Reactors

I have spent the last couple of years of self improvement focussed on addressing my persistent blind spots: petty, irrational hatreds at common (and usually completely innocuous and innocent) human behaviour. Those little hatreds? Are everywhere, the product of a mother and stepfather with very strong opinions on some of the silliest things. I was raised to regard thrift stores as dens of iniquity towards which no self-respecting human should never venture, as one example. Eva cured me of that nonsense on our first date. Before you think his first date with his wife was a Value Village? rest assured: it was also a movie and a bookstore.

(The movie was The Matrix -- I'd seen it already a week previous, alone, and was mesmerized but also unable to really understand what I was watching. I sensed somehow Eva would be able to explain it to me, and she did, After twenty seven years "I bet Eva could explain this to me" is still a frequent thought.)

Eva has forced me to confront a very few of my blind spots head on, the ones she found silliest and most incomprehensible, such as my disgust at thrift stores. I really should have known better: the same maternal woman who shunned thrift stores might be found at a flea market....so long as it wasn't a flea market near home, but THAT pebble didn't fully drop until I was an adult.

But I oftentimes have trouble, or have had trouble, confronting these animosities on my own. Why would I watch a soccer game? A game with a comically huge net into which next to nobody can ever score? Hell, there have been entire soccer games played without a SHOT ON GOAL for either side!  Do I really want to waste my afternoon watching twenty two people kicking a ball back and forth without purpose?  Come on. Told that soccer was the world's most popular sport, I would retort that nobody ever said the world made sense. 

With my new openness to confronting things like this I sat down to watch Canada play in the World Cup...and ended up choosing to watch the rest of the games our national team played. It turns out soccer is more akin to hyperkinetic chess than anything else, and while I can't say it'll replace hockey as my favourite sport, it's now on a par with basketball. If I have a team I can easily invest in playing some kind of consequential match, I will tune in. Petty animosity defused.

Here's another one of these silly things I'd silently judge people for engaging in: paying money to watch other people play video games. 

I hasten to stress to you I don't hate video games. Not at all. They are a blind spot, to me, though...a huge one, possibly the biggest. I stopped being able to play them when the joystick sprouted extra buttons (was that '83? '84?) and today they mystify me: so much information to absorb, both in the lore and the gameplay...godsdamnit that looks like work. I have this aversion to working without SOME kind of compensation. Of course winning a video game after hundreds of hours ought to be compensation, but see, I just never thought of that because videogames are a black hole in my head.

And if videogames seemed to me like a lot of work for a questionable payoff, the notion that a person would pay not to play, but to watch other people play? Preposterous. Hey, it's your money, but if you spend it like THAT.... I'll keep that internal, but  come on.

The strength of these silly things I've not confronted serves as a shield. It's often so strong it will all but prohibit even cursory examination, and so I completely skip over the fact I myself have paid money to watch somebody play a video game. Twice, in fact.  I have also spent countless hours watching people play video games....and in extreme cases I will watch every game player I can find play the games I love the absolute best, the ones that have given my life meaning....oh, I'm talking about music, of course, but what's the difference, really? 

I can't even recall where exactly it started. I know it was back in that Covid dreamtime when I had no responsibilities outside the house whatsoever. I do remember the screen handles of the first three reactors I stumbled across: Jamal_aka_Jamel; JayveeTV, and especially Dicon Dissectional Reactions, hosted by a young man named Daniel whose insights into the music and lyrics were often far beyond his years. Of the three, only the first is still reacting, albeit no longer to music, but you can find everyone's output in the vast YouTube catacombs and resurrect whatever you want for your listening pleasure. I still bring up Daniel's reactions every once in a while because for a teenager he shows such incredible maturity in them.

Music for me, as I've said more than once, is largely solitary. While Eva loves and appreciates a wide variety of it, I can't very well subject her to all, or even most, of what I listen to no matter how much I like it. Other people in my soul forest are the same, only more so: that's weird, I've heard more than once, and so I no longer share music with those people. 

So there is something really powerful in watching total strangers listen to something I love and love it themselves. Even better if those total strangers know more than I do about music and can point out what they know. And of course they don't remain total strangers for long. You learn about their own lives, you learn their likes and dislikes...the best of them become something almost like friends....friends who routinely grant you the sublime experience of hearing your favourite music with fresh ears. 

I do not expect anyone reading this to follow these links, but I'm going to post them here anyway.

The first one is a woman named Amy (her channel is called Virgin Rock)  reacting to Joni Mitchell's "A Case Of You". 

Amy is a harpist, classically trained, and before she started her channel she was woefully ignorant of music that wasn't classical. With the help of her husband Vlad, who curates and makes suggestions behind the scenes, she has rectified that ignorance. 

I have so many favourite songs that it's something of a farce. But "A Case Of You" is in the upper tier of favourites, a song I never tire of, and Amy positively tears into it here. People who have been listening to this song far longer than I have tell Amy she's uncovered things about the song they'd never noticed. I found her on Patreon and bought her complete Blue album reaction for six bucks U.S. And I feel like I got damned good value for doing it.

Joni Mitchell - A Case Of You | A Classical Musicians's FIRST Listen And Reaction

I love Amy's stuff. It doesn't hurt that she looks a little (and sounds a LOT) like my first love.

The second reaction probably has to be Hi Ren.

I discovered Hi Ren, by Ren Gill, soon after he released it in late 2022. It is the most important piece of music I have heard in my lifetime. Anybody fighting pain of any kind really ought to make time to hear it.

After making time to hear it, I made a LOT more time to listen to other people making time to hear it, because watching people fall under Ren's spell is hypnotic, mesmerizing.  There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of reactions to this song on YouTube. One of the reactors, a guy named Knox Hill, has since gone on to jam with Ren on stage. (Several of my reactors have teamed up with OTHER reactors I love, which is a whole other layer of awesome.)

This is The Charismatic Voice, Elizabeth Zharoff, a former professional opera singer, getting bewitched. 

There are some reactors who let all or most of the piece play without a word before talking. There are others who pause frequently and rewind. "Jacob Reacts", doing Bette Midler's "The Rose", got to the end of it, said "I have to hear this again", and started it over.

Find a song you like and search it on YouTube with the word 'reaction'. If you're anything like me, you'll get a lot out of what you find. 

And I will never criticize anyone for paying money to watch somebody play a video game ever again. 

Bubbles

Bubbles came to us in 2013, along with his brother Mooch (caution, that blog is a tear-jerker). 

I'll be honest: at first "Bubba", as Eva and eventually Mark called him, was almost an afterthought. Not because he was any kind of bad cat: because Mooch basically demanded affection 24/7. When Mooch died suddenly in 2017....well, we half joked that Mooch didn't really die, just jumped into his brother's body, because it was as if somebody flipped a switch. Bubbles took up duty purring Mark off to sleep and his affection level increased about seventy percent. 

He was always a big cat. A HUGE cat. A dense example of felinity. In the vernacular, a heckin' chonker who could tip the scale over (literally) into an oh lawd, he's a comin'. He topped out at about 30  pounds, and if he wanted to, he could put one paw on you seemingly with three hundred pounds of force. But somehow he was always soft and, until just recently, sleek. And hellaciously strong. I recall him BOUNCING from the floor three quarters of the way up our patio door, trying to get a bug. How he could haul his hindquarters that high I still have no idea.

They weighed him today to determine dosages, and he was less than 17 pounds. But the big problem with Bubba was his ear. It got infected about six years ago, and we have spent thousands trying everything to get rid of it, to no avail. Over the last few weeks Eva has been almost scooping pus out of that ear three times a day, and it was hurting him to the point he would bite her. The only option left -- short of the one we took today -- was an ear-ectomy that the vet said wasn't even a guarantee. 

Why do I always feel like I have to justify this?

Probably because, in this case, Bubbles purred in my arms the whole way to the vet. He gave me several of his patented head butts. He was completely calm in the vet's office, no wriggling, not even a meow. 

And his eyes were bloody and he was starting to have accidents and....he's no longer hurting. He can be with his brother (they were inseparable in life). He can be with Papa Mark....pretty sure he is already. 

Bubbles got along with every animal he encountered, even our dog Georgia-Peach, whose sudden attack on Bubbs was the reason we put her down. It truly speaks to the nature of this cat that he became best friends with the Dollydog.  Here is a link to the Dolly and Bubbles channel.

And here he is on top of Bitsy. 

And who could forget his brief career as a pole dancer? 

We aren't bereft. We still have Dolly and Bitsy and Jack and Cricket, plus the Q.T.-cat. But you know, I tend to think in terms of tapestries, and from now on his thread will be missing and missed. 

We keep bringing pets into our worlds, don't we? Knowing full well we'll be taking them out of our worlds too? We judge the pain at the end is worth the love that gets us there. And it is. Bubbles, Bubba, Bubbs, Chubbs, Bubbachonk....we loved you, we love you still, and we always will. 

INTEGRITY

 Integrity, from Latin integritatem, "soundness, wholeness, completeness". Related word: integer.

Two opposing and famous poems come instantly to mind, the first showing a life of integrity, the second showing the consequences of missing integrity. 

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

THE SECOND COMING (excerpt)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats

(Incidentally, Kipling would not call me a man. I flunk out on the third stanza, every line of it. I don't take unnecessary risks, and risking "it all" is (hopefully) never necessary; and sometimes I think I came without a will installed.)

I think of integrity in two ways. One, it's saying what you'll do and doing what you say. The other is being true to yourself and true to others.

We live in a civilization that no longer values integrity and is losing it. The consequences of that are  everywhere.

In Canada: look at Pierre Poilievre. The Conservative leader spent eight terms as an MP, accomplishing nothing of note, before being elected leader in an incomprehensible landslide (68% of the vote; the next candidate got 16%) in 2022. He was all set to slide in to the PM's chair...and then the Liberals deleted Trudeau and anointed Mark Carney, instantly flipping the script. 

Pierre couldn't flip the script. FUCK CARNEY signs replaced the FUCK TRUDEAU signs before Carney even took power. (That's what amounts to...one side of...political debate these days.) This despite the fact Trudeau and Carney are about as far apart in qualification as it's possible to get.

Pierre then proceeded to lose an election and refuse to accept the loss. He booted the winner of the safest Conservative seat in the country out and took  his place. Then his leadership was reviewed.

Normally every party member in the country is eligible to vote in leadership reviews. Not this one. Pierre limited the votes to 3,000 hand-picked attendees of the convention....and demanded an oath of loyalty. Despite this, he only managed 84% of the vote...but acted as if he had 100% of the vote.

Two Conservatives have crossed the floor to the Liberals since. More are likely to follow. Carney and his Liberals are soaring in the polls; Poilievre and the Conservatives are crumbling. All because Poilievre lied to himself, his party, and the country.

Down south, of course, things are much worse. 

To listen to the president, the country is the best it's ever been, except where the other party is in power, where it's the worst it's ever been. Like virtually everything else out of his mouth, both of these are lies. Not just lies; giant whoppers. And they're starting to catch up with him.

You can only hoodwink people so long before the integrity of your reality collapses. Sooner or later people will recognize that no, the economy is not "booming" and their lives are not improving. Lose your integrity and reap the whirlwind. I can't predict how things will go, but I expect the house of cards to collapse spectacularly in the coming weeks.

TOMORROW

 I like how these things bleed into one another. I guess I should have said, last blog, that I have faith in tomorrow. The only evidence I have that I will wake up in the morning is purely circumstantial: I've woken up every morning since I first woke up, excepting of course the few times I've slept past noon.

So yeah, I have faith tomorrow will arrive. What kind of tomorrow is another question entirely these days.

"Tomorrow" used to be two words, "to morrow", from 1350 to about 1650, then "to-morrow" until the early 1900s. "Morrow is from OE morgen, "morning". If you want to refer to the day after tomorrow, you can use the charming "overmorrow", just like you can say "ereyesterday" for the day before yesterday. 

There's not much to write here, because tomorrow has always been unknowable to me, and not worth much thought. Matthew 6:34: " Do not worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will have its own worries. The troubles we have in a day are enough for one day." (NLV)  I first heard that verse as a young child and it seemed eminently sensible. It's stuck with me ever since, and it's the first thing that enters my mind whenever I try to make a plan. 

Musically, tomorrow is a common theme. My first thought is, probably predictably, Annie; I've sung "the sun will come out tomorrow" on more than one occasion. But my second thought is, I think, more interesting. It's a song in the Xhosa language of the Kalahari Desert, called Iza Ngomso ("Come Tomorrow") and the first line is oddly famiiliar : Ivula izawubuya ezulwini, "the rain will return to the cloud", i.e. "the sun will come out tomorrow...."

(The album that came from, The Drop That Contained The Sea, is firmly in my top ten albums of all time in any genre.)

I've read many stories about tomorrow. By far the most prescient of them was The Machine Stops, published by E.M. Forster in 1909. A skilled futurist can extrapolate current trends. An imaginative one can envision new technologies. But it takes genius to predict how trends and technologies will shape our attitudes and actions on an individual and especially societal level. Forster's "Machine" is not a phone or a tablet, but anybody with a phone or a tablet will recognize their machine in the story. 

And the next topic is "integrity". If I have any, I'll see you....tomorrow. 

FAITH

 was the sister of my first babysitter. And that whole family sure had a surfeit of it. Often of a Sunday I would be sent next door to wallow in the strange family stink and then be dragged to church. 

You know the family stink? It's different in every family, and not always noticeable if your respective dead skin cells smell similarly. When they don't, though...hoo boy. It takes about seven minutes for your nose to acclimatize and while that's happening you have plenty of time to wish you were anywhere else. I've come to understand that if I walk into your house and don't smell anything off, you're at least provisionally part of my tribe. 

Martha, her sister Faith, her brother Mark, and their parents John and Lillian were not.

Nor was their church. I remember nothing of it, not even its denomination. It was probably a Catholic church, because my mom was Catholic and I'd been baptized into that faith as an infant...but I'm not 100% sure, because I forgot everything about every service three minutes after the benediction. Attending another church when you're Catholic is for some reason regarded as a mortal sin. But my mother, like every other Catholic I've ever met, picked and chose her strictures and her Scriptures. 

I didn't know any better growing up but I came to detest Catholicism. 

Kathleen Madigan gives one good reason here. Okay, so if we're supposed to take this God stuff seriously, I should talk to Him. But like Kathleen I was explicitly told NOT to do that: in the Catholic faith that seems to be a faux pas. You can contact anything else: your guardian angel, the saint in charge of whatever it is you're pissed about...you can even pray to Jesus's Mom, if you've a mind to. Catholics love talking to their idealized portraits of Mary (while gleefully shitting all over every other woman in history)...they've stripped all the humanity out of her along with her sex. 

Catholicism has this creature called a Pope, and when he's speaking on official matters of faith and morals -- they use Latin to scare you and say ex cathedra -- well, then he's perfect. Infallible. Unquestionable. 

Whatever.

The Bible isn't too keen on public prayer, but in Catholic school you'd better Hail Mary, Our Father and Glory Be with the rest of them. Later on, before you marry (another Catholic, of course, what are you, hellbound?) you must take a premarital course covering sex and children, taught to you by a man prohibited from having either.  And in the meantime you can show your faith by not eating meat. Okay, only on Fridays (and Ash Wednesday). Too tough? Then you can abstain from meat  only on the five or six Fridays of Lent. And if that's still too onerous, you can eat meat all you want and refrain from eating something else.

Amateurs. If you're going to have a food prohibition, be consistent with it, would you?

 My second baptism never should have happened. Well, to hear them tell it, my first baptism was invalid for some reason nobody ever bothered explaining to me. I was baptized again at about 14. I had no say in this. I should have had a say in this. I firmly believe no child should be baptized into any faith, for the same reason children shouldn't have sex: they can't consent. No, it's not a parent's responsibility to create little wine-and-wafer carbon copies of themselves...and if you think I'm wrong, I frankly don't care. 

By high school I had completely abandoned church; by university I recognized some sort of hole in my world and tried again to jam God into it, this time the Lutheran flavour of God. Tastes like chicken, it's finger licking god!

 I read the Bible -- excepting a few begats -- and studied it fairly intently. 

There's something in there, to be sure, but it has been endlessly distorted, mansplained, agenda'd, and, when all else fails, manufactured. Hell is not the only widely accepted Christian invention that doesn't actually exist. If you really want your mind blown, the original Christians met in people's homes and there is no command anywhere in the Bible to attend, let alone build, a church. 

Both Catholic and Protestant churches have you recite the Nicene Creed (the sucker dates from the year 325 CE)  as a statement of faith, and I can't do this without gagging on just about every....gosh darn....line.

We believe in one God, 

just one? Lotta gods out there. Why just this one? I imagine this creed will give us some clues

the Father, the Almighty, 

Almighty, yeah, fine, every god needs its ego stroked, but why not the Mother? Serious question.

maker of heaven and earth, 

of all that is, 

seen and unseen. 

Now when I create something, be it dinner, a piece of music, or this blog post, did I do that? Or did God do that through me? That's a whale of a question...a Free Will-y question, you might say. New Agers and others say that we are God experiencing Itself. That jibes with that passage where Jesus asked his followers why they were amazed at his miracles. "These things, and more, shall you also do", he said, and if that's not co-creating I don't know what is.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, 

Christ is a title: it means 'anointed one'. Jesus is the only Christ we know of to have been called the Christ, but he wasn't the first man so titled. It used to be the honorific for the High Priest of Israel in Judaism. Lord, of course, narrows it down. I believe Jesus the Christ existed; I don't feel a need to call him Lord.

the only Son of God, 

Gee. You don't have to go very far into Christianity before you find a verse telling you we are ALL sons (and daughters) of God.

eternally begotten of the Father, 

Just DETERMINED to erase anything maternal, notice?

God from God, Light from Light, 

true God from true God, 

begotten, not made, 

of one Being with the Father; 

through him all things were made. 

Five times in five lines the insistence that Jesus was not created, but simply is the essence of God. This is clearly critically important to the faith and completely meaningless to me.

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, 

This above all else rubs me the wrong way about Christianity, this "salvation" nonsense. Most sects are very strict about it: you're "saved" through faith plus or minus good deeds...and what exactly do I need saving from? The God who supposedly created me in the first place? Sure, dude, whatever. 

was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary 

Good luck finding an actual reason the act that propagates the species is disgusting to Christians. I can't do it. At this point I'd lay money that the only thing 'virginal' about Mary was all the prophecies written about her and her little godling ahead of time.

and was made man. 

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; 

he suffered death and was buried. 

On the third day he rose again 

in accordance with the Scriptures; 

You'll forgive me if I seek some sort of, oh, I don't know, explanation for Zombie Jesus. And no, "it's a miracle" won't cut it. I get it, this is a god thing, we're supposed to just accept it. I won't. 

he ascended into heaven 

and is seated at the right hand of the Father. 

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, 

Nope, sorry, bzzzzt, There's one of your bigger clues man created god and not the other way around: this "god" is deeply HUMAN. Judgment is a human trait. Divine love has no place for it.

There's more, but I've already blasphemed myself out of contention nine times over. Really and truly, I couldn't care less about Mary's intact hymen or even Jesus's popping back up three days after he snuffed it. What matters to me is what Jesus taught and how he modelled his teachings. Like I said, there's something there. But sorting out what's original and authentic from the sheaves and sheaves of manipulations and additions requires years of diligent study. Seems to me any god worth his Lot of salt would make it a little easier.

So if I don't have faith in the Christian God, in what do I have faith?

I've long had faith death isn't the end of existence. Science is slowly catching up to me, although of course it merely says death takes longer than we thought, but we are aware we're dead after we die. This is a matter of faith, because I have no evidence for it, but I feel certain something must persist. Time is far too huge for three score and ten and CUT.

I am aware of the secular humanist take that life is what we make it (I believe that to be true, in fact) and one life is all we get. I just don't think it's true, and admittedly all I've got are feelings, so feel free to mock me. At least I know if I'm wrong here, I'm far from alone.

I'm not sure what else I can say I have faith in. Faith is supposed to be belief in the absence of evidence, and I have evidence for the power of love, you know?

Then again, there's always St. Thomas Aquinas: "For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without faith, no evidence is possible". When you get mucking around in the eschatology, you need to continually redefine "evidence". You need to think poetically and mythically, not literally. You need, above all to remember all of us speak, each in (their) own tongue.

LOVE

A day behind already. Meant to get this done last night, life intervened.  

What can I possibly write here when I've written about little else for twenty years?

Other kinds of love, of course. When there's only one word for love, there are many different kinds.

Today I'd like to talk about my love of hockey.

------

My earliest hockey memory: watching the Montréal Canadiens win the Stanley Cup in 1976, when I was four years old. Specifically I remember hearing Queen's We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions for the first time in the aftermath, instantly attentive to the STOMP STOMP CLAP, STOMP STOMP CLAP, then gobsmacked when the one song morphed into another -- they can do that?

I've never played because, quite simply, I can't skate. The closest I've come to playing hockey is detailed here and it's both sweet and beyond embarrassing. 

My Dad was a Maple Leafs fan, but more so a fan of the game. He instilled in me a passion for the Blue and White and an ironclad conviction that hockey is the best sport on earth. (For reasons beyond the scope of this blog I also believe the National Hockey League is the worst league on earth...)

I went to one game at Maple Leaf Gardens in, I think, would have been 1978 or 1979; my mom's date caught me a puck shot into the crowd by Leafs defenceman Ian Turnbull. Since then, I've been to a couple of games at the Air Canada Centre with my dad, and once I won a sales contest at work and got box seats (that was an experience). I've also seen a Marlies game (the Maple Leafs' farm team) and  Kitchener Rangers game with Eva.

Hmm. That just made me think. That Rangers/Belleville Bulls game was excruciating. Not because of the score (the Marlies won, 7-4) but because of the crowd. Somebody had a vuvuzela, which is one sound guaranteed to find my last nerve and pluck it, over and over. But even worse were the Bulls fans around us who never stopped chanting "BELLE----VILLE" in minor thirds all game. It's become a marital catchphrase here for when we don't want to acknowledge what the other person is saying. Just drown it out: BELLE---VILLE!"

Now the closest OHL team to me is...the Belleville Bulls.

I can't cheer for them because ugh BELLE----VILLE. That leaves the Peterborough Petes (don't like Peterborough much, it has a rough vibe) and the Kingston Frontenacs. Or I could just keep cheering the Rangers from afar. What to do, what to do. 

Why do I love hockey?

It has, to my mind, the perfect mix of skill and will, speed and finesse, offence and defence. It's not like basketball where nearly every possession is a goal; it's not like soccer, where sometimes there aren't even shots on goal. 

Hockey is graceful when it isn't brutal; hockey players are a breed apart. NHL history is littered with people playing, and contributing, when they ought to have been in a hospital. The toughness is baked in. A guy could have his legs amputated and the team would tell the media he was out with "a lower body injury". It's incredible. 

The sounds of hockey are captivating, best heard live: the slissshh of skates cutting the ice; the sharp crack of a crisp pass landing on a stick; the crunch of a check into the boards; and every once in a while somebody rings a shot off one or both posts with a CLANK that echoes to the rafters. 

For every sixty minutes of telecast, an NHL game has, on average, twenty seven minutes of game action. Compare that to football: barely three minutes of gameplay per hour of telecast. The choice is obvious. 

But it's more than that. There's a camaraderie in hockey that deeply appeals to me. Unwritten rules ban most ego displays. Hell, before the 1999-2000 season there were TIES. The idea of a tie really resonates. Any time you can play a game without a winner and a loser, you should do it, says I. 

Canadians invented this sport, but others have taken it and ran with it. A parallel hockey system arose in the Soviet Union: in 1972, the year of my birth, the whole of Canada shut down for an eight game series that people still recall today. We won, but it was a close thing.

Since then, many other countries have developed hockey pipelines to the NHL and several of them contribute star players way out of proportion of their country's populations. Take Finland, for example, the bronze winner in these Olympics. That team had several NHL superstars and could well have beaten us in the semifinals. 

Even the also-rans are getting better. Canada used to routinely demolish countries like France and Switzerland and while the talent gap is still wide, it's starting to narrow. As a hockey fan, I love this. It's great when a little pipsqueak country puts a scare into a power....or even beats them. The thing about hockey: you can thoroughly dominate  the skaters on the other team, but you still have to get pucks by the goaltender...and sometimes the goaltender simply won't let that happen.

Yesterday Canada's Olympic team played for gold and lost, in overtime.

It was a game they should have won. They outshot and outplayed the American skaters, but Connor Hellebuyck was sensational (and lucky) and Jack Hughes sent a dagger through our hearts in overtime.

It sucks to lose gold. It especially sucks to lose gold to the United States given current political and economic tensions. Sidney Crosby, the captain of Team Canada and one of the greatest players of all time, missed the semi and the gold medal game with an injury and that must really hurt for him.  I highly doubt he'll be around in 2030. Father Time catches up to everyone. 

Now we go back to our humdrum, stumblebum NHL season. The Leafs are going to miss the playoffs and seem to require yet another  rebuild. I swear this team is cursed. All the money in the world, and they spend it, but always on the wrong players. It's extremely frustrating if you let it be. I don'r, anymore. It's a game. It's only a game. 

Only the best game I know. 

DESIRE

 Desire, ultimately from Latin desiderare, "to await what the stars will bring"; literally, "from the stars".

Oh, my stars.

The dictionary gives us the expected meaning of "to wish for, to want, to crave" and then explicitly gives another meaning: to have a strong sexual attraction.

Oh, my stars.

________

Of all the ways I'm weird, this is one of the biggest.

Many other men seem to experience desire constantly, and without discrimination. Make a dating site profile with the most objectively ugly picture of a woman you can find, give her a perfectly hideous fake history, and guys will swarm around like flies. DTF? DTF? (That's "down to fuck" if you're lucky enough to not know the acronym.) I can't help but think this kind of indiscriminate desire isn't for a woman at all, but just for a wet dick.

My desire is indiscriminate, too, but only in potential. 

I don't have a physical type. If I look at all the people to whom I have the potential to feel intimately attracted:

• there are a lot of them. Twenty, in fact
• they are all shapes and sizes: tall and willowy, pixie, morbidly obese, blonde, brunette, and redhead; hell, one of the people I love is pretty much bald
• they do tend to be within about ten years of my age. I haven't been attracted to high schoolers since I was in high school myself
• they all share a set of qualities I find attractive: intelligence (broadly defined), compassion, humour, self-awareness
• as such, the number could go higher.

So that's potential. What unlocks it?

I discovered the demisexual label in 2015 and seized on it eagerly: it's always nice to find out you're a perfectly normal zebra and not some kind of weird fucked up horse named Waldo. Demisexual: unable to experience desire without an emotional connection. 

But that's not actually true. I don't need as much of an emotional connection as I had thought, probably because I wasn't born this way, I made myself this way in grade nine.

 It turns out that the easiest way to unlock my desire is...to desire me. 

Seems obvious, doesn't it?  But while I have been grateful for an abundance of love in my life, comparatively little of it has led to horizontal refreshment. I don't say that to elicit pity: my body count is higher than I'd like it to be. 

It's possible I've missed a hint or two. There are times I'm fairly certain in the moment that okay, that felt like an invitation but what if I'm wrong? If I'm wrong and I've gotten so far as to disclose my own desire, the only thing to do is to find a hole and cover myself up with it. Eternally, for a start. 

And so I have slept with multiple women -- that's slept with, as in shared a bed and slumber -- without so much as kissing them. I've wanted to: if we're close enough to share a bed, we're close enough to do things together in it. But without a move from you, that want is easily suppressed. Kiss me with intent, though, and I'm apt to tumble in short order.

I've said this before and people still don't believe it, but I'm much more likely to want to love you in the morning than the evening. I don't want to go to bed with you near as much as I want to wake up with you: to see your face stripped of all its masks. Knowing you feel safe enough with me to grant me that vision is a very powerful aphrodisiac. And morning breath actually cancels out.

Love is "feeling vulnerable, safely". Desire is an invitation to love.

HEART

 The organ that does all the heavy lifting in the background does a lot of heavy lifting in the language, too.

Besides the blood-pump, "heart' can mean "personality", "compassion", "love and affection", "courage", "character", "memory" ("by heart")  and "most vital part".  In the past it meant "intellect". 

But of all those meanings, it's usually shorthand for love. The heart supposedly creates enough energy each day to drive a car twenty miles; extrapolated over a lifetime, that's "to the moon and back". So if you've ever told someone you love them to the moon and back, you're saying "I love you with every heartbeat, with every ounce of energy I produce as long as I live". 

Heart is an old, old word. In Old English it was heorte, from Proto-Indo-European kerd, which is where 'courage' comes from. The expression "break my heart" goes all the way back to 1400. 

It's not hard to see how ancients came to believe the heart was the centre of their being. You can feel your heart fluctuating with your emotions. 

The heart shape we punctuate texts with is thought to derive from silphium, a species of giant fennel that drove the economy of ancient Libya, among other places. It was a popular seasoning, a potent medicine, and especially, a fairly effective and extremely widely used contraceptive. It was harvested into extinction by the first century CE; legend has it Emperor Nero was presented with the last surviving stalk. (Unconfirmed reports suggest it may yet survive.) 

-------

My heart is, as everyone knows, oversized.

It always has been, at least since I was nine years old. I have an infinity heart on my left shoulder; 

(That red mark beneath it is from Eva scratching me earlier that day to demonstrate what the tat would feel like.) 

I swore up and down I'd never get a tattoo from early childhood until almost the day I got two of them. They have meaning. That infinity heart is the standard symbol for polyamory....but if you don't know that, "infinite love" is a suitable alternative phrasing, and works just as well to define me. 

And once again I've run out of inspiration. Tomorrow's topic is spicy, you'll see more tomorrow. 

LOSS

 I'm processing a loss today, actually. 

Not a death, a loss. Specifically the Canadian women's hockey team lost the gold medal game 2-1 to the U.S. in overtime.

You laugh. A hockey game? That you didn't even play?

Well, yes, actually. 

Women's hockey has come a long, long way in the last twenty years. A certain breed of male hockey fan will never accept this, but in some ways the women's game is an improvement. Men's hockey emphasizes a heavy forecheck and board battles; women, with full contact banned, rely on lateral motion with a lot more open ice. The skill is easier to see. So is the puck, for beginning hockey fans. The women don't shoot or pass as hard, so it's easier to find your bearings on the ice.

And the women's game is a throwback to the Original Six (team) era of the NHL.

Nowadays, with some very vivid exceptions, there isn't much hate in the NHL. Fights are dramatically down. Players are often best of friends off the ice, even when they play for opposing teams. This is partly because trades are common: the asshole you can't stand today might be your valued teammate tomorrow. 

This wasn't always the case in the NHL and it isn't the case in the women's game today. 

Back in days of yore,  trades were rare, you often stayed with one team for all or most of your career, and opposing NHL players avoided each other if at all possible. And if not possible, words, or more than words, might have been exchanged.

The U.S. and Canadian women do not like each other one bit. They are the two dominant teams in the sport, so the gold always comes down to U.S.-Canada, and everyone knows it. There have been line brawls. There have been fights in exhibition games. 

That American team was a wagon this year. They gave up two goals all tournament. Their penalty kill was perfect. They creamed us 5-0 in the prelims. Our women did well to push that game to overtime before Megan Kellor delivered a filthy dangling dagger.

Sigh.

So long as the men win gold. There's always been a 'heated rivalry' between the U.S. and Canada but now that the U.S. government's stated goal is the elimination of Canada as a nation, there's a little extra zing in the games. It's not as if losing the men's gold medal hockey game presages the breakup of the country. But if they win, it'll feel a bit like that, and I don't want to lose my country.

_______

I used to be the sorest of losers. (Not a very gracious winner, either). Sore losers who are really good at losing don't tend to stay sore losers very long: the behaviour is self-correcting, usually by means of somebody punching your face. Plus the more you lose, the more you're a LOSER, the harder it is to feel anything at all about losing. Ho hum, lost again, just call me Beck...

I outgrew that crap (mostly) by high school and I have a much more mature view of life now. You win some, you lose some. Sometimes a loss is really a win. Sometimes you just pretend it is, as in losing your virginity. That's built up to be this huge milestone in a young man's life, you're supposed to STRUT, and taking stock after I'd painted the condom....I didn't feel like strutting. I mean, it was nice and all, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why men, in particular, treat sex like a Holy (g)Rail. 

I've used my lance a lot since, and had my sword turned to stone. Sex with the right partner is worlds better. 

---------

Losing stuff. It happens to me daily, almost hourly. It usually doesn't stay lost. It's always in the last place I look for it, because I stop looking once I find it. I haven't lost anything terribly monetarily valuable, but for whatever reason, if something has sentimental value, it's sure to go missing at some point. 

Being lost: hasn't happened recently. Which is a shame. You never know what you'll find 'till you're lost.

Hopefully soon I'll  have a better idea how to end these things. I used to have an ending picked out before I even started, often, but for the past year or so the mental fields have been barren, scorched and salted. Every sentence is like pulling teeth and structure is beyond me. But that's why I'm doing this. Talk about loss: the world has lost its innocence. You say the world was never innocent, and of course you're right, but did you really think there was a cabal of billionaires raping, murdering and eating children? And at least at the epicentre, all semblance of a moral compass has been lost.

This stuff is so enraging it numbs me, paralyzes me, if I let it. And it's so easy to let it. I have to write my way out again, because otherwise I'll be lost myself. 

ASH

I could write about The Ashes, the biennial tournament between England and Australia.

But pretending to care about that arcane sport wouldn't  be cricket...

----

Lent again. Forty days of blog prompts, courtesy the Unitarian Universalist church. I've never gotten through all forty. Let's try again. 

----

Mark's absence is still a presence here. I think of him and talk to him daily. Last week I knocked him to the floor by accident; Dolly's upended him too. Luckily he's contained, some ashes in a little pendant. He doesn't say boo. He never did.

Remember his poem?

I am of the Light

Take me and teach me

Love me and lead me

Into the Light always. 

I had a moment the other night. I was laying in bed scrolling aimlessly, and somebody asked "what do human ashes look like under a microscope?

They look like nebulae.

I could hear Mark softly saying, from somewhere in the Light, "I told you so".

Today is Ash Wednesday in the Christian faith. On this day at special church services, the faithful are daubed with ash, which has signified mortality and repentance since ancient times. The ash is imposed in the shape of a cross, and the worshipper is told "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return".

Kinda hits different looking at that "dust". Even if it's brushed off as a product of extreme heat. 

I look at that ash and I hear Joni Mitchell:

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion-year-old carbon

And we've got to get ourselves

Back to the garden...

Carl Sagan, who disdained the standard definitions of God but who denied he was an atheist, put it this way: 

We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff...

Mark used to riff on that theme endlessly. He is why I'm not afraid of death at all. I'm not looking forward to the pain of dying, but death doesn't  faze me. 

Human ash, like other kinds of ash, can make excellent fertilizer. Which means even if we stop growing after death, we can help something else grow. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed...another thing Mark was keen to tell me...

There are forty of these. Some will spawn more text than others. Which is excuse-speak for "I can't think of a damn thing else to say" on this topic. 

DIY Families

It's always fun when I find the hook for one blog while researching another.

The late James Dobson, evangelist and leader of "Focus on the Family", was viciously homophobic, as you might expect. In researching my last blog I was confronted with nasty anti-gay propaganda everywhere I looked. But it was the mildest quote that hit me hardest:

 His usual audience gasps. "Any combination thereof! Shame! Shame! Sinner!" And I'm here shrugging and saying "he's not wrong. So when can we have group marriage, already?"

Before 2005, to be married in Canada you had to meet five conditions having to do with: 

• Number (two only)
• Sex (opposite)
• Age (16 with a judge's permission, 18 without)
• Consanguinity (a five dollar word prohibiting close blood relatives from marrying each other
• Consent (you obviously can't marry someone against their will)

In 2005 it became legal for two men or two women to marry. I was best man for my closest friend's wedding that year; he and his partner travelled two thousand miles to be in a place where their union was legal. 

That couple is still married today, albeit living in the United States. As of 2021, the most recent date for which data is available, there were 117,640 same-sex couples in Canada. About one third of them (33.4%, or 39,292 couples) are married. About 12% of same sex couples (14,117) have children living with them. 

Traditional one-man, one-woman marriage still exists (of course). It needs to be said because opponents of  same-sex marriage unfailingly blared that if we allowed men to marry men and women to marry women, marriage as a whole would collapse, families would collapse, society would collapse, and our entire galaxy would shove itself into a black hole forthwith. Of course they could never explain how all this collapsing would happen. I asked quite a few of them; the mere question marked me as an enemy, a heathen, hellbound.

It's been over twenty years. Society may well be collapsing but I don't think 1.1% of Canadian couples are responsible. 

And even James Dobson suggested that if gay people could get married, there was no reason to stop groups of people from marrying. He was correct.

Look at those five conditions again. Note the conditions that actually pose a danger to the couple and to society:

AGE. Adults cannot marry children, nor can children marry other children. This is eminently reasonable since children are too young to consent.

CONSANGUINITY. Study the royal families of Europe to see why this condition's here: incest has ugly physical, mental and emotional consequences. It is of course assumed that people who marry will engage in intercourse, if not produce children. I would argue that assumption is not valid in all cases, but concede it is in most, (and how do you prevent it? Marriage between relatives is okay as long as both are sterilized?) Naw. Just admit this is a reasonable precaution. 

CONSENT. I have consistently stated I am strongly opposed to any structure of relationship that does not include consent. THIS INCLUDES the scenario most people seem to imagine when they hear the words "group marriage:" one 'alpha' male and his harem, the harem usually being much younger....often violating the AGE principle. 

So these are all problematic. How is NUMBER likewise problematic?

It is so only if we're talking about Mormon-style polygamy, Joe Smith and his child-wives. But even that's a function of AGE (too young) or CONSENT (often manufactured where it exists at all). 

Ensuring these kind of relationships are NOT permitted would be the responsibility of the court.

Yes, the court. I won't force churches to recognize something they're manifestly uncomfortable with. And in some cases I wouldn't trust churches

-------------

I was not in a group marriage. I was not married to Mark. 

Eva was not in a group marriage either -- that would have been illegal -- but she considered herself married to both of us and so did we. I officiated the commitment ceremony after careful research about what I could and couldn't say. (That ceremony took place in our home; a public ceremony would have been a legal grey area I was keen to avoid.)

In polyamorous terms, we were a "non-hierarchical cohabitating MFM vee." 

Non-hierarchical: neither relationship was considered more important

Cohabitating: we lived in the same house

MFM: the gender makeup of the arrangement, this also shows Mark and I were not partners (or it'd be MMF)

Vee: emphasizing Eva's position as the "hinge" partner

This is one form of polyamory. There are dozens....some people say there are as many kinds of polyamorous relationship as there are polyamorous people in relationships. If you want to discard all the terminology, you can just call it a 'DIY' or 'chosen' family and leave it at that.

Now ask yourself: are chosen families any more or less valid than the families we are born into? If not, why not?

Under current Canadian law (Section 293 of the Criminal Code), Canadians are prohibited from engaging in "common-law relationship[s] with multiple partners simultaneously if the relationships involve a conjugal aspect". If the law had ever come for us, we could have simply (and truthfully) stated that only one common law relationship existed, between Eva and Mark...but the law likely never would have come for us, because it focused on cases where coercion and lack of consent existed. 

So we were (probably) home free. But ours is merely one possible configuration. There are triads, quads, and more exotic structures out there that likely would run afoul of the law...and I can think of no good reason why they should.  Provided, again, that all parties consent (which is a defining requirement of polyamory in the first place). 

Why is this necessary? It isn't, to many polyamorous people, just as there are many homosexual couples who choose not to marry. Yet marriage is an option for those same sex couples who do choose it, and I believe it should be an option for people like us.

How many people are like us? A surprising number. One in five people have practiced some form of ethical non-monogamy. Now, just as with gays, only a fraction of a fraction of that one in five would ever consider multiple marriage. As a percentage of all couples, it might be as low as 1.1%....which is the number of same sex married couples. 

Marriage confers certain benefits, from an advantageous tax structure to legal hospital access to issues surrounding death. There is also the emotional benefit inherent in saying to the world: this relationship matters. I commit to this person.

You can finagle your way into something resembling some of these benefits, and Eva and Mark did, But only some, and those only because our relationship structure was what it was.

Children would have complicated things immensely.

If you read the article linked above, you may be surprised to find some polyamorous people have children. The people who fixate on sex are of course disgusted and again I find myself incredulous at how any non-traditional relationship is IMMEDIATELY sexualized. Do traditional couples have sex in front of their children? Of course not. Neither do gay people and neither do polyamorous people. Eva used to say that our family was "99% just like yours, and 1% is none of your business". That cuts both ways: your sex life as a monogamous people is equally none of my business. But it's amazing how many people immediately think orgy orgy orgy. Hell, there are ASEXUAL polyamorous peeps. 

These poly families with children have had to fight for legal rights on a case by case basis. In both Newfoundland and British Columbia, judges have granted that three people can be named as parents on a child's birth certificate. 

In the U.S.: three dads appear on a child's birth certificate in California; Somerville and Cambridge, MA, prohibit discrimination against polyamorous families in employment and policing; Oakland and Berkeley, CA disallow discrimination based on relationship structure in business, city services and housing. 

These are good first steps. Cuba is the goal.

In Cuba, you choose your family structure. You choose who is legally protected as a part of your family unit. This has untold benefits well beyond polyamory: why can't two sisters live together and raise each other's kids if they want? Maybe four close friends want to form a family. Shouldn't that be up to them?

Really. Shouldn't it be?

Epstein and Dobson

 Trigger warning, obviously. 

Sometimes the things that "go without saying" need to be said. At top volume. 

I am disgusted with the Epstein Files and everything they reveal.

No, actually. Disgusted is far too mild a word. I know a lot of words, and I don't know one that even begins to convey the level of enraged, nauseated, sad terror and helplessness I feel.

Every day brings new revoltations. Today we learn J.K. Rowling has some level of involvement with the sex-trafficking financier. She, of course, denies this vehemently. There are reports on social media, yet to be verified, that the logs for her yacht Samsara have been scrubbed, against maritime law. 

For what it's worth, this hateful woman is on record calling Lolita ""a tragic love story". I've read that book. What Mein Kampf was to the Holocaust, Lolita is to the holocaust of child sexual exploitation. 

The level of depravity knows no bounds. Rapes, murders, torture and snuff films....it's sickening. More sickening is the realization of who was involved: very rich and powerful people on both sides of the political aisle (but, so far, heavily implicating the right, including Trump and his cabinet). These are people lavishly rewarded in life, many of them in positions of great power and prestige -- and all of them acting as if they'd never be caught. Or if caught, they'd never face justice.

And in many cases, they seem to be right. Just to add to my fury.

Vladimir Putin's name appears in the files more than a thousand times -- but never in the context of abuse. This strongly supports blackmail and lends credence to the stories that Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 and given the code name "Krasnov", Meanwhile, Trump has surrounded himself with people utterly loyal to him, many of whom have reason to block any investigation.

And most of his followers haven't even blinked.

I sincerely thought this might rattle some of them. You really can't imagine more heinous crimes than the ones these files show Trump was heavily involved in. His name appears 38,000 times and that's just the files we know about. I had thought they would cheekily redact every mention of him, but they're even more brazen than that. Gloating. Look what we did.

And something I've only seen a few people say: it's almost certainly still going on. ICE is busily filling concentration camps with potential victims. While we watch. While nothing is done. 

The anger. It burns. Strongly enough that I want to take a step back from the abuse and, ahem, "focus" on one name that caught my attention in the files: James Dobson. Like Putin and scores of other individuals mentioned in the files, there's no record of his assaulting or abusing women. But Jeffery Epstein sent a link to a woman asking him how to deal with resentment towards her father, and that link advocates a toxic attitude at the root of abuse.

James Dobson was your standard "Christian" evangelist, among the most popular of them, with the scare quotes around "Christian" very much intentional. He had the requisite hatreds:

• gay people. Dobson resigned from the American Psychological Association when they stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, and he believed in discredited "conversion therapy" (which is still happening in 48 states. Not, thankfully, in Canada, 
• trans and nonbinary people. Here's his take.  It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of who trans people are (it's not a matter of "belief") and he claims there's not a single study showing hormone treatment improves lives. (The regret rate for transition surgery is between one and two percent. 
• women. Dobson would not agree:the framing he'd have used is that women serve a very important role. Please bold, italicize and underline "serve". He had the unmitigated gall to write a book called "What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women" back in 1975, because as a man he's of course qualified to write such a thing.
• children, and here's where we get into the Epstein/sexual abuse connection.

You have to understand the reach here. Dobson and his hate group "Focus on the Family" were and are the preeminent "Christian" authorities on parenting. (I'm sorry-not-sorry for the scare quotes; Dobson's Christianity was fully inverted.) What matters is that millions of people take his advice as, well, gospel.

According to Dobson, you should spank your child starting at 15 months. The child must never even suspect they can win a battle of wills with you. Your authority as a parent is absolute. 

His advice: when fathers "act out' and abuse you or neglect you, they can't help it. It's because they themselves are "broken" and the correct emotion to feel in response to their brokenness is pity and forgiveness. If you get angry, you're just hurting him further. He's not the problem: you are!

This is a famous abuse pattern called DARVO: 

• Deny. Abuse is not abuse, it's something like "irregular behaviour" or "emotional handicap".
• Attack (the victim). The problem isn't abuse, it's your longing for proper behaviour from a father 'incapable' of showing it. Why would you expect love from your father? This is YOUR fault.
• Reverse Victim and Offender: the abuser shouldn't change their behaviour (they "can't); the victim should simply accept the abuse, or they are the 'real' problem

Again, this is not some random crackpot. This is from a man with serious influence, offering a template for abuse that agreed with the world's most famous abuser.

James Dobson may never have sexually abused a child. But he sure offered child abusers a great template.

2025 wrap

"I'm doing my 2025* wrap up blog today," I told Eva.

"Try and find something positive to say," she replied, almost dared.

Yeah, it's been that kind of year.

We knew at its beginning that it would involve upheaval. Eva's mom had passed away in October 2024* and she left us her century old overgrown doublewide trailer three hours to the east. We had structured our lives such that moving made the most financial sense (we'd been paying the mortgage on this place for some time, reducing its carrying cost)...but that didn't mean I had to like it.

I moved a lot as a kid. My parents were all about the "fresh start"; they were the kind of people who could move into a new house on Saturday and be out Sunday looking at farmhouses for sale. Mom and John achieved their dream of country living after I'd left home.

It was never a dream I shared. For all my babbling about community, I confess I LIKE the anonymity of urbanity. I prefer worlds in which strangers never ask me what I do for a living. I must have been asked that question as regarded my parents fifteen times on my first day of grade nine at Oakridge S.S. in London, and the answer didn't pass anyone's vibe check. Preppy high schools are just like small towns. I shouldn't have to go back to high school at the age of fiftymumble, damn it.

And the move itself was the hardest of the more than twenty I've been through. We got here just in time for a massive ice storm that killed our power for most of three days; a tree had fallen across our driveway, trapping a family friend here. Not an auspicious beginning. 

And it wasn't a week before a woman I'd never seen before in my life was asking me what I did for a living. Sigh. She's now a Facebook friend, so maybe I'm growing up. 

We made the best of it, the three of us. Winter slushed into spring simmered into summer, and we found much to appreciate here. Darkness, quiet, space, an agreeable sense of being hidden from the world. A lack of steps to trip and fall on. A bidet attachment I wish I'd bought thirty years ago. We bought it mostly to save the septic tank from toilet tissue; but what it really does is -- you know how on those days when you're peeing out your bum, the softest asswipe feels like coarse sandpaper soaked in acid? Yeah, that's gone. Now my bean-blowing starfish is caressed by a gentle blast of warm water, air-dried, and told "you're a good boy".

We were all enjoying the country, and then Mark died on the morning of August 21 and changed everything.

Eva and I were married fourteen years before Mark arrived. We've always had the comfortable sort of marriage that gives each other space, so losing Mark didn't affect us  (no THEM, only a lesser us). We just picked up the threads of our tapestry, but it's now missing Mark's colour, a colour that had permeated our world before. Mark's absence is a daily presence, for us and our animals both. You pick up the pieces and go on (what choice do you have?) but you feel it, all the time.

His ashes rest in a framed memorial with a picture of him surrounded by Dolly and Bubbles and Q.T., right beside  the television. We apologize to him when we put a show on that he hated.

Eva and I are alive, but neither of us have been in good health this year. Eva has lost thirteen teeth, to her great upset. Her oral hygiene had always been perfect, but when you take sixty (!) pills a day in a (futile) effort to maintain nutrition balance, shit happens. She has dentures now, but eating is still a struggle for her.

My own mental health has not been the greatest and it's had numerous ugly physical manifestations I'd just as soon not get into. As the year ends, I'm starting a new job, which will get me out of the house and in contact with other human beings. It's been a decade since paying bills involved physical effort, and let's just say I can tell. After a mere 24 hours over four days, my feet needed a day of nothingness, Which is kind of pathetic; if you'd seen me at the end of each shift, hobbling and wobbling, you'd scratch the "kind of". But every day has been a little bit better. 

We've joined the local YMCA entirely for the therapy pool, which is kept almost at bathtub temperature. In fact, I went swimming in the middle of writing this blog. Eva had a small town moment of her own: a pair of women her age singing George Michael in the change room. One of them admired Eva's ink and out of nowhere pointed to her bikini line and said "I used to have a little mouse tattoo right here until my pussy ate it."

Stay classy, Campbellford.

The highlight of my year was modest: a day in Kingston seeing the S.S. Keewatin, a Titanic-era steamship I'd crossed paths with before but hadn't toured. A wonderful, if beastly hot, day. 

______

Most years I blurb a bit on books, movies and music I've been exposed to. Little point in that this time: I've seen all of one movie for the year (on any kind of screen): The Long Walk, a brilliant film I'll never watch again. Eva wants me to go on record: we both loved the novel, the movie is traumatizing. Music has been almost entirely classical as I seek to lengthen my attention span; I'm quite sure nobody cares. Joe Hill's King Sorrow has been my favourite read this year.

There's really not much more I can say. This year more than most hollowed me out.

All the best to you all in 2026. 

*There. This is fixed now. I had every single year wrong in this without noticing. Ken, you dumbass. 

Dostoevsky and Destiny

 You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.

--Feodor Doestoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova ("Nameless Nobody")

This nameless nobody relates very strongly. At least until the word "misery". 

__________

I can't say I was groomed for anything. My parents put me in a 'gifted' class in grade seven, not because I was some sort of prodigy but because I was ferociously bullied at two different schools over the three years prior and they thought a group of more academically inclined students wouldn't break my glasses or stuff me into garbage cans and toilets face first. A good thought: the only bullying I got in grades seven and eight came from the "(mun)danes" in the school at large. But my fellow 'gifties' didn't treat me very well either, because my 'gifts' didn't align with theirs. I've told you this before. 

I can't fault the teachers....academically, at least. My grade seven teacher read us everything from Beowulf to Bernard Shaw, and for every book we read in class I'd read at least one related novel at home. Mr. McLeod was also in the habit of whispering in his students' ears, and licking them as he did it; he was sacked sometime in March, if I remember correctly. 

Those two years in the gifted program, as I've also told you, stunted me terribly in mathematics, a subject I had less than zero aptitude for as it was. I hold them directly responsible for my having to work my ass off in grade twelve for a final grade of 65 percent -- twenty points below any other grade I received in high school. 

My mother often lamented that my grades weren't even higher. She felt that I was slacking through high school, that I should have been applying myself much more diligently. We had some very bitter arguments.

I am, and always have been, a "good enough" sort of person. High eighties to mid nineties seemed good enough to me, good enough to get a scholarship from the Ontario Provincial Police, good enough to set me up for whatever I wanted to do in life. 

I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I still don't. I doubt I ever will. 

I will never forget some random stranger on the quad outside MacDonald House, Frosh Week,  asking me what I was majoring in (English) and what I was going to do with my degree. I stopped dead. If I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, how could I know what to do with a degree? The random stranger suggested teaching and I recoiled. It's not that I couldn't be a good teacher. I think I could be...if  my students wanted to learn. I'd just spent five years of high school surrounded by people who didn't want to learn, and the prospect of dealing with those people professionally made my blood run cold.  I shelved the decision. I'm good at shelving decisions.

It became a moot point because I never finished the degree. I never finished the degree because I was so beyond disgusted with the entire university environment (and also because I became hellishly addicted to the internet, which was everything I came to university for). And I've told you that too. 

That's a lot of words to say I have never done anything ambitious towards following any path. According to Gospodin Dostoevsky, I should be (a) miserable and (b) inflicting that misery on all around me. 

Well, first off I'm not generally miserable. I do go through down periods, usually lasting a few hours to a few days, and yes, I can get in a rut about what little I've made of my life and how little effort I can ever seem to muster to make anything of my life and it's beyond laziness, Ken, what the fuck is wrong with you?

 Second, at those times you won't find me here. Whatever the old saying says, misery does NOT love company, and I have enough trouble imagining people hate me without giving them a(nother) reason to.

And third, especially since the pandemic, when I find that hate starting to slide in, I make a choice to replace it with love. "And in my confusion I began to love everyone around me". 

_________

I don't believe in destiny.

As I understand it, destiny is something lovely and huge that just happens to you, without any effort on your part. If you have to work for it, it's not destiny, it's a product of your own hard work. I really do want to emphasize this point. My pal Craig was destined to be a professional trumpeter. I knew it in grade ten and I'm pretty sure he did too. Do you have any idea how hard he worked to get to that point? He practiced hours and hours a day, networked his ass off, and I can't think of a single thing I want badly enough in this world to expend that kind of effort. Craig's talent with a trumpet is undeniable, but it was his tenacity that allowed him to live his dream. 

We say of our life partners that we were "destined" to be together and it's sooooo romantic, isn't it? Or maybe cloying, maybe just a bit controlling. Who are you to deny your destiny? You belong right here, with me. 

I mean, it's hard not to imagine some guiding process behind the dizzying array of choices and circumstances that have to occur to bring any two people together. But calling it 'destiny' kind of undermines what happens after you meet...a whole lot of hopefully very conscious choices on both your parts to grow closer. Little different from how Craig made a conscious choice every day to pick up his horn and blow. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, baby, practice. 

Besides, not to put too fine a point on it, but I truly believe the group of potential lifemates is much, much larger than most people imagine.

_________

The path of least resistance always felt like the correct path to me, as far back as grade school, if not before. To this day, if I make a typo three times writing a word, I'll abort the entire thought. To those who say "no pain, no gain", I've always retorted, "no pain, no....PAIN! Duh!" And so I've lived a simple life, with simple pleasures, all I can afford. But you know something? The best things in life really are free. I look at a guy like Elon Musk and marvel. He's got everything he could ever want, enough money to buy and sell God....and I've never once seen him happy. I've never once seen him sharing a friendly, let alone a loving, moment with anyone. 

 I see in him everything Eva saved me from, an existence full of stuff, devoid of substance. Instead I learned to "en-joy" life: remember, the prefix "-en" means "to put into". Put the joy into life and you'll find happiness in the damnedest places. I microdose on little glimmers of joy every day.

I have no tenacity, so I've had to scale my dreams down. I'd love to see the world, but the system we have says I would need to fundamentally change who I am to do it. Because I can't just run out and hop on a plane; that costs money, and the only legal way to get money in sufficient quantity is to sell your soul to the machine.

I refuse.

The machine is fundamentally anti-human. And I don't know if you've noticed, but it's starting to break down. There's a ronk! ronk! ronk! as society loses its bearings....the whole thing's going to come apart in your hands if you get too close.

Do I wish I lived a different life? Sometimes. Sometimes very strongly. But never enough to forfeit who I am. 

Blue Jays wake, 2025

No shame.

No shame in taking the world champions to extra innings of game seven. All but the most rabid Dodger partisans agree the Jays outplayed them and deserved the win. In the end, experience won out over upstart talent, but my God. The Jays had the winning run 90 feet away. Twice. 

You saw that upstart talent every game and it's all there in print: first World Series pinch hit grand slam (Addison Barger); finest rookie pitching performance in postseason history (Trey Yesavage); most hits in a postseason (Ernie Clement, 30); the first time anyone has ever homered off a previous World Series MVP in a game seven (Bo Bichette, off Ohtani).

We saw players grinding through injury, most notably Springer and Bichette, but Clement was banged up as well, not like his stats were any clue). 

We saw pure class (every Jays reliever wearing Alex Vesia's #51 on their caps; the L.A. closer was away from the Series for a personal matter).

We saw an eighteen inning gut punch, walked off by Freddie Freeman.

On the other side, we saw probably the most impressive pitching performance I've ever seen, all things considered. Not Yamamoto's game six, as good as that was. No, his game SEVEN. Pitching on HOURS rest (lol), he threw 2 and 2/3 scoreless innings at us. At US, the team that had pretty much bashed every other pitcher to smithereens this postseason. Yamamoto was the first pitcher to pitch the very next game in a postseason series after going six or more innings the day prior since Randy Johnson, who pitched Games 6 and 7 of the 2001 World Series.

Pretty good company. 

There was Shohei Ohtani, the two-way wonder, pitching well and hitting better than well. That dude is scary. The Jays did get him to strike out a few times, but if he put the ball in play his outs tended to be loud. 

And there were the Dodgers' bats, cool to tepid for most of the series, that broke out in the late stages of game seven. You can only keep these guys down so long. The team has Hall of Famers all over it.

Every single position player and every pitcher (a) did something to help win a game in (b)oth the regular and postseason. As such, I'd like to say a few words about each of them, because I have never in my life seen a team that was so clearly a team. Every pundit predicted either a fourth or fifth place finish in the AL East, and I'll admit after the first couple months of the season, it did look like the pundits were right. But starting at the beginning of July this team caught fire and gelled in an incredibly special way. It took them within 90 feet -- or perhaps within a couple of inches, if Isiah Kiner-Falefa had only ran through or dove headfirst -- from taking down the behemoths of baseball.

I was going to do a report card on every player, the way I used to for Leaf teams that didn't even make the playoffs. But the parade of As and A-plusses gets boring (and yes, relative to expectations, most of this roster gets at least an A). 

So let me go one through nine, from game seven, before I tackle the pitchers in their World Series starting order, then a couple of others who deserve a shout-out. 

1) George Springer, DH: A resurgent season for the 35-year old. He showed hockey-level grit after getting drilled by a fastball, only missing one game, clearly playing through a lot of pain. "Springer Dingers" dotted the season. 

2) Nathan Lukes, LF: TEN YEARS in the minors before he got here and contributed.Pesky hitter, like so many of these Jays. 

3) Vladimir Guerrero, Jr, 1B: Before the ALCS I said Vladdy was overpaid. Putting aside my ironclad conviction that nobody is worth that much, he wasn't performing anywhere close to justifying that contract in my eyes. Well, I still don't think anybody should be given half a billion bucks, especially for playing a game, but if you accept baseball contract logic...he earned his money this postseason.  He batted .397 with a ridiculous OPS of 1.289 (.800 is above average and 1.000 is superstar level). He keeps this up and I may come around on that contract.

4) Bo Bichette, SS: (only led MLB in hits until his injury, and finished leading the Jays in hits despite missing the last twenty games. Came back for the Series, didn't look out of place, hit a monster three run homer in game seven. His defence is questionable and many think he'd be a better 2B. 

5) Anthony ("Bam-Bam")  Barger:, RF:  Rising star that came out of nowhere. Drilled the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history; beyond that was an absolute force with a cannon for an arm. Of all the up and comers on this team, he might have the brightest future.

6) Alejandro ("Captain") Kirk, C:  Caught most of the regular season and playoffs. Elite pitch framing and a booming bat. Guerreo might be the face of this team, but Kirk is its heart.

7) Daulton Varsho, CF: His bat went cold at the worst time, but let's not forget this man is a Gold Glover. If something can be caught, he'll probably catch it. And he, too, had his clutch moments. He did hit our first World Series home run since '93.

8) Ernie Clement, 3B: This is another guy nobody wanted, who only turned into the single most dependable hitter on the team and the hardest out in baseball. Set a record for postseason hits with 30 and played great defence as well. He bleeds baby blue, and I hope he can repeat his heroics next season. 

9) Andrés Gimenez 2B/SS Another Gold Glover whose bat came up clutch more than once, including an improbable home run. Another glue guy who exudes the joy of playing the game. 

Isiah Kiner-Falefa, INF: Man, I'm ticked he chose to slide rather than run through the base. We reacquired him for defence and he did provide that, along with a few clutch hits.

SP Kevin Gausman: Our most dependable arm during the season and he pitched well in the Series, just not as well as his opponent. 

SP Trey Yesavage: The only reason I said Barger above might have the highest ceiling on the team is because I don't know how sustainable Trey's freakish delivery is. I could be wrong. I hope I am, because if I am this man has multiple Cy Young seasons ahead of him. When he can command the zone, he's all but unhittable. Stunningly mature demeanour, he came from Low-A all the way to the World Series with icy veins. 

SP Shane Bieber: Risky signing after Tommy John surgery. Paid off. I hope we keep him.

SP ("Mad") Max Scherzer: Love this wily old vet's personality. And his drive. We've likely seen the last of him until his HOF induction. Which WILL happen.

Chris Bassitt: Special shoutout to this starter who moved to the pen for the playoffs and who was literally unhittable until game seven of the Series.  I think he's better suited to relief and I really would like to keep him about as much as he wants to stay.

Jeff Hoffman: he thinks he cost us the Series. No one player did: an awful lot had to go just right for the Dodgers to win that game. There were times I cursed his name during the season, but when he was on, he threw fire, including striking out the side to end a game.

Eric Lauer is another starter turned reliever who pitched very well for us throughout the postseason. 

There are other players who didn't see the field during the Series that I'm curious to see develop, notably Joey Loperfido and Will Wagner. 

This team can be proud of its run, even if the baseball world has already discounted it. (The Jays do not appear on anyone's list to make the Series next year...the lack of respect is puzzling.)

Thank you, Blue Jays. You're a bright light in a dark time.

 

Happy Quarter Century, Eva and Ken

Twenty five years.

Five cars,  eight pets (not counting the dogs we inherited). Five domiciles, though the majority of time was spent in the house we specifically picked with kids in mind. 

No kids.

She offered me a divorce when it became clear -- after seven miscarriages and the failed adoption process -- that we wouldn't be blessed with children. It's the only time that word has ever come up in 25 years and I slapped it down hard. I married her, which means I married everything that came along with her...and didn't marry what didn't.  Although our vows named each other "the mother/father of our children" and I would have loved any child we had with my whole being, I got a vasectomy when the Universe made it more than obvious we weren't meant to be parents. I'm more than okay with this most of the time. Every now and again I see a child blooming and think that could have been our child and the twinge can be painful, but it's always fleeting.

We were each other's best friends pretty much upon meeting. That hasn't changed. We've had some very high highs: our Disney trip fifteen years ago was perhaps the highest of them. We've had some very low lows, usually financial in nature, but we have powered through.

We've seen each other through health scares and health triumphs, the latter exemplified by her having lost more than half of her body weight, the former largely arising, on her end, from complications from the surgery that diminished her. It's a toss-up whether she'd choose to have that surgery again, and the consequences of not having the surgery would almost certainly have included death. That should give you an inkling how hard the last several years have been to and for her. 

That's our marriage in broad strokes. But the abiding joy of it is in the little things, the countless in-jokes, the meals Eva prepares as offerings, the daily shared joys and pains. I'm sure most couples of this duration can relate: you have a cornucopia of trivialities, meaningless to others,  that are nevertheless rich with meaning for you. 

Before we even married, Eva corrected the spendthrift that ruled my life from 18-28. Then she worked on calming me, ridding me of some nervous tics, and generally opening my mind. (That's been a lifetime's work.)

For my part (I just asked), Eva tells me I taught her what love is. I objected: she clearly knew, but she was insistent. "I mean unconditional love, truly unconditional. You love me no matter what I look like on a given day, and even no matter how I ACT on a given day."

Well, duh, that's what love is. But I guess she hadn't experienced it before.

I've calmed her mental storms and taught her to relax -- that's my lifetime's work for her, forever telling her that yes, it's okay to take time out for herself, make the meal she enjoys, and it's especially okay to tell the mother-voice inside her -- which insists she's not good enough, not skinny enough, not productive enough, not enough period -- to take a running leap.

Twenty five years.

Still going strong.

I love you, Eva.

"Work Spouses"

 Reddit has been around for twenty years. It bills itself as the 'front page of the internet', and it's vast beyond imagination: over 138,000 active subreddits discussing everything under the sun. I've been addicted to it since I discovered it; it's basically the next iteration of USENET, the imaginary place I disappeared into when I was supposed to be attending university classes.

Everything under the sun, including the sun itself. As Ecclesiastes has it, there's nothing new under the sun.

Name a subreddit, and odds are it has one or more eternal, internal debates simmering away. At least once a week you'll find a post in r/canada mocking Tim Horton's. In r/stephenking nobody ever shuts up about The Shining (book) vs The Shining (movie), and intolerably often somebody who never read IT barges in claiming an infamous scene towards the end of that novel proves King is a pedophile. People who actually have read the novel explain in wearisome detail how that scene is (a) not pornographic and (b) integral to both the character and the plot, and like as not the visitor doesn't bother to read the response and says "well I guess you're all pedophiles too" and storms away. Until tomorrow when his twin wanders in with the same accusations.

The online world. Ain't it grand?

I don't mind the repetition. My particular flavour of neurodivergence finds it comforting, and I develop a deep understanding as topics are raised, expanded upon and raised again. Maybe there are no new topics to discuss, but there's always more that can be added, different words that can be used. If you think that's pointless, I'll point you to religions. Like Stephen Raskin said, 

"Religions only look different if you get 'em from a retailer. If you go to a wholesaler, you'll find they all get it from the same distributor."

(Did you know Arabic Christians refer to God as Allah? It's simply the Arabic for "God", and they speak Arabic...)

Anyway.

I recently came across something on Reddit I'd somehow never seen before. In r/randomthoughts, user "erisedheroine" posted "The phrases 'work husband' and 'work wife' are such weird terms".

My interest was piqued because I didn't think there was anything at all weird about work spouses. I've only ever had one woman I referred to as my "work wife"; she was and is happily and monogamously  partnered up and I never once  any kind of prurient thought towards her. We both took the job seriously in an environment where nobody else did. That tends to engender a "you and I against the world" mentality that bonds people. When you add in that Haley and I were on the same early morning schedule and got to see each other bleary and cranky in the morning...that we spent more waking hours together than either of us did with our actual partners (thanks, capitalism) and you can perhaps see how I view "work wife". 

Eva once, several jobs ago, had a work husband named Dane. He was Aussie and he had a ringing way of drawling the words "I know". Those words in that inflection joined our collection of spousal catchphrases. Dane was in Eva's orbit long before we opened, and I know nothing ever happened between them.

Innocently, naively, I opened the thread. A sample of the comments:

It absolutely is weird. They're outright admitting they see a co-worker in the same light as their spouse. This is ultimately just the prelude to cheating.

Yeah.. I get work mom or work dad or even work cuz. But work wife or work husband.. I think that’s code for I am emotionally cheating and since it’s a term that makes it normal and acceptable.

I feel like if you're both single, fine, do what you like.  If one or both of you are partnered, knock it off.  It's disrespectful to your actual relationship(s).

There were some people saying "calm down, it's a joke, it's not spouses as in fucking each other, it's spouses as in nag nag nag nag nag." Every one of the people saying the term was okay was downvoted. 

I backed out as if slapped. My flabbers were well and truly gasted. This is so contrary to how I use the term that I couldn't credit it

I thought for a second. This was only one thread. Surely this topic has been raised on the site before. One of the oddities of Reddit: the same things that get upvoted in one thread on one subreddit get downvoted elsewhere. Let's gather some more opinions. 

CTRL-F "work husband"

Yup, as expected, it's a common discussion I'd somehow just missed in all my time on Reddit. So let's dip into the other threads. 

Countless iterations of the same situation. "Yeah, my ex-husband's 'work wife' is now the mother of his children." "I'm falling in love with my work husband".  "My husband is telling me he's staying in the same room as his work wife on the company junket." And so on.

It's probably revealing to admit, but "sex' and "marriage" don't automatically correlate in my mind. Think of  any married couple you know. Is your first, second or even hundredth thought sexual in nature? If you're married, did you promise to make her squirt or suck him dry in your vows? Hell, the standard wedding vows don't even mention children, so it's kind of hard to see what sex has to do with marriage. I betcha it's religious. Specifically Christian.

Yep. Genesis 2:23-24:

23 The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones

    and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called ‘woman,’

    for she was taken out of man.”

24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Okay, hold up a minute here. This is saying married people "become one flesh" because woman "was taken out of man". I shouldn't need to explain basic biology at this late date, but even Neolithic goat herders knew that's exactly backwards. MEN are taken out of WOMEN when they're born.  You'll forgive me if I choose not to take this seriously. 

Oh, look, here's someone identifying as polyamorous and objecting to the term. "We use our words with intent", she says. "And so I have a 'work twin', not a 'work husband'.

My e-friend Justin says he understands why someone might reserve the 'spouse' title for their actual spouse -- so do I, to be fair -- but then adds this:

At the end of the day a phrase is just a phrase.

Each person’s meaning behind that designated title may vary. So if we’re worried about flirtation in the workplace and implied interest I mean, people can flirt at work without calling someone their “work husband” so that part really doesn’t concern me at all!

Words. Intentions. So many topics boil down to words and intentions. I am amazed people are threatened by mere words, without seeing the intentions behind them. It's where most of my confusion in this world comes from. 

I don't see "work husband" and think "one flesh". Instead I think "emotionally close". But that's threatening to a whole other load of people. Emotionally close? Only a matter of time until they're physically close.

And yeah, someone put my libido in my heart, but that doesn't mean I automatically  have humina humina bow-chicka-bow-bow HYOOOOOOOGAH thoughts about the women I'm emotionally close to. They do cross my mind sometimes. I know it's often up for debate, but the fact is I AM human, and male, and straight, with all that implies. 

I also respect people and their relationships.

In an ideal world, which is to say my own little world, nobody's threatened by "work husbands" and "work wives".  I'm going to keep trying to spread my ideal world out into the real world, little by little. It's the only thing I know how to do.