WW2 Nazi castle intrigue/action flick has a young Clint Eastwood playing second-fiddle to Richard Burton in an ensemble cast. Such under-utilization earned you a star-and-a-half penalty, bozos.

Blindness ***
(2008) Was this an artful exploration of the nature of humans and their societies or just more plot-driven hollywood-style muck? I think they were trying for the former but too much of it felt more like the latter and whenever it did; just when the plot needed to move; it didn't. I think this could almost have been a great movie had it not stalled a couple times.

Diehard 2 - featuring Skeeter Willis‏

2009-07-06T13:21:00.005-04:00

Welcome back. It’s been quite a while since we’ve met. I’m a few years older, but not necessarily wiser. Mr. FWG has sporadically reminded me that I owe him a follow-up blog to my premier several years ago – and he’s right, I do.

So, here I am, in my sophomore performance.

I’ve recently returned from a short getaway to New York City, aka Manhattan for you early Native Americans, and aka New Amsterdam for you early 1600’s settlers.

My family and I did the traditional touristy things and spent many hours on the top of the bus or in the back of a carriage-drawn bicycle. Money well spent, I suppose. I enjoyed the never-ending name dropping: Mr. Diehard lives here and another Mr. Famous was shot there, etc. Assuming, of course that this big-city trivia is remotely accurate. Who am I to doubt the historical accuracy from a bicycle-riding student from Bulgaria?

I found it odd that hundreds of people sit in lawn chairs in the heart of Times Square – all day long, 7 days a week. It’s quite a sight. The first time I saw it, I assumed that a street performance was about to begin – but no. It’s common place. Locals, tourists – they just sit there and watch the world go by, surrounded by all the never-ending lights of Times Square.
Apparently, all those companies advertising in Times Square are spending $600,000 PER MONTH to advertise there. Isn’t that sick? That’s over $7 million a year for EACH of those companies – and there’s dozens of them. Isn’t our society’s priorities warped? Just think how much further ahead our medical science could be if they re-directed even half of that wasteful spending to research.

I’ll step down from my soap box.

There seems to be quite a concerted effort by the tour guides to distinguish between ‘Old Money’ and ‘New Money’. Mr. Old Money owns these seven blocks and Mrs. New Money lives up there in the tower with her husband, Mr. Sony. All I know is that, old or new, they’ve all spent WAY TOO much money on real estate in New York. Most of them can’t descend their elevator and leave their building without seeing so much as a tree. Mostly concrete and asphalt for as far as the eye can see. Did you know that I have grass outside MY Thorold front door and several trees to look at - complete with their own singing birds. These millionaires would be jealous if they only knew how little I spent compared to them.

The new President is all the rage down there. Only time will tell if this change is the change that they were looking for. All I know is that several street vendors tried to sell me condoms with his likeness on them. Nothing says love like sharing the inner beauty of your significant other with the President’s likeness. I’ve heard of walking in another man’s shoes, but this is going too far.
New York was a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. It’s good to be back to my small town. I was born in a small town, and I can breathe in a small town, probably die in this same small town.

[Insert John Cougar copyright infringement lawsuit here]

Thanks Rich for the invite. See you again in 3 years.

...Skeeter

Not the Steve-o

2009-07-05T08:44:00.005-04:00

Snippets that people have said aloud in my presence. I leave the contexts to your imagination.

The popping days are over.

My parents have money. They just choose to live like trailer trash.

I don't know why seniors get discounts. They're the only ones in this society with any money.

Well, technically, she's a MILF.

They're messing with the eco-system of my head.

Has anyone seen my other end?

I haven't rented any good cheese in a while.

Is that a cigar in your pocket?

Those goddam Arabs got more money than brains.

So, you getting any action since you dumped the dry-humper?

I just can't connect with wood.

The Newfounese have not invented wine yet.

[Editor's note: FWG personally has nothing against Arabs or Newfounese (also known as Newfoundlanders) or any other illusionary tribal category.]

Where were you...

2009-06-26T17:12:00.004-04:00

You know, whenever people say to me, "Where were you when you heard Kennedy was killed?", I have to say, "Sorry. I wasn't born yet. I wasn't even germinating in momma's tummy yet. I wasn't even a sparkle in some rapist's eye yet. I may posess the wisdom of a two-hundred year old guru, but I'm actually only forty. Kennedy departed six years before I came along."

[Editor's note: No one has ever asked FWG where he was when Kennedy was shot.]

But if Michael Jackson's death is the Kennedy of my generation -

[Editor's note: Not very likely. Half of FWG's friends are cheering, "The PED is DEAD!"]

- then I will not forget where I was. I was on Facebook chatting with Cap'n Vino. Here lies the transcript, forever immortalized:

FWG [is off duty ‘til Monday night!]

coincidence? obviously not.

Cap'n Vino [Wow, Farrah and MJ on the same day?]
I've never really been into it myself, but who am I to judge?

FWG
been into what?

Cap'n Vino
duty.
ok, I clearly did not get enough sleep.

FWG
I was talkin bout MJ and FF

Cap'n Vino
ok, now your comment makes more sense.
add Ed McMahon to the mix and there's your 3.

FWG
what about the leblanc guy?

Cap'n Vino
Patrick Swayze is wiping his brow, I'm sure.
who?

FWG
whatever

Cap'n Vino
matt leblanc? joey from friends?

FWG
no this guy was 81 and died yesterday and the newspaper ppl thought that was significant
and he was canadian

Cap'n Vino
oh, romeo

FWG
tada

Cap'n Vino
but he wasn't in entertainment, so apparently he doesn't count.

FWG
he probably watched TV
thats entertainment

Cap'n Vino
I don't know...a guy named romeo...he was probably more into reading shakespeare

FWG
u win

Cap'n Vino
excellent. it's all about winning

FWG
THIS JUST IN...
rod has emailed cottage response

Cap'n Vino
und?

FWG
he only has one vacation day left
what a loser

Cap'n Vino
and I guess he's not willing to take a leave of absence for the remaining 6 days?
you told him there'd be booze right?

FWG
friggin guy's back and forth between his office and Dallas office all the time
he should just tell each office he's at the other

Cap'n Vino
that works for me. he could go into town every couple of days and make a call. problem solved.

FWG
presto

Cap'n Vino
I'm growing basil...I could make that
oops...presto. never mind

FWG
I'm lost. what's the word I'm looking for?

Cap'n Vino
map?

FWG
something -esto

Cap'n Vino
manifesto

FWG
pesto?
thtz not it
is it?

Cap'n Vino
basil, olive oil, pine nuts? yep, pesto is it.

FWG
okay. dunno why it became so unfamiliar to me all of a sudden

Cap'n Vino
it's a funny word. I say we call it presto from now on.

FWG
I'm in.
and a one item pizza is called pepperonli

Cap'n Vino
I'm having a hard time saying that one and I'm nearly sober.

FWG
PEPPER... ONLY
CINCH
oops - cappslock stuck

Cap'n Vino
stop yelling at me!!!
I think the I at the end threw me off
if I were to have a one topping pizza, it would probably be mushrooms.
we could call it mushroomi

FWG
not in my house you wouldn't
but you're at the shop

Cap'n Vino
I am so

FWG
you are so

Cap'n Vino
what did you call me?!?

FWG
So.

Cap'n Vino
I see.
I'm sending off a message to my friend jeannine to see if they are available.

FWG
bravo

Cap'n Vino
I crack me up.

FWG
yeah, that word 'available'

Cap'n Vino
What are the chances that you guys have some vacation time available Aug. 29-Sept. 5? We've rented a cottage up north with our friend FWG. Stacey (our wedding photog, and Plonk's gay cousin's ex-wife) was due to come along but just bailed.So FWG and us decided to take turns asking people who would be fun to see if they are available. He got first dibs, but his person only has one day of vacation left. Our turn!You're my number one! (of course, if you guys can't make it, I'll be telling all my other picks that they were number one, but you seriously ARE my first pick.) It is such an awesome place. This is our 3rd year there. It's the only cottage on the lake. VERY PRIVATE. No hydro. Propane appliances and lights.Anyhooo, let me know if you guys are interested.ciao baby.
there...sent

FWG
Nice.
All your previous picks were busy, I guess.

Cap'n Vino
ya, pretty much.
I'm hooked on this damn bouncing balls game!

FWG
sounds painful

Cap'n Vino
it's not a real hook

FWG
ew

Cap'n Vino
I'm getting a hand cramp from playing so much

FWG
i think i've heard enough
did you guys ever meet my friends tim and aaron from Florida?

Cap'n Vino
yes, many years ago

FWG
they've talked about wanting to visit this summer. They may be my next proposal if Jeanine ixnays.

Cap'n Vino
sounds groovy

FWG
did u just say groovy?

Cap'n Vino
no, but I may have typed it

FWG
oh yes - there it is.

Cap'n Vino
yes, I've just browsed the transcripts. I did, in fact, type "groovy"

FWG
would you call the cottage wheel-chair accessible?

Cap'n Vino
well, there's a ramp to get in, but I'm not sure about door sizes and all that.
getting to the beach could be a chore too

FWG
acknowledged.

Cap'n Vino
why? who's in a wheelchair?

FWG
Frank of "Frank and Jeff"
awsone fellas
aw-SUM, I mean
hates me this keyboard

Cap'n Vino
tim & aaron already get the boot?

FWG
No. I'm already planning the next 88 rounds of picks

Cap'n Vino
good plan.

Cap'n Vino
won't you take me to funkytown?

FWG
in your dreams

Cap'n Vino
I love the 80 's lunch

FWG
oh

Cap'n Vino
bastard!

FWG
i wish you'd stop bringing that up

Cap'n Vino
I'll try...how about shithead?

FWG
no thanks. cutting down.

Cap'n Vino
peckerbreath?

FWG
i haven't had oral sex recently, if that's what you’re asking

Cap'n Vino
I wasn't, but thanks for the info

Cap'n Vino
hey

FWG
horses

Cap'n Vino
peter (of doug & peter) just signed a lease for the shop two doors down. He's opening a gluten-free bakery in September.

FWG
wowzers I say

Cap'n Vino
ya, I think doug's got some nervous diarrhea now.

FWG
[pushes lunch away]

Cap'n Vino
Mmm...lunch. I should have mine soon

FWG
please. take mine.
I'm gonna head outside. Enjoy the weather.

Cap'n Vino
I'm going to stay in and enjoy the a/c

FWG
Let me know what Jeanine and whozits has to say, buc

Cap'n Vino
have fun!

FWG
...karoo

Cap'n Vino
will do

FWG
later gator

Did you make it to the end? Sorry for doing that to you.

97 lame questions

2009-06-22T10:03:00.008-04:00

Don't you just hate lazy bloggers who steal their Facebook tags and cross-post them to their blog? Oh well. Too bad. Times are tough.

100 Truths (actually 97). After you've filled this out, tag 15 people and have them do the same.

1. Last beverage--- Grape-splashed bottled water. It's half done.

2. Last phone call--- To Caledon - to wish 'happy Fathers Day' to the only man who deserves to be called my father.

3. Last text message--- Couple years ago. Probably said, "luv u"

4. Last song you listened to --- Robert Plant, 29 Palms. Watched the video on YouTube.

5. Last time you cried--- With any intensity? Last winter. Drank too much. Things got heavy.

HAVE YOU EVER:

6. Dated someone twice --- With a break between? Not that I recall.

7. Been cheated on?--- Always.

8. Kissed someone & regretted it?--- Too often.

9. Lost someone special?--- Of course. How can you not?

10. Been depressed?--- Yes but never again.

11. Been drunk and threw up? --- All too recently.

LIST FOUR FAVORITE COLORS:

12. Sky blue
13. See above
14. See above
15. See above

HAVE YOU:

16. Made new friends--- Constantly.

17. Fallen out of love --- My love for all people waxes and wanes perpetually.

18. Laughed until you cried --- Yesterday. The culprit: http://rachelmurie.blogspot.com/2009/06/santa-baby.html

19. Met someone who changed you --- Of course. Everyone.

20. Found out who your true friends were --- An arbitrary label but in essence - I sense who are 'truer' than others.

21. Found out someone was talking about you --- I did. And it was me.

22. Kissed anyone on your friend's list--- A couple dozen. But only three with the tongue and everything.

23. How many people on your friends list do you know in real life --- All but Rick Mercer.

24. How many kids do you want to have--- Some days, one. Usually zero.

25. Do you have any pets --- No but the roommates have koy, a dog and a three-legged cat.

26. Do you want to change your name--- Yes.

27. What did you do for your last birthday--- Had a surprise party inflicted on me five months prior to the actual date. 'Surprise' is an understatement.

28. What time did you wake up today --- 5:30PM. And now I'm on duty and on Facebook!

29. What were you doing at midnight last night--- Watching a John Carpenter movie - 'Assault on Precinct 13' with my co-workers in the Security Office. I kept laughing at it and hoping I wasn't hurting the John Carpenter fan's feelings.

30. Name something you CANNOT wait for --- I can wait.

31. Last time you saw your father--- Early May. He bought me dinner. I shall return the favor next weekend.

32. What is one thing you wish you could change about your life --- I'd like to lose some weight before it kills me.

33. What are you listening to right now --- the fan on the lap top.

34. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom --- Rarely. Generally Toms conspire to avoid me. No idea why.

35. What's getting on your nerves right now? --- My nerves are at peace.

36. Most visited webpage --- Hotmail. And whoever said CNN News -- are you insane!

37. What's your name--- Richard David Landriault

38. Nicknames--- FWG, Blue, Huggybear, New Day Rising.

39. Relationship Status --- No comment.

40. Zodiac sign --- No comment.

41. Male or female or transgendered --- I had a penis the last time I checked.

63. Elementary --- So it is, my dear Watson.

43. Middle School --- No.

44. High school --- Never again.

45. Hair color --- Blonde this time of year.

46. Long or short --- Very short right now. Almost buzz-like.

47. Height --- 5'11".

48. Have a crush on anyone? --- You could say that.

49. What do you like about yourself? --- That I am largely free, joyful, at peace, and compelled by noble purpose.

50. Piercings --- No thanks. I'm fine with the way I was originally assembled.

51. Tattoos --- I don't want to be poked, thanks. By anything.

52. Righty or lefty --- Righty. Wait, do you mean -- Never mind. Righty.

FIRSTS :

53. First surgery --- Appendix. Grade seven. The school priests declined to visit me at the hospital, contrary to usual practice on account of my parents being godless heathens.

54. First piercing --- Aint gonna happen, Sunshine.

55. First best friend--- Robbie Egger. We were gonna be the next Hardy Boys.

56. First sport you joined --- Lacrosse.

57. First pet --- Maggie. A kitten. She disappeared when Mom had a change of heart. Later so did Cocoa, the dog. I was shattered both times and never got to say goodbye.

58. First vacation--- Typical cottage type.

59. First concert --- Kim Mitchell. Had a great time. Didn't realize yet how awesome he's not.

60. First crush --- Never mind.

RIGHT NOW

61. Eating --- Ka-bobs and potato salad.

62. Drinking --- Grape-splashed bottled water, which I already explained. Next time you repeat a question we're done. This is a boring interview anyway.

63. I'm about to --- Patrol wings E,F,I and G.

64. Listening to --- Like I said, the fan on the lap top. And... We're done.

65. Waiting for ---

YOUR FUTURE :

66. Want kids? ---

67. Want to get married? ---

68. Careers in mind? ---

WHICH IS BETTER WITH THE OPPOSITE SEX?

69. Lips or eyes ---

70. Hugs or kisses --

71. Shorter or taller ---

72. Older or Younger ---

73. Romantic or spontaneous ---

74. Nice stomach or nice arms ---

75. Sensitive or loud ---

76. Hook-up or relationship ---

77. Trouble maker or hesitant ---

HAVE YOU EVER :

78. Kissed a stranger---

79. Drank hard liquor ---

80. Lost glasses/contacts ---

81. Sex on first date ---

82. Broken someone's heart ---

83. Had your own heart broken---

84. Been arrested ---

85. Turned someone down ---

86. Cried when someone died ---

87. Liked a friend that is a girl? ---

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:

88. Yourself ---

89. Miracles ---

90. Heaven ---

91. Hell ---

92. Santa Claus ---

93. Kiss on the first date? ---

94. Angels ---

ANSWER TRUTHFULLY:

95. Is there one person you want to be with right now? ---

96. Had more than one girlfriend at one time? ---

97. Posting this as 100 Truths? ---

Your turn!

You're all invited to participate!

But Remember!
COVER AND COUGH!

Only YOU can save the human race!

Book: A Game of Thrones

2009-06-19T03:43:00.002-04:00

George R. R. Martin (1997)

Captivating and brilliant!

For an author to know so many characters so well; to bring them so vividly to life and especially to give them the legitimate voices to exert their genuine will and yet still somehow manage an intricate plot is a major achievement in storytelling.

The other great problem with such a cast of hundreds, of course, is its threat to overwhelm and chase away the reader but Martin uses tricks of nomenclature and innumerable hints and reminders and tames what at first looms a beast.

The dialogue is key to a tale that is largely court intrigue (ah, but so much more interesting than that sounds) and this dialogue is absolute dynamite; unendingly clever and multi-faceted in its uses. It keeps the story charged; intense; well-paced.

The imagery barely suffices at times but that's fine. You can't have everything. The narrative often irks with such a penchant for the simple was/were structure but perhaps this is Martin's idea of epic style as opposed to a flaw in his wordsmithing repertoire. Perhaps not. But there are regular nuggets of subtle genius which bring scenes sparkling to life and some excellent wisdom throughout. Make no mistake. It is fantasy. It is fiction but it is also a reminder of the beasts that we are and the beastliness we have so far overcome.

What else can I say? This guy is a killer storyteller and I shall be almost as sad at this tale's closure some three or four books from now - almost - as I was to finally close Return of the King. And by that I do not mean to pit Martin against Tolkien. To do so is as pointless as pitting Einstein against Freud. They have their separate purposes and we're blessed to have both. May we celebrate!

The mystery deepens

2009-06-17T22:37:00.003-04:00

As both Graham and Her Flumadiddliness Bablatrice II have pointed out, the Genitals In Space mystery diagram is clearly an upside down dude. A chef, perhaps, with goatee and very tiny legs.

But this can not be the final explanation. The College most definitely does not teach upside down dudery, nor cooking, for that matter, at its trade campus. And anyway, what self-respecting cooking course has need to diagram a cartoon pecker-nosed chef - even right side up, let alone inverted?

Curiouser and curiouser. No, there has to be a better explanation and I shall leave no stone unturned in this quest to unearth the truth.

My only clue thus far; Roger has noted a slight similarity to some hi-tech doo-dad called a thermo something reactor switch or something. I'll have to re-read his comment.

Genitals In Space?

2009-06-13T06:45:00.004-04:00

So maybe you know. Maybe you didn't until now. I got me a security guard job. Not the kind where I can sit and write all night; not yet anyway, but the kind where I can alternately read and exercise which is very useful for now. It's like not having a job but still getting a pay cheque.

So I'm "working" at Slow Hawk College of Applied Arts and Technology and on this day I'm at the campus that specializes in trades. Automotive, Machine Shop, Hydraulics, Steamfitting, Plumbing, Refrigeration, Green Energy, yadda yadda yadda...

Having never experienced post-secondary education, I'm counting on you guys to help me out with a few things. First off is this:

I'm passing by a classroom and through the interior windows I see the instructor gesturing toward the diagram he has scrawled on the whiteboard which I have here duplicated as accurately as possible:

I'm dying to know what the heck this could be. I'm assuming it's not supposed to be a penis in a rocket ship. As far as I know, the only classes in session during this quiet summer semester fall into the carpentry, electrical, welding and automotive categories. If anyone has any familiarity with any of these trades (ahem, Roger) and has a guess what's going on in this picture -- I'm all ears.

Latest anti-flu poster

2009-06-09T14:53:00.005-04:00

Word of the Day

2009-05-28T11:19:00.003-04:00

Now what kind of self-proclaimed writer would I be if I didn't offer a regular feature that promises to enrich the reader's vocabulary? Of course, "Day" must be taken loosely. With my track record it may be more like word-of-the-year.

Today's word: GRANDBASTARD

Definition: I don't really know for sure. Possibly it refers to the bastard child of your legitimate offspring. Or it could be the legitimate child of your bastard offspring. Or perhaps it is just one who is a phenomenal jerk. Who knows?

Let's see it in a sentence:

"...Lord Frey, who had outlived seven wives and filled his twin castles with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and bastards and grandbastards as well."

------ George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

Great book, by the way. Many thanks to Aequitas for the recommendation.

So there you have it. Please join us for tomorrow's word of the day, freckelshnowzercat.