I'm An Adult Now...

I've all my wisdom teeth
Two up top, two beneath
And yet, I'll recognize
My mouth says things that aren't so wise...
The Crash Test Dummies, "Comin' Back Soon" (The Bereft Man's Song)


Well, actually, all I ever had was the one wisdom tooth, on the lower right. And it came out yesterday. Which is when I meant to do this blog, but between the aftermath of the knockout drugs they pumped in and (ahem) the pain, all I felt like doing was sleeping.

I'll spare you the details, since odds are near certain you've either had it done yourself--up to four times--or at least know someone who's been through it. I will say this, however: we need to bring back capital punishment. Not just for cop-killers, mass murdering scumbags and telemarketers, but for those people who, upon hearing you're going in for an operation no matter how comparatively trivial, proceed to shout out every horror story they've ever heard, or God forbid experienced.

My sister had her wisdom teeth out and her jaw got infected. She missed work for a week and a half.

I was wondering why my jaw was so damn sore...turns out the teeth crumbled and they had to hammer 'em out. Split the gums and everything.

My cousin--Gregor Samsa, have you heard of him?--had his wisdom teeth out. The next morning, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

I had to run the same gauntlet when I had my vasectomy. At least this time the effing anaesthetic took.

I could also do without the people who go the other way. Yeah, I had my wisdom teeth out at ten and was back to work by eleven. Of course, I only realized at noon they'd also removed all my insides and replaced them with cybernetic components. Pain? We doan NEED no steekin' pain, seenhor.

Hey, they told me take two days off. What was I supposed to do, say no? Besides, I've been required to be at work every Saturday since the start of the year (and every fourth Sunday, to boot). Getting a weekend off...it's like pulling tooth.

So now I'm sitting here wisdomless, having just finished gumming some scrambled eggs to death, and coping with the pain of it all. Oh, I won't lie and say it's agony. But put it this way: I'm glad there was only one of those things to come out. I don't know how I'd cope with four.

I used to think that if my wisdom teeth were still around in my mid-to-late twenties, they weren't coming out at all. That was until Eva had hers out last year...and she was older then than I am now. Regardless, I long looked upon that operation as the final gateway between the land of children and grownups. And now, I'm through it: three days after my 36th birthday.

Birthdays--they're like straws on a camel's back, you know? I've never felt their accumulating weight until the last couple of years. This year, I must confess to having gone through a wee funk ahead of time, a mini-depressive episode that lasted about a week and, in hindsight, surprised the hell out of me. I mean, for many years I've been lambasting the culture of youth that pervades the world, and insisting I'm not afraid of growing old. It beats the alternative, right?

So it was something of a shock to have found myself obsessively examining my mental age-markers. These things didn't just suddenly appear...even as a young child I always felt much more comfortable with adults, and easily twenty years older than my calendar age. My musical tastes (some of them, anyway) mirror those of your grandfather and like a true old fogey, I've cultivated an ignorance of popular culture that has served me well.

But over the past ten years or so, it's not just that I'm getting older: it's that the world around me seems to be getting younger. I honestly believe my generation was the last (at least for some time) that was in a hurry to grow up. These days, it seems as if more and more people are living with their parents into their twenties (or even longer); hopping from job to job and relationship to relationship, lacking direction, lacking commitment. Indeed, commitment and its twin term responsibility are now baaaaad words.

"Kidults" or "adultescents" rationalize their behaviour (and have it rationalized for them by parent-enablers and social workers). They say I've got to find myself and marriage is a trap and it takes money, lots of money, to start a family. Also what's the hurry? Maybe...someday...

Of course, they'll rarely acknowledge the truth and say things like I'm afraid. Or I'm gonna live for me as long as possible before I start living for someone else.

Oh, I'm not putting myself on any kind of pedestal: I was incredibly immature when I was a teenager and I still exhibit traces of that immaturity even today. The difference is, I'm ashamed of it. "Kidults" revel in it.

I should add here that I know many teens who are more adult than most adults--the cult of "kidult" doesn't look like it will claim everyone. But still, I find it a tad worrisome that so many people run from the very things my generation used to run towards.

Anyway, I kind of digressed there...I imagine there's a blog post, or a whole series of them, that I could write on "Peter Pan Syndrome" if I didn't find it so depressing.

You know when I first realized how old I really am? When the Paris Hilton sex video was suddenly all over the Internet. 2003, that would have been. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, practically everybody I know had seen it or was at least very interested in seeing it and knew where to find it. Me, I wouldn't have known Paris Hilton from the Hilton in Paris. (I still wouldn't, by the way, and consider this to be but one emblem of my sanity.) Furthermore, the idea of watching some bootleg sex tape held zero interest for me.

This phenomenon has repeated itself countless times in the ensuing years. It seems there's a new Internet craze every day, and despite being on the Internet every day, I never hear about any of them until six or eight months have passed. It makes me wonder what sites people are trolling. Am I missing something on my Google homepage, perhaps? Some line at the bottom that says "click here for today's pointless excrescence of pop culture"?

Back in the long ago 80s, before most of the people I work with were born (yike, there's an ageist thought), I used to listen to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem every week without fail. (Now it's the Vinyl Cafe with Stewart McLean on CBC Radio: like the Pursuit of Happiness says, I'm an adult now). These days, I look at the music charts in the newspapers and find I don't know at least three quarters of the artists and have never heard, oh, ninety percent of the songs. I remember the first time I saw "f." in front of some artist's name on the charts, as in

#6. Kill All Tha Muhfuhs M.C. Gangsta Baggypantz f. Lil' Skank

It took me weeks to figure out the "f." stood for "featuring", and when that revelation burst upon me, I reacted with contempt. Christ, I thought. Not only do these songs have no melody whatsoever, they're laced with profanity and they degrade women first and the rest of humanity second, women are lining up to be "featured" in them. And, Lil' Skank, I thought, if you're trying to abbreviate "little", the apostrophe goes after the first l.

It all makes me think Pink...

I still look in the mirror now and again and wonder what I'm going to do when I grow up. Then I reflect that I haven't been growing up for some time now; I've been growing out instead. By which I mean my perspectives have been broadening. (Yeah, so has my gut, smartass.) Still a long ways to go, of course: I intend to keep living until I'm dead, and who knows, maybe even after that.

Well, this is a first.

Lately--over the past couple of years or so--I increasingly find myself starting books and not finishing them.
I used to think this was heresy, only slightly more defensible than the grave sin of skipping to the back of the book to see how it ends. But I'm older now. There comes a point in any novel where I lift myself out of the story and ask myself, "Do I care?" And quite often now, I don't.
A slow-moving plot doesn't faze me; in fact, some of my favourite books meander along at a snail's pace. All I need is one character whose fate concerns me, one way or another.

But in all my reading life, I've never been confronted with a situation where I identify more with the villains than the heroes. Such is the case with The Fourth Realm, by John Twelve Hawks.

The first installment of the trilogy, The Traveller, was quite entertaining in a Matrix-meets-1984 kind of way. In the novel, governments are portrayed as unwitting puppets of a vast, shadowy organization called "The Tabula" or "The Brethren", whose goal is Jeremy Bentham's Virtual Panopticon on a worldwide scale: constant surveillance of every citizen on earth. Our heroes, the "Travellers", seek to subvert the Tabula by peaceful means; their allies and protectors, the "Harlequins", are considerably more violent.

John Twelve Hawks is quite the enigma: publically, very little is known about him--in fact, nobody seems to know if that's his real name. He claims to live "off the Grid", by which he means his existence is as untraceable as he can make it. Supposedly he communicates via satellite phone, doesn't own a television...and yet he has a website, a rather spectacular website. I smell a publicity stunt.

Amidst the quasi-Buddhist cosmology and mysticism in this series, there is plenty of meat about the "culture of fear" (so necessary for control), and the free and easy way so many people hand over aspects of their freedom to government and corporations. If you believe the novel, or the material on Twelve Hawks' website, the technology necessary for total survellance is not very far off. The more you read into this series, the more disquieted you are supposed to become.

And yet I found myself, more and more, welcoming the idea of a virtual Panopticon. This is not a new sentiment with me. I once mounted a spirited defense of Big Brother in front of my Grade Ten English class. People thought me nuts then; people still think I'm nuts now.

I hasten to add that even then, I conceded that "Big Brother" was a grossly perverted version of a fundamentally sound (to my mind) philosophy. And I was eventually wrestled to the intellectual mat by the repeated assertion that, given Big Brother technology, Orwell's dystopian vision is all but inevitable. It's much like Communism that way. From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs is a beautiful precept that always seems to be distorted to evil ends. Here's another: What would Jesus Do? That one almost always magically morphs into What Would I Do If I Were Jesus?

Robert J. Sawyer, in his excellent Neanderthal Parallax, presents a society in which each citizen wears what's called a Companion. Your Companion implant records everything you see, say and do, sending it all to a vast, ultrasecure database called an alibi archive. Your alibi archive records are accessible to you at any time, and to the authorities only when you have been accused of a crime. Of course, there are those who choose to leave their Companions wide open to public viewing 24/7: called Exhibitionists, each of them wears silver at all times (so you know who they are) and each has a devoted cult following...the ultimate reality show. But these people aside, your Companion/alibi archive link is yours alone.
The benefits of such an approach ought to be self-evident. Crime is virtually unheard of (serious crime, in this society, is punished by sterilization of the offender and anyone sharing fifty percent of his or her genes). Any crime that is committed is easily solved; framing someone for a crime is almost impossible. After a few generations, the very idea of criminality is almost expunged--what would be the point, when you know you're going to be found out? No one ever goes missing; your Companion functions as something like an ultra-deluxe Blackberry device to help you solve problems and instantly communicate with anyone, anywhere.

This is sort of an anti-Fourth Realm kind of series, positing the idea that "total information awareness" is not necessarily a bad thing. It's also one of probably very few novels ever written that takes this view...which happens to be mine.

I have always believed that the desire for privacy is, on some level, kind of bizarre. I mean, what are you doing that you're afraid somebody might see? The only non-criminal acts I can think of that people want total privacy for tend to be sexual. Masturbation, for instance. While I'm not arguing for giant public masturbation sessions, let's get real: anyone who claims to have never masturbated is lying. Where's the shame in something so common? In a sane world, catching somebody masturbating would induce no awkwardness...it wouldn't even rate mentioning.

Freedom? We're all prisoners in some way, not of government or some organization acting behind the scenes, but of ourselves. We're slaves to convention, to time, to the almighty dollar sign. Freedom is a state of mind: like all states of mind, it exists independant of external surroundings. This is a lesson most of the human race has yet to learn. Once we do learn this lesson, it will be understood that freedom can not be bought and sold, taken or given away.

This is where I think John Twelve Hawks has it wrong. He's crafted a world where there's lots of freedom from, and imbued every "right-thinking" person in it with the desire for loads more "freedom to". Given the choice, I'll take freedom from every time. Maybe that makes me an odd duck, a traitor to the human race. It also makes it very difficult to finish this book.

To Myself (I)

Everybody's busy lately! You'd think it was Christmas or something...one friend hasn't blogged in six weeks, another--who tends to be a thrice-a-week girl--has gone a near-unprecedented six days. I'm one to talk--five days slithered by while I wasn't looking, or, rather, while I was looking everywhere but at this computer. Various blog topics suggested themselves. The Pickton trial? Nah--too depressing. The one-year anniversary of Conservative government in Canada? Blah. People either don't care or they care entirely too much. Work? It's just work--boring if you don't work where I do, and, for that matter, twice as boring if you do. I think it's fair to say I've got a mild case of writer's block.
Enter Marcus Aurelius.
If you haven't read his Meditations (actually titled "To Himself"), do yourself a favour and get hold of them. They are available online in several translations, not all of them eminently readable to even a moderately educated person of today. (The Casuabon's not bad; the Long is tortuous.) Back in my monied days, I was briefly a Folio Society member and the Staniforth Meditations was probably the only book I don't regret buying from them. It repays repeat readings. Aurelius was, as far as I am concerned, obsessed with death and dying--the topic rarely leaves his thoughts for long--but when he's not discoursing on dissolution he comes up with many remarkable insights and prescriptions for right living. Opening three pages at random:

What is no good for the hive is no good for the bee. (VI: 54)

Vex not thy spirit at the course of things; they heed not thy vexation. (VII: 38)

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. (X: 16)

And the Ex-Lax:

If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.

Man, I'm wrong a lot. Just ask anyone. From the trivially wrong (I predicted a Ducks-Predators Stanley Cup final this year, which would necessitate realignment of the league sometime between now and June) to the deeply, profoundly wrong (I repeatedly predicted the price of oil to continue on up into the stratosphere, but it's fallen thirty percent seemingly just to spite me), I routinely fudge things despite my best efforts and even the odd bit of cheatery. (" 'Do you Cheetah, my son?' 'Yes, I Cheetah all the time.' ") From consulting the blogs of other, deeper minds to holding off on predictions until they're almost realities, I've been known to indulge in a little sleight-of-word every now and again.
But I still get it wrong. Almost as often as I get it right.

It's my prejudice, of course, that steers me wrong most of the time. Like everyone, I'm biased; unlike many, I wear (most of) my biases proudly.
I'm biased against the stupid: blatantly smartist, I am. My closest friend, Jason Van Dyke, once observed "it's not elitist if you're part of the elite", a sentiment I've echoed more than once since.
So when kids die in traffic "accidents" (they persist in using the term, even though the vast majority aren't accidents at all), and it turns out they were (a) drinking and/or (b) not wearing seatbelts, I go all cold inside. I look at the grieving parents and wish I could feel some shred of sympathy for their stupid offspring. And I wince when I hear the word "tragic", so often paired with the word "accident". There's nothing tragic about a drunk driver killing his passengers: not if they knew he was drunk, anyway, and who doesn't? There is something very tragic when that same drunk driver runs over an innocent bystander, of course; someone "in the wrong place at the wrong time"--another phrase I hate. The innocent are never in the wrong place, much less at the wrong time. It's the criminal who is wrong, always, by definition, full stop.
Yes, I'm biased against the lawless, too. In fact, I'm a bastion of tolerance for idiots by comparison. It comes, I think, from lionizing my father the peace officer for my whole life: cop good, bad guy...bad.
But there are rogue cops.
And there are quite a few people--probably all of us, including the smartest--who do stupid things without realizing it, on occasion. Like me, for instance.
I was very nearly fired from one job for an extremely offensive comment I made to a female co-worker. I meant absolutely no offense when I said it, but after her slack-jawed outraged reaction I very quickly figured out that what I meant and what I said were two entirely different things. Since then--it only took one mis-step--I've been very careful with my tongue around absolutely everyone of the female gender. But the point is, I should have been careful that first time, and I wasn't.

My first dance with a woman who became, briefly, my fiancee, the song was Meat Loaf's "Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad". You know the one: I want you, I need you, but there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you. Prophetic man, that Mr. Loaf. And yet I went out and bought her a ring, hoping to shut up the voice in my head telling me don't go out and buy her a ring.

Well I've gone and done it, so what are you gonna say now?

You're a horse's ass, is what I'm gonna say, and I'm gonna keep saying it until you agree with me.

Took about six months. Six months of stubborn stupidity.

Next girlfriend. Suffered from chronic depression, which was, of course, all her fault. I couldn't cope with that, it being, of course, All About Me. So I treated her like utter dirt, then wondered why she wouldn't take me back once I did come to my senses. The truth--'cause she's smart, and you're stupid'--never crossed my mind until much later.

And that's just one breed of idiocy I've been prone to. Fact is I have no right to hate the stupid, not when I myself am one of their number.

Criminals? I've often said that they're made, not born, and decried excuses like poverty and familial dysfunction. But I shouldn't be so quick to deny the truth, not when so many criminals are poor and do come from broken homes. You pair such social factors with today's media, which perversely glorifies criminality at every turn (check out YouTube for today's random assault!) and you can (or should) forgive these people: they know not what they do. Or don't care, at least, which amounts to the same.

Sometimes my biases are almost criminal in themselves.

How barbarous, to deny men the privilege of pursuing what they imagine to be their proper concerns and interests! Yet, in a sense, this is just what you are doing when you allow your indignation to rise at their wrongdoing; for after all, they are only following their own apparent concerns and interests. You say they are mistaken? Why then, tell them so, and explain it to them, instead of being indignant.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI: 28