Country Shopping

This part of Canada, like a lot of parts of Canada, is beautiful.  People come from all over the world to visit because of its beauty.  I love this part of Canada.  Sometimes the beauty is almost indescribable.  Two days ago we had a freezing rain storm.  To people who don’t live in this climate it’s a difficult one to describe.  It’s a rain that freezes as soon as it makes contact with something.  Where we live it’s the most dangerous type of precipitation.  The ice virtually congeals around the twigs and branches of trees sometimes so much that it will bring the tree down, often onto power lines cutting out electricity.  We get a ton of snow here most years in the Gatineau Hills but that inconvenience is nothing compared to freezing rain.  When we were commuting to work in the city and there was a freezing rain storm it meant that we weren’t making it to work that day.  Just walking to the end of the driveway and remaining on your feet is a Cirque du Soleilian effort so forget about driving.  But the point is that notwithstanding all of that, freezing rain can cover nature in diamonds.  It takes this beautiful place and puts jewellery on it.

You need to do stuff outside in order to get through a Canadian winter.  We have a vast series of cross-country ski and snow-shoe trails about 15 minutes away that we try to utilize a couple times a week.  There’s a decent ski hill about an hour away that I get to a number of times a season.  Sometimes usually later in the season, after there’s been a thaw or rain and then a flash freeze the lake can be transformed into the most amazing skating rink.  And we walk the roads a lot also in an effort to embrace it.

Canada’s a cold place.  Today’s the 24th of February.  In a lot of places with four seasons people are beginning to see Spring manifesting.  This morning when I got up it was minus 20 C/-4 F.  I have the furnace, the fireplace and the wood stove all active this morning.  I’m booked on a week long ski trip to the Quebec City area on March 21 and the conditions will still be excellent.  Winter is really long here.  I don’t delude myself any longer.  By my educated estimate what I affectionately refer to as the shit season starts on November 01 and subsides no earlier than April 15.  That’s six and a half months of shit.

I’m four and three-quarter months through my last Canadian winter.  I hereby make the following covenant in writing:  We will be somewhere else between November 01/22 and April 15/23.  The only way that we will not be somewhere else this November will be indicative of my tragic demise.  Unfortunately this is a distinct possibility for a couple of reasons.  First, there are a lot of miles on this sixty-one year old frame and second, ol’Vlad has officially invaded Ukraine today so there’s a chance there won’t be anywhere left to go.

Suzanne and I have spent the last couple of months scheming where we will end up.  I should note that we would already be somewhere else if weren’t for a couple of reasons.  Reason number one is that on November 30, 2021 the Trudeau government, based on the science, made it mandatory for the safety of all people in Canada to be vaccinated before boarding an airplane.  If there’s another country in the world that has this mandate I have been unable to find it.  We’re so lucky to live in a land that listens to the science.  As it was pretty clear at that the time of this announcement that vaccinated people could transmit the virus and that the person crammed into the seat beside you could be an unvaccinated international traveller transiting through Canada who chances are may not have needed to be tested, maybe it wasn’t really based on actual science.  As this plan was announced during the ($630M) 2021 election campaign and wasn’t enacted until two months after the Liberals “won” (gaining three seats more that the 2019 election), maybe it was based more on the science of headlines and public opinion.  Oh reason number two you ask?  Suzanne is not vaccinated.

So one of the main reasons I want to spend less time here other than the severe Canadian climate should be somewhat obvious.  It’s because of parenthesis usage.  Do you see them up there in that paragraph above?  Politics and me are no longer good bedfellows.  Politics and social media actually.  Politics, social media and other people’s opinions really.  Okay, okay - politics, social media, other people’s opinions, media, mass consumption and consumerism, ecological unsustainability, religion and the concept of free will along my own inherent contradictions are no longer good bedfellows and I think moving to the Andes with a continuing regimen of psychoanalysis and maybe the odd ayahuasca journey will be beneficial.

I guess I blew the punchline huh?  The punchline is Ecuador.  Why Ecuador you say?  Let me tell ya.  We had a few criteria that needed to be met.  We needed to find a place that was temperate.  Not too hot and definitely not cold.  We plan on being out of Canada a little longer than the average snowbird, possibly up to nine months of the year.  There had to be great diversity.  Culture shock is the best.  It had to be affordable and allow us to maintain a certain lifestyle.  It had to have a sound infrastructure as I’m old - Suzanne is ageless but I’m old.  It had to be reasonably accessible and preferably a single day of travel away.  And it had to provide a gateway to other travel opportunities.

Once we hit on Ecuador it ticked all the boxes and more.  It’s a reasonably stable democracy with a centrist (possibly right) party presently in power.  As I mentioned I’m old.  As I also mentioned I’m sick of politics and opinions so I won’t share one here other than to say it’s a stable democracy.  There is solid, very reasonably priced dental and health care.  In fact it has become a destination for health care tourism.  Great internet too so I can efficiently get rid of all social media.  The climate is amazing.  There is the coastal area, the sierra (Andes) and the Amazonia.  The coast provides myriad beach towns and all the fun that entails.  The Andes are spectacular and the elevation creates these little micro-climates all over the country.  So a two or three hundred metre difference can have an immense impact on the weather of different areas just a short distance apart.  And then there’s the freakin Amazon jungle.  I’m a little embarrassed to say that prior to beginning this exercise I didn’t really know the Amazon basin encompasses half of Ecuador including a number of tributaries of the Amazon River.  You can leave Ottawa in the morning and be in Quito in the evening and although it’s on the west coast of South America it’s the same damn time-zone.  As you’re probably aware, the name Ecuador derives from equator and this means that the sun comes up at 6:30 in the morning and sets at 6:30 in the evening, 365 days a year.  Quito is also a jumping off point to the rest of South America so travel opportunities abound.

Kinda sounds like paradise to me.

We’re hoping that something happens with the restriction and we can do an exploratory trip in May for a month and then we’re going to rent our place here for a year in November and do it.   Now if the restriction is not lifted then the bad bedfellows come back into play because as it turns out you can board a plane in progressive ol’Canada without being vaccinated.  The thing is that you just have to be a rich Canadian to do it.  Rich Canadian’s must have a different physiology or biology from regular or poor folks or something because you don’t need to be vaccinated to board a private plane in Canada.  I didn’t know it but I guess Covid can somehow tell how much money you have in the bank?

We’re not rich.  We’re just regular schmucks.  I’ve done a bit of research and it looks like we may be able to swing a seat on a private jet for somewhere between $5-10K.  That’s fucking insane and will definitely rule out an exploratory venture but if the restriction’s still on as November draws near it may be an investment we’ll be willing to make.

The only real resource we’ve got is time and that seems to be depleting at an exponential rate and with bad bedfellows and guys like ol’Vlad around I don’t think we should wait.

Diversity in the Neighbourhood

I have an ex-military neighbour who’s so right-wing while self-describing as a centrist (or as they like to call themselves - fiscal conservatives) who one time mentioned without a hint of irony that he was kind of fascinated with Augusto Pinochet.  That although he seemed to bully his critics and political opponents and generally appeared to not be a very nice guy, he did indeed spur strong economic growth in Chile.  My neighbour had been to Chile once or twice with the military and observed that “the people” really didn’t have that much bad to say about the guy.

Is it just me but I seem to recall back in the olden days there was a little more room for political curiosity and healthy skepticism?  The climate seemed more open for dogs to play with cats and colouring outside the lines was not quite so threatening a concept.  Regular Joe’s seemed to have more room to be inquisitive and prone to scratch the surface in order to gain some purchase on what makes things tick.

Itch relief and mechanical discovery in the case of the Pinochet reign would indicate militarily taking control and ousting a democratically elected government with the backing of the US and installing economics that included banning unions, killing dissenters, getting rid of certain tariff protections, imprisoning dissenters, privatizing a large number of government industry including social security and selling well below market value to (you guessed it) people within his own circle, torturing dissenters, and all the while amassing a personal fortune over the seventeen years of his iron-fisted dictatorship.  Did I mention he killed dissenters?

Pinochet used the influence of the “Chicago Boys”.  The Chicago Boys were a number of American educated Latin-American economists that had studied and believed in a libertarian free-market system of deregulation and privatization applied to heavily controlled economies.  

It’s worth noting that the Heritage Foundation credits them with transforming Chile into Latin America’s best performing economy and one of the worlds most business-friendly jurisdictions.    I just broke out in hives typing the Heritage Foundation.  I just did again.  It’s also worth mentioning that this training program was conceived back in the 1950’s by the US State Department as a kind of apprentice program between the University of Chicago and Chile’s Catholic University.  And again it’s worth noting that while the original project from the 50’s has ended the training program continues to this day.

I wonder when Milton Friedman, arguably considered one of the greatest western economists, was loading these boys up with all this good wholesome economic theory whether he clearly understood the symptoms usually associated to a “heavily controlled economy”.  I imagine it was a pretty sweet gig being one of the “smartest” dudes around and your behemoth government, so existentially terrorized by any other form of socio-economics outside of free-market capitalism, hands you a continent and a half of perfect petri-dishes in which to perform your experiments on like real people with like real lives.

Remember  - no irony, he meant it.  Should I admire that kind of conviction?

We All Gotta Problem Man

I recently found an extremely competent psychoanalyst.  Psychoanalysis apparently starts out like most things these days - with the ticky-box exercise.  There are numerous backgrounder forms that must be completed and supplied back that for some inexplicable (to me at least) reason appeases the governing college and prevents culpability or liability that would allow the insurance company to reject a claim. 

I’m not cynical enough to be saying that anyone other than my councillor is reading the content of these forms. I’m just saying that someone is saying that their completion is integral to help prevent some sort of bad outcome.

So my therapist asked me to fill out the forms and as I’m really trying not to make this a performative experience like I have every other time in the past when I’ve gone through the therapy process, I answered every question honestly.  Some really good shit too.  Things like under “What prompted you to seek services at this time”?, I gave the ol’ “the fact that the job left but the anxiety didn’t” and under “Please give a brief account of the history of your problem, from the beginning - I threw down “I have for forty years been anxious about work and how others perceived me and how some affectation continues” and then under the oldie but goody - “Is there any other information you think may help the therapist”?, I delivered - “I have spent my life working, toiling and playing in the matrix.  I’ve always dreamt about breaking free from it and live my true life.  Now that I have the chance to do this I still seem to keep my foot on the brake, afraid to pull the trigger that will free me up to do it”.

Oh and under - “Are you using any recreational drugs or alcohol for coping”?, I responded that “although coping is a big word, I do drink, primarily on the weekends and occasionally will consume a cannabis edible”.

Go ahead and guess which response seemed to illicit the strongest comment.  I’m guessing you guessed it.  How often are you consuming cannabis? was the closing question from my first session.  Her concern and I really found it to be quaint was that it can cause psychosis.  Holy fuck, do you not think that tug left the jetty a long time ago?  And this was after trying to describe to her how many times as a young explorer acid provided me an immediate line to “god” and the clarity in which it described back to me how we waste almost all of the beautiful blip in the space time continuum we’ve been granted.  

Vonnegut wrote: “maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists”.  Maybe I should have just written that down.

Regardless of this and myriad more subjectivity, I will endeavour to continue to veer away from the performative and offer up some faith that just talking about all this shit will aid solace as the blip dwindles.

I Gotta Problem Man Part Deux

Okay, maybe quantification hasn’t completely fixed it.  There probably shouldn’t be a throbbing mass of anxiety pooling in my solar plexus every night the backlight on the Kindle escape pod is extinguished if it were the appropriate retrofit right?  Since I’ve retired this quivering gob seems in a fit of exasperation and has gone downright revolutionary since my Kid got that cancer thing.

Anyway I thought prior to my diagnosis I should probably do the responsible thing and seek out some help.

I Gotta Problem Man

I suffer from a form of existential angst. 

Thankfully it’s easily quantified. 

I am simply stressed by the injustice that at some point a long time ago, be it by design or evolution, humanity fell into a perpetuating system of socioeconomics that behooved a teeny weeny minority toward wealth and allowed the chips to fall where they may for everyone else. 

That’s it. That’s the sum total of my malady. 

Thank god I wrote it down. I’m all better now. Bye. 

We’re Just Boomers in a Dangerous Time

Recently Suzanne and I were again mired in my favourite fun-loving conversation - the pandemic realpolitik.  You know the one - how critical thinking has somehow morphed into group think and how blessed we’ve been to be recently surrounded with such plentiful virology expertise, the pro’s and con’s of the science of isolation and curfew and blah and blah and blah.  You’d think we’d worn holes in these subjects long ago but mercifully something just then caused a small dent in the space-time continuum and the conversation pivoted to more of my recent favourites -  identity politics, free speech and gender.  

Oh goody!  

Suzanne argued that being cis-gendered individuals we far too often default to heteronormativity and as I’m a product of generational toxic masculinity and she of white feminism, it’s easy to ignore the totality of the gender spectrum.

I agreed that of course this vast spectrum exists and suggested that we’re all just a product of a number of undefined things - possibly a pinch of objective reality, a dash of biological evolution, a smidge of some obscure spiritual fatalism, possibly a dram of free will or merely just some crafted voodoo combination of a million things.  What it really boils down to is semantic as clearly nobody knows, why the hell does it matter and who the fuck is anyone to pre-suppose?  Just be kind to everyone and stop having all the answers.

It was at this point that Suzanne noted that our white oppression is intersectional and that no matter how much gas-lighting or how many micro-aggressions I do this was the truth and it was also true that I would be cancelled if my words got out.

I didn’t know what it was that I could possibly be cancelled from but it sounded kind of nice.  Just then another humane dent appeared and I remembered that the last quarter of the Rams/Cardinal’s game and the final round of the Sony Open were downstairs waiting on PVR.  Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time.  Maybe there is some beneficent control-centre floating atop a cloud somewhere.

Opinion or Mis-information?

Remember having an opinion?  I seem to remember back in the olden times when there existed the ability to share an opinion with someone other than those who’d unwittingly been trapped into a Faustian commitment that rendered listening to your babble inescapable.  Boy has that changed.  I recall those old timey opinions.  They were subtle or nuanced and sometimes unconventional enough to feel like a treat or singular enough to be goose-bump inducing.  

These new kinds of opinions are inclusive.  That’s another word that doesn’t appear to mean what it used to.  What is it with all these words that don’t mean what they used to?  Seems to me now it just means that opinion makes you in or else it makes you out.  These new kinds of opinions often times appear to me to be conjured and curated by whatever club you’ve attached your sorry ass to and anything that slightly contradicts the groupthink alchemizes into propaganda or mis-information.

I’m giving up having opinions.  It’s become too damn dangerous.  My political opinions used to come easy and with such clarity but now they just make me ponder bad things.  Bad things like:  how can I be anti-trucker and still think it’s insane that our government can subjugate rights by invoking the Emergency Measures Act?  How can I despise all discrimination and still think freedom of speech is integral?  How can I feel that humans are free to identify any way they want yet still feel sex on this planet is binary?  So many questions, so much danger.

Oh and then there’s the pandemic.

I remember a time when I was comfortable spouting my opinion that pharmaceutical companies were keenly directed toward markets that would maximize their profits.  You know the good old days before big sickness became ubiquitous in the first world and was really just a concern for the poor.  Like way back in 2015 when according to the UN 1.6 million people in Africa died from malaria, tuberculosis or HIV.  The drugs to prevent these deaths existed in abundance and were extremely affordable, problem was only around 2% were manufactured on the continent and that created a dearth of affordable medicine and the general population couldn’t afford to buy imported treatments.

Oh yeah and also from the UN in’15 - “many African political leaders and development experts believe that the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to offer technical support to African manufacturers. For example, in 2001, 39 international pharmaceutical companies dragged the South African government to court to challenge its plans to manufacture and import cheap, generic HIV/AIDS drugs”.  

The UN is a big husky brute of a bureaucracy with a befuddling mandate but sometimes they sure can put lots of good words together into sentences.  

But now apparently that we’re faced with this great big batch of white first-world sick all of a sudden if you’re to believe what your own eyes are reading or watching, some grand mal seizure of altruism has come over the pharma bro’s.  They’re now unbiased science with a big ol’twist of benevolence and with this motivation have discovered in the relative blink of an eye the vaccines to allow for us to scratch our way back to a semblance of normalcy.

Now I’m all for science.  It’s just that science is tied to the free market and the free market has historically been given a pretty wide berth for priorities possibly being open to manipulation and maybe just maybe a little too much emphasis gets directed towards profit and not so much to making all the people feel better.  Kinda like how the priority of vaccinating the planet quickly shifted when Omicron hit stride and boosters for the first world once again put worrying about those people on hold.

There’s are a number of terms for “priorities possibly open to manipulation”.  My favourite one is corruption and don’t start with the “but they’re businesses and they have to make money” stuff.  Free market capitalism wasn’t concocted with the idea for anyone to make this much money.

This here opinion might not make me guest of the day at the next neighbourhood barbecue.  In factually based information, when I judge this here opinion based on the stuff my own little beady eyes are reading or watching, I’m pretty sure it’s not an opinion at all.  It’s a lead ingot thrust into a fire metastasizing into mis-information gold and apparently I’ve shape-shifted into “one of those”.

These days I spend a lot of my time being anxious and wary of being the sucker momentarily cornered by some buffoon with similar righteous indignation.  It’s always so vehement and exacting and forthright and immediately indicates if I’m in the right place.  I’m usually not.  

But then, this is just my opinion.

I Was Something and I Think I Can Be It Again

I’ve been a lot of thing I’m not and I’m pretty sure I can be something I am again.

My Dad died a few years back.  He wasn’t well and what made him unwell was only going to get worse.  Ironically his coy ability to check out a mere day after yet another doctor prescribed tethering him to an oxygen tank came as a relief. It was obvious to all of us that he was way past having fun with the ageing process and magically he just conjured up the ability to turn the light off. 

Not having him around though is surreal.  It strikes me at the oddest times.  I can be doing anything and the obscurity of him not being here floods over me – that the one guy who was seemingly enamoured to listen to whatever bullshit I was dealing is no longer available, no longer sitting stoically in his chair, devoid of any demonstrative indication of how he felt save for the occasional subtle glint in an eye or tweak of his quiet posture that made it ridiculously obvious of how proud he was to have me as his son and somehow even more importantly, his friend.

I really miss him but it’s not that overtly emotional - oh my god he’s gone and I’m never going to see him again - emptiness.  It’s more the idea that I’ll never have the chance to just look at him and feel first person the sense of pride he exuded toward a guy he loved who continually struggled, sometimes succeeded and yet somehow always flushed him with pride.

 

Yeah I know that I tie his existence directly to how I feel about myself but oddly this appears to be how some of us weaker humans have learned to evolve.  All I know is that words, in my hands, are too weak a tool to convey the importance of this intrinsic human bond.

Dad loved what he “did for a living”.  I’m pretty sure he was in a perpetual state of professional happiness, contentment and fulfillment.

Dad was a builder.  He built houses primarily but other things too.  I can’t tell you how many times when we worked together that he would arrive on-site, brimming with piss and vinegar in possession of a solution to a situation that seemed inexplicable the day before.   In his typically reserved way he would explain that while he slept, the solution came to him.  Never did he intimate that he spent the night gripping it or tossing and turning in search of an answer - it just came to him while he slept.  Since these days I’ve always just assumed this is the basic difference between loving what you do and doing what you think you need to.

So the two things that lend me similar happiness and contentment are writing and building shit.  The writing comes with the fallibility of subjectivity, so one never really knows if the project is completed in the way it was initially designed.  That’s a good thing really, even if what's been penned is trash.  The objective is merely the process.

The building shit thing though is much more clearly defined.  It comes with conclusive design.  Even if it’s created on the fly, its rightness or wrongness is immediately apparent.  Clearly it’s impossible to trick physics and structure into being anything but deterministic.  The beauty is in the simplicity of the precision and it immediately kicks back an objective reality should one choose to leave it wrong.

So after being a whole bunch of other things I’m not now I’m a construction Project Manager.  I work on really big sites that have a million balls in the air, that possess manifold minutiae and an absurd level of bureaucratic hoop jumping.  I make “good” money doing this and make great money for the owners of the company.  This current and hopefully final project means I have an apartment in a small town two hours away from my home where I live during the week in order to do it.

I don’t hate my job. In fact often times I get a sense of gratification or pride from a job well done.  I just resent the fact that I have to fritter away so much time on it.  I just always assumed that once I achieved this level of maturity, after all the minute detail juggling and concurrence in the bureaucratic mating rituals, it would get easier.

 

This unfortunately is not the case.  As a young man, just at the very beginning of my career development and in conjunction with a pair of merry pranksters it was decided that we would spend our weekends undergoing prolonged periods of rigorous medicated training.  This type of training exemplifies to those with their eyes open, a different world.  At the conclusion of this experiment I should have been appropriately educated to changed course and explore a more obscure career path, something that better suited my recent learning, something with a more broadly conceived idea of social scheme. I apparently decided against this concept - no doubt for the same reasons that lead me to hide inside the medication in the first place.  Ultimately this has rendered me somewhat damaged when it comes to playing by the rules of our present paradigm and these rules tend to eat me up.  At 59 it’s not a good idea to allow there to be crap in your life that eats you up.  If one lets that stuff continue to get to you it won’t be long till there are mutating cells literally eating you up and therein lies the basis of my resentment.

My wife retired in May after thirty years with the federales.  I’m scheduled to leap gleefully from the hamster wheel in September of 2021.  The retirement countdown clicker, a virtual device usually enlisted by members of the federal public service, recently turned 600ish days.  Twenty months to fend off the development of mutating cells.  Twenty months till my daughter and son-in-law purchase their handy man special in the country in need of my tinkerage.  Twenty-two months till we board a plane probably to India to begin a third world exploration adventure and to capture it in words and pictures.

Twenty months till I am. 

Travel Tips avec un petit morceau de Revisionist History

Here’s something that you probably haven’t been giving much thought to lately and it kind of worries me that I have; The Magna Carta.  Yeah I know, I’m getting weirder and weirder but I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with it.  There’re a few reasons that lead me to bring it up now.  One thing is, if you keep your ear to the ground you’ll probably hear more about it over the next while, as we will be celebrating its 800^th anniversary in 2015.

Also, my sister-in-law Lorraine just landed in town and she lives in Salisbury England, where the best surviving exemplification is housed at the Salisbury Cathedral.  It’s been there since it was created in 1215, which is pretty damned impressive.  There were thirteen original copies of Magna Carta created and only four of these still exist.  I’ve seen the one in Salisbury while visiting in the past.

My Open Letter to Jian Ghomeshi

Hey Jian, rhymes with neon.  Remember that?  It’s been a few weeks now and I’ve got some things to get off my chest, so if you’ll indulge me, that would be awesome bud.  

How you doin by the way?  Where the hell are ya?  Somewhere a long way from home methinks.  You'd better be anyway.  Can’t imagine the reception you’d receive down at Whole Foods the next time you ran out to replenish the organic almond milk.  I’ve heard it a couple of times that you might be in Los Angeles but I’m thinking that’s still too close to home.  If you were in La La Land, I’m pretty sure TMZ would have tracked you down and turned this Canadian story into something more continental.  An implosion of this magnitude will transgress any border especially with your NPR links.  Remember when you were on 180 stations across America?  No I’m guessing you’re someplace like the Solomon Islands or Vanuatu trying to figure out the next move.  Or maybe you’ve decided that a little repentance is due and you’re hunched over, on your knees polishing the marble floors of a Tibetan monastery with a toothbrush.  I really doubt it but a man can dream can’t he?

Music at Last

I used to be such a pretentious knob.  Get it?  That’s a joke.  The punch line exists in the use of past tense.  I guess when you think about it, it’s almost impossible to have opinions about things and not assume that yours are more dignified or important than others.  And so we go through life formulating and believing our own preconceptions about things.  Thankfully though, I’m blessed with the assurance that my opinions are indeed the correct ones (this is another joke).

I’m pretentiously judgmental about a ton of stuff.  Possibly you can empathize; I automatically judge someone when they walk by with a Tim Horton’s coffee.  In a food shop (notice I didn’t say grocery store), I’m judgey Jerry at the checkout line as I survey the carts ahead of me for their deadly contents; inching my nose ever higher every time something processed hits the conveyor.  You can just imagine what runs through my head at the sight of someone ordering a commercial domestic beer and heaven help the character of those who happen to be laying on a beach reading anything with the words “shades” or “grey” or the like on it.

But the one thing that over-arched all my other pretensions were the opinions I held about my music.  And when I say my music, it is just that.  I have claimed and assumed it as my own and have eventually grown to be defined by it.

Zen and the Art of Firewood Maintenance

We burn a lot of firewood around here.  I thought it would be fun to see if I could make burning wood even remotely humourous or poignant.  At the conclusion of this car wreck I’m not really sure what I accomplished but what the hell, it was fun.

With me being at home now we go through about 15 face cords a year.  I used to buy all my firewood.  This caused a bit of a paradox in the complicated folds of my wee mind.  Somehow I saw this as reducing the sustainability of the whole thing.  Obviously I would still be using far less electricity to fire the furnace if I’m burning wood, purchased or not.  But the idea of buying wood from what is effectively a wood factory kind of bugs me.  I understand that these guys probably manage their wood lots well, taking down only appropriate trees in order to keep the lot healthy.  It’s just that this leaves too many opportunities for unquestionable practices.  Yes, believe it or not this shit actually goes through my head.  So now it’s not just greed capitalist that can’t be trusted but Gaston Tranche Montagne from out back of Poltimore, who can’t be counted on to take down a tree properly.

God, I hope I’m not turning into a conspiracy theorist.  It’s recently been pointed out that I’m becoming a lot more reclusive out here.  I’m not so sure this is a good sign.  A buddy of mine told me on the phone the other day that I’m turning into Ted Kaczynski.  Don’t fret though; my revolution remains a peaceful one – we’re only building love bombs here baby!

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

When he was sentenced to prison, Nelson Mandela said to the court that had just convicted him, “I do not deny that I planned sabotage.  I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence.  I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by whites.”  

This could be the most honest thing anyone has ever said.  Madiba had immense balls!

My Father Has Dementia and I Ramble - a Lot!

It’s been an interesting bunch of months.  My Dad had colon cancer surgery about eighteen months ago.  It was a successful operation.

The mechanic who performed the surgery did a bang-up job.  All the disconnecting of hoses here and re-attaching of hoses there was done exactly according to the manual found in my father’s glove box.  I have a buddy who’s a marine mechanic and I’m awed by his ability around a specialized piece of mechanics too.

Unlike a marine mechanic though, the medical community has another aspect to their repair work.  They call it algiatry and it’s all about pain medicine and walking up the pain ladder for managing analgesia.

The white-coated cult has embraced this.  It’s become sacrosanct in their rituals to the point where this actual branch of medicine exists and medication has become of utmost importance.  I guess it’s been a natural progression.  As a species we’ve been looking for the magic pill almost since the beginning of civilization.  Cultures from all over time and place have enlisted sorcerers, witch doctors or medicine men; all of which utilized potions in the course of their healing rituals.

Living Here can be Dangerous to One's Health

We live in the most idyllic place.  Seven years ago, almost to the day, we decided to move away from an ultra-cool urban loft in the ultra-trendy West Village area of Ottawa.  Crammed between the gentrification going on in Hintonburg and Westboro, it’s in my opinion the best neighbourhood in the city.

We also had a lake property that we developed through the early years of our relationship.  It was a beautiful, totally secluded lot just inside the Laurentians area outside of Lac des Plages, Quebec.  It was on a tiny pristine lake, no motorboats allowed.  We put a trailer on the property and developed a great little infrastructure around it and for ten years, running off of propane and a solar paneled 12-volt battery, carved out a cool little summer cottage existence.

Suzanne and Jerry Have a Chat

An actual recent conversation in our house:

Me:  Do you think my big fat ego can take me being a cleaning lady?

Suzanne:  What could possibly be left of your big fat ego?

It’s been two years already.  It’s been two years since I really left the corporate world.  Oh I’ve dabbled a bit since but it’s really just been a dabble here and a dabble there.

I'm presently spending a lot of time working on a business but it remains in the pre-revenue stage.  I’ve noticed that the natural habitat of “the dabble” appears to be the pre-revenue stage.  This is a bad stage.  This is a really, really bad stage.  I hate this stage.

Anyway, my big fat guilty conscience could sure use to contribute a little more financially.  It’s pretty interesting how the progressive male mind works.  When you’re on the other side, mired in the fray you think  - I can handle this ego thing.  I’m above it all for I am metrosexualman...mercifully deprived of the ravages of ego (I know, I know, shotty’d from the Time Bandits…AGAIN!  But please bask in the use of such a millennial urban term juxtaposed against a seminal thirty-year-old movie.) Where was I again? Oh yeah...well apparently I’m not so good at handling this ego thing.  My ego is as strong as it ever was; in fact with this whole emancipation exercise I’m going through, I think my ego has turned into a bit of a mind parasite, lurking under the surface just waiting to pounce.

Jackie-san is Gone

So a guy I lived with my second year of college died this week.  Fifty-four, had a massive coronary.  Poof – gone!  I hope he’d walked through the gates of enlightenment but I’m doubten her (Brockville speak).  Probably back for another 5 or 10 or 20,000 lifetimes according to those whacky Hindu hijinks or who knows, maybe just worm food.  Irrespective of ones philosophical beliefs he’s certainly shipped out of this dimension – Gonedy! (more Brockville speak with a little phonetic Hindu twist).

We lived together in a three-bedroom dump in “Da Get-toe” on Morissette off of Merivale in Ottawa.  Funny the things you remember.  One was a yearlong competition.  The rules were simple.  When you went to the can at night, you kept the lights off and sat down to pee.  Once seated you flicked on the light.  The object was to kill as many cockroaches as possible as they scattered in the light.  Apparently I wasn’t much of a Buddhist or Tolstoyan in college.  Kevin, our third roomy held the lofty record of eleven in a single seating by years-end.

Jack was a really solid guy.  He was going to school to study Law and Security in hopes of becoming a cop.  Boy was he living with the wrong dudes.  Anyway, he never became a policeman and I hope he was good with that.  The last time I spoke with him was about five years back.  He was married to a girl I went to high school with and they had a couple of boys.  Life seemed good.

 

I can’t imagine that he’s gone.

I better get busy – time’s short!    

Spirit Y'all Has a New Home.

Hello people.  How ya?  I haven’t posted in a while.  And by a while I mean 505 days.  Crazy huh?  What the hell happened?

I’ll tell you what happened.  What happened was, is that I acquired a new coach.  I’ve tried this “life-coach” thing a couple of times before but I made a fundamental error both times.  I agreed to act as a guinea pig for a really good friend of mine and for my wife.  They both needed a lab rat during the time of their coaching accreditation.  They say you shouldn’t do this and in this particular case they, the generalized other, is absolutely right.  That ol’objectivety thing can really be tough ya know.

I've done it properly this time and the new guy is a real ball-buster.  Can you imagine, he makes me make commitments and things?  You know what I mean, the kind of commitments that he expects you to know enough to meet???  Man, I hate those types of commitments.  Couldn’t I just make commitments that I didn’t really have to commit too?  The guy is obviously a madman.