I don't want to die in the city

He was perhaps the last of the old-fashioned lumberjacks.

He worked through old and new and crippling pains, through vicious weather, through the irritants of weaker men, through loneliness.

He survived injury and trees that tried to kill him and dullards who dared to talk at the dinner table.

He befriended the forest, the wind, the horses and dogs.

He succumbed to narrow thinking and... temptation.

He soured in prison, aged in captivity, eroded in the city; a new prison: confined to the streets, the basement market and bookshops, an apartment in the sky with his bookshelves and little gardens. He stared out the windows for years at the grid of rooftops and grey horizons and never a forest in sight.

"I don't want to die in the city," he said, but it had to be inevitable.

He respected women and indigenous peoples and animals and tired drearily of men but he took to me for reasons I don't understand. And so I tolerated him for reasons I don't need to understand. I promised we'd take a trip when it became possible. We'd go see the trees (that tried to kill him). But then I too fell to physical ruin.

A new friend took up his cause. They won a reprieve. She had a car. They fled the city, saw the trees and the lakes.

They left the shore on a boat. He left the boat and in the water he was free of the tyranny of useless legs, but not of an old tired heart. "I don't feel good," he said suddenly to her; the woman on the boat. And the water moved over him and secured his escape from the city.

I haven't spared as much thought for the Lonely Lumberjack because Grandma passed away the same day and frankly she was dearer to me.

I remember that day when Carlos brightened and dropped a shield and declared a revelation; it's okay to ask for help. And soon thereafter he released this poem; my favourite.

My entire life
I have walked
Whatever path alone
Forged ahead
No matter what
Emotions not ever betraying
My stern face

Lately, I have made
A pleasant discovery
It sort of
Crept up on me

To always be alone
Is not
Who I have to be

To bend; accept help
Is to develop
A trust

Not to be like
An old machine
That gradually
Submits
To
Rust

- The Lonely Lumberjack

Today is the first day...

... of a new era: life without grandparents. 

I was blessed to have six of them, and blessed to have one who outlasted the rest by decades. She was a living great great grandmother. Five generations living at once; four now.

She was simple, kind, loving; ever dependable in these traits; as unpretentious as it gets. She liked bingo and phone calls from relatives. She played her Nintendo (NES) for decades after the rest of us moved on. We used to meet for breakfasts on a regular basis and we thought we were near the end of the long pause; thought we were gonna finally get together again soon. But time ran out. That's okay. Little pains and hardships had long grown into major ones. She was ready to call it quits I think.

I'm grateful for all the time and love she gave me. I'm glad she is not suffering. I'm hoping my aunt and uncle are... okay. It must be real hard to lose a great mom.

Love you.

NDR

Scrambling

 Anyone remember the Avitable Scramble? Well I do. And I say we're overdue. Someone hit the timer:

1. I have a rental CPAP machine now and I'm getting 5 hrs sleep per night; that's about double my previous output over the last two or three weeks.

2. I'm hungry but I don't like going upstairs where the kitchen is generally located because stairs make my little leg hurts and I am a little suckie baby.

3. Maybe I should have tried to get some more sleep instead of trying to write words this early in the morning.

4. There is no 4.

5. HA! I love that joke. I got it from Monty Python. I use it way too often and no one can stop me.

6. Speaking of too many Bruces. Our formerly favourite Bruce; the Boss; Mister everyman-lovin' Springsteen is charging $4000 at the high end of his concert ticket pricing. Hmm. Maybe he's become a libertarian fuck-wit of the sort he would have hated back when he still resembled a human being. Or... maybe he's just senile and doesn't know what's going on.

7. There is no 7. Ha ha ha ha. It gets funnier every time.

8. So I got sad about the Lemoncloud minecraft server. My friends all seemed to disappear and my goals seemed to be looking unrealistic as they are so long-term and player turnover seems too high in this world. So I never logged in for over a month and when I came back some of my claims had been expired leaving key properties unprotected. A fair amount of vandalism occurred and the top 80% of my resources are gone. The 80% at top value. Plenty of dirt and old rusty swords were left behind. However a little bird tells me that an acquaintance may have emptied my vault and may be storing my major valuables for me. That's the kind of thing I have done for friends in the past...

9. Did someone set a timer? No?

10. Speaking of Dynamic Pricing, sometimes; rarely, it is used benevolently: In Finland speeding tickets are calculated based on your income. This is a concept which should be stunningly obvious but which never occurred to me until I was seventeen; about seven years after I became smarter and more human than the life-size petrified dog turds that we call politicians in this deliriously fucked up country that looks so great on the surface if you have not the slightest idea what is going on around you.

11. I forgive you for not knowing what is going on around you. You probably have a job or a life or kids or something so what chance have you got at doing the 48 hours or research per day it would take to unearth enough truth from the mountains of bullshit we call society in order to have sufficient awareness to - to what? To live nobly? To make all the right moves? To find legitimate happiness? Just what IS the magic formula? It changes from time to time, doesn't it? Because the planet and our flawed societal schemes continue to degrade with time, and so the "right" answers become more and more compromised.

12. Well. I hope that cheered you up a little, imaginary readers!  

P.S. I've done a little nibblet of research and can't find any reason why this Canadian baby and her hard-working mom should be booted from Canada:

Petition · SIGN TO STOP THE DEPORTATION OF FATUMAH NAJJUMA AND HER DAUGHTER FROM CANADA. · Change.org

Please go fax yourself

Dear aliens:

Still stuck on this cute but withering planet named something akin to "Dirt" by its most bombastic inhabitants (who treat both it and each other as such) where in accordance to their kooky machinations I was pushed to sending the following communication today:

Dear person or other:

I received your very excellent and efficient ambulance care on 6 June 2022 while subscribed to Ontario Works system. I currently face severe mobility and transportation barriers and not being a proprietor from the previous century, I do not own a fax machine. Thus my inquiries to the automatonic telephone nexus were met with no applicable response.

 

Would you please do me the biggest favour and fax to yourself the following info?

patient XXXXXXXXXX, XXXXXXX XXXXX

OHIP# XXXX XXX XXX XX

acct# XXXXXXX (balance $45.00)

Ontario Works# XXX XXX XXX   

your fax # XXX-XXX-XXXX

Otherwise I will wait to hear from a collections entity and I guess have someone to talk to.

Thank you again for the excellent health care; as always professional, effective and unhindered by superfluous human connection. I hope you all have a great day.

Sincerely...,

Feel free to swing by any time.

There comes a proud moment in every young man's life...

... when you become so technology-dependent you'd be dead without it. I couldn't have been older than 45 when I hit that mark. Maybe it was earlier. Maybe a lot earlier.

My CPAP machine died a horrible death about two weeks ago. Thanks likely in part to supply chain issues and likely in part to wild demand stemming from a huge recall event, my wait for a new one will probably be counted in months. My friend Super Priest has already been waiting months for his. Mind you he still has his old (cancer-causing) one in working condition meanwhile. Lucky jerk.

Anything resembling normal sleep is now impossible so I've been sitting upright for the last 300 hours hoping to fall asleep and hoping to stay asleep for more than a minute. This comes true once every 24 hours or so, usually between sunrise and noon and lasts for two or three hours. I survive on that and little catnaps here and there.

That said, I've been feeling great. Not tired at all. Yesterday I cleaned the house from top to bottom. Saturday I performed a surprise concert on the roof, and the day before that I took a flight on the Hindenburg. Also this paragraph is bullshit. I am a zombie most of the time and trying not to be miserable about it.

Hoping to land a rental unit soon. Surprisingly there are some available.

Media late to the party again: Governments' Dirty Tricks

The title of this video reads:

How Fossil Fuel Giants RIG International Law To Ensure Their Profits Are Protected

Pretty cute. It should read How Industry Uses the Federal Governments They Own to Establish International Law Which Protects Their Profits.

Industry does not create law on their own, and governments are not "Scrambling to not get sued..." as this reporter suggests. Governments created this situation intentionally through so called "trade deals" which they pushed through as undemocratically and secretly as they possibly could so as to support government sugar daddies while pretending to be on humanity's side. 

I used to protest these conspiratorial "trade agreements" whenever their creation was leaked and we had just barely enough voices to get them knocked down for awhile but I never thought the governments (both righties and lefties) would give up and of course they didn't and of course they were ultimately successful.

The migrations continue. Governments gradually shed transparency and saddle us with it while stripping our privacy and taking it for themselves. 

Keep up the great work, voters.

A Symmetry of Thumb

So this is my proudest moment.

I have used my amazing all-star creative and influencer powers to bring together some of the most brilliant minds in music today to produce the next We Are The World basically. I'll include brief bios below but they're redundant. These are household names of the highest echelon okay.

The project is called A Symmetry of Thumb and if that title doesn't quite seem grammatically sound to you, that is only because WE ARE ALL SO MUCH SMARTER THAN YOU! Anyway, enjoy. 

The Symmetry of Thumb Collective:

Jens Lekkman

Songwriter, storyteller, shit-kicker and honey-lipped vocalist. Sweden's answer to ABBA.

sssnacksss

Wielder of two opposable thumbs and YouTuber of sixteen years with 1,401,735 views. Hey. You could be the one million four hundred and one thousand seven hundred and thirty sixth. What are you waiting for?

Reprise

Tiefling, ranger, beast-master, revenge-conspirator, cat-lover, sexual legend, alcoholic and friend to children and other smallish people everywhere (except dwarves). All this before the age of seventeen!

Julie Andrews

Actor, singer, author and official Disney Legend. Fifty-ninth Greatest Briton of all-time and Hasty Pudding's Woman of the Year for 1983; the same year Queen Elizabeth II went into space, only to be replaced by the alien doppelganger who returned in her place. COINCIDENCE ??  

Rick Astley

Dancer, Internet prankster, two-thumbed guitar enthusiast, man who will never give you up and presumably one of the top 68 million Britons.

New Day Rising

Video editor, Crip, Gordon Ramsay fanboy, competitive eater, laundry-day nudist and guy who doesn't actually realize what "Crip" means.

 

[insert clever title]

Hah! Punked you. I did not return next month. Or the next. And now it's July and the day after the We're So Great We Rock Nuthin Wrong Here Day Holiday Fun Day and I am not hung over 'cause I can't afford to drink anymore. But maybe some day. Also I spent the day at home alone doing some real honest to god writing and hosting an event on the LemonCloud Survival-1 minecraft server AND... I ate some tuna sandwiches, worked on a video and sneezed riotously; making my back twitch and seize like a fucker. Same things I do every day.

Hey! You want to know what's on my mind! Well of course you do! All my imaginary readers are dying to know what's on my mind.

It's July Camp NaNoWriMo and though I'm probably done with NaNoWriMos for the foreseeable future I am happy that my buddy Chess Champ is participating and I am very much with him in spirit as I pursue my own challenge which is just 250 words (minimum) each day.

And for the record I am not counting any blog content; only my serious fiction project; a collection of related short stories which I very fully outlined a few years back.

Yesterday was day one and I wrote 650 words and even though I was not particularly well-rested it was not difficult. I'm happy with the work and also free of my usual perfectionist trip-traps. If things start to go sideways, big whoop. I can carry on in some not-quite-right direction, let the project evolve and edit it into the right shape when the time is right. How did I just spend years not writing and thinking I couldn't do it? What an idiot.

That's it for today. And don't worry. I am not calculating my word-count here! These 312 words shall not be logged!

Love you.

Wow. Another month down the drain

 Hey-o folks. Sorry to break another month of blog silence but I must share this very important announcement: Just in... there are two S's in "Easters"

See you next month.

act /akt/

My acting career culminated in grade seven. Our French class performed a play for the school as part of some larger event which was attended by many parents. It was set in a discothèque. We all had to dance as the play opened. Then we talked. I had one line and I still have it memorized. Ready for this?

"D'accord!"

Which means I agree. I basically just piggybacked on someone else's line. Then we danced again to a cacophony of derisive laughter from the audience as the curtain closed.

I still remember the review I received for my performance: "Hey wasn't that your French class in the play? I'm surprised you weren't in it."

Madame Visser could have at least given me "Je suis d'accord." Maybe that would have got me in the spotlight long enough to be noticed. Oh well.

Totally not us.

Article 1201

So I just noticed that my post count is 1200 on the nose. Kind of a milestone. Twelve hundred blog posts in sixteen years. I realize not all have been winners.

Now if you're an obsessive kind of go-getter you could add up my summary figures from a mile down the side-bar there and you'd come up a handful shy of 1200. That's because a few have been taken off the air for various reasons.

Just for fun, I thought, where could I be if I'd driven a kilometer for every post I've published? I could write a blog post about whatever place that is! So I opened google maps on North America and without any tools of any kind, picked a randommy spot to start looking for a 1200-mark, by trial and error.

For my first guess I picked St. Louis, zoomed in and plunked a waypoint down on "East St-Louis."

1151 KM.

Whoa! That's #%$ close! And still plenty of St. Louis ahead! So I moved toward the far end of the official Greater St.Louis Area and spotted the Spirit of St. Louis Airport and plunked again. 1197 KM! Am I a sub-conscious geography wizard or what!

Oh wait. Google says that the address for SOSL Airport is actually Chesterfield Missouri. What?? Say it isn't so! Okay, wait a minute.

Okay, I just wikipediated Chesterfield MO and they say it's a suburb of the City of St. Louis and a member of St. Louis County. So there. I'm gonna say I nailed it. And I'm not doing a post about a lousy airport. I'm a freaking subconscious geography wizard people! A legend! Don't ever question me again!

Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2022

Those smug old boys in Cleveland are at it again and you too can cast your performer votes; up to one ballot per day until April 29th at vote.rockhall.com!

And this year, if you're a particularly nasty little insectoid maniac you can even vote for - well, I can't bear to say his name but - the creepy caterwauler sometimes known as Slim Shady. Yeah. I was afraid he'd show up this year. On the bright side I've been on the Commodores/Lionel Richie campaign ever since Radiohead ascended, And look who showed up! I suppose I can call it a fair compromise. The White Banshee was inevitable anyway.