Iggy, this is your last chance

Mr. Ignatieff, I've been watching your nonperformance as Liberal Non-Leader for some time now. At first, I have to admit, I figured you were laying low because you had a Harp(er)oon up your sleeve somewhere, and you were only waiting for the correct 'winning conditions' (to bring back an odious Canadian political phrase) to arrive. Then the Harp(er)oon must have gone off in your face, or something, because I haven't seen hide nor hair of you for the last few months. Your party has been plummeting in the polls, and you don't even seem to care.

Well, listen up, Iggy: the PM is about to try to finish you off...or so he thinks. In reality, what he's fixing to hand you is a glorious chance to resurrect your moribund political career. And all you have to do is take that chance.

Harper is getting a little too cutesy for his own good, here. He's presented you with what he thinks is a dilemma: support his HST legislation, and reap a whirlwind of voter scorn and disgust. Or reject it, and piss off your provincial cousins in Ontario and British Columbia to no end.

"This is not a difficult decision", according to Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. "Either Parliament supports the right of the provinces to choose to screw their taxpayers even harder and deeper a harmonized value-added tax or it does not."

Iggy, here's a tip from one of those beleaguered taxpayers: choose "It Does Not."

That choice is going to rankle Dalton McGuinty, your Liberal cousin in Ontario, and Gordon Campbell, the guy who's not even a distant cousin of yours in British Columbia (his misappropriation of the term 'Liberal' is one of Canada's biggest political mysteries). Both these gentlemen have spoken of little else over the past half year. They've expended a great deal of energy presenting a giant pile of manure as a lovely and delicious chocolate cake. The HST, they say, will save businesses $100 million...which (of course) will be passed on to their customers.

Yeah, right. Passed like a giant pile of manure. Canadians aren't buying it. I've been trolling sites hither and yon for some time now, and if anybody actually supports the HST, they've chosen to keep their support real quiet. The closest I've seen to support comes from a few folks who are willing to pay an HST provided the rate is amended to ten percent, no higher. And that ain't happening.

So Iggy: the choice is yours. You're the only thing standing between Canadians and a punishing tax load they neither asked for nor want. I think Canadians can distinguish between the provincial and federal wings of the Liberals and vote accordingly. Contrary to popular Ottawa opinion, we're not quite that dumb.

If you choose to kill this legislation and the HST, believe you me, your political fortune will come back from the dead. If you don't...well, you might wish you were dead.

Black Friday

I don't get it.

I mean, I really don't get it.

I've noticed a distinct acceleration in the Canadian retail market over the past week. While we are nowhere near the orgasmic paroxysm called 'Black Friday' in the United States, we're well on our way: several major Canadian retailers are touting early Boxing Day sales. "THE SAVINGS START....NOW!!!"

I was laying in bed at 1:30 this morning (vacation-related insomnia), listening to 680 News covering the massive lineups at some mall in Atlanta, Georgia. Garmin navigation systems were on sale for $60, George Foreman grills for $9...not counting the cost of time or aggravation, of course. There were apparently traffic jams to get into parking lots.

This makes no sense no matter whose perspective you take. The retailers are running huge loss-leaders to draw people in, and do you really think people stick around to buy anything that might make the store money once the stock of 90% off crap is gone? If you're a consumer--which is all you are in America, forever and ever amen and don't you ever forget it--you're facing a near-riot just to procure that special gift that convinces the people around you that you're not maxed out on seventeen credit cards, almost foreclosed out of your house and facing The Winter Of The Collection Agencies.

And take just a minute to have pity on the poor employees. Says Wikipedia:

Black Friday is not an official holiday, but many employees have the day off (with the exceptions of those employed in retail, health care and banking)...

There are several professions that society utterly depends on. Law enforcement is one such. Health care is another. There are more: firefighters; those charged with keeping our power, water, and sewage systems running. Shelters for the homeless and abused. Superintendents. Doubtless you can think of others.

RETAIL IS NOT ONE OF THEM.

I work in a grocery store. I am under no illusions as to how important my job is in the grand scheme of things...though many other people seem to be. Our franchisee spends a good chunk of nearly every holiday at the store (sad, isn't it?) and he reports the phones ring almost nonstop all day long. If he was to pick them up, he'd be besieged with are you open? and why aren't you open? Last Christmas Day he stopped counting at a hundred calls. We close early on Christmas Eve, and this upsets a great many customers, too. When Wal*Mart announced last December that they were henceforth open 24/7 "to serve you better", more than a few people remarked "it's about bloody time". It made me want to show them a real bloody time, let me tell you.

The other thing I don't get about Black Friday is the timing of it. Oh, sure, it kicks off the holiday shopping season, I get that much. So, okay, you head out at midnight the night before in search of BARGAINS GALORE, brave the madding crowd, and come home with your Christmas shopping done. You're done...and there's a whole month ahead. The retailer's faced with the daunting prospect of enticing you to max out your eighteenth credit card...over a whole month. This retail strategy strikes me as stupidly shortsighted.

In Canada-as-it-was, not as-it-is-striving-mightily-to-become, there used to be no sales worthy of the name over the whole pre-Christmas season. They called them sales, of course, and items could be had for ten or twenty percent off, but there was none of this 'nearly free' madness. That was when retailers were smart and they took full advantage of their captive market. Everybody had to shop for Christmas, the prevailing wisdom went, so why should we lose money on that? Then there'd be the great blowoff called Boxing Day...to eliminate any excess inventory. Few people seemed willing to move their Christmas into January to take advantage of the Boxing Day sales. Remember those days? That was back when Christmas wasn't about stuff and how much money you could spend.

Now the Boxing Day sales have already started and they'll run almost into February.

Every year I'm holiday'ed out by mid-December. And it's only getting worse. This is a Black Friday, indeed.

ClimateGate

I was going to write something on the whole Climategate controversy today, but frankly, I'm just too tired. (h/t Catelli for getting to this first).

So instead, I'm going to take you to Peter Watts and he shall set you straight.

I will add two things. One, it's not called "global warming" anymore for several reasons (one of which is that people, particularly in Canada, tend to think that'd be a good thing and two, the globe is not uniformly, or even entirely predictably, warming). The second thing I'll add is that even if you're inclined to dismiss the findings of scientists all over the planet, replicated over and over and over again, all you have to do is head north to see climate change in action. Ask some Inuit. Their oral histories cover off quite a period, and they're seeing unprecedented things of late.

Look, we can argue amongst ourselves as to what degree we're at fault for this climate change. And we can perhaps quibble with the models, most of which predict data so far in the future that their creators will be safely dead. But we dare not dispute the evidence in our very faces.

Human beings are nothing if not adaptable. But, to paraphrase the motto of LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net, we need to deal with reality before reality deals with us.

A Gay Old Time

I've been watching the 'Brendan Burke is gay!" story play out over the last few days. Sparked by John Buccingross's fine writeup over at espn.com, the coverage has spread far and wide. An interview aired last night on TSN.

It's not really much of a story. Or at least, it shouldn't be. Brendan Burke, 19, is the son of Brian Burke, general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Brendan's gay. That's it.

Well, okay, that's not quite it. Brendan came out to his dad last Christmas. The elder Burke is the very definition of a 'man's man'--he came to Toronto boasting his new team requires 'the proper levels of pugnacity, testosterone, truculence and belligerence." No nancy-boys on a Burke team, understand.

.

There are fathers all over the world, made more or less in the Brian Burke mold, whose reaction to a son's coming out ranges from disdain to rage, sometimes killing rage. This father said "we love you, this won't change a thing." He said "I had a million good reasons to love and admire Brendan. This news didn't alter any of them."

"I wish this burden would fall on someone else's shoulders, not Brendan's. Pioneers are often misunderstood and mistrusted. But since he wishes to blaze this trail, I stand beside him with an axe! I simply could not be more proud of Brendan than I am, and I love him as much as I admire him." -- Brian Burke

To be honest, once I determined Brian Burke fully accepted his son, I've been much more interested in the reaction than the story itself.

There are many online venues where people comment about hockey games as they unfold, and I usually have one tab open while I'm watching on TV, contributing my own observations on occasion. The interview between Brendan, Brian, and TSN's Dave Hodge aired in the first intermission of last night's Leafs-Lightning game, and the forum lit up with several species of disbelief. The dominant reaction seemed to be why is this a story? Who cares if his son's gay?

I felt a stab of Canadian pride, reading this over and over, because in an ideal world, this wouldn't be a story...and in Canada, at least, we're moving towards this ideal world rather than away from it. Gay marriage has been legal here for over four years. The hullabaloo has died down. On the surface, at least, most people accept gays.

But only on the surface. I kept reading the forum, and noticed something that extinguished my pride like a dash of cold water. More than a few people still have this deeply ingrained schoolyard tendency to dismiss anything they disagree with (or simply don't understand) with the words that's so gay. A person they disagree with is branded a fag or a homo. When tempers get heated, the epithets include cocksucker and queer and other even more colourful terms, all meaning the same thing: homosexual.

A confession: I used to be a homophobe. It was kind of a default stance, really: I hadn't considered it. In my cocksure teens (pun definitely intended), I'd never, to my knowledge, met a gay person and the thought of what gay people did with each other disgusted me. You put your dick where? EWWWWWWWW! (Interestingly--at least to me--lesbianism never so much as crossed my mind.)

Looking back, I can trace my first doubts about my homophobia all the way back to the schoolyard. I distinctly recall wondering why so many things were gay and so many boys were faggots. It didn't make sense. One wrong step in the schoolyard dance and you'd have that faggot burden on you...and once your classmates decided to label you that way, no amount of protest could get it off. Hell, at first I didn't even know what a faggot was, but I knew damned well I didn't want to be one. Unfortunately, it's ridiculously easy to become a faggot, at least in preteen imaginations. I was one in short order.

I never spoke up. Not once did I ask somebody why doing well in school, or singing to yourself, or any of a thousand other things made you a gaylord, particularly after I'd earned that label a dozen times over. I had the bullied boy's unerring sense of consequence, and I knew no good could come of questioning the judgment of my peers. Stupid and queer, too! That's two reasons to bash his face in! One reason was more than enough for the guys I went to school with, thank you.

There have been doubts about my sexuality shot at me from odd quarters over the years, well beyond the reflexive insults of elementary and high school. People wonder why I don't tend to fixate upon, or even notice, stunningly beautiful women, for instance. I rotate between three answers to that question:

--who cares? it's not as if stunningly beautiful women are ever going to fixate upon, or even notice, me

--She Ain't Pretty (she just looks that way)

--I've never, not once, looked at a man and thought, wow, he's stunningly beautiful.

But I can put paid to such speculation even more easily. Like 37% of males (according to Kinsey, and the number could well be higher) I have had a homosexual experience--and I have no desire whatsoever to have another. Not out of disgust or shame, I'll say that. I don't regret the experience I had, although I did in its immediate aftermath. Actually, it was kind of fun. But once was enough.

How does one go from from homophobe-by-default to gay acceptance? Two short steps:

1) Make some friends, and be friends with them for a while

2) Find out your friends are gay.

You're then faced with a decision: reject your friend on the basis of this new piece of information about them, which, so long as your friend isn't attracted to you, doesn't impact you in any way, or...realize, understand and accept that homosexuality is okay.

"Things like gay slurs, I think once players realize there could be a gay person next to them or a gay person around them they stop using them. It's not that they're homophobic, it's just that they don't think about what the consequences for a gay person next to them might be."--Brendan Burke

Is it that simple, I wonder? There's a subset of the population that reacts with hatred and thinly disguised fear whenever someone around them is outed...almost as if they're afraid homosexuality is airborne, like H1N1. I get the feeling these macho types think they're so attractive to women that they must be attractive to any passing queer, too. Ludicrous.

My closest friend is gay. He's anything but flamboyant and to look at him, you'd never suspect. I'm given to understand that much of the gay population is like him: interested only in minding their own business, regarding their sexuality, on those rare occasions when they have to--as no different from the colour of their eyes or hair. Statistics suggest at least one in ten people is a homosexual, which means that chances are you know a gay person, whether you know you do or not.

As for gays in sport, I can state with certainty that there are many of them. I do hope Brendan Burke's courageous decision to make his sexuality public knowledge makes it easier for others to do the same. Because the people on that online forum are wrong: Brendan Burke's sexuality is newsworthy. But they're also right: it shouldn't be.

Lois Griffin Rebuts FOX News

First, the unbelievable claim heard on FOX News:




Lois Griffin responds:



Hmm. I haven't forgotten that terrorist attack, have you?

"That's Not News!"

Jim Kunstler embarks on his latest iteration of apocalypse with the following:

How infantile is American society? Last night's CBS "Business Update" (in the midst of its "60 Minutes" program) featured three items: 1.) The New Moon teen vampire movie led the weekend box-office receipts; 2.) Cadbury shares hit an all-time high; 3.) Michael Jackson's rhinestone-studded white glove sold at auction for $350,000. Some in-house CBS-News producer is responsible for this fucking nonsense. How does he or she keep her job? Is there no adult supervision at the network?

My answer, which dovetails nicely with his, is: no, there isn't. But that's no surprise, since there are so few adults left in America (or indeed, anywhere else in Western society) anymore.

Kunstler goes on to say that it's far past time America re-localized and called a halt to its financial shenanigans. He's been arguing the same thing every week for a number of years, and still few people seem willing even to give him a hearing, let alone take him seriously. I won't bother to enter into his world in this blog entry. I'll stop at his front door and ponder his opening question instead.

Back when I was a kid and often subject to The Question--"what do you want to be when you grow up?"--I was never really sure. I wanted to be a policeman like my dad for a while, until I realized my physical and mental limitations (poor eyesight, no co-ordination, and a decided tendency towards absentmindedness) weren't exactly conducive to a life of crime-fighting. I wanted to be a musician, but lacked the discipline to elevate myself beyond the pedestrian. Then I hit upon becoming a writer.

I took an English degree towards this end...and hated it so much I had to drop out to save my sanity. Between the professors telling you how to think (their way, always) and the mind-numbingly boring material, filtered always through professorial perception and stripped of any interest it might have had), I just couldn't take it after a couple of years. I saw myself as an editorialist-in-waiting, and literary criticism didn't fit in my worldview.

Then I found out that an editorialist-in-waiting is a de facto reporter, and I quaked in my boots. If there's anything worse than being a news reporter, I don't know what it is. I'd rather be a used car salesman. Hell, I'd rather be a politician.

A good reporter regards everything as his or her business. Privacy is irrelevant (except where it comes to sources, that is). I am a very open individual myself, if I know you and trust you, but that's me. You may be a private person, unwilling to share the intimate details of your life with the world...and I respect that. Particularly when (let's say) your house burns down or your child drowns. I fail to see how sharing your feelings in those instances with Mr. Action 7 will do you any good at all.

I could maybe change my mindset on this...heaven knows I've changed my mind on enough things over the years, and my attitude regarding privacy is riddled with complexities and inconsistencies. But there remains one fundamental issue that keeps me far, far away from the news business, and it's the title of this post.

I can't begin to tell you the number of times I have said these three words. Often silently, to myself, sometimes I practically scream them. But scarcely a day goes by without those three words springing to mind. That's not news.

It's not news when a Hollywood couple gets married, much less when they get divorced. Whoever wins or loses the latest reality treacle on television, it's not news. Pretty much the whole field of entertainment is, well, entertainment...not news.

Sports, likewise, are sports. They're not news. If your local team wins a championship, that's news, I suppose--it certainly affects a significant proportion of the population. But the results of a single game? Or the off-field antics of an athlete-celebrity? Is this important? Does it benefit me somehow to know this? If I follow the team, I already know it, and I have sports channels to see replays. If I don't follow the team, I...DON'T...CARE.

News is what is wrong with the world. More importantly, and often missing from other peoples' definitions, news is what's right with the world. Pretty much every problem ever faced by humanity has been, or is being, solved somewhere. Who, what, where, when, why and how? If the problem isn't getting solved in this particular part of the world, why?

Kunstler gives three examples of non-news from the business update (!) segment of 60 Minutes. The first is a box office recap. Unless you're in the business of selling Twilight merchandise, tell me, really, do you give a tinker's fart? Do we judge the worth of movies by their take, now? Scary thought.

The second--Cadbury shares are up--is, well, of marginal interest. In and of itself it means nothing unless you're one of that tiny subset of people who own stock in Cadbury. Taking the wider view--which I doubt 60 Minutes did--it says something about what sort of 'luxuries' people turn to in hard times.

And the third, that a piece of jewel-encrusted fabric once worn by a man who's now dead sold for over a third of a million dollars...

You know what? I take everything I just said back. That is news. It's news that fits squarely in the category of what's wrong with the world. And likewise, most of the pappy sappy crap out of Hollywood is news, for the same reason.

Congratulations, Ken, you just depressed the hell out of yourself.

There are no words

for how bad this Leafs team is. Pathetic, base, horrendous, peewee--well, peewee comes close, maybe. Wonder if they could beat a peewee team. Hell, I'm not sure they could beat the Timbits.

As of right now, you've got one forward--Phil Kessel--who knows how to play the game. For now, anyway: he's only been a Leaf for seven games. Give him time: eventually his hockey sense will desert him and he'll be able to miss an empty net on a clear-cut breakaway the way every other Leaf forward does.

You've got one all-round defenseman in Ian White who plays the game hard every shift. He's the obvious choice for captain, but the Leafs' braintrust evidently does not feel his game is worthy of emulation. Or something.

You have half a goalie in Jonas Gustavsson. He's great positionally and he has acrobatic reflexes but his rebound control is atrocious and he handles the puck like it's a live grenade.

This team would play better coaching itself than they do under Wilson--if Ronnie had any dignity, he'd quit. Every game, he makes boneheaded decisions--like insisting Luke Schenn play on his off side and scapegoating him for every mistake he makes, while continuing to trot out far weaker players shift in and shift out. Like demanding Kessel play with the least talented wingers at his disposal. Like selecting Stempniak to play in a shootout, based on--well, who knows, a dartboard, maybe. Certainly not on anything like his ability to score.

The Leafs blew a 3-0 lead to the only other team in their class tonight, the Carolina Hurricanes. The 'Canes had previously won just one of fourteen games, but they prevailed 6-5 in a shootout against the jugger-nought Leafs.

At least the Leafs got a point. Now they're on pace for a whopping 49 points this year, by far the worst total they've ever mustered, considering points are soooo much easier to come by now that you can get one for losing in overtime or a shootout. The standings say they have twelve points. If this was twenty years ago, they'd have six. Six points in twenty games, for a lovely .150 winning percentage.

You know what? I don't mind so much that they're horrible. I'm used to horrible. What really irks me as a lifelong fan is they just keep on doing the same things, playing the same lines, as if something that hasn't worked all season will magically work all of a sudden. It's the very definition of insanity. And this after all that blather about "a culture of accountability" and the need to continually earn your ice time.

To be perfectly honest, my misgivings started just as the preseason ended. They'd played very well in the exhibition matches, thanks largely to the play of guys like Kadri, Bozak, Hanson and Stalberg...only one of whom made the team. Kadri was sent down to junior, on defensible grounds that he was as skinny as a beanpole and if he'd stayed up he'd eventually be killed. But they also demoted Hanson and Bozak, both of whom clearly deserved to make the team. Stalberg was kept up, but lacking linemates with whom he'd established a fiery chemistry, he wasn't himself and was soon relegated back to the Marlies. Nothing against Mitchell and Wallin (well, okay, I've got something against Wallin: he can't play hockey)--those rookies are clearly the better players and deserve a roster spot you're taking up.

Burke has really backed himself into a corner. He's got a last-place team getting worse instead of better. He's hard against the salary cap, meaning he's getting no value whatsoever out of his payroll. He's got two, maybe three players worth keeping and the rest are trade bait--but who would take them, and for what? Even worse, he's traded away his first round picks for the next two years in the Kessel deal. And yes, Kessel is easily worth one of those picks himself and maybe even both of them. But man, that's hard to say when you're staring at a couple of drafts in a row with no first round pick in them.

The only, and I mean only, consolation is that half this dreadful team is on expiring contracts. (If this is how they play when they're angling for a raise...) Loads of cap room will open up in the off season and Burke will be able to target a bunch of free agents--that's if their current teams don't lock them up first. So it's that old Leaf chant. "wait until next year", coming out in freaking NOVEMBER.

I have box seats to a game this Saturday against the Washington Capitals. At this point, sorry to say it, I'm going (a) because it's free and (b) because I get to watch a real team play hockey. Until the Leafs decide they want to win hockey games, I've decided I'm not going to cheer for them. I'll be waiting with blue and white bells on, and--let's face it--I'm probably still going to watch, if only to see if they have, in fact, decided to show some desire. But I'm growing increasingly weary of cheering for a loser that seems perfectly content to remain one.

And that's how I feel about that.

Finding the Humour

I'm not really a funny guy. Certainly not funny like my brother-in-law, who can make a gargoyle guffaw. Or my father, who doesn't consider his day well and truly lived until he's caused someone to shoot something out of their nose.

Some people--my dad and brother-in-law among them--have a gift for transmuting stress into humour. I've seen it done often enough that I can make a passable attempt, but that's about it.

Remove the stress, though, and funny things bubble up in its place.

Like at the hospital yesterday. Yeah, I know we're in the middle of an H1N1 epidemic and I understand what this sign was trying to communicate, but the lobby of a hospital seems an odd place for a sign that says PLEASE DO NOT VISIT IF YOU ARE NOT FEELING WELL. I chuckled at it yesterday, before Eva's surgery; now that it's over with, I'm finding that to be a real knee-slapper.

Jesus, my father, though. We're on line at the Atrium Cafeteria and perusing the lunch specials. "What's a 'Greek burger'? I asked, innocently. Without any pause at all, Dad says "Just two buns".

Jim, clad in a T-shirt emblazoned with the message "I'M A VIRGIN BUT THIS IS AN OLD T-SHIRT", was looking around for shit to disturb to great comic effect, prompting Eva to tell everyone she was in hospital to receive a "brotherectomy". Incidentally, at the aptly named 'kiss and go' station outside day surgery, Eva and I exchanged tender I-love-you's. I told her I'd see her 'on the other side' and earned a punch in the shoulder for that weak sally. Jim told Eva "see ya, spaz" and she said "later, dork" and for perhaps the first time in my life I truly understood siblings: we'd all said exactly the same thing.

There's a weird humour (to me, at least) in the fact I have sent over seventy text messages in the past two days. Me, the guy who two weeks ago didn't have a cell phone and swore up and down he'd never get one until he had no choice; me, the same guy who's been saying for years that text messages make no sense whatsoever when you've got a freaking phone in your hand. I will say this: for the sake of my sanity and productivity, the number of texts is going to plummet when Eva gets home in less than an hour. It's damned hard to get anything done when there's an earthquake in your pants seemingly every other minute. I am not a multitasker. Hell, most days it's all I can do to be a tasker.

Anyway, my dad and I are out in his car on the grounds it's (a) substantially more comfortable than a hospital waiting room and (b) equipped with XM Satellite Radio and its comedy channels. There's a comedienne talking about finding the humour in everyday life. With my father snoring away in the seat beside me--that man can fall asleep instantly and with vigour--I reflected that I try. I really try to find the humour. Sometimes it's elusive, as when, for instance, your wife is going in for surgery. This comedienne said she puts it on her 'To-Do" list each and every day: "Find something funny." Then again, she says she completes her To-Do list every night before bed, writing down everything she did that day and checking it all off. Sounds like me.

I'd like to thank Jim and my dad for leavening the situation considerably over the past couple of days. It would have been entirely too serious around here without you.

Eva is fine

That's the gist of what this post is going to say: my wife is fine. She's being kept in hospital overnight because of her diabetes and (extremely mild) asthma. Truth be told, she probably could have been released this evening.

Everyone knows hospitals aren't fun places to be. I have to give Henderson Hospital some points for friendly, courteous doctors and volunteers. I was kept informed of where my wife was at all times; the minute the surgery was over, her doctor came out and told me she was okay, gave me a rundown on the procedure, and let me know what was happening next.

Oh, and they have this view off their cafeteria patio:

Nice.

The surgery started on time and was finished about twenty minutes ahead of when we were told it would be. They did not perform the riskier omentectomy, as the laparoscopic instruments were sufficient. In addition to the hysterectomy, they found and drained a cyst on one of Eva's ovaries.

Thank you to brother Jim for serving as transport and comic relief; also to my dad who made the long drive down from Britt to stay with me through what would have been a much longer day without either of you. Thanks as well for the outpouring of support from friends all over. Eva should be home by noon tomorrow. Me? I'm just happy the operation is over with and was a success.

Up In Smoke

I have a few flaws. Quite a few, if you get me on days that end in -y.

One big one: I never seem to grasp anything the first time you explain it to me. My grasping mechanism is continually on the fritz: whole paragraphs can go by, literally, as they say, in one ear and out the other; and then WHAMMO! with great force, my mind will snatch one detail and fixate on it. From then on, it takes an unconscionable amount of effort to divest me of that single detail. Plans or situations change, and the changes are explained to me, and three hours or three days later all I remember is that single word in chapter 4, paragraph m, subsection why the hell can't you pay attention?

My mind is most likely to seize on words I want to hear. Sometimes the words can be close to what I'm hoping to hear and my brain goes yep, that's close enough. You heard that, didn't you? I did. And now that we've heard it, we can't unhear it.

Words can not express how annoying this is for my wife, who must keep a mental hammer and chisel on hand at all times to prise the offending scrap of yep, that's what we heard out of my skull and pound in the correct version. She's used to this behaviour. It has, after all, been ten years. But it's still frustrating as hell, all the more so because she can never tell which detail I'm going to seize on and cling to.

Make all this about a subject on which my attitude already runs somewhere between scalding and nuclear--like, for instance, cigarettes--and the atmosphere can get really volatile really quickly.

Eva's an on-again, off-again smoker. Once, not too long ago, she was off for nearly four years. When her upcoming surgery was scheduled, she resolved to quit again, hopefully this time for good. We set out a schedule for her to gradually cut back, leaving her smoke free three weeks before the operation. I was told then--or at least I heard then--that smoking anywhere near the surgery date was extremely hazardous. Since this confirmed long standing knowledge--my every neural synapse might as well have smoking is extremely hazardous inscribed on it some place--this assumed monumental degrees of certitude.

Eva has explained to me more than once the difficulties of becoming a non-smoker when you're currently a smoker. And I nod my head and say all the right things. I tell myself I get it, I understand, I accept, I empathize.

But then I'm faced with the reality of her hellish addiction and her heroic efforts to overcome it, and I don't get it. I don't understand, I can't accept, and instead of support and empathy, Eva's treated to judgment and contempt. Which is just the sort of thing to help alleviate her stress and eliminate the need for a smoke, wouldn't you say?

Eva cut back and cut back and one day about a month ahead of schedule, she announced she was ready to stop. And she did, with a few minor slips that I (mostly) let go. Then as the surgery came closer, the stress, quite understandably, built up. Her Nicorette inhaler came out more often. On the one hand, I rejoiced that it wasn't an actual cigarette. On the other, much larger hand, I grumbled, silently, that you can't expect to quit a nicotine addiction if you keep supplying yourself with nicotine. And damn it all, the thing even looks like a cigarette. So of course that meant to me there was no difference. And the surgery's getting closer and closer.

Then last Friday night she was cleaning out one of her purses and found an old, really old, pack of smokes she swore up and down she didn't know were there.

I stared at them coldly.I knew in my heart she was telling the truth. Eva wasn't holding out on me...she had admitted every one of the few slips she'd had. But still, they were cigarettes, real ones, and I couldn't for the life of me understand why she was looking at them with such longing. I look at a cigarette and all I see is extremely hazardous no matter how many times Eva explains addiction to me. In my mind's eye I see my beloved wife--who doesn't have a smoker's cough except in my imagination--hacking in the immediate aftermath of her surgery and ripping apart every last stitch. Her organs would fuse together and she would die and all for what? How long does the good feeling from one cigarette last? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? Surely no more than an hour. Eva was going to die on the table for an hour's peace.

I chewed on this bitter cud over and over, and eventually it all just boiled out of me. It wasn't pretty. It looked, in fact, like the leavings of about a dozen packs of cigarettes, all vomited up and staining the air between us.

The argument raged for over an hour...probably the longest fight we've had in ten years together. (After we'd made up, we noted the reason we'd kept the heat on so long: Tux, who cringes if Mommy or Daddy so much as raises a voice, was at the kennel that night.)

And at the end of it, I still wasn't as convinced or as understanding as I should have been.

Yes, they'd like you to quit smoking. Of course they would, they're medical professionals. But they only insist you not smoke for the twelve hours preceding your surgery and as it turns out, if that's too onerous you're allowed to use...a Nicorette inhaler. Turns out that even though it looks like a cigarette and has nicotine like a cigarette, it ain't a cigarette. Or as Eva put it, "if you think this is the same as smoking, then I'm going out to get a pack right now."

The thing I refused to get through my brain--it still sits uneasily in there--is that cigarettes are the best friends of the addicted. They make life just that little bit more bearable while they're in there, and if you happen to be addicted to cigarettes, it's only natural that you'll want them more and more as the stress level goes higher and higher.

In truth, Eva has done a remarkable job fighting this battle. In truth, I shouldn't judge or begrudge her. Past battles won have no bearing on this one except as motivation: you kicked this before, you can again.

I can do better. I will do better.

Lest We Forget

No words of mine today. Instead, the words of Eric Bogle, as interpreted by the incomparable John McDermott:



...and a column from Sarah Hampson that perfectly encapsulates my thoughts on this, the holiest day of the secular calendar.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

The Storm Before the Dawn

Pardon the break. In my experience, at least, a long run between blog entries is a product of either (a) too little happening or (b) too much. This would be a (b) break.

To be fair, it's not that a lot has happened...it's that a lot is about to.

My wife, Eva, is going in for some pretty major surgery a week Wednesday. The ablation she had back in May didn't take. The next step is a hysterectomy.

Now, hysterectomies in this latter age are not such of a much. Millions of women undergo them and six weeks later they're better than new. And while any surgery has attendant risks--people have died during tonsillectomies--a hysterectomy is pretty ho-hum as major surgeries go.

But there are issues.

The first is that Eva has not had children. This rules out a traditional vaginal hysterectomy. The second is her size, which may rule out a laparoscopic hysterectomy (one performed by remote control, as it were). They're going to try this first, but laparoscopic instruments are only so long. Accordingly, if this does not work, they must perform an omentectomy. The gentle way to describe this procedure: a long incision and removal of some or all of the fat pad surrounding the torso. That's the way I like to think of it. Sounds nice and clinical and safe, unlike, say, "open 'er up like a side of beef".

Wikipedia's description of a omentectomy seems quite benign: "the surgical removal of the omentum, a relatively simple procedure with no major side effects." Nice of them to put that right in the definition where I'm more likely to believe it. Most of the time. Ken, I tell myself, this is one case where you don't have to worry about your shitty peripheral vision. There are no major effects creeping in from the sides. So sayeth Wikipedia, and Wikipedia never lies. For long, anyway.

If the laparoscopy is successful, Eva will be home for dinner on Wednesday. If the omentectomy is necessary, she'll be hospitalized for three to five days. Or longer, if any back effects materialize. Back effects, the ones Wikipedia doesn't mention because apparently Wikipedia doesn't check its six. Infection is the big one. I mean, c'mon here, large parts of Eva that are not meant to be exposed to air are going to be exposed to air. And this being hospital air, there's just no telling what exotic things are floating around in it, waiting to make Eva's internal acquaintance. Howya doon, there, never seen you round these parts before. Howzabout I just settle in and proliferate a while?

There are a host--hell, a regiment--of other back effects, none of which has as yet announced itself in my brain. They're shadowy spectral wraiths, all the more ominous for lacking names. Like most of their kind, they own the nights.

Really, the emotional concoction here is complex and more than a little ugly. Fear is the prime component, of course, and fear in me breeds a number of base affects, irritability easily sparking into outright anger being the most common. A heady dose of guilt, as well: guilt because I have all this fear and it's not even me having the damned surgery. Oh, yeah, buddy, you think YOU'RE scared. What about your wife, huh? What about her? You have no right to be afraid. No right at all. How dare you. And so on: the end of that particular thought train is Admit it, you're just manufacturing this fear to get some attention of your own.

No, I'm not. While I'm nowhere near as scared as Eva must be, and indeed I can't even adequately imagine what Eva's going through, I am frightened. And I feel like a failure as a husband because I'm supposed to be Eva's rock in hard times. I'm not a rock. At this point I'm more like beach sand. More on this and its recent ripening into conflict in an upcoming post.

Mixed with the fear and the guilt is an unsteady hope. In talking about the upcoming surgery with Eva, I was surprised, shocked, stunned, to hear she was actually hoping like hell the laparoscopy would fail and they'd have to do the omentectomy. My mind reeled: given a choice between six hours in hospital, in-one-door-pull-it-out-and-out-the-other, and what could be six days in hospital, battling who knows what, well, my choice is clear, and so is hers...and they're the exact opposite.

So here's the argument for the omentectomy.

Eva is unlike most women her size in many respects. As I have mentioned more than once, there is a great deal of muscle under her flab and she is remarkably fit given her weight. She does have type II diabetes, a product of polycystic ovaries and their bastard offspring insulin resistance, but her sugars are usually in very good control. Her blood pressure and cholesterol are normal or better.

But Eva does share two characteristics with many other large women: she wants to lose weight...and she can't.

All too often I hear people--comics or would-be comics being painfully unfunny, most of them--telling fat people to "just lose weight, already." Because apparently it's that simple, and never mind that the diet industry makes billions every year. The problem is compounded with Eva: the above mentioned polycystic ovary syndrome and hormonal imbalances are largely (ha-ha) to blame. (Check out those symptoms. While not all PCOS-afflicted women have everything listed here, my wife does. In spades.) The hysterectomy should correct or at least ameliorate the hormonal issues and the omentectomy would help even more. It's not just that they'd be removing some thirty pounds--it's the immediate beneficial effect that Eva less those thirty pounds would experience. Her insulin resistance would abate, as would the PCOS, making it much easier for her to abate.

I suppose the cynic, reading this, will derive "instant tummy tuck" out of it, and that's fair as far as it goes. The truth is that Eva believes the benefits of an omentectomy are worth a week in hospital and an infection or three if it comes to that. Now that she's explained it to me, I've come around to her way of thinking...much as it pains me.

To be continued...

Fiction that has changed my life (1)

AZTEC, by Gary Jennings

My wife read this in grade seven. She went to give a book report on it and the teacher stopped her partway through and asked her to give the presentation after school, on account of the 'adult' nature of the novel. There was, Eva says, also some doubt as to whether she had in fact read the whole thing. She had.
Jennings was the second author Eva introduced to me and my first exposure to historical fiction. He remains the standard by which I judge the genre, and so far everything I've read has come up wanting.

Jennings immerses you in his cultures to the point where you start thinking the language and dreaming the set pieces. You'll come out the other end of any Jennings novel with a deep appreciation for the sweep of human history and the human beings who have lived it. And fair warning: you'll be exposed to sex, at times perverted, and violence, often casually graphic. Those of a prurient nature will undoubtedly question the explicit sex scenes. I'm pretty sure Jennings would respond that (a) each one is integral to the plot (which is true) and (b) humans are sexual animals. Ditto the violence: the author is, if anything, understating the brutality of the Aztec era.
Aside from being a hell of an epic well told, AZTEC gifted me with a whole new level of empathy and understanding towards other cultures. We look upon human sacrifice as repellent in the extreme, for instance. So did the priests who came to "civilize" the Aztecs. Through Mixtli's detailing of his life and times, we are given to understand and maybe even accept that his people saw things differently. To be sacrificed to a god was, in that time and place, a great honour to which anyone would quite naturally aspire. People almost always went to their deaths willingly, even joyfully.

Now I am by no means suggesting that maybe we ought to kick off Vancouver 2010 by throwing a few dozen people into the cauldron that contains the Olympic flame. I am suggesting that there remain cultures in which human sacrifice is considered an honour and a duty. One such culture is currently at war with ours, and our media tends to portray Islamic terrorists as evil and/or stupid. They are neither: just ask them.

At this point you're probably sniggering and sputtering and calling me a traitor to my society and civilization. That's fine and quite understandable. But having read AZTEC, I feel as if I've lived Mixtli's life, seen what he's seen, believed (for the time I spent in his world) as he did. And so I've come away with--not a moral equivalence--but the idea that different societies (indeed, different individuals in societies) have different morals. This, in turn, has helped me immeasurably in my day-to-day life. I try never to dismiss anyone's thought process without at least an attempt at getting in their head and thinking it for myself. On matters with any complexity at all, I'm far less apt to unequivocally agree or disagree with anyone than I once was. In short and generally speaking, I no longer see the world as black and white but in shades of grey.

Which doesn't mean I'm incapable or unwilling to make moral judgments: I do so all the time. I do, however, strive mightily not to impose my morals on others, or indeed assume they believe as I do. In AZTEC, this imposition happens on a grand scale and the results are nothing less than tragic.

Thanks to AZTEC, I've come to believe it is never my place to rob a person of an opportunity to define themselves. That quite possibly may be the strongest insight I've had in 37 years of life and it's surely a big debt to owe a single book.

Swine, Whine and Buyin'

This week has brought with it a whole passel of things I don't understand.

1) H1N1

With very few exceptions (stand up and take a bow, Sault Ste. Marie and Brantford!), our government has thoroughly botched the rollout of the H1N1 vaccine. Those two cities had a phone line and website already in place for the seasonal flu shot, which you got by appointment only. It worked wonders this time around, and it made me wonder why everyone else is so far behind. For that matter, why isn't there a database with everybody's health record in it? They could maybe call it something like eHealth Onta...wait a minute...there is such an organization, but it's a giant money laundromat...*sigh*

Anyway, if you aren't lucky enough to live in Brantford or the Soo, you're stuck waiting in endless lines at clinics with extremely limited hours. The way I figure it, you're more likely to catch H1N1 at these shindigs than get vaccinated against it.

And so no, I haven't got my shot. I have every intention of getting the damned thing, despite all the websites telling me it will make me sick/subvert my mind to Big Government/turn my scrotum green/what have you. (Memo to Bill Maher, and I say this with no due respect: I hope you get H1N1 and die.)

Okay, I don't really mean that. From what I've heard, this flu might not kill you, but it'll make you wish you were dead...and I wouldn't wish that on anyone, whether it be my wife or some nitwit with a TV show that people, regrettably, take seriously. I'd like to think Maher's viewers might detect some kind of agenda in his asininity and go researching for themselves...then I think of all the misinformation scattered hither and yon all over the Web and shudder.

2) Hallowe'en

Every year there are fewer and fewer kids trick-or-treating. It's to the point now where it's not even worth buying the candy: most of it will go to waste.

This shouldn't surprise me the way it does. I mean, in an age when you can't even let your little darling walk to school on his own, why would you send him out in the dark? Still, what a huge change from All Hallow's Eve say, 30 years ago, when kids roamed the streets in packs, bringing home Hefty Bags full of swag. (My candy would last months; the chocolate bars would be gone within a day.)

At the same time, Hallowe'en seems to have become an adult holiday while my back was turned. People are now playing dress-up into their thirties and beyond.

Like every other holiday on the calendar, Hallowe'en has become a commercial parody of itself. You can easily blow a hundred bucks or more on a costume you'll wear all of once, and where once we had a simple jack o'lantern, now we've got skeletons hanging from trees, the undead rising from electronic coffins, and such like. What's the October equivalent of bah, humbug! anyway?

3) THE HUGE $1.00 SALE

(or, to put it more boldly,

Click on the photo to be blown away.

This is easily the hottest flyer, front to back, that we've run in at least a year, perhaps two. It couldn't come soon enough. The last six months or so have seen weak ad after weak ad, with maybe one or two items worth buying and the rest just filler. Our competition has been stuck in the same sort of rut. My guess is that everybody's been trying to ride out the recession without losing too much margin on their sale items (every sale worthy of the name is a loss leader)...but the end result is few customers, and those we do get cherry-pick us to death. It's worse in this city. We've got Zehrs, the Real Canadian Superstore, Sobeys, Foodland, No Frills, Price Chopper, Food Basics, and even (wow) a Wal-Mart Supercenter, all within a half hour of our house. Add in a couple of independents and it's easy to see how you can do your weekly grocery shop each week getting everything on sale. Great for the consumer: hell for the retailer.

So this week, kaboom, hot ad. Not pictured on the front page are Danactive 4-packs for $1 (save $2.29).

I booked 3600 units for this and my rep was concerned I had too much. Actually, so was I. After all, this is drinkable yogurt we're talking about here...something that routinely goes out of code sitting on my shelf.

Not this time. This time it just walked out of the store.

I'd forgotten about the chocolate milk paradox. See, when chocolate milk is not on sale, we sell about 50 units a week. When it's in the flyer at 97 cents, we sell 50 units every half hour.

This to me makes no sense. I've said it often enough: if you don't normally buy something, no matter how cheap it is, IT ISN'T A DEAL. And yes, I'll make allowances for people buying the chocolate milk "for a treat"...but they buy sixteen of them. Seriously. NOBODY (except me) buys just one chocolate milk when it's on sale.

Back to the Danactive. Now this is even odder than chocolate milk, because before this stuff went on sale there was next to no demand whatsoever on it. In fact, it was selling just above the threshold I set for discontinuing an item. Now, just because it's a dollar instead of $3.29, it's the must-have item of the year.

It all came clear as I began to hear from literally dozens of people that they were buying this to fight against H1N1 infection. So I guess I'm no better than the government, because damn it all, I'm out of vaccine too.

I'm off for some much needed rest. Happy Hallowe'en, everyone, and don't let the flu bugs bite.

From the Mailbox Today...

LIFE EXPLAINED BY AN MBA GRADUATE

A boat docked in a tiny Mexican fishing village. A tourist complimented the local fishermen on the quality of their fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.


"Not very long." they answered in unison.
"Why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?"
The fishermen explained that their small catches were sufficient to meet their needs and those of their families.

"But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

"We sleep late, fish a little, play with our children, and take siestas with our wives.
In the evenings, we go into the village to see our friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. On Sundays we go to church.


We have a full life."
The tourist interrupted,

"I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch.
With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat."
"And after that?"
"With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers.
Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant.
You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City , Los Angeles , or even New York City !

From there you can direct your huge new enterprise."
"How long would that take?"
"Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years." replied the tourist.
"And after that?"
"Afterwards? Well my friend, that's when it gets really interesting, "
answered the tourist, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start buying and selling stocks and make millions!"
"Millions? Really? And after that?" asked the fishermen.

"After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends."

Eva, renewed

or, all hail CPAP

The last few mornings have been different chez Breadbin. Different and really quite cool. See...unlike every morning for the last, oh, five years at least, my wife's been awake.

It's a long-running joke around here that I'm chipper in the morning and she's chippy. Truth be told, I've lost some of my larkiness over the last few years and really put a coffee or two to good use. But Eva has been something altogether different...something closer kin to the walking dead.

She'd thought she was suffering from a touch of CFS--chronic fatigue syndrome. Often plagued with insomnia, she had a hell of a time getting to sleep and an even harder time staying asleep. It was very common for me to wake up at 5:15 a.m. and stumble downstairs to find her on the couch watching television, awake for hours already. If she'd managed to sleep through the night, it would take her, minimum, an hour before she'd be ready to deal with the world. And then afternoon, and sometimes morning, naps would be absolutely essential. I'm not sure, to be honest, she ever really got fully asleep or came fully awake.

She underwent a sleep study a little over a week ago. That was, she reports, possibly the worst two nights of her life. Consider: she was taped to a bed only slightly softer than concrete, in a nondescript room bearing almost no resemblance to a bedroom. (The second night, her bed was in an actual doctor's office, complete with computer monitor screen glow and fan noise.) Taped or glued to her were over a dozen sensors, many of which malfunctioned at some point and had to be re-calibrated. It's really amazing she got any kind of sleep at all.

Really, I don't understand these sleep studies. Rather than accommodating patients wherever possible, the people there, no matter how professional they are, seem to deliberately go out of their way to alienate, stress out, and even humiliate their patients. You're wired up, in your pajamas, in a room with a whole bunch of strangers, before being relegated to your cell bedroom. No reading lamp, no television, no fan, no window. No private bathroom, not even a little two-piece. Very little warning that you're facing a night's sleep beyond your worst nightmare.

This all seems to me not just cruel but counterproductive. How can you possibly hope to properly gauge someone's sleep patterns when you've done just about everything possible to disrupt and disturb them?

Nevertheless, they managed to determine, in the three minutes of sleep Eva got that first night, that she needed a CPAP machine. (An official diagnosis will come in the new year, but we do know she suffers from sleep apnea.)

The second night--almost a week later--she was misfitted with a machine. I say 'misfitted' because the mask was both too large and applied far too tightly.

Pardon me my predictable digression. I can't say for sure the reason they selected a large mask for my wife is because she's a large person. But I suspect it, and it PISSES ME OFF. She's been the victim of entirely too many wrong assumptions in the past. Doctors routinely tighten the blood pressure cuffs to the point of severe bruising because hey, she's fat, her blood pressure must be off the scale. (It''s normal.) On one occasion she had a woman actually grab chips and cookies (one package of each) out of her grocery cart and say "you should be ashamed of yourself"...because obviously that's all Eva ever eats, a box of cookies and a bag of chips and that's breakfast. Oh, it makes me furious, the ignorance piled on the obese.

Anyway...despite the ill-fitting mask that ensured she drooled all over her pillow that second night, she did sleep a little better. And the last three nights, she's had a properly-adjusted CPAP machine in her own bed, and has slept better than she can remember having slept in a very long time.

So good, in fact, that our conversation this morning ran the gamut from zit popping to piglike aliens.

Pimple popping...Eva is completely fascinated with it, to my endless chagrin. She claims to be repulsed by pimples and possessed of an irresistible urge to "make them go away". Personally, when I'm repulsed with something, I don't want to go near it, but whatever. She enjoys popping pimples. Last night before beddy-bye, I was treated to the sound effects of this little beauty. Splock. Goosh. Shlapuck.

BARF.

This morning, she'd joyfully progressed to the real thing, by way of some presumably disgusting YouTube videos I positively refuse to link. Blech. Still, she was half-frowning, half-laughing at her laptop. It had been a while since I'd seen even a half-laugh at quarter of six in the morning.

She drove me into work this morning and I mentioned I'd read some study purporting to prove that pigs are smarter than dolphins. Without missing a beat, she said "well, let's just hope the aliens aren't piglike, then, eh?"

See, this is one of the many things I adore about my Eva. Because her mind doesn't just leap on occasion, it hopscotches, Evel Knivels and shorts off into geosynchronous orbit...and mine can follow hers. Panting, gasping for breath, but not too far behind. Pigs...we treat them like shit, slaughter them by the millions (and man, we loves us our pork chops...pork roasts, smoked pork shoulder, aka salty porky goodness in this house...you get the point). And suppose aliens exist, and stumble across us, something we've talked about in the past, though never at that hour of the morning. Well, we'd better hope they don't identify with the swine on this planet.

Morning gibberish, dressed up in dreamy logic and discussed in dead earnest. I love Eva. I love wakeful Eva even better.

Thinking Religion To Death

"God is beyond the ability of human reasoning to define, too vast to be labelled as a being, and only knowable as Being."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Very interesting textual interview here..

Oh, so many books to read. The fiction list includes the second book of Stieg Larssen's Millennium trilogy; Margaret Atwood's Year Of The Flood; Galore, by Michael Crumney; the aforementioned Under The Dome, and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

Add one more: Karen Armstrong's The Case For God.

Call me a seeker. I believe, actually, that most of us are...it's just that we seek in different ways, and thus find (what appear to be) different things. For many years, I have been uncomfortable with people who claim to have All The Answers, be they fundycostal types or militant atheists of the Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris school.

I'm also uncomfortable with organized religion. Years of reflection have convinced me that the problem with organized religion is that it's organized. I often state that the superiority complexes seemingly inherent in religions the world over are what turn me off, and they do, but superiority complexes are a human failing, just as obvious in political dogma, and are not, strictly speaking, religion's fault. No--for me, what niggles at my brain is this "organized" business.

Religion is, at its heart, a communing with the numinous. All the externals--the rituals, the doctrines, the hierarchies--are incidental almost to the point of irrelevance (and more than occasional irreverence as well). Yet the human inclination to keep things organized, classified, categorized and specified means the externals assume an importance completely out of proportion to their value.

Now don't get me wrong. Ritual can play a part, an important part, in divine communion. But too many get caught up in the rituals as if they ARE divine communion, and refuse to understand their mistake...even going so far as to condemn others for making the same mistake in a different way. In my Christian years, I was often told "Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship." At root, all religion is just that.

Karen Armstrong does not seem to be making a case for the existence of God here, but examining the belief in God over the centuries. From what I can tell, it looks very much as if she's arguing that "God" is bigger than what's come to be the standard definition. I've often thought that myself. Why does Christianity insist on restricting God to one gender and one role? In my own writings about God, I often mixmaster up the pronouns, sometimes using He, sometimes She, sometimes It...and occasionally You and I. (cf. Joan Osborne's song "What if God Was One Of Us?", used as the theme to the sadly defunct Joan of Arcadia).

This sort of thing really resonates with me. I like the idea of Reason not in opposition to Religion, but aside from it. I like (and identify) with a God most easily reached through music and art and impossible to encompass with thought alone.

And this makes sense whether you use New Age or Christian terminology. To the New Ager, each of us is comprised of Body, Mind, and Spirit; the Body does not contain the Spirit but rather the other way around (hence auras and such). The Spirit is often thought of as a piece of the Universal Soul; the Mind is simply there for making sense of the Body's impressions. To attempt to 'divine' Spirit through the Mind is to miss the point.

Put in a completely different way, "for in Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). My own sense is that most people would read that sentence to mean in His WAYS we live and move and have our being"...and I think this is one case where it might be of benefit to take your Bible literally.

If you think through a quotation like that, you'll be forever missing the forest for the trees, trying to 'spot' God in every little thing and not realizing you're actually drowning in God every minute of every day.

In any event, I look forward to discovering Armstrong's thoughts on the matter. I see my public library, wonder of wonders, actually stocks this title....

The Downside of Living in Canada

My closest friend was born and raised in Ontario, moved to California in his mid twenties, and has bounced all over the U.S. He's lived briefly in Nevada and Florida and visited, well, just about everywhere, not just in America but in the world. He's had dual Canadian/American citizenship for over a decade now.

Like me, he's grown progressively more progressive over the years. Even though he loves his adopted homeland, he's much more deeply appreciative of the land he left behind.

Contrary to extremely popular American mythology, we Canadians are not 'taxed to death'. My friend reports that a typical family living in Ontario pays about as much in tax as one in California. So you fine Yankees envisioning a move to northern climes when the Republicans take control in 2012 and turn the United States into a theocracy have one less thing to worry about.

But be warned. There's a catch, and it's a doozy.

Sometimes it seems as if everything costs more up here. Forget taxes: I'm talking retail prices. With a dollar that's reasonably close to parity (and at times last year traded well above parity) with the greenback, you would naturally expect prices to be in the same ballpark.

They're not. Sometimes, they're not even in the same league.

Take books, for instance. Almost without exception, Canadians pay at least two dollars more for a paperback than our American neighbours. And hardbacks? It's either laugh, cry or scream. Stephen King's latest, UNDER THE DOME (a book, by the way, I'm salivating over the prospect of reading) is available for pre-order on amazon.com for US$9.00. The same novel on amazon.ca? C$25.19--which at the most recent currency fix translates to US$23.84. That's a 264% markup.

Groceries. Living, as most Canadians do, relatively close to the border, we often see ads on TV for American grocery stores. (Ads on TV for Canadian grocery stores are exceedingly rare, for reasons I don't pretend to understand.) Anyway, the sale prices, particularly on staples like milk and eggs, are beyond belief. Milk for $1.49 a gallon? I can't help wondering what the hell it's contaminated with, when the same stuff goes for $3.97 or more here in Ontario. Large eggs, 99 cents a dozen? Our cost is more than double that...we lose money selling them for $1.97.

It goes on. Pretty much every time my friend comes up here from the land of the nearly free and the home of the save!, we find ourselves touring various and sundry stores. Jay's a penny-pincher extraordinaire, and so he tends to balk at buying anything, no matter how good the deal might be, but the prices here on, say, clothing, make him visibly recoil. He makes it a policy not to spend more than $10 on any item of clothing...which severely limits his choices when he comes up here.

"Look at this sweater, Ken", he'll say as we're browsing Roots. "Seventy bucks! How can you justify paying that much money? And it says it's ON SALE. Yeah, right!"

I don't justify paying that kind of money, actually. I've never bought anything for myself at Roots or stores like it. When I've received such clothing as a gift, I have been overjoyed--the quality is phenomenal and damn it, it's comfortable--but I've also felt some species of perverse guilt or shame or something. Because I'm really not worth that much. Or maybe I am, but I shouldn't have to be.

Electronics, cars...it's all pricier. "They" say it's because we're a small market...that bilingual packaging costs more...that blah-di-blah-blah blah. Whatever. The U.S./Canadian border is an artificial construct and goods don't magically increase in value as they cross it. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it even if you charge me more for it.

Jason, in San Diego, pays less than half what I do each month for media--T.V., landline, cell, and Internet. For this, he gets: many television channels the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission has decided I'm not allowed to watch; Google Voice (unavailable here); a cell package that blows mine right out of the water; and Internet access at a connection speed that I can barely comprehend.

But it gets worse. Sometimes, items or services available at a cost in the U.S. are not available in Canada--not legally, at any rate--no matter how much you pay. I noted Google Voice above. It's not alone. In Canada, we can't (legally, at any rate)

--use a Kindle

--access hulu.com, Pandora.com and many similar sites

--watch HBO, Nick at Nite, SyFy, and who knows how many other channels (we sure don't!)

--watch Super Bowl commercials as they air (the Canadian networks substitute their own signal, even when you're not watching on a Canadian network!)

Hell, we practically just got the freakin' iPhone.

It's really little wonder this country is so rife with Internet piracy. I suspect most of us would have no problem accessing stuff legally if there was any way to do so.

Bubble Boy On Balloon Boy

I call myself "bubble boy" because that's how I feel. I was overprotected as a kid, with my full knowledge and consent, but only rarely do I mean 'bubble boy' in that sense; comparatively speaking, I was much more adventurous than the majority of today's children, who spend their every waking minute watching one screen or another and who almost invariably get chauffered to school each and every day.

I call myself "bubble boy" with crystal clarity and even a touch of pride about my naivete. Truth is, I don't understand people. Sometimes this is, admittedly, a handicap, even a serious one. Sometimes, though--increasingly often in this latter age, I contend--it keeps me from going completely off the rails.

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You just never know what popular culture's gonna vomit up next. News event: Boy flies off in homemade balloon, and practically before the damn thing is off the ground, it's all over the Internet. T-shirts are being hawked, because, hey, who cares about a six-year-old kid when there's money to be made?

Turns out it's a hoax. Sad to say, these days that's my first reaction whenever I hear anything like this. Sometimes I've got absolutely zero evidence to that effect and yet I'm still sure of it. Kid's missing? Really? Are you sure? Maybe his parents are just attention-whores. Let's test that hypothesis, first. Hey, they've been on Wife Swap and a few other television shows, and there was at one point some sort of deal with them to create a reality series. Interesting, interesting. And the dad variously states the balloon's for "alternative transportation" and for experiments on finding extraterrestrial life. Yeah.

Let's just wait a little while and see if the kid's found, say, in a box in his attic. The sheriff in the case noted "the suggestion that the boy ... was coached to hide seems inconceivable." Not to me, it doesn't. I don't know what attitude's worse, frankly: my instant suspicion or somebody else's instant avarice.

But what really gets me about this case is what usually gets me. No forethought. You're a total dickweed using your six-year-old to get international attention. You've concocted this elaborate scam, forcing authorities to spend many thousand dollars searching for nothing. You've even managed to get an international airport shut down. Good on you, sir.

It goes without saying you made sure there's no video of the whole sorry event, right? And when you coached your six-year-old moneymaker to hide, you also made sure he wouldn't do anything silly once found, like blurt out "you guys said we did this for the show". Right? Because that would be just dumb. It would mean that instead of making money, you might be forced to pay lots and lots of money. You might have your kid taken away from you, which probably means very little to you except that everybody around will know just what sort of parent you are. Kind of puts a crimp in the bank account. Kind of spoils the fantasy-reality you've spent so much time and effort crafting. Kind of makes you a class-A idiot.