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.