Random Thought #9

The good thing about a bad haircut is that it will grow on you.

Random Thought #8

"Academy of Country Music" sounds like an oxymoron. Or possibly just moronic.

Produce This

'A Less Prententious Excuse For Getting a Woman in a Bikini' is what I'm going to call it. By it I mean the TV show I'm going to produce. It's inspired by 'Survivor.' Cause really, that's all the show is - a pretentious excuse to get women in bikinis.

Untruth in Advertising - "Snuggies"

"It's a blanket with sleeves!" Actually, it's a bathrobe or housecoat on backwards.

Untruth in Advertising - Generics

"Contains no artifical colouring." You can create natural red colouring by letting iron sit in the open air. It's called rust. But methinks the iron content of iron is probably a little on the unhealthy side of natural colouring. It's called iron poisoning. Maybe yellow #5 isn't so bad for you.

Voices

I faintly heard the sound of voices from my place on the couch where I lay reading and thought that perhaps the neighbours were playing music or the TV to loud but not loud enough to bother me. And the dog began to whine that she wanted to go out so I suited up and took her out and from behind me rose a crescendo of heavenly voices speaking to me of His coming and His love. I turned and stared at nothing but blinking lights as I pondered the source and meaning of these ethereal charms. And then, at the other end of the block - as if by providence - a car alarm sounded in the midnight air. And all was right again.

Random Thought #7 - The Price is Right

I realize it is warm in Southern California but if there is a slim chance of you showing up on national television, choose not to wear a mumu and flipflops out of the house that day.

Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about the people who died?

Why do we watch the news with it's horrific stories of personal trauma and tragedy? Why are we eager to hear the story of the 18 year old robbery/murder suspect from the snippet during the commercial break in the middle of the Simpsons? What concern have we with the train wreck in India that kills over 100 people with another hundred still missing? And why is it so distant?

Do we want to be informed? Do we want justice? Or are we just voyeurs? Do we live a little more fully, a little more on the dark side? Does proxy crime make it easier when the Joe Schmo takes the fall and we walk away with nary a guilty thought nor a lick of punishment? It's the perfect crime. If only Momma knew; we made the news tonight.

Untruth in Advertising - Sleep Country

The newest ads for Sleep Country say something along the lines of the following: "This year, six thousand athletes will be converging on Vancouver. Sleep Country is the official supplier of matresses for the Olympics. So remember the next time you see a winner on the platform accepting a medal, the night before they slept on a Sleep Country matress." So did all the losers.

Remember

I have been thinking much - as I often do this time of year - of our men and women overseas. And I wonder about the world and how they see this day, if they celebrate... no... memorialize it the way we do. Most commonwealth countries have some version of Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. It's a chance to fly flags and not go to work and spend a few minutes thinking about Grandpa or some other relative and mourn their passing.

As much as I'd like to think the day wasn't wasted cleaning windows or doing laundry, the reality is that most of us really will spend only a few minutes this day thinking about it. Then we'll go on with our lives and pretend we know nothing about it.

Why can't we spend the day - the whole day - in deep, monk-like contemplation of the way the world works and the absurdity of human nature. If we did that here, and they did that there the whole day long, and maybe if we thought about not just today but tomorrow and the next day and every day, maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't need this day at all.

The Battle of Good and Evil

Back in university I took a very dull but mandatory class about English Literature from the Renaissance to the Romantics or some other such incredibly dull bullshit. I don't remember much from that nap aside from an amazingly high score on a pathetically weak essay and one seminar session about Milton's Archeopaleopathica or whatever he called it. Hey, I took English Lit., not Latin. Paradise Lost to you and me.

Sadly, that seminar, like most was marred by a back and forth between two shortsighted people who were big on recycling. And yet, the memory of what that one and a half hours could have been sometimes haunts me when I encounter people with desire and morals.

God gave us free will. We have the right to choose between two or more possibilites. Each has its consequences. Seems simple enough.

But now the paradox. The fall of man came from the eating of the forbidden fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Ah! The forbidden fruit! That bright shiny, tempting, golden apple, round and luscious. It's a symbol of course. For sex. Or knowledge of good and evil. Or knowledge itself. Or any dualism you want. If God gave us free will and only ask us not to eat of the fruit - the fruit that would let Adam and Eve know whether they ought to listen to God or not - how would they know that disobedience to God was wrong? In other words, they had free will so long as they did what they were told. If this is the case, then God screwed the pooch. He failed and is therefore fallable. If God is falable, then the whole thing falls apart.

So here's your choice: eat drink and be merry. Have a good time if you will. Live the high life for which you have already paid your bill. Or hide in the shadows of your heart and fear the reckoning of a resounding whisper. Despise yourself for being you and hate the gift God gave you.

If the notion of God is correct, I think we can safely agree, he's not into masochism.

The Spades

The opening act – a country fried folk singer – thanks the audience, sells himself at the door and relinquishes the stage to the main attraction. A small town band on the rise under the tutelage of such recent past and present Canadian masters as The Hip, The Trews, Sam Roberts, Matt Good, The Arkells, and Big Sugar’s Gordie Johnson, they have a devoted following in their hometown. Drummer “Winchester” Street gets caught on his way through the crowd by a fan seeking an autograph and a conversation with the someday famous. He looks obviously anxious (ever the shy one) as lead singer and guitarist James McKenty puts a foot on the dais and looks back to see he’s there alone. “Chachi” hangs in the back chugging his Labatt 50. James steps down and stands beside me, glaring at the drunken chick chatting up Winchester. I hide a smirk and chuckle from him behind my tumbler of whiskey and Coke. They’ve done this every Friday night in a hundred different bars.

Winchester gives a smile and slides away, climbing over the equipment to take his place at the drums. James straps on his Gibson blues guitar. Chachi ambles through the crowd and picks up his bass.

James starts it off with the echoing riff from the new single, The Revenge of Johnny Laundry. Hit them hard and fast at the start and they’ve love the rest. But this is the hometown crowd and he’s preaching to the converted.

Winchester has picked up some new skills since I saw them last. His stringy hair flies as he puts the beats down, feeling the rhythm deep inside. He has his shirtsleeves rolled up showing off his drummers’ biceps and his omnipresent tie and vest fit in with the band’s semi-formal style. His smile shows off a chipped front tooth, having traded in his hockey stick for drumsticks.
A few of the classics. A few of the new. Sometimes the intro is so long it’s a song in itself.

The place shakes with the movement of 49 tons of diesel locomotive crashing through the walls. Eleanor Rigby could wake the dead.

Chachi looks like he’s having an aneurism as he grinds the wires. Winchester’s arms vibrate as his bandmates challenge his skills of barrel rolling. Two hundred barrels!

Chachi has apparently added a keyboard to his repertoire of instruments. Maybe he always had it and I just never noticed. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him play the mandolin, banjo and an accordion in previous shows. He’s one of those guys that you just know was meant to be famous.
James is a show unto himself in a dark grey suit and t-shirt and blue and grey fedora. A distant stare is fixed in his eyes, staring off into some unknown abyss of muses and musical notes. Sweat and spittle fly as he kisses the microphone, hands cupping the cheeks of his lover. He uses his bottle of beer as a slide. I’ve seen the man play one handed and drink his beer with the other. Does the chicken neck. Does the blind man shuffle and the side step slide.

“I smoke the Putter’s Light. Saves me a little money.” Salvation Army Love.

One of the roadies brings a round of tequila shots on stage from the house. He stays on to play the tambourine, cheek to cheek with Chachi while the other roadie takes a picture with a 35mm Canon for posterity and publicity.

The staff security guard stands at the corner of the stage with one foot up on the platform, not moving, not even a tapping foot, just chewing his gum open mouthed and staring down every audience member in turn.

There’s a random assortment of groupies. A drunken cougar with no sense of rhythm – no sense at all – dances in the front row. With her blonde bob and white blouse and red skirt she reminds me of one of my old professors who just never quite seemed to fit in though she tried as she might. The woman danced the way I imagine my professor would dance if she were drunk. A drunk looking to forget about his recent sorrows stares blankly at the wall behind the band. The longer he stands there drinking, the quicker he forgets until he can no longer focus on anything at all. A couple is making out in the corner, either inspired by or ignoring the music. A punk rock chick in shit kickers to the knees, a sweater tied around her waist, a t-shirt so tight I can see the straps of her bra and hair sticking out in random directions thrashes about, the lonely mosher at the wrong show. A couple are on something illicit. They gyrate and slide and wave wildly to whatever music they hear in that psychedelic world. A drunken oaf crashes through the crowd, barely able to stand up, he leans back and almost falls on me. I sidestep him. A couple of white guys, including myself, just stand there tapping a foot.

All this is nothing new to the band. They’ve seen it all before. They loved it once and then hated it and love it still. There are no flashing lights of laser shows or fancy backdrops. Just a bunch of boys having a good time on stage, nearly forgetting there is an audience at all. But it is still work. Lonely work. They’re on the road with few friends to greet them in each new town. They’ve ridden long cross-country roads and ridden the same ones back. They sing the same songs every night. The songs were once close to their hearts and filled them with pride to play them and share a little piece of themselves and have the audience pick up on that even if they didn’t know it. But once they’ve played them a thousand times, they begin to loathe them and hope the next hit makes the crowd forget the last one.

As the third rye hits my belly and its warmth seeps through me, I lose the words to describe it all and find my own private reverie in their place. I begin to sway and lip the lyrics. A shudder runs up my spine and reverberates in my chest and shoulders. Is that girl in front of me from work? No, that’s not her. Is my cell phone ringing against my thigh or is just the vibrations from the amp that I am standing beside? Don’t care. I stare at the dull red light of the exit sign above me. A few years ago this place would have been choked with cigarette smoke and I would have lit up beside the boys in the back room and watched silent highlight reels on the days sporting events on the TV. Though it’s my third drink, I’m not drunk. It takes more than that to get an Irishman drunk. No, it’s something else. My heart beats with the bass drum. I tingle with the rhythm and certain notes and riffs spark like neurons in my brain igniting memories that haven’t happened yet but should. Everything is all right even when things aren’t all right. Though they don’t know me the band gets me in the way that music is universal. Or maybe I get them. And it always amazes me how it all comes together. One of them digs up the words in a place on a map only he sees or maybe he divines them like some divine gold. Each has their own value. He shows his treasure to the others and they come up with a beat and a riff to frame it with in someone’s living room or garage. They remember it and carry it with them everywhere they go. Somehow they’ve written a song and they each understand it and show it to a group of people and the people understand it too.

At two in the morning they’re burning on fumes and so are we. We stand around dumbly watching the empty stage after the band has left, knowing how this works. The band comes back and does another song. Chachi has already broken a string. James plays so fast and hard that he breaks one too. Then another. Consummate professionals, they carry on until the end of the song and James screams “There’s nothing left!” and holds up his guitar as evidence. He jumps down and brushes by me as Chachi and Winchester play him off on the keyboard before disappearing upstairs themselves. Long after the lights have come up and the band is gone and the get out music is playing, the white noise rings in my ears.

Ok, so there’s a little bullshit in this account. But there’s cat piss in perfume and nothing in my other account.

2009 Douchies!

We are now accepting open nominations for the 2009 Douchie Awards. To nominate your favourite douchebag this year, please send me a letter, e-mail, phone call, text, facebook message or personalized memo describing the person and the particular event that made you realize they are a douchebag. The top five or so nominees will get a write up spotlighted in my blog. A winner will be chosen sometime in December. The winner will recieve absolutely nothing but my complete lack of respect for being such a total douchebag. Maybe I'll rig up some kind of gold spraypainted douchebag plaque or something. Don't push me. This is just a spur of the moment idea. I'll get around to it.

Your nominees should be one or more of the following:Egotistical, disrespectful, drunk, have an IQ of less than cheese, racist, sexist, bigoted, famous, hypocritical, self-absorbed or any other reason you can think of.

Include a photo if you can.

This is not a joke. Well, it is a joke but I'm asking seriously for your input. Check out http://foxxwilder.blogspot.com/ and click the "Douche on the Street" label on the left side for an idea of what I'm looking for. Feel free to have your friends nominate people as well. And hope they don't nominate you. And you can't nominate me.

SNAFU

Situation critical.
Negotiations failed, peace talks cancelled.
One too many incidents.
Flashpoint.
Uprising. Revolution.
Something new and hidden and dark boils to the surface
and we wonder how the surveillence satellites didn't pick this up
after all these years.
Of course, you realize, this means war.
And the door slams behind you.

Random Thought #6

What circumstances can life throw at you that would require you to do online banking in a rowboat?

Random Thought #5

Be nice to your high school AV geeks. Someday they'll be the roadies to your favourite band.

Random Thought #4 - Etiquet

If I can put the seat down, why can't you flush?

Random Writing #4 - Piece of Heaven on Earth

In the middle of this white brick and plastic siding upscale suburb a godly halo of light shines down on this ungodly earth. In a sunken lot on the edge of town between two new cookie cutter houses runs a creek shored up on either side by a rabble of rubble, clean rock fill and long grass. Mounting the banks are wild baby’s breath, Scottish thistle, goldenrod and a bloom of tiny yellow buttercups on the far side. The creek, just a trickle, really, is traversed by a dilapidated and rotting wooden post fence held together by mangled rusty wires which is connected to a modern white glazed chain link barrier on either side. In the distance a weary looking red barn sags against its own weight, looking for all the world in need of a place to lie down and die peacefully. In between and on the horizon, fallow fields wave in the afternoon breeze with ripples of delight, playing a game of tag with itself under the watchful eye of the sky. Cliffs of pine and maple and oak climb up out of the ground to keep the fields from straying too far from home.

It seems a portal to another time and another place. I glance over my shoulder at the private drive guarded by gates and brick barriers and the slickly treated baseball diamond lawns and take a step forward.

Douche on the Street #12

Yet another one from the celebrity files.

Though I can't find the quote itself and can't remember exactly which member said it, the whole band will win this one by way of association. It was either Jimmy Page or Robert Plant a few weeks back that said Led Zepplin will never allow either Rock Band or Guitar Hero to make a game based on their library. The reason went something along the lines of "no one could ever reproduce our muusical genius." Now, first of all, no one is going to reproduce your so-called genius. The music in the game will come directly from your master recordings. The ones you made. Your music. Not reproduced. Produced by you. Secondly, if you were referring to your own fans as inept musicians (which surely most of them are), you alienate your income base. Thirdly, if you were referring to your own fans, who cares? You don't have to listen to them playing at home and there are already plenty of hacks playing Stairway on Youtube.

For having more ego than your music demands, you are all a bunch of douchebags.

Douche on the Street #11

I think this one pretty much speaks for itself. But as I'm trying to be a writer, you'll have to put up with me while I speak for it anyway. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVibsTv0NHo

In the middle of her acceptance speech - the very first one she ever gets to make - , you climb up on stage and interupt her, stealing the mic and claiming "I'ma let you finish" but not letting her finish and instead, using someone else's spotlight to advance your own hidden agenda. You tout the merits of another nominee, Beyonce, as having "one of the best videos ever." While the poor young woman stands there mortified by your complete lack acceptable behaviour, you make an ass of yourself by promoting a video that sucks. It takes more than a shaken booty to create an outstanding music video.

I'm no fan of country music or even of Taylor Swift or even her video. But at least she was graceful. Or at least as graceful as one can be under the circumstances.

At first it seemed like a joke as you mounted the stage. Maybe some kind surprise for the audience. But it turns out the only joke here is you, Mr. West. Because you have no personal decency, you destroy the dreams in a young girl's heart, you have the taste of a preteen boy and have more ego than you can possibly fit inside you head, you are an epic douchebag.

You won yourself an award out of this one, West. You get a nomination for the 2009 Douchies.

Douche on the Street #10

The douches have had a busy week.

You go speeding by in your big bad black SUV down the middle of a downtown street and it makes you feel big and strong and that the world is your plaything. Out of the quiet of the night, a dull metallic thunk rides the night air and resounds from the brick walls. On closer inspection - even before a closer inspection, the smell makes it obvious - the dark stain sprawled across the uneven pavement came from the silver tallboy can with it's temperature sensitive mountains. Beer.

Because it's been at least thirty years since the government and private interest groups have made most of us realize - with tv, radio, newspaper and ribbon campaigns, with talks by victims and convicts in our high schools on the gore and tragedy and stupidity of it all - that drunk driving is so not cool and so totally dangerous and illegal and yet you feel the need to be big and powerful in your deadly black SUV, you are a douchebag of epic porportions. If I'd had my cell and caught your license plate number as you sped down the street, you'd be sitting on the wrong end of a breathalyzer and pissing your pants right now. Douchebag.

Douche on the Street #9

I always thought that your get-ups and face paint and greasy long hair were a bit sketchy. But that was the 70's and I guess that was the thing back then. I never much cared for your music. And now I find that it was about the rock n roll at all. It was about the money for you. God knows you should have enough of it by now but apparently that's not so. At least, not to your liking. You hold a contest for your fans to see which city has the most fans and that city will get a concert by you and yours, whether it be a "stadium or cornfield." Well the votes are in and Oshawa, Ontario, Canada has the most votes. They want you. They want you live. Of all the cities in North America - Detriot, New York, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, L.A., New Orleans - Oshawa - a city with maybe a third the population of the smallest of those cities - wants you the most. By a long shot. And you shot them down. Why? I can't say for certain. There's some mumbo-jumbo in the press about how you want to make sure there is a venue large enough to accomodate the entire region. But let's face it. You figured you wouldn't make enough money from a small town show.

Within a day having the people of Oshawa drop their pants and bend over, you back-pedalled and announced a show. Saving face?

Because you make it seem like you care about your fans when all you care about is the money, you are a douchebag. Because you go back on your word to ensure you don't lose money in bad press, you are still a douche.

Douche on the Street #8

At 3:30 on a Sunday morning, I'm two blocks away when you burst into a full out run. I hear you thumping along the bridge behind me and move to the side to let you pass. "Wait! Hold on!" you shout as though it were an emergency. But I can feel what is coming. I know it. I've heard it before you even open your mouth. I stop and you catch up, bending over to catch your breath, panting. When you feel ready you blurt out "Got an extra smoke?" Now, what I'm sure you meant to ask was "May I buy a smoke from you?" or even "May I have a cigarette?" rather than your bluntly rude question. But I ignore your poor grammar and focus on the fact that with the trouble you are having breathing, you should probably give up smoking and give you the answer you deserve, "No," and walk away. If you were really that desperate, there was a twenty-four hour convenience store another block up that would gladly have facilitated your habit. But because you expect me to supply the entire city with free cigarettes because you're too cheap or lazy to make sure you have an adequate supply of tobacco and because you can't formulate a proper question, you are a douche.

Douche on the Street #7

"Aye!? Aye!? Aye!? Donuts? Aye!? Aye!? Aye!?" He cried from the back seat of his car any time I came close on my trips back and forth to the dumpster. He reminded me of the seagulls from Finding Nemo who chant "Mine?! Mine?!" Even his friends in the front seat were telling him to shut up. Though I ignored him, I felt like retorting, "Are you retarded?" Because you don't have any concept of acceptable public behaviour, you are a douche.

Sick as a Dog

I've never anyone that sick before. And I've seen people on their deathbed. It started with a little swollen eye and with two hours have grown to include her whole face, the skin stretched taught and abnormally pink. Yet her tail continued to wag and she seemed in fine spirits. Then the diarrhea struck. Then the vomiting. It came at such a pace that I couldn't keep up while trying to clean it. An apparent eye infection turned into an allergic reaction and then into some kind of poisoning. After the fifteenth vomit, he energy had been sapped and she laid down, her hind quarters draped across her bone shaped dog bed, the other hand laying limp on the kitchen floor, jowl pressed to the tile. Her breathing became laboured, light and quick, her lips quivering. Bubbles of spittle formed at the corner of her mouth. Her breathing evened but was slow and light. The spittle stop foaming. When I thought she might be ok, I fell asleep beside her on the floor. When I awoke, she was standing there beside me, staring at me, panting slightly in the heat. Tail wagging. Her face was back to normal. She'd drank a bowl of water sometime in the few hours I slept. Her strength and energy had waned but she felt well enough to thank my guardianship with a lick of the ear.

She still can't keep anything down but the worst has passed we believe. One wonders where that old saying comes from.

Random Writing #3

The sky overhead was a muddled blue-grey through the haze of a heat drenched street. A sudden hot breeze stirred the dust in the street until it became airborne just as a peel of thunder cracked the humidity in the distance. A drop here and there and within seconds the ground was a darker shade than it had been. He stood there as the cold drops seemed to burst into steam as they hit his neck and face, the drops shattering and splintering with the force of impact, running down his chin and soaking the shoulders of his shirt. These sudden storms were common in the area though they never occurred when he thought to carry an umbrella. It should have been a break from the sticky heat that wrapped his body like a rubber suit. But the heat merely laid low, compacted itself against the ground, hid under the blades of grass beside the mosquitoes and flies. When the rain stopped, it would come back again, heavier and thicker than before, permeating the world with its wretched wet blanket.

Terror of Mechagodzilla

It seems even the Japanese had a taste for sideburns, oversized aviator sunglasses and fluffy mustaches back in the 70's. Now we really know why people were running in mass panic through the streets of Toyko.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I have plunged from the highest peak. I have tamed the wilde beast. I have grabbed the behemoth by the horns and fought a valiant, bitter battle to the very end, victorious. I braved the thunderous storm and came out the other side no worse for the wear.

It was a journey of enlightenment, testing my steel, courage and wit like no journey found on paper or digitally encoded. I lived it. And now I can say, I am no pussy. But a ride warrior, I am not.

Fall of Empire or Trains, Planes and Automobiles

Lately I've been thinking about the rise and fall of empires. My interest in literature tends toward that of the British empire and its subsequent decline. There is an amazing and varied library of work that comes of the breaking of the English spirit and the rise of the spirits of its former colonies.

America... had such potential as an empire. When it was founded it was fresh, virginal and new. It was uncorrupted and unspoiled. There was food and resources in abundance. Forests rang with the wing beats of birds and plains roared with the hooves of bison. The skies were free and clear and blue. The wind whispered of hope.

But an old sewer bred new diseases. Along with hope came outdated ideas and fractured dreams. But despite this handicap, America thrived and became a world power. Into the 20th century it grew. In part I would attribute this to the expansion of the railroad. With it came the spread of ideas and the ability to communicate in a timely fashion. Riding the rails... you get a sense of a country and the people that inhabit it. Further, the economic and commercial abilities that came with it helped grow the country into an superpower with it's wealth of resources.

Even during the Great Depression, it was a big open country with the promise of a better life just around the next corner.

But then things soured. My guess was it was the invention of commercial air traffic. Business class spread the wealth. But travelling salesmen wanted consistency. There's a Denny's on every highway out of town. Every airport looks more of less the same. There are no particular wonders of creation at any easily reached destination. Somewhere in the skies between New York and LA you miss the fields and farms and people and the forests and children fishing shoeless under a shade tree and the hum from the earth that beats in all our breasts like the heart of humanity. You miss America. It becomes a homogeneous wasteland of Walmarts and McDonalds and airport lounges and graffiti decorated alleyways and garbage strewn highways and big screen TVs. All you remember is the rainbow wigged freak holding a sign on the sidewalk as being the only definition between one day and the next. You could go to sleep in Phoenix and wake up in Springfield and never know the difference. The rooms at the Holiday Inn in Indianapolis are exactly the same as the rooms at the Holiday Inn in Seattle like some kind of wormhole on earth that you'd never known you'd gone through but for the time difference. Art and music and culture have become a hodgepodge of crap. And no one gives a damn. While America still holds world power status, no one really seems to care what goes on over there. Ideas have gone sour but no one wants to import more milk. It's easier to take what they want than to pay for it, to nurture it and reap it. No one learns from the fall of empires. They simply build new ones on the ruins of the old, building an impregnable fortress on quicksand. America is no longer a country. It's a stopping point on route to greater destinations. But in the end, all walls fall down.

The next great empire? I bet most of you said China. You'd be wrong. China might be making big business on the backs of foreigners, but it seems to have little interest in anything outside it's borders beyond money. The next great empire is.... drum roll please.... the Internet.

Violence and You

I have been rethinking my view that violence on TV and in video games is desensitizing toward violence in young people. I never believed it before and I don't believe it now. If anything, I think it is a lack of real violence in today's world that desensitizing. Let's face it, despite what you hear about on the evening news, you don't see a whole lot of real life violence in your daily routine, soccer moms notwithstanding.

In the old days, you got to see a lot of it. Daddy went off to war but the war was in the next field and you found his body surrounded by hundreds of other bodies later on that evening.

You used to butcher your own dinner.

Daddy had too much to drink and took his frustration at the world out on Mommy. Sadly, you might still encounter this.

These days you see it all through the TV. But it's distant. It's far away and over there and someone else. It's not a window or a picture frame. The bodies on the evening news are no different from those in the latest high octane thriller. They're somewhere else and that's movie makeup.

But that's precisely the point of desensitization, you might say. Maybe. But one imagines watching your father get cut to ribbons from across the battlefield might be a little more traumatic. And logic says you're far less likely to go out and kill someone if you're sitting around the living room playing the latest bloodbath FPS than if you're hopped up on PCP and getting into bar fights.

On a semi-related topic, I hear tell in the news that Canadian soldiers returning from Afghanistan are having difficulty readjusting to Western life. They're picking fights, assaulting strangers and wives and generally giving a bad impression of the very professional business of killing people. It seems the training the army provides is too good. The people that have been there and killed other and seen their friends die are disassociating from reality. Is Jack Bauer to blame for violence on the home front? Or are we? Of course, it could be those nasty terrorists.

A Blast from the Past

Back in 1995, a vet stole a Patton tank from a local armoury in San Diego. He crushed 40 or so cars in an hour long chase, finally getting caught on a concrete median and shot to death by police.

Imagine a commuter that day.

"Hey honey. How was your day?"

"Well, I almost got ran over by a tank. But otherwise not bad."

Another One About Stars

It's hard to imagine in our little smog infested, light polluted corner of the world, the multitude of stars that are visible to the naked eye in the night time sky. But imagine if you will a scene 4000 years ago in an already ancient desert with the sand at your feet and the cool of night creeping across your skin, smooth and refreshing after the day's heat. In the fathomless darkness overhead rest thousands of lights. Each one a god or goddess or dearly departed soul. It's easy to see how a mere mortal could lose count and think that each dead relative took to blinking in the sky after life. Each new star an old soul. Not a great leap to see how Christianity might interpret the skies above as heaven.

That was 4000 years ago in an already well established society with kings and theology and language and lore. They had architecture and medicine and an understanding of the place of Earth within the solar system. Imagine then the history of those nomadic tribes that must have wandered north in search of peace and plentitude and what they must have thought upon reaching the desert and what made them stay there. Imagine what those nomads must have done to get there, possibly following a star on the northern horizon that never moved. Imagine the importance that star must have had years later when it came time to create a new mythology for a new group of nomads.

And we think on those clear nights on the edge of town or driving home through the country side, "look at all the pretty lights," and wonder what might be out there.

Sen. Flaherty tries to implement knife registration

AP - Senator Horation Flaherty of Wyoming announced yesterday that he is going to propose a new knife registration initiative, similar to proposed ideas of a gun registry. Flaherty, a former District Attornery first came up with the idea in 2001 when trying a defendant for murder. The defendant had used a knife to murder his neighbour during a dispute over a lawnmower. Jake Fibrisi had a history of violence, including three counts of assault using a knife.

“Out here in the Midwest,” says Flaherty, “guns are harder to come by. Knifes [sic] are the weapon of choice for many people. Think about it. Any eight year old can walk into a Bed, Bath and Beyond and pick up a fourteen inch blade with no questions asked. Are we living in the middle ages that anyone can walk the streets baring a sword?”

Flaherty’s proposition has drawn flak from the right. Opponents say it infringes on their God-given right to bear arms. “This is ridiculous,” claims Sen. Jim Reeves of Texas. “Knives are perfectly legal. How are our sportsmen supposed to hunt and fish without their knives? How is my wife supposed to make dinner? How are American families who can’t afford guns supposed to defend their homes?”

Sen. David Mulroney agrees with Reeves, saying that, “Flaherty of all people – a former DA – should know that this knife ban will never hold up in court. Furthermore, knives are an integral part of American society. From time to time they may be used in crimes but studies have shown that by and far these crimes were perpetrated by foreigners and homosexuals. Americans rely on knives to protect themselves from these evil-doers.”

Flaherty’s proposed ban would stop anyone with a criminal record from buying knives of any kind. Only those of age 21 or older with valid ID would be able to purchase knives and would be placed on a seven day waiting list during which time background checks could be performed. Holders would be required to submit their fingerprints to be kept in a database with the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as being issued a permit. A few experts agree that countless lives could be saved if the knife population could be controlled.

But others argue that controlling knives would be a greater challenge than the cost warrants. “A knife registry accomplishes nothing. It would cost an estimated $48 million (US) to implement. If it goes through, only law-abiding people will abide by it. Criminals will simply buy black market knives from the street, stolen from homes and smuggled in from other countries. When knives are outlawed, only outlaws will have knives,” says Timothy Vasquez of the University of Wisconsin’s criminology department.

Flaherty shoots back that “that’s the point. Catch them red-handed without a permit and you can throw the book at them.” Flaherty also wants to increase the sentencing for knife related crimes. Under his proposition, carrying a knife without a permit could result in a minimum 5 years jail time. Armed assault with a knife could be as heavy as 20 years.

The story goes deeper. Flaherty’s grandson, who cannot be identified due to the fact that he is only 16, was recently caught with a knife at school. “He was only trying to cut his meatloaf, is tough as bricks, it is,” claims Bonita the lunch lady, a foreigner. Still, school security apprehended the youth and he was charged with possession of a deadly weapon. Flaherty is “deeply distraught by this turn of events” and laments that something was not done sooner. “Surely he felt threatened by some other children – children who probably had baseball bats or hardcover books or heavy boots. But the law is the law. If he had had a permit, this would never have happened. I’m sure, however, that he will be exonerated.”

When asked if Sen. Flaherty was behind the gun control registration, he replied, “Good God, no. There are nuts out there with knives. How am I supposed to defend myself with deadly force if knives are banned?”

The preceeding story is complete bullshit. Sounds kind of true, though, doesn't it?

Random Thought #3

Comso is just porno for women.

Business Ethics

Currently there is a commercial running for Biore [?] which begs the reader whether they are "too old for zits? Too young for wrinkles? Then you've been overlooked. You need this brand new product for people who have perfect skin."

All the keys at work are locked in a box which requires a key to open. The box is behind a self-locking door.

Nunc cognosco ex parte

I stood dumbly in the crowd looking around to find a friendly face. None presented themselves though I saw a few I vaguely recognized as people I'd seen on campus or been in large classes with. The marshals ushered us into lines and organized and reorganized us as late comers appeared, double file, alphabetically with higher ranked names to the left.

It was a beautiful spring day - 14 degrees and rising to 20, baby blue skies with tapering wisps of fluffy white cloud hanging overhead as we marched leisurely along the path, up the ramp, across the handi-capable bridge, down the stairs and up the stairs to the podium to take our seats with a few people scampering off to hug relatives and wave to friends before hustling back into line. Sit and stand in honour of our sacred professors looking like clowns in their multicoloured robes and hats and sashes and hoods and belts. Clowns or some silly sacred secret society out to take over the world and sacrifice parakeets to the gods of knowledge. I felt pretty smart in my own green robe and white trimmed hood. Breezy and comfortable but a little heavy and lacking pockets. There were no mortarboard hats for the graduates. Mortarboards used to be for scholars so that they could still be useful members of society.

I couldn't see my family or much of anything else for that matter from my seat in one of the back rows. I could see the trees to my right, the library to my left and the national flags of two dozen countries hanging from the wall of the building opposite me. The flags of Canada, Ontario and the university fluttered in a good breeze over the entrance arch. The girl seated to my right kept texting someone during the two hour ceremony.

The honourary graduate received her diploma and make a twenty minute speech about reducing the use of plastic water bottles - hence our free reusable stainless steel water bottles. [Isn't plastic recyclable? Isn't steel a non-renewable resource? Weren't the plastic cups used to serve lemonade to guests made of plastic? Weren't they making a mockery of the good people sitting at the "green pledge" table?].

I waited as row after row of students stood up and lined up and walked across the stage gladhanding glad hands all the wealthier for the business we had imparted them. My row was called. I stood up and lined up and handed the card with my name on it the guy saying the names, walked up the guy who told me to walk up to the chancellor, walked up to the chancellor, shook her hand and accepted her quick congratulations, posed for a quick photo from both sides, walked on to someone else's quick congratulations and glad hands, past the professors - one of whom bent forward to offer his quick congratulations and glad hand (one I didn't recognize or remember ever having seen) - and filed back into my seat followed by the E's. In the span of fifteen seconds I had gone from young fumbling fool to highly educated scholar and walked into my future. A few more speeches by people I didn't know and didn't care about and a few songs and I was done.

And for all the pomp and circumstance... Well, all the rhetoric they spout behind that podium upon that stage is just that - rhetoric. There's no brave new world out there. I haven't breached the horizon or crossed the threshold of time and space. It's the same world and the same time and place [because it's always here and now]. I'll begrudgingly admit maybe I learned a thing or two in my four years inside those walls [but not the practical kind of knowledge you might learn inside less reputable walls]. But after thirty thousand dollars, I walked away from that school with a few distant friends, a piece of paper, a stainless steel water bottle, a free yearbook and convocation program and a lifetime membership to the OED online. And I can't help but feel a little jilted. Wasn't there supposed to be more to this?

Having actually graduated a year ago and only going through the ceremony this summer, I can safely say I'm not leaping to the head of the pack in leading the world to a better tomorrow. Which is not to say I lack talent. Don't worry, I'm still arrogant in that department... and few others. But it's not like you get a piece of paper and they're hanging on your coattails waiting for you to drop the next bon mot. They aren't banging on your door offering you a job saving the world. It's a tough, grueling world of job hunting to find even menial labour researching documents and entering data let alone become president of the country. Quite frankly it is frustrating that they build up post secondary education as the be all end all of society only to find that when you finish that race, you're just starting a cross country marathon with far more competitors vying for first place and the gold medal.

I have achieved something that less than 1% of the world's population achieves. But then considerably small portion of the population has clean drinking water, too. Still, for all the setbacks and build ups and let downs, I'm not giving up on the dream of sitting on my ass for large amounts of money while my secretary does most of the work. If Bush can do it, so can I.

High on Life

Man, what is this shit? Taste's like shit. I'm not feeling anything. Better do another, I think. No, still nothing. This was awfully expensive I'm not getting anything off it. Fuck. Life is the worst drug ever.

Random Thought #2

Life is a never ending series of defining moments that are oddly difficult to define.

I don't believe in the singularity of fate but I've always thought that life was pretty linear. You follow a path and come to a crossroads. You choose another path and follow it to another crossroads, ad infinitum. It's a bit of a cliche but it's pretty well known way of visualizing life. But what it life isn't a series of choices made? What if it is not the divergence of the path into more than one way but rather a convergence when two paths come together? The intricate web of all the decisions and events of one's life come together at a single point to propel us on to the next destination.

Two roads converged in the woods, and I-
I took the one I came by,
And that has made no difference.

Life Lesson #3

Life would be so much easier if women could learn to (not) think like men.

Just in Time For Christmas

I remember when I was a kid and the war between VHS and Beta had just ended with VHS the inferior victor. Back then a movie would come out in theatres, have a good run of three to five months depending on its popularity, be available for purchase on cassette about a year after that and then on TV a year after that. There was an uproar back then about piracy back then, too.

This was back in the mid to late 80's, you understand. Now it's the mid to late 00's. Replace VHS with DVD or Blu-Ray and digital copy and movies are available for free online before you can go see them for an arm and a leg and a left testicle at the theatre. If you can afford the fare, you'd best act fast because a blockbuster flick will be showing for the next twelve minutes. I exaggerate, of course. But a good run seems to last for a maximum of six weeks these days. I swear I have seen movies available on DVD a mere three months after its big screen debut. On occasion I have even seen movies on the rot box in only six months.

I'd be curious to know what this fasttrack to obscurity says about a) our consumerist culture b)piracy c) the thing that I forgot because it's four in the morning. Are film companies just producing more and more tripe that we gobble up like dogs? Is the demand for entertainment so great that we want immediate gratification and are no longer willing to pay for it? In essence, has the availability of movies on the net depleted the box office receipts so much that it is no longer profitable to run a film for longer than the reel it's developed on? I'd be curious if I wasn't so lazy. I'd probably be less lazy if film companies weren't producing such dribble.

Ritzy

Tabi bought some President's Choice Rich & Flaky crackers. Apparently they're made with 100% pure Paris Hilton.

Justification

I always forget to justify these things. Not as in state my defence, justify as in alignment. 

Ape-shit

How was your day?

Ape-shit.

Ape-shit?

You know how I always say it's like working with fuckin' monkeys? Except that you can train monkeys? Well today they called me on it and replaced the employees with monkeys. There was crying and sweaty monkey love and something hit the fan.

...Ape-shit.

Ape-shit.

Random Writing #2

We were having a dinner party. Chris showed up in a tuxedo. Tess had on a slinky black number with wide shoulder straps and ample cleavage. I felt underdressed in a wool sweater and jeans.

The thing about it was that we had to cross through a swanky restaurant to get to my upstairs apartment. I greeted them at the door of the restaurant, introduced Matthew the mairtre’d and ushered them down the pine finished aisle between the tables to the back where the tables were spaced further apart. “The best part of this apartment,” I said, “is the piano,” and motioned to my right where Billy was playing at a grand, his light, half-hearted, seemingly unconnected notes mingled with the tinks of wine glasses and silverwear on china.

I directed them through the low wall that segmented off the piano and its surrounding tables from the rest. “Watch your step,” I warned taking the step down. I turned to give my hand to Tess to steady her way in her four inch heels. Her hand met mine and seemed to send its warmth and life into me. It was then that I noticed the black and white striped baton in her other hand. An odd choice for an accessory but Tess was an extraordinary character. She stepped down but did not release my hand, continuing on across the floor with my tailing behind, in the direction of the piano though our course was to the left. Chris, ever the cheeky one, slipped into the small space between Tess and me, glancing back at me over his shoulder with a wry smile and wink, making a parade of the whole affair.

“Do you know “You’re My Thrill?” she called a little too loudly to Billy. She spoke without self-consciousness, completely oblivious to the looks. Billy stopped his playing on the wrong note and cocked and eyebrow at her before catching her meaning and starting in on the intro.

Only then did my hand fall to my side as she released it to take two quick steps toward the piano, faltering slightly on one heel. She launched into the words loud enough for the whole place to hear.

Chris stood there in his tuxedo bobbing his head slightly to the tempo and looking more thoughtful than I had ever seen him, raising a fist to his chin and propping the elbow up with his other hand across his gut. Somewhere from the corner of my eye as I stood dumbly watching Tess I noticed the look in Chris’ eyes and realized that this wasn’t going to be easy. He was in love with her, too.

Science Mystery Theatre

It has now been seven and a half months since the Large Hadron Collider went online in Geneva and we have yet to be obliterated by evil terminators from the future. Of course, the LHC has been shut down for seven of those seven and a half months. But it seems unlikely we will be swallowed by microscopic black holes next time it boots up.

Life Lesson #2

The best thing about my $30,000 CDN education is my lifetime free access to the Oxford English Dictionary Online. 

Douche on the Street #6

Chad Kroger sued his former Nickelback band-mate, drummer, Ryan Vikedal, for any royalties he received for his efforts on the bands albums. Kroger, you might recall, pens such hauntingly poetic (cheesy crap) songs as "Rock Star" about his fervent and somehow successful attempt at becoming a rock star and his whiney nostalgia about going back to high school despite now being a famous rock star. For being so incredibly whiney, self-absorbed, backstabbing, vindictive and inexplicably popular (I mean, come on ladies, he's two steps down from trailer trash trash - the kind of trash you find on the floor of trailer trash's trailer), you are a douche. While I always try to end these things with the word douche, I must stress here that of all the douchy douches who irk my ire for a few brief seconds of my day, you are the douchiest. Goodbye!

...Douche.

Stephen Hawking, Porn Star

I recently bought myself a second hand Mac computer for the purpose of learning how to use a piece of crap - I mean how to use a Mac. After all, it is the industry standard for desktop publishing according to my old boss who ought to know since it was his business. Though quite frankly I think it would be a much more profitable business if it didn't take forty minutes to save a document. But hey, what do I know about business?

While toying around with this thing, I've discovered that it has a built in speech synthesizer which will read out loud anything you write if you only ask it too. 

Have you ever seen that episode of Family Guy where Brian goes back to school and has Stephen Hawking as a professor, and during a party at his house, a cut-scene starts where he's having sex with his wife and he says in that synthesizer voice, "I've been thinking about this all day?" Yeah. Well that voice was done with a Mac computer's synthesizer but it's pretty close to the one Steve's got. So for those of us perverted enough and who like to daly in all the finer (seedier) forms of literature, open TextEdit, type in "I want to fuck you senseless" or you're favourite cheesy porno line, go to edit - speech - start speaking and have yourself a merry little laugh.

Oddly enough, Tabi, a friendly voice on the other end of a tech support line for a certain computer manufacturer, was unaware of this particular feature until I stumbled upon it. Apparently none of her coworkers new about it either. 

Semi-State of Existence or Schrodinger's Cat

"I think I'm dying," Holly said to me. 

In typical cynic's style I responded, "We're all dying."

There's a thought experiment cooked up by a guy named Schrodinger about a cat in a box with vial of poison that may or may not break depending on whether any radiation is detected. I'm not sure of the how or why of this experiment (do not try this one at home, please), but supposedly it has something to do with quantum physics. In any case, at some point the cat is supposedly both alive and dead at the same time. Not half alive and half dead, I gather but both alive and dead. 

And it got me thinking. Dead is pretty easy to define. It's not alive. Inanimate. Unmoving. Lacking the gumption to rouse oneself to the laziest act of thinking. Dead. Now alive on the other hand... That's a whole different kettle of kittens. From the moment we are born we are on a collision course with death. Even if there is no such thing as destiny, we are bound to die. You could say we were dead in the beginning. Sure the scientist tell us there are a few criteria for something to be considered alive. Must consume, must respire, must defecate, must reproduce and must have DNA. But even the scientist are pretty vague on the whole thing. After all, life from outer space may be completely different. They figure you pretty much know it when you see it even if you don't know what it is. So then, if life is so hard to define, how is it that we can define dead as not alive - or more exactly as something that was once alive but no longer is? That's sort of like defining a word by using the word. 

At some point though, we must indeed be alive and dead. At one moment we are alive and the next we are dead. States being what they are, they require some kind of transitionary period. Here's where that quantum physics kicks in. Electrons circling the nucleus are in a set orbit around said nucleus. If at any point energy is thrust into the atom, the electrons kick it into overdrive and make a wider orbit. According to my astronomy professor, there is no in between state. It goes from one level to another. But this isn't really true. For however incredibly brief a period, the electron is somewhere in between it's two set distances from the nucleus. So while the cat is in a heightened state of dying, it is still alive. But then it's not. Like ice melting, at some point it's not quite water and not quite ice, but something in between. Is life then perchance that in between twixt death and something else? Are we alive at all? Or just in a more active state of death? Or despite Holly's insistence, are we quite fully alive at all times until death hunts us down and lays us flat with a single final shot?

Questions, questions, questions....

From the Files

Mmm. The smell of fresh hot bread. I think it's just about ready. I think I'll take it out of the oven now. 

The bread rack, on the other hand has a different plan. It thinks I am easy prey. It has lain in ambush, waiting to strike. It pounces! But I am not so easy a target. I catch it in midair. We wrestle. It tries to crush me with its burning hot mass and flailing limbs. I try to fend it off, straining to keep from getting gouged by its not very razor-like corners. Finally the moment is right. With a last effort, it tries a wild blow but I dodge, sending it face first to the tile. It is defeated. And I am victorious. (I love italics).

The moral, you ask? Never turn your back on a bread rack. 

Douche on the Street #5

You move stealthily through the night, deftly weaving a path through the shadows and back alleys, invisible to the naked eye. A man on a mission, you keep out of sight until your dirty deeds are done. Only once it is done and the evidence is disposed of - city works was never meant to cover up your heinous crimes - may you brag to your friends. Oh, yes, you are a master of ninjas. Too bad you're not very clever. 

No, not very clever at all. Because you insist on defacing public property and making me pay to have your lame jabs at a respectable segment of society cleaned up, you are a douche. 

Bringing Sexy Back

I regret to inform you, Mr. Timberlake, that Sexy never went anywhere. Ok, well it took a sabbatical sometime in the mid eighties during which Time hired a few temps like Denim, Spandex and Big Hair to pick up the slack but obviously there is no replacement for an experienced employee. Sexy took some time off but it never went anywhere. Hence, you can't bring it back. Even if it did go somewhere, I highly doubt you and your Brillo hair or stubble top or whatever you're sporting these days could bring it back. 

What you're most likely confusing Sexy with, as many people do, is Skanky, Sexy's fugly little child. And it never really went anywhere either. 

Douche on the Street #4

This one is not from personal experience but rather comes courtesy of Tabitha who works at a call centre for a large company. 

She answers the phone with her usual spiel and the man on the other end says, "Put a man on the phone for me. There's a good girl," in a most condescending manner. 

Look, sir. Tabi has had as much training as every man in that building and is just as qualified to solve your problem as anyone else. You - a man - called in because you couldn't solve the problem on your own. Because this is the new millennium and you still live in some mysogenistic time warp, you are a douche. 

Tabi solved his problem. 

Stephen Hawking on Acid

Within the atom, electrons circle the nucleus. Within the nucleus and the electrons, even smaller things may circle the centre - bosons and positrons and whatnot. 

Within the universe, galaxies circle and spin around one another. Within the galaxies, planets and stars circle and spin. 

Galaxies are made up of stars and planets. Stars and planets are made up of atoms. Atoms are made up of electrons and things we know nothing about. So what if the universe is not the end all be all of existence? What if universes spiral and spin around in something even larger? What if even that greater thing is just a tiny piece of something even larger? What if the universe is an atom?

Life Lesson #1

No one wants to pet a wet dog. But everyone wants to touch a wet pussy.

For More Information

To His Royal Highness, The King of Leons,

Regarding your concern that your "sex is on fire," this could be due to a number of factors. While there are still some tests to run, based on the symptoms you describe, it seems likely that you may have contracted a venereal disease. Please discontinue any sexual activities and seek immediate medical attention at your nearest facility before your gonads shrivel up and drop off. Please find enclosed a few brochures. Thank you for your interest in this topic. 

Sincerely, Dr. Joe Plumber

Brochure 1

Brochure 2

Brochure 3

Douche on the Street #3

Mr. Machismo. On the first really fine day of spring I see a man of twenty something walking down the street toward me twirling his shirt around his finger. I grant you it was a fine day indeed, but come on. It was thirteen degrees. No one else of the hundred or so other people I saw in my twelve minute walk were shirtless, not even the androgenous guy/girl that asks for change all the time. The reason that you were shirtless wasn't because you were hot. It was because you could go shirtless and show off your muscles without being cold. That fact that you feel the need to show off your muscles in such a manner makes you a douche.

Random Thought

I never really know if you are awake until I do something to wake you up.

Douche on the Street #2

"I wear my dark sunglasses at night," is a hit song, not a creed to live by. Douche.

Twenty Five Things Later

Rules: Do NOT tag twenty five friends. Do NOT force them to do this too.

1. I have a teddy bear named Pookie.
2. Pookie has his own Facebook.
3. I have only ever broken one bone in my body – I chipped the knuckle of my left hand playing basketball. “Playing some b-ball outside of the school, when a couple of friends, they were up to no good, started breaking bones in my neighbourhood. I chipped one little thumb and my mom got scared. She said, ‘You’re going to the hospital to have that thumb repaired.’”
4. I am deeply in love with my home entertainment centre. But like all relationships, it could be improved with surround sound.
5. My Nanaimo bars and butter tarts are to die for.
6. I keep two blogs, one of which you will never read. The other of which you will probably never read, either.
7. Magic hands.
8. I once farted during an exam in a conference room with only four other people in it while seated on a wooden chair. It resounded. Then I did it again.
9. I’ve always wanted to jump off a bridge onto a moving train or passing semi.
10. I’ve always wanted to hop a freight train and just see where it goes.
11. I speak three languages, I have studied most of the collected works of Shakespeare, I can understand Chaucer and Beowulf, I have obtained a degree in English Literature, I have backpacked Europe – twice – and written a book about my adventures. Now I draw faces on cookies for a living.
12. I am addicted to Coke.
13. This is my fourth laptop charger in a year and a half. Blame Lily.
14. If I could, I would build the world out of LEGO.
15. The last person to call me was an automated message from California telling me the warranty on my non-existent vehicle has expired.
16. I like whiskey.
17. I like whiskey.
18. I see the sun for an average of probably three hours a day.
19. I have a wife and children living in Rio.
20. I lied about number 19.
21. I now habitually say California as “Cali-forn-ya.”
22. I wish people would put more effort into their insults. “Fag” or “bitch” doesn’t have the ring to it of something like “Thou art a syphilitic sore on the genitalia of society.”
23. I really just pretend not to have a sense of humour.
24. I feel more at home when I have no home than when I do.
25. I’m only doing this because Tabi has me whipped.

Changing the World one Malkovich at a Time

Have you ever been to a history museum that had different rooms for different periods in time?Behind saloon doors you can witness a wax re-enactment of the Old West. In the dark cave entrance you hunt stuffed saber tooth tiger skins with Neolithic man. Through sliding doors you stand on the bridge with Captain Kirk and his toupee.

What if there was a museum where you pass through the doors and enter not a mock up of a different time or different place in space, but that you went there. The door is a wormhole that bends to your will and you can enter your favourite nostalgic dream and contract the cholera or bubonic plague or Tribble fever or whatever the fuck it is you contract in the future. Wear the gut wrenching corsets of Elizabethan England, the drafty rags of a Medieval wretch, or the package bearing tights of the intergalactic space. Would you enter the rabbit hole? Or would you stay here with medicare and comfortable clothes? Live dangerously? Or just plain live?

And now for today's movie review. Being John Malkovich: Just fuckin' bizarre.

Just Plain Canadian

A new movie on the scene - which I haven't yet seen - has Josh Jackson playing the lead role of someone who does something. I have no idea who or what but one assumes he has One Week to live. In the commercial now being aired, Josh's character (who is aging well I might add) rolls up the rim of a coffee cup to read the words "Go west young man" (no punctuation). Any Canadian will immediately identify it as a "Roll up the Rim to Win" cup profferred by Tim Hortons (although Tim Horton's employees cannot distinguish winning tabs from those of rival coffee corp Country Style). And because of this, you know it's a Canadian movie.

Somehow coffee has become synonymous with Canada. We drink the most coffee per capita of any country. And coffee doesn't even grow in this country.

Irish Canadians

I am a Canadian of Irish decent as many Canadians are. This is oddly one of the few countries in the world that actually celebrates St. Patrick's Day. The local parade was held today though I missed it because I had to work, I managed to make it to my downtown apartment as it ended and its celebrants made their ways home. One particular onlooker had on one of those big floppy green and white Dr. Seuss hats. I thought to myself, I appreciate the fact that you are enthusiastically trying to celebrate my Irish heritage, sir, something of which I, myself, am awfully proud, but that hat makes you look like a douchebag. Please remove it and get stereotypically blue-blind paralytic drunk instead.

The Passchen

"But they get back together in the end, right?" I asked her.

"I don't know," she responded. And we still don't know because we walked away from the last half hour of The Breakup to go do laundry or something. Yeah... laundry.

"Marley dies in the end, you know," she said of Marley and Me.

"What? And this was supposed to be a kids' movie?" And it got me thinking about movies and what our expectations of movies are supposed to be. Because I wanted them to get back together. I wanted Marley to live. This was not purely for the sake of any emotional attachment one might have for the characters themselves. Rather, that's just the way that fun movies are expected to be. 

Then there's Passchendaele, Canada's war epic. I can't say as I knew exactly what to expect. The one I thought was going to die didn't I and the one I thought wasn't did. But in a war movie, usually at least one of the heroes dies in some vainglorious pursuit of king and country. So you know someone is going to die. There's the love scene, of course. A little gratuitous if you ask me. And the end.. I wouldn't have seen that coming in a million years, even though it was foreshadowed at least twice. It's a little graphic although not all that gory. In some artsy-fartsy way I gather it was making a comment on the futility of the war. The temporary ceasefire was an emotional thing to observe. But given the climate of modern society, I had expected the film to lean a little further in condemnation of war. While it certainly did not make things look rosy, though the mud ran red, Aesop would have taken "A man's got to do what a man's got to do" out of the story. 

Paul Gross' wooden Mountie character of Due South fame came off as a little... wooden. What worked so well in that show was a little lost in this one. Attribute it to shell shock, I suppose. It's not that his acting is bad, per se. The character is just a little too stoic to be a character that one forms a bond with. 

Likewise, Joe Dinicol's Train 48 naive character is warped into this picture. Though the kid is charismatic, he overacts a bit here. 

I'm not sure what it is about Canadian produced drama but that's typically what you get: a period piece that seems as wooden as you the sets. My mind harkens back to Anne of Green Gables and it's spinoff. It just feels like paper dolls dancing against a gorgeous, fertile background that is utterly Canadian. 

Still, while I had expected a little more from the movie, it's wasn't exactly disappointing. It was just... Canadian. 

The Fifth of November

"The building is just a symbol. So is the act of blowing it up. Alone a symbol is meaningless. But with enough people behind it... Blowing up a building can change the world."

The movie version of V for Vendetta came out in 2005. That's four years after 9/11 for those of you too lazy to do the math. The film is a loose version of the comic. Obviously some of the world events that happened after the original comic have influenced the film. I realize I've already touched on this back in Politcal Ponderings but for a second there I had a much more fully realized vision of what I'd like to say. It's gone now so I'll have to wing it.

The above quote comes from about a half hour into the film. I don't know if it appears in the original graphic novel. But I have to say that it certainly resonates with today's audience. The movie presents a post-apocalyptic United Kingdom; a world in which the United States has begun a war it couldn't finish.

Sounds a little real, doesn't it?

A terrorist blows up the Old Bailey in London (to which the quote refers) and attempts the demolition of the Parliament buildings in the end. Mostly for revenge. But also to change the world. And he succeeds. The people rise and topple their oppressive totalitarian government. Gives you hope, doesn't it? Makes you think we can make a difference? That we can change the world if we act together? That we can make it a better place? For a minute at least. Until you realize we may be on the other end of the story, that we may not be the disenfranchised people, rather that we might be the restrictive government.

It's a funny world of "us" and "them" and "they" want us to believe that we are the righteous, the god-fearing, the enlightened few, the meekly brutal who shall inherit the future for faith or by bullet.

I don't know who is right and who is wrong. I don't know the means nor the end to which they lead. All I know is that my opinions don't match those of the girl in the next room, the person closest to me in the world let alone a group of people large enough to enforce a revolution. And there's the crux, the cross upon which we crucify ourselves. The utopia of today is the dystopia of tomorrow. The vision we share now is a startling mirage we may fear in the future. What works for one may not be what works for another. I dream of a world of socialized medicine, equal opportunities and higher education. But for others the world is a greedy place of fortune, inheritance and oppression in order to keep it. Indeed, even in a world of my dreams, how bland would it all be? How do you enforce a vision? You can't hold a gun to a dream and "the people" is but a passing - if reoccurring - dream.

A building was blown up almost eight years back and it changed the world. Not for the better. But are we the victims or the perpetrators? Did we rise to fight injustice? Does injustice exist? Or did we suffer the consequences of our police-state actions - "the people" rising in revolt to our oppression?

In another movie moment, a life story of Che Guevara is set to be released soon, starring the talented Benicio del Torro. A review I read today said the film is far from the truth, claiming Hollywood has glamourized a brutal man. I misquote, "...if it weren't for his ideology, Che would have been nothing more than a brutal serial killer." I don't know the truth and am only vaguely familiar with the history of the man. I believe he was a vicious killer. And I believe he had a good if misguided cause. On the one hand there is a real world example of the people rising together in an attempt to create something better for themselves and more or less failing in that attempt. On the other hand... well, it didn't work out so well. Still, I feel a need to defend the glamour of the horror. Hollywood may be presenting us with a faux version of the events. But isn't that what we need? Not the utopia itself. Not a united world. We need the dream. Or we fall victims to ourselves.

Important Information

Dear Employers,
As you no doubt are aware, we are in the midst of a recession. 129,000 jobs were lost in Ontario in January alone. Rest assured, however, that your employees and I are fully willing to show up for work. We have rent to pay, school, and kids to take care of. What this means is that we can't drop everything at the drop of a hat to come slave away for you at minimum wage but that we will try our hardest to makes end meet.

Please be aware that we have bills to pay and sometimes cannot afford to pay them even on the pittance we are being paid by you while working full time let alone part time.

The best thing to do in this times of economic hardship is to spend money like there's no tomorrow. By doing so, you stimulate economic growth. The money you spent is in turn spent by the people you paid it to. The more you spend, the quicker the recession will be over with.

As millionaires, perhaps you should not be complaining about slow business, and consider yourself lucky that you don't have to work for a living.

And Another Thing...

I watched "Gladiator" again the other day. It seems to me, although I could be wrong, that somewhere in that three hours there was a line to effect of "Haven't you had enough?" in reference to the blood being spilled in the name of entertainment. Evidently not. It doesn't look like we've progressed much in the last two thousand or so years. We're still pretty found of watching people get slaughtered as evidenced by the film "Gladiator." The only difference seems to be that we're more willing to buy it. It's fake blood and fake violence and we're just as willing to look.

And yet...

With the recent demise of Heath Ledger and the following box office smash, methinks the public would pay even more than usual to see the real thing happen on the screen.

Klondike 8675309

I love it when she curls up to me at night, moving close to my body, sliding her arm along my side until it locks in underneath my own. I love it when she comes to me after work and wraps her hands around my waist and smiles up at me, almost childishly; she has some sort of surprise for me. I love it when we order pizza and sit on the bed and eat it while watching the Sunday night line-up, without any particular conversation or obligations, just enjoying each other's presence.

She says I don't tell don't her often enough how I feel or what I'm thinking. She says I don't say those three words often enough, "I love you." And truth be told, she's probably right. I don't say it very often. I think, and we've been through this before, that those words are flung around far too nonchalantly these days. But I say it in other ways, if you're paying attention. Much like smiling, it's all in the eyes. If you look closely, you might see a little film of wetness shining on my green irises. You can feel it in a hug. You might not see it all the time as you're often sleeping when I have such looks on my face.

What she doesn't seem to realize is that to a man, love is not a thought, it's a feeling. As such, it's entirely separate from thoughts. A feeling is something like happiness, sadness, anger or melancholy. A thought runs along the lines of "I need to feed the dogs," or "I wonder how many steps it would take me to get to the grocery store." And somewhere in between thoughts and feelings is what I'll call instinctual thoughts. For instance, boredom is a feeling but one that people often immediately recognize and vocalize to the point of awareness. A feeling of thirst or hunger or the need to pee. They're feelings. The body is telling you something and you're brain responds. But real feelings, the kind like love, don't make themselves aware, per se. They're there. They're being felt. But they're in the background somewhere, a chemical reaction taking place somewhere in the brain that produces effects of euphoria and increased heart rate. But they aren't thoughts. They pass through the back of your mind like disembodied shadows in the dark, flitting from corner to corner out of the corner of your eye. And you're aware of it on some level. But what's shining in the light of the sun and has captured your attention like a golden idol is the sparkle of her eye and what you think is "I'm lucky," or you're looking into the depth of impenetrable blackness and you think for a brief second that you can see something, but you're not sure what it is you see. Maybe it's electricity. Maybe on some atomic level there is some little operator named Lucy desperately pulling and plugging in wires on a tiny atomic switchboard and for a second you've been connected to that other person. And if you think about it, you might think, "That's love." But chances are, if you're a man, at least, you just feel it. You don't think it. That's just the way we're wired. Our switchboards are outdated while women have the latest in switchboard technology.

After a little more than twenty eight years of life on this planet, I suppose the one thing I've learned about women is that they don't work like men. They work on an emotional basis. Men, on the other hand, work on (what men call) a basis of logic. Whether it's truly logical or not is to be debated.

Dear Hollywood

There is this thing called "first person view." Essentially the idea is that you get to see what a character sees. In literature, this is referred to as first person limited. As you read, you see what the main character sees and follow what that character is thinking. In video games, you get this POV a lot in shooters, so you can see exactly what you're shooting at. In movies, this view didn't used to be used much. Sometimes in epics you would see the love interests in the end staring out over a balcony at a wide expanse of mountains or a town and the camera would wrap around as though you could see what they were seeing and then the words "The End" would fade in and out to black. While this is a first person view, it's still a wide angle shot.

First person is useful for a number of things. As I said, in video games, it allows you to see what you're shooting at. In literature, it narrows the scope of the story for the reader until the end when you get that punch in the gut that makes you see the whole story from some other character's point of view. You identify with the character. You're in touch with the action. It feels like it's about you. It creates a sense of urgency.

In the year of someone's lord, nineteen hundred and ninety eight, a breakthrough war film titled Saving Private Ryan emerged upon the silver screen. The film made waves for it's first person views during battles in WWII. It made people nauseous. It captured the urgency of battle. It made people see the horror of war up close and far too personal. It wasn't a story about glory and honour. It was a story about duty and necessity, a twist on the usual war epic.

Since then, action directors have been latching on to first person view like crack. They're addicted and there needs to be an intervention. It's destroying the quality of movies.

Exhibit A: Quantum of Solace, the new Bond picture. The film, as most action films do now, makes pretty constant use of the first person view, or at the very least, the extreme close up. In the opening sequence, Bond is being chased by some cars. I'm not sure how many cars, exactly. Only that they were black. The scene makes many frequent cuts from one angle to another, some of them less than a second long. There are some crashes and guns firing and an explosion or two. None of the shots takes more than five seconds, I'd wager, many of them very close, with a narrow field of view despite the wide screen. By the end of the scene, all I'm left knowing is that Bond has somehow survived.

Shortly after that in the second chase scene, this time with Bond in hot pursuit, pretty much the same thing happens. There are a lot of very short shots, a close up of a hand pulling on something, flashes and crashes and flying glass coming from nowhere in particular. Interrupt that with a John Woo fight hanging from ropes for fifteen to twenty seconds. Then back to the crashing and flying and close ups of arms and guns and broken glass not doing anything in particular - or at least not doing anything in particular because we can't see what those things are attached to due to the extreme close ups and first person view. In the end, Bond kills the guy. To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure who he was chasing as the the shots were short and close up that I never got to see the face. It's only afterward that the name is said to confirm my suspicion on that one, and that's only because I didn't know who the other character in the room was.

The movie pretty much carries on that way. Sure, there's a story that's a kind of flimsy. There are touching moments of male bonding (no pun intended). There is emotion and sympathy and empathy. There are chases on foot, in planes, in cars, in boats (a boat chase? how often does that happen in real life? You know why? Because boats are slow). There are shootouts and explosions and women and martinis. The typical Bondian fare served up with a dash of bitter darkness. All in all, it's not a bad movie. But it does suffer from that short shot close up and first person point of view. Much of the time it's impossible to tell what the hell is going on as though you're expected to just accept the mindless action on screen as being entertainment in itself.

But it's not. The action needs to serve the story. And while the action in Quantum of Solace serves to advance the plot, it doesn't serve to entertain. So my plea to Hollywood directors is simply this: bring back the wide angle shot. That good old panoramic view lets viewers see the action in all it's glory. They know which character is doing what without the need to make one second shots. They capture the scenery and a sense of scope. It is one thing to show the action. It's another to show the context in which the action happens.

Adam and Eve or Lilith?

"We don't sweat, we don't belch, we don't shit and we don't fart. If we didn't bitch, we'd explode," she likes to generally misquote the female comic that I'm finding this as being attributed to Diane Ford. I've seen the bit and didn't think it was all that funny though it did produce a smirk on my oft smirking face. It seems to have caught on with the females and a lot of them seem content to accept this tongue in cheek explanation as a viable truth.

"If you don't shit, you're not a human being. And if you're not a human being, that makes you some kind of horrible she-demon," I reply, asserting my power of logic and, I feel, employing my great powers of wit.

She smiles knowingly.

A Geography Lesson

Emma: I think I'm just in denial.

Lauren: Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, you know.

Emma: It's in Egypt? [I'm amused here because she's clever enough to figure out the pun but not enough to know where the Nile is]. I thought it was somewhere, like, you know, in the Amazon or something.

Lauren: No.

Emma: Well what's in the Amazon then?

Kids today....

Screw You, 2008

If we ever meet again in a dark alleyway, I'll shank you like a prison bitch. Even in the beginning when it was good and fresh, you raped my wallet. Now that things are old and we've fallen into a rut, you take me to court looking for child support for the child that we never had together.

When I went looking for a better position in life, you held me back. I may be indispensable but I'm not irreplaceable. Let me move on with 2009 and find a place where I'm actually happy. Drawing smiley faces on cookies has it's novelties but I'm more interested in the novel than in forced fondant smiles.

Once again you took from me a little piece of my family. As little a piece as it may have been, it was still family. Though I still have 90% of my family left, they are a precious thing not easily replaced, if at all. Certainly not all of them are.

You stole my food from the refrigerator. Not anymore. Now only my girlfriend will be drinking my last Coke and polishing off my cashews.

I've grown tired of you and your friends. It's over between us. I don't want to see you around here anymore. I'm with someone new now. It's good and fresh and clean and well lighted. We drink whiskey and wine. The dog sits on the chair staring at me with never quite closing eyes, twitching with the odd flea bite or random noise. The wind rattles the window panes and it is cold and crisp outside, like all new beginnings are. Cold and crisp. They start that way and grow inside you like a fire. Warming your insides out right to your fingertips until it feels like your touch could light things on fire. Anything is possible in a place like this. It exists outside reality. All it takes is a will and there is a way, here in this place. Everything moves in slow motion in the wink of an eye, here. Everything here feels softer and more sensual. My skin tingles and tickles with her caress. Like strawberries on the edge of the upper lip. It smells like green grass and lilacs instead of stale cigarette smoke and sour grapes. Music follows behind her with sweet memories that haven't happened yet. She takes like milk chocolate with an aftertaste of French vanilla. Have you ever had that feeling of being drunk but that that feeling has provided you with ultimate clarity? Focusing on something far away through the very near lens of impure glass. Through beer goggles everything seems steady and perfectly clear. You feel the tumbler of whiskey in your hand, really feel it, pressing against your palm, your fingertips, trace the edge with those fingertips, smell it, taste it in the smell, open your mouth and drink only the flavour of dark amber ambrosia, taste the virgin, bourbon and sherry soaked white oak, a hint of coal smoke and copper and know that it, a glass of whiskey, like all things, as a the writers tell us, is the perfect analogy for life. It is complex and simple with ripples and our fingerprints all over it. That's what my new lover brings to me. She carries all life has to offer in her pocket and breathes sweet promises in my ear. She massages my shoulders and tells me to forget all about the past and for awhile I let her wash me in her new found glory.

With all first kisses, it is magic. It lingers on our lips and in our hearts and warms us from the inside. After a while, the noisemakers stop. The streamers hit the floor. The champagne stops bubbling. The music stops and we stand in the middle of the dance floor, lingering, waiting, hoping the last dance wasn't the last piece of cloud we will ever walk upon as our hands fall to our sides, away from the waists and shoulders and hands of new lovers. The bar is closed and the DJ plays the get out music and we go home with the one closest to us because it's better than going home alone. The fatigue sets in, thighs and shoulders stiff with uncommon movement. We wake up in the afternoon wondering where we are and how we got here and how to get home. Next week we go out searching for new lovers and new adventures and in the meantime always come home to the known, the irrepressible constant; the past with whom we can't live without but can never quite bring ourselves to live with.

God rest ye merry gentlemen. Hark, the herald angels sing. Another year over and what have you done? The same thing I'll do tomorrow. I'll always come back to you, 2008. Even if 2009 gives better ____.

And I think to myself, "What the fuck was I thinking?" And I think to myself, "What a wonderful world." And I think to myself, if nothing else, "I did it my way."

A Note To Harley's Bassist

Your bass has four strings. Make use of the other two. Just because it's a bassline doesn't mean you have to keep playing the same notes over and over again. That's the drummer's job.

Also, reverb is your friend. It's not your lover. Step back from the speakers. When audiences cringe from the wailing feedback, you're standing too close.

A New Year's Playlist for the Nostalgic Man

1. Auld Lang Syne
2. Counting Crows - A Long December
3. Billy Joel - Piano Man
4. Wintersleep - A Weighty Ghost
5. Jenny Owens Young - Fuck Was I
6. Aimee Man - High on Sunday 51
7. David Francey - Far End of Summer (or any Francey song, really. Take your pick)
8. James Taylor - Sweet Baby James
9. Plain White T's - Hey There, Delilah
10. The Trews - Ishmael and Maggie
11. The Pogues - Dirty Old Town
12. Loudon Wainwright III - White Winos
13. The Verve - Freshmen
14. Louis Armstrong - What a Wonderful World
15. Frank Sinatra - My Way