The Outrage Trap

I want to make something abundantly clear before we get going here.

Two things, actually. 

1) It's Lake Ontario. Just like it's the Gulf of Mexico, just like it's the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The president of the United States does NOT have the authority to rename international bodies of water and while I suppose he's technically entitled to call the Kennedy Center anything he wants, doing so is a tasteless and tacky desecration of a memorial. Nobody is obligated to play these silly games, and nobody with a shred of decency will. 

2) I have no actual issue with the United Nations jettisoning the Mercator projection we all learned in school and declaring the Equal Earth cartographic projection  its official globe. It's a more accurate representation of global landmass. Any time you try to depict a globe on a map or vice versa, you're going to get distortion. Equal Earth moves all the distortion into the oceans where it's less noticeable (Africa in particular is MUCH bigger than Mercator shows it to be, while the U.S.is smaller and of course that triggers Trump, right?

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In the wake of Trump's juvenile rechristening of Lake Ontario as "Lake America", I've seen quite a few proposals for a Canadian response. Ottawa council is calling for Trump Avenue to be renamed "Taco Avenue" (for 'Trump Always Chickens Out"). There's a Trump Lake in Ontario (because if you can say a word, Ontario has a lake named for that word) and it's likewise up for a rebrand. Reddit is awash with ideas to rename other Great Lakes. We could insert Obama's name into Lake Superior, like this: Lake Obama Superior. We could call it Lake Huron The Epstein List.  We could even call Lake Erie "Lake America" and really confuse the hell out of people. 

Very droll. And playing right into the regime's hands. 

How is it that people are STILL blind to this pattern? Trump does something ridiculously stupid and/or offensive, but ultimately inconsequential, then uses the obscuring fog of outrage to do something truly monstrous. 

He's been performing this simple trick all his life and people keep falling for it. He called covid "the Chinese virus". People lost their minds at how racist that is. He could have called it the Chinky Gooky Slanty-Eyed Sideways Pussy virus and it wouldn't have changed the fact he stole personal protective equipment from the states to funnel through his son-in-law's newly formed company and profit off the pandemic.  It wouldn't have changed the fact he advised people to drink bleach. It certainly wouldn't change the casualty list. 

What do we really care about, people? Words? Or deaths? Do you think anybody who died of covid spent their last minutes wishing Trump had simply followed established guidelines in naming the virus? That maybe if he'd been less racist, they'd feel better?

Every single thing Trump has done since retaking the White House is a distraction from the unreleased Epstein files. Trump raped children. He murdered at least one and probably several. He may have even eaten one or more. And here we are reduced to arguing about whether it's Lake Ontario or Lake America.

PRIORITIES.

The press should be throwing Epstein's name in Trump's face every waking minute of every day. Instead it's dutifully covering "both sides" of each Trump contretemps.

There are not two sides here. The lake is called Lake Ontario and has been for centuries, long before there was a Canada OR a United States. The press should insist on calling it that. So should Google. So should Apple. But people? If they don't? We have far bigger fish frying. Far, far bigger fish. Did you see where Trump is looking to scrap daycare in the United States as a means of getting women out of the workforce? Do you think perhaps that's a more important story than what some yahoos decide to call a lake?

Have you noticed all the recalls on food lately? If you have read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, you saw this coming. Don't be surprised if soon they stop bothering to recall poisonous food altogether.  It's all part of the plan to reduce the American population to 100 million, and no, they don't care how they accomplish that. Maybe this should be discussed instead of what to call the Gulf of Mexico, hmmm?

His cult is going to call it Lake America regardless, and laugh at anyone trying to correct them. And they'll tell you if "we" can go around changing the names of pancake syrups and confederate statues and even people (Steve calls himself "Stephanie" now)...then they can surely change the name of a lake.

Don't fall for the bait. They don't care that corporations aren't governments and that every corporation that changed the name or the logo of its product did so for the only reason corporations ever do anything: they think there's money in it.  They don't care that the United States is the only country on the planet that glorifies its traitors. And trying to get them to accept that trans people exist outside a psychiatric textbook -- let alone that they are human beings with human rights --  is simply unpossible.  I'm not sure there's anything the Right holds more sacred than the notion that men are men, women are holes/incubators, and there can be no in-betweens. You can hate them for this, and all that does is add more hatred to the seething sea of hatred that already exists. Or you can simply love and cherish the trans and nonbinary people in your life, and insist on their humanity. 

IF YOU WANT TO OPPOSE SOMETHING, EMPOWER ITS OPPOSITE.

Don't even give it voice: that empowers it. In an ideal world, people who are against the current regime wouldn't even name the president or his party. EMPOWER THE OPPOSITE.

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The UN vote to use the Equal Earth projection on future globes was almost unanimous. Six countries abstained, but only the United States voted no, and they did so angrily. “Instead of focusing on genuine problems... this body is debating map projects from the 16th century and their role in promoting reparations and cognitive justice,” US representative Yaryna Ferencevych said ahead of the vote.

Yaryna has a point.I hate to admit it. How does changing a projection actually help anybody on the ground it depicts? Does it put food in a single mouth? Does it provide even a smidgen of health care to a continent that desperately needs it?

And yeah, of course I see the hypocrisy. Calling it Lake America doesn't solve anything either. The American Reich isn't interested in solving problems any more than they believe the United Nations is. "Lake America" is a beacon. If I call it that, I'm MAGA. 

So I won't. 

But the globe? This is just the sort of symbolic bullshit my side of the political spectrum LOVES to do. It's so easy, such low hanging fruit. Let's make a holiday and call it Juneteenth (or "Truth And Reconciliation Day", don't think Canadian liberals are any less smugly stupid). Then we've solved racism! Let's insist on calling people "Latinx" even though they've told us they hate that...because we know best! We can make Africa bigger on a globe and it will make Africans bigger in our hearts! Yeah, that's the ticket!  And why would we say "mother"....it's only one of the oldest words in any language, after all. Useless concept.  Let's call "mothers" BIRTHING PEOPLE instead!  That'll make 'em feel good about themselves. That's what my birthing person in law says, anyway. 

Don't be distracted by their hate. Don't play their juvenile games. Maybe seek to understand why some names are changed...while realizing others don't have to be. Stalingrad will be called St Petersburg again one day. In the meantime....fight for causes, not nomenclatures. 

And people? 

I don't care about your pronouns. I genuinely don't. I'll use whatever pronouns you insist on...but I care a lot more about your adjectives and ESPECIALLY your verbs. 

 W

Jim

My brother-in-law, Jim Hopf, was a complicated man who seemed simple on top. 

He described himself as a 'proud asshole'. Physically, he was a big, beefy guy with something of a simian face and an imposing mien, like an ambulatory cliff. This is a dude who was bouncing in bars before he was of legal age to drink in them. Somebody once clocked him over the head with a two-by-four. Jim said "that wasn't smart" and removed the guy from the bar and the dignity from the guy.

Dude. That may as well have been Jim's actual name. His dad called him dude. His sister called him dude. The world called him dude.

The day I first met him (July 1, 1999),  Dude carried our sofa up a long flight of stairs. By himself. Seemingly without much effort. A full size sofa. My mind still gibbers at that. He was, quite simply, the anti-Ken. Jim could strip and rebuild an engine and accomplish any simple to moderate mechanical task with both hands shut and one eye tied behind his back. On more than one occasion he spent a day at our house doing things beyond my wife's handy abilities (and certainly beyond those of her handless husband). 

Let me give you an idea of the family I married into. I was -- exactly where I'm sitting right now, as a matter of fact, just facing the other way. Christmas morning, something like 2003. Jim and his father -- that link is worth your time -- were browsing through the TV channels in search of the perfect show to accompany the unwrapping of presents. They were perusing the on-screen guide for the Bell satellite TV and they'd strayed into the upper channels...the "adult" channels. My father-in-law announced to the room at large that we should watch Backdoor Anal Sluts 12. Without missing a beat, Jim said, "uh, dad? I haven't seen Backdoor Anal Sluts 1 through 11, I don't think I'd get much of the plot."

Beneath the bluster and blowhard that was all casual observers could see of Jim, there were hidden depths...and a nimble mind that could actually take in new information and use that information to change his opinion on something. It wasn't easy -- he'd put up a fight -- but he would genuinely listen and learn and respect and that's not something I see out of many people anymore. Particularly people of his, how shall we put this, rural blue collar sensibilities. 

Hidden depths, for sure. Besides his requisite mechanical careers, he taught developmentally challenged kids and he was damned good at it. Jim was likely to call his charges 'retards' where they couldn't hear him -- like I said, no filter -- but if challenged on it he'd echo Ralphie May, here, and quite frankly I agree with him. "Retarded" just means 'slow'. It's descriptive. Having been called that word and dozens of supposedly worse words myself,  let me just say that Jim, Ralphie, and George (Carlin) had it right: there are no bad words. Bad thoughts and bad intentions, maybe -- but Jim Hopf didn't have many of those. 

Back in my Price Chopper and Sobeys days I mentored challenged kids myself, and Jim taught me how to do it: above all, to treat them no different than I would any other kid. That approach worked wonders, damn near miracles, with several of the students. I consider those kids and what they became some of the highlights of my professional life, and I have Jim to thank for that.

He was briefly married not long after I met him. The less said about that shitshow, the better. Suffice it to say they walked down the aisle to an instrumental version of The Minstrel Boy. Beautiful song. Perhaps I alone amongst all the audience knew every line of lyric...oh, dear. I couldn't help wincing.It felt like an omen. It was one. 

After that marriage went kablooey I recall doing a dump run with Jim in one of his succession of pickup trucks. He must have told me he'd never marry again fifteen times in that hour, and each time I simply said "never is a long time, dude". 

Never turned out to be 2011. Twelve years to the day after I'd met him, he married Ally. They had two kids, Alexa and Lily, and they lived a happy life up until Jim got sick. 

He was good enough at his factory job to be sent to Japan for seminars twice. He jokes that it was a Beverly Hillbillies situation but he learned a LOT there. The Japanese philosophy of kaizen (constant improvement) appealed to him and the other Japanese philosophy of mentsu wo tamotsu (saving face) amplified something already present in Jim, for good or ill. 

I really want to stress this, because I've already said some things and have yet to say some others that might lead you to think Jim was some sort of beast. He was not. He was an unmedicated court jester.

Court jesters served an important function. Monarchs tend to surround themselves with sycophants who tell them what they want to hear. Jesters were often the only ones who could, by means of a joke, tell the truth. That was Jim, unafraid to speak truth to power, or to question a policy that existed for the sake of existing. He had a deep-seated need to be right about things...and he often was.

As for unmedicated: he was what Eva would be without pharmaceutical help to stabilize her mind. Circumstances have forced Eva to learn how to relax; that's a lesson that eluded her brother. Jim "relaxed" by building and fixing things, and his mind never stopped whirling. Eva has a need to be in control of events; Jim had a need to be correct. And yeah, no filter. Dirty jokes would spill out of him like ticker-tape no matter the environment.

But Jim was also  someone who would stop and help a stranger in distress, no matter the stranger, no matter the distress, no matter the cost to himself. 

He LIVED for his girls. He taught both of them basic mechanics, and he taught them well. In order to find pictures of Jim for this blog I had to page through seemingly hundreds of shots of his daughters.

He was always, and I do mean always, looking for ways to make his own and other peoples' lives better on tiny and grand scales. 

And goddamnit was he FUNNY. He could turn anything into a joke and make you laugh uproariously.

I remember going to Canada's Wonderland with Eva and Jim and our mutual friend Bill (another would-be comedian)...they went through one headbanger of a roller coaster course singing at the top of their lungs to the tune of the William Tell Overture: "I've gotta head like a ping-pong ball, I've gotta head like a ping-pong ball...." Later, joining me on a swinging ride and observing my green face, he admonished me in a voice the whole damn park could hear to "PUKE ON THE OUTSWING! PUKE ON THE OUTSWING!" I'm just scratching the surface. He could have done stand-up. 

He attended Eva and Mark's commitment ceremony in 2018 and came to really care about Mark. That meant the world to us.

Jim was a good man. Like so many other good men, he was undone by a savage illness. 

I will spare you the details of his sickness, except to tell you three things. 

One, he was supposed to take something for that sickness and chose not to for FOUR YEARS because 

Two, the effect -- not even the side effect, the effect, the point of the medicine was to give him explosive diarrhea. 

And three, the consequence of his not taking that medicine essentially enshittified (actually ammonia-fied)  his brain. His wife punted him on to us to deal with. You'd have to ask her why; I wasn't inside that marriage. The timing, frankly, couldn't have been much worse. 

We worked with him. I told him early on that about 80% of what came out of his mouth didn't need to, and simply started ignoring anything I judged part of that 80%. It was down to about 30% within a week or two. He began to ask before he 'fixed' things. And we figured out that as long as we could leave Jim something to 'save face', he would accept being wrong about something and actually change his mind.

 He thought he'd be welcomed home at some point. We thought so too, despite his wife telling us she'd only take him back if he was the Jim of twenty years ago. That impossibility was not something we relayed to him, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, he was getting better. 

But then his disease asserted itself with a will. 

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There is a movie I've brought up a few times, a movie that I consider every bit as important to watch as Schindler's List.  It's called AMOUR, and it's about the slow decline due to age (or illness) that waits for many of us. It's in French with English subtitles, it has perhaps the best acting I have ever seen in anything anywhere, and when I say you really should have to see it, I exempt Eva, who has lived it, first with her mother, then with her father, and now (MOST unfairly) with Jim, her only sibling.

AMOUR concerns an old, loving couple named Georges and Anne, with a daughter named Eva. (My wife's mother's name was Anne and it was one of the reasons I selected this movie to watch for a French class, the others being the title and the fact the film is universally acclaimed.)

Anne suffers a small stroke at the breakfast table one morning. She undergoes surgery to repair a blocked carotid artery but something goes wrong and she's paralyzed on her right side and confined to a wheelchair. At times she seems to improve and Georges hopes it's all temporary, but then she suffers a second stroke and becomes demented and incapable of coherent speech. Her husband employs nurses to care for her, but one of them mistreats her and is fired. Anne had asked Georges never to send her back to hospital, and so Georges continues to care for her at home. She refuses to drink at one point and he slaps her out of frustration.  The shocked look on her face makes abundantly clear he's never done anything remotely like that before....

...and we can relate.

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 I never slapped Jim and neither did Eva. I did grab a long-handled brush from him, a brush he was absolutely insistent was his cane, and I vigorously scrubbed his face with the bristles shrieking  DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A CANE TO YOU JIM?!?! and I still can't believe I did that. It came after about 90 minutes of screaming at him (talking to him, no matter how loudly, got us nothing but blank stares) and that ninety minutes of screaming came after three weeks of constant vigilance to make sure Jim wasn't doing anything dangerous....because he had no idea what he was doing. At all. He would announce he was getting a glass of milk, and actually make it to the refrigerator, but then he'd forget to get a glass and pour the milk on the floor. It did not make for a dignified existence. 

AMOUR is one of my favourite movies. You'd think I'd have been prepared to see it play out in front of me.  I wasn't, not even close. And I wasn't even doing very much direct caretaking of Jim. I was mostly trying to keep EVA sane. She was lucky to get three hours of fitful rest out of every twenty four hour period and it seemed like every single time she'd fall asleep, either Jim or something else would intrude. The exhaustion and emotional strain made both of us fractious in the extreme.

We save pop can tabs in an old 2kg peanut butter jar for an organization that makes wheelchairs out of them. One morning Jim poured fifty or sixty of those tabs into a glass, poured Coke in the glass, and tried to drink it. 

It was right about then that we finally twigged to the fact he was beyond our ability to care for, and into hospital he went. He was released after four days....and "home" (here, not in Stratford where he belonged)  for three before everything came crashing back. I was honestly afraid caring for Jim might kill Eva. I had dreams three nights running of waking up in the morning and finding both of them dead.

Campbellford Memorial Hospital was able to stabilize him and treat him, but his condition worsened until it became clear he would not get better.

His wife and kids couldn't be bothered to come see him -- they had to be browbeaten into doing so much as recording a message for him to see them on an impersonal screen. The palliative doctor had to BEG through Eva for that much. The hospital staff were shocked speechless. We, alas, were not. Disgusted, but not at all surprised. 

I have written and rewritten this next part countless times. I bitterly regret its necessity; this is supposed to be about Jim. But there are some things here that need to be said. 

I get that Jim had his faults. Don't we all? And I can forgive -- with effort -- his coming here because of them. I have a great deal of trouble understanding why a partner would flatly refuse to visit someone on his deathbed. I struggle to reconcile "loving wife of sixteen years" with two requests to reschedule her last video call with her husband to a time more "convenient". (She wanted to sleep in, you see. Priorities.) Meanwhile my wife has forfeited weeks of sleep taking care of another woman's husband, and spending time with him when that woman felt "it wasn't worth the drive".

As I said before, I wasn't in that marriage. And folks? I get that I'm something of a biased observer. But if you happen to hear any narratives suggesting Jim Hopf was some sort of monster, I would urge you to question them. Vigorously. There are already falsehoods circulating -- it was not our choice that he came to live with us, we were left with no choice when somebody forgot the vows she spoke in our hearing on July 1, 2011.  God only knows what else is being said about Jim and who is being painted as a victim, but it bears little resemblance to the truth.

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Jim's final wish -- since hugging his children was out of the question -- was to accompany Eva to the  Campbellford Fair demolition derby. This was a big deal for him. In his time he designed, drove and repaired derby cars. The hospital board coordinated with the fair board, the patient transfer people offered their services pro bono, and I'm pretty sure the press was going to be involved. 

Jim and Eva

 

The fair and derby were on Sunday, and on Saturday afternoon Jim's care team nixed it. He was simply too far gone. But my wife's family -- both sides -- is full of stubborn sons of bitches. Jim stayed with us, his breathing getting slower and more ragged, until Monday morning, when he rode off into the sunrise. Eva was at his side holding his hand, as she had been the previous two nights.

There are thanks to be given here. 

To Jim's palliative doctor, Dr. Parks, for letting him go gentle into that good morning.

To the nurses at CMH, especially Megan, who took such good care of Jim AND Eva.

To Sherry, who flew a long way to say goodbye to her cousin, and to the other family members and friends who cared about Jim enough to know it was "worth the drive" to come see him.

To the Nicholls family for your unwavering love and support. We would be lost without you.

To the rest of our family, natural and chosen, who have checked in and kept us functional through what has been one of the most stressful experiences of our lives.

And finally: to Jim. Dude...I've met few people as different from me as you were. And I've learned so much from you. I just know whenever you are now, you've oiled the door hinges, rearranged the storage to be more efficient...and cracked everybody around you up three or four times with filthy jokes. 

We love you, dude.

A lot.

R.I.P. JAMES ("JIM") GORDON HOPF, October 2, 1973 - August 10, 2026

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...

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

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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

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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.