Update

Two weeks gone by in a blur. Lots of life packed into those two weeks, little of which I'm at liberty to write about, meaning a Breadbin gone cold once again. I feel like I owe my readers an apology...then I look around my little blogosphere. One friend, who used to post considerably more often than I ever did, confines most of his output to Twitter now, posting once a month to his blog, if that; another hasn't written a blog post in over a year and a half. I'm coming up on thirteen hundred posts in this here Breadbin and I'd very much like to keep it going...but it often feels these days as if there's little to write that hasn't been written already. Several times, even.

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My French course proceeds apace. I got 96% on my midterm and 98% on the little 75-word essay. I'm not bragging: nearly all of this material I learned by grade eleven, and so marks like this are to be expected. Actually, the near-perfect marks bother me inordinately for not being perfect...because the errors I occasionally make are stupid, stupid little errors. I know "maison" is feminine. I know how to spell "mademoiselle". It irritates me not just that I make little mistakes like this -- hey, everybody's brain farts every now and again -- but that I fail to catch these errors proofreading. That really pisses me off. I edit instinctively in English. Any errors you find in these blog posts (and there have been many over the years) occur because I don't often proofread before I publish. But in French, it seems like I can look at the same sentence over and over without seeing the GLARING ERROR staring me in the face.

I never had this perfectionist streak in high school. I got high marks without much effort (in anything that didn't involve math) largely because of a whole lot of outside reading. My parents used to wonder what kind of marks I'd pull down if I actually tried...and I never cared to. I had a cynical attitude towards school even then: not a place to learn, but a place to show what you've learned. That attitude grew exponentially in university, when "what you've learned" better be "exactly what the professor told you". No marks given for outside learning, not when that outside learning contradicted the prof's pet theory. Have I mentioned just how much I hated university? I have?

Anyway...

My French teacher, the same one I had for the conversational French course I took last term just to get me thinking in French again, is really good. He's been teaching French and Latin for decades, Many of our handouts bear the name of the high school he used to teach in, which brings back memories of my own high school French. I will confess, though, to a certain impatience. French courses the world over start by teaching you a certain class of verbs that end in -er: parler (to talk), étudier (to study) and so on, Logically, this makes sense: there are quite a number of these -er verbs and they all conjugate exactly alike, which means you can build up a decent vocabulary fairly quickly. After you've drilled those -er verbs into your head you are confronted with être (to be) and avoir (to have), which are both irregular; learning them gives you access to many useful expressions. But what you don't get, at least for far too long, is any instruction in tenses. We're just getting to aller (to go) this week, which will open up the future a crack (I'm going to do thus-and-such)...the actual future tense of verbs is beyond the scope of this course and possibly the next one, too. That's to say nothing of other tenses and moods...it's all well and good to know how to say "I talk", but you kind of want to know how to say things like "I would talk" or "I will have talked"...hell, we haven't even got to "I talked" yet.
Again, this is logical...an English speaker can easily get lost in the various verb endings that denote tense and mood in French. Logical, maybe...but frustrating. It makes me wonder how close to fluent I really was, once.

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

There's a dishwasher arriving in our house this week. This will be the first dishwasher I've owned since...since forever, it seems. I''ve been the dishwasher for as long as I can remember, and while it's one of the few household tasks I don't mind doing...I'm never going to win contests at it.
To my way of thinking, dish soap plus rubrubrub should equal clean. Even when the dish soap is Dawn--which is liquid magic--it doesn't, not always. "When are you going to learn to clean the outsides of things?" my wife will sigh, and I'll sigh back and clean the damned dish and that'll be it until it happens again, which hopefully isn't the same day. If pressed, I'll pass the buck and blame the light in the kitchen -- which really isn't bright enough for me -- but inwardly I'll face once again the Eternal Truth: cleaning things sucks, especially things which are just going to get dirty again right quick. The amount of effort I will put into a task is commensurate with the amount of time that effing task will STAY DONE.
This extends to every corner of my life. I really wish I could shave ONCE and be done with it, that grass would grow just to a certain height and no higher, that dust would realize it serves no discernable purpose and just bugger off.  Laziness is a fault I will own up to readily, mostly because you can't miss it in me.
So now comes the dishwasher, which really doesn't reduce the labour load any ("doing the dishes" will now mean ("loading and unloading")...but which will probably do a better job than yours truly and thus will preserve Eva's sanity.
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Lots going on in the world outside. Scandals everywhere you look, no matter the political party. In America, we have Obama being viewed through a whole new PRISM. I'm sorry, I find this mordantly funny. Not that government is spying on American citizens to an unheard-of degree -- that's terrifying, Technology aside, it's exactly the kind of scenario the Founding Fathers had in mind when they put forth the Second Amendment, and this is coming from the furthest thing to a gun nut you're likely to find. Sadly, most Americans are unlikely to notice any of this, because Honey Boo Boo.
No, what I find funny is the right-wing reaction to this bullshit. Some of the same people who will rail against Big Government in any other context are saying that spying on Americans can be justified in the name of security. One of them actually said something to the effect that "this just shows how real the Islamist threat actually is: even Obama's paying attention".) Puh-leeze. With this kind of data mining, it's only a matter of time until the definition of "enemy of the state" is greatly broadened.
The tinfoil-hat types (which I will not link: search them out yourself if you want) are saying there's no good reason for Americans to know the extent of their government's surveillance...yet...and so they expect Americans will be provided with one very shortly. I'm just putting the thought out there. I don't expect a large-scale terrorist attack in the next little while, but if one happens to materialize I will find myself questioning everything I thought I knew about...everything.

Closer to home, we have our provincial Liberal government embroiled in a power plant scandal. I'll be honest: until the dirty tricks showed up I wasn't paying much attention to this. Cancelling things for political reasons is what governments do: it's as old as NIMBY. But now it seems there's a coverup as to how and why this was cancelled, and Premier Wynne's unlikely to withstand the shaking her government is getting. I expect a vote of non-confidence and an election very soon now.

Then we have the good ship Harper  in Ottawa encountering the first real storm of its sailing. Up until now, our Dear Leader has been fantastically adept at steering around political shoals and hidden reefs; any dissenters have been cheerfully thrown overboard: But now we have this Senate expenses hurricane: an ill wind blowing Harper no good.There has even been talk of Harper resigning...which believe you me, won't happen. Anybody with the chutzpah to rename the national government after himself isn't going anywhere. I'll tell you what: if Rob Ford resigns as Mayor of Toronto, I'll put some credence into Harper's resignation. But Ford would rather smoke crack than resign, so...

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And that's about it from here for a few days. Keep well, everyone.

Prom Memories

Today I learned the average American family expects to spend $1139 on prom this year, and that figure inches ever higher. Interestingly, families with a gross income under $50K a year spend more on high school proms than more affluent families.

Scary.

I haven't mentioned my high school prom once in this Breadbin's history, because the memory of it still stings over two decades after the fact. In a precursor to my university years then on the horizon, I made a series of poor choices which seemed reasonable at the time, but which led to my "big night' being all but ruined--and I won't whine about that, because I actively and totally ruined the night of the girl who was supposed to be my date. I haven't seen or heard from her in the interim. I doubt she's forgiven me. I wouldn't have forgiven me.

Casting back through the mists of time--

1990, OAC year (what used to be called 'grade 13' in Ontario)
Ingersoll District C.I.

Well, this is interesting. I'm kissing a girl. For the first time since third grade. And with considerably more passion than I knew existed in third grade. In fact, any more passion seems likely to produce an embarrassing stain.

I've managed to get most of the way through high school without anything like this happening. Not for lack of dreaming, mind you.. But the problem with fantasies, at least in my experience, is that they stand zero chance of becoming realities, which makes it hard to explain this girl I'm welded at the lips to. And it's even harder to explain how these kissing and make-out sessions keep happening--the music room (naturally), a park, a cemetery (hey, it's peaceful and private), and once, just once, her living room on a shared spare period. That occasion was progressing into something a little more serious than kissing when her dad unexpectedly came home to spoil the party.)

Yes, hard to explain. Very, very hard.

"You make me feel safe", she tells me, and doesn't that make my heart go pitter-pat? Other guys had taken advantage of her before me, and as very. very hard as it was, I wouldn't yield to that temptation. I'm going through a Christian phase and even without the goody-two-shoes facade I wear like a hair shirt, I understand instinctively that any relationship I seek with this woman (and I seek, how I seek) would be much better if I could show some restraint. So I do. Repeatedly.

I ask her to prom with all the jittery stuttery circumlocutions you might expect from a guy who's terrified he might wake up at any moment, and she says "I thought you'd never ask" and the dream continues. Nice dream.

It's coming up on prom night, the tickets have been procured, and the high school grapevine has informed me that Sandy and I have plans. A red flag is raised in my mind because it's not Sandy informing me of these plans, and the flag is joined by a host of alarm bells when I find out what those plans are. After pfom, we're to join another couple (the girl half of which I'll be engaged to in two years, but I couldn't possibly guess that now) for a drive down to Port Dover's beach. And what happens on Port Dover's beach? The grapevine has a number of suggestions. Perhaps in nine months there will be a new "son of a beach" in the world, eh, Ken?

Well, crap on that.

Do I approach Sandy, seeking clarification of these plans made without my knowledge or consent? I do not. Do I approach the other couple? I do not. What I do is withhold Sandy's ticket out a week before the event and then explain to her why I'm doing it.

Which is damned odd because it's 2013 now and I can't explain why I did it.

My parents were quite leery of me going to Port Dover, but they didn't forbid me outright. I did that. I forbade myself. Because I wasn't sure I'd be able to exercise that famed Ken-restraint on a beach in Port Dover, and putting me in this position was clearly Sandy's fault, and damn her to hell or at least to a lonely prom night because I'm at war with myself.

Total dick move, there.

Needless to say, the break-up was swift and spectacular. I'm not sure what Sandy did for her prom night--my self-righteousness extended so far as to not give a fart in a glove. I tried to find myself a date, on insanely short notice, to no avail, and so I went alone, after having dinner with my parents (how romantic is that?)
I managed a couple of dances that night, including one with the girl we were supposed to be double-dating with, the one I'd be engaged to briefly in two years. Still couldn't guess that: give me a month. I hung out with my best friend at the time and his girlfriend, whose name was also Sandy. And after prom I went home, which was undoubtedly where an immature jerk like me belonged.

Sandy, it's not like you'll ever see this, but I'm sorry. What I did has bothered me quite a bit since I grew up enough to realize how much it should. It doesn't make up for destroying your prom, I know. I hope you've overcome the loss of that rite of passage and that it's nothing more than a sad footnote in your past about the jerk who screwed you because he was afraid he might screw you.

I'm sorry.

The Week That Was

Six months ago I wrote off Rob Ford's career in the wake of a conflict of interest scandal I was sure would take his career down. It didn't. Now there's a video that purports to show the man Cory Doctorow calls "Toronto's laughable bumblefuck of a Mayor" smoking crack cocaine in the company of known criminals. Whether said video is authentic or not, there is no redeeming quality to this story whatsoever. If it is Rob Ford and if he is indeed smoking crack, I can't see how his mayoralty will survive. Those many of you in Toronto who view the ouster of Rob Ford as redeeming need to consider the age-old question of the means and the ends. You see, you too can help to raise the two hundred large the drug dealers have set as the price to release the video. (As of this writing, we're more than halfway to the goal: please give generously, because drug dealers are people too, and these particular drug dealers are afraid for their livelihood in Toronto and quite possibly their lives.)

Is this what crowdsourcing has come to?

******

Nearly a year ago I bitterly lamented our federal government, which tends to tout its scandalous behaviour as a sign of strength. Harper has weathered every storm by gleefully scaping any goat he can find and either refusing  independent investigations outright or (more likely) eagerly embracing them as a stalling tactic. (Investigations take time, and political memories are short.)

Now the long-simmering Senate expense scandal has come to a furious boil, so far costing two senators their place in caucus and the PMO's chief of staff his job. (Nigel Wright had given generously, cutting a  personal check for ninety large, insisting it was a "gift"; Harper in turn insisted he knew nothing about this, which Thomas Walkom argues is flatly impossible. Harper, meanwhile, is in South America on a trade mission. The stench of corruption is in the air over Ottawa. Justin Trudeau must be salivating.

*******

The weather turned lethal over Moore, OK. Again. The EF4 twister followed an eerily similar path as an F5  in 1999 and an F4 in 2003; five tornadoes have struck this city since 2003. I don't know about you, but I'd be thinking relocation.
As with any natural disaster, tales of miniature tragedies play out alongside  heartwarming tear-jerkers galore.
I was very happy for this woman and her beloved dog, but all the same, I found myself more than a little irked watching the video. NOBODY HELPS HER. She's an elderly lady and her dog is trapped under rubble and NONE of the journalists there lifts a finger until she begs for it.

And then there's the little matter of prayers.

Almost without exception, survivors of this tornado thanked God, said they were blessed, told us they had guardian angels watching over them, told us their prayers were answered. The cognitive dissonance is simply staggering, but it's very common in the wake of disasters natural and man-made. Are you glad to be alive? Undoubtedly. But in your morning prayers, were you *really* beseeching the Almighty for this?

And I can't help but wonder, did this "act of God" -- don't look at me, that's what these things are called -- kill your neighbours and friends because they didn't pray hard enough? My apologies to religious folk offended by the question, but it has bothered me for years. It's a much more graphic example of the competing football teams, each praying for victory. Only one team can win: does God disfavour the other?

******
As you can perhaps tell from the tone of the foregoing, I'm back from vacation and nobody needs a vacation as much as the person who just had one. Yesterday was a lovely twelve hour shift and I'm stiffer than a board this morning, with a mind to match. This is my only day off for a week, and I'm off to try and improve my mood a little...

The "I Want" List

Notwithstanding my last post, in which I claimed my materialism has vanished, there remain a few material things I'd like to have at some point in my life.

Number one is probably

A GARAGE

No, I don't drive and never will, at least until we trust the Googlecars. But I do scrape the windshield in the winter, and that's not a task I relish overmuch. Especially after freezing rain.
In all the houses I've lived in--over thirty--I've had a garage once, and it lasted for less than a year before it got treed in a nasty summer storm.  Miraculously, the car inside the garage at the time sustained only minor scratches.
That remains the worst storm I've lived through. There were no tornadoes, just some mighty downbursts producing wind speeds in excess of 160 km/h (100 mph) and toppling trees all over town. Some people in Ingersoll went over a week without power...and we lost our garage. I've been pining for it ever since.

Number two: A FIREPLACE

I know that it's almost indescribably bad for me , that in a sane world, fireplaces would be illegal and their use harshly punished. (Don't believe me? Read that Sam Harris essay.) I know all this, have known it for years. And yet--A house just seems more like a home with a fire burning in it. Witness your dog or cat sitting so close to the flames that you wonder how it doesn't just spontaneously combust and instead it's just luxuriating in the warmth. There's something about a fire. Call me irrational, but there it is.


Number three:  A LAZY-BOY RECLINER

a.k.a. "the Daddy-Chair". I want a chair with heat and massage, the kind of chair that gets all weepy-eyed when you have to leave it. I want a chair that states This is the head of the household.

(Anyone who finds that last bit sexist: paraphrasing My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I may be the head of the household, but Eva is the neck, and the neck turns the head.)

Number four: A GRANDFATHER CLOCK

I don't know where this obsession came from. I've never had one. Truth be told, I love clocks in general, the more unique the better. One of my most prized possessions, destroyed in one move or other, was this:



There is probably no object on this earth I want more than that Arrow ball clock. Eva tried to buy one for me our first Christmas together; the company had just gone out of business.
Barring that exact clock, I'd like a grandfather clock. Its stately, sedate and somehow comforting presence speaks to me of stability and reminds me that this too shall pass.

Number five is related to number four: A VIEW OF WATER

This isn't, of course, a material thing...and yet it is. It is in that a house on the water will cost you easily fifty grand more than the same house that's not. To me, at least, it's fifty grand well spent.

River, lake, ocean, it doesn't matter. I'm not like Eva, who seems to have been a mermaid in a prior life, but I really appreciate the calming effect of water. I love the sound of it, trickling and sloshing. Someday we plan to retire to a place that has a water view. We'll probably have to search long and hard to find such a place that doesn't bankrupt us. But we will search and we will find, because this one's number one on my wife's "I want" list.

Reflections on Happiness

I used to be materialistic to a fault. I spent my twenties revelling in an endless cavalcade of stuff, bought with money that was supposed to be spent on self-improvement. It took an unconscionably long time to notice that desire never stayed dormant: each satisfied whim would attract its brothers and sisters and step-cousins. Once I realized that want begets want (a notion which really ought to be self-evident), I found myself at a loss as to what to do about it all. Stop wanting? That seemed like an over-reaction, not to mention impossible. I'd spent the better part of a decade mistaking ephemeral endorphin highs for happiness, but that goal of simple happiness eluded me. It sure didn't come with a full house, not least because that full house implied an empty wallet. But an empty house and a fall wallet didn't seem to be a fair trade.
It's silly to me now, but I hamster-wheeled in that state of mind for months, just prior to meeting my wife. The overwhelming characteristic of that mental space was despair: not a melodramatic I'm-gonna-off-myself despair, but more of an I've-failed-at-life-and-there-doesn't-seem-to-be-a-makeup-test kind of despair. I had no career goals, no life goals, just a bunch of own-goals and a sense that my life was veering out of control.

The spiritual books I was reading at the time (that's me, always looking to the books for answers) told me I can't have happy (well, duh), and I can't do happy, I can only be happy. The first time I read that I pitched the book across the room, enraged. Fat girl, be skinny. Poor man, be rich.  Oh, if all the world's problems could be solved with magical hocus-pocus incantations. Be happy, indeed.

Then I met Eva and it was like a switch was flipped. It's not that happiness came into my life--a corny sentiment, also a wrong one. It was that I discovered the capacity for happiness than had been in me all along.
What Eva did do was accept me unconditionally. It stabilized my life considerably, more and more as time went on. Now, some fourteen years later, people remark on how even-keeled I am. I'm still prone to little freak-outs when life pitches me a curveball, but they resolve themselves fairly quickly.
I've become a little more socially adept, a bit more self-confident, a lot more empathic. These are gifts my wife has given me, gifts I am eternally grateful for. But beyond the gift of a life shared with her, the biggest gift she has given me is understanding. Among many other things, I now understand the truth behind you can only be happy.

It's a choice. It's all a choice, every thought I think, word I speak, action I perform. That seemed preposterous years ago...it was so much easier to just say shit happens and privately wonder why all the shit seemed to happen to me. The truth, of course, was that I was the cause of my own shit.

And shit flushes.

I still have a ways to go. I need to find within myself the discipline to persist at a task. I also need to overcome a fear of rejection that I have allowed to paralyze me professionally and otherwise for far too long. I sense the answers to these questions -- which have eluded me far longer than that simple happiness I once yearned for and have now found -- are hidden just out of sight, behind a gauzy curtain I can almost reach and sweep open. But that happiness is a core ingredient to any lasting success in life, and it eludes many people just as it once eluded me. Be happy.

It really is that simple. Which is not to say easy. Simple is what life is when you strip away all the complications and complexities. (It's no wonder that the two most consistently happy groups of people are children and the simple-minded.) But we're wedded to our complexities and dramas and simplifying life is not always easy. It is, however, happy-making.

Love and Hate

At least the prefix 'ex-' is used here.

It isn't always. On many occasions I've seen headlines like

Man Stabs Girlfriend 37 Times

Wife Sets Husband On Fire

'Lovers' Quarrel' Leads to Murder, Suicide

I read the articles attached to headlines like this and amidst all the gory, sensational details ("penis thrown in trash can!")  I never find the one detail that seems most critical to me: why?

Or maybe how would be the better question. How does love turn to hate?  There are no words to adequately express the depth of my confusion here.

Let's first remove the "lover" and the "girlfriend" and "boyfriend" from stories like this. I think when you even start thinking about destroying somebody, mentally or physically, words like friend and lover can get chucked out the window. And if you "quarrel" with somebody, you don't then kill them, or I'd have a trail of corpses ten miles long by now.

I can state with certainty that I am not capable of murder in cold blood. I'm not sure I'm capable of murder in hot blood. I could kill in self-defence, and in defence of quite a number of people I love dearly--but provoked murder is beyond me.

Further, I don't think I'm actually capable of hatred. Not the kind of hatred that would motivate me to expend untold amounts of energy, as in the linked story above, utterly ruining someone's life. That just seems like such a waste of time and emotional intensity, and no good can come out of it.

Ah, but that's you being rational, Ken. Love is not rational and neither is hate.

I was told that last night by someone I barely know, but who strikes me as very perceptive. I've slept on it and I have to say that I disagree with part of it.

Hate is irrational, for the reason I've given above. It's a waste of time and energy and nothing good ever came of hatred, even (or perhaps especially) for the hater. Yet it persists and remains a potent force in the world, and that to me is the very definition of irrational.

But love? That which "makes the world go round"? The thing that's "all you need"? The thing without which, according to Corinthians, you are "nothing"? I can't accept that something so essential to the human condition--in many spiritual traditions, it is the human condition--can be irrational.

Certainly lust can be irrational. The kind of lust that leads a man to throw away a wife and life in favour of a hundred punps, a tickle and a squirt (with a woman who is, more often than not, a pale imitation of the wife he's betraying)--that's irrational as hell. But lust is not love, as most (not all) teenagers eventually learn.

It may seem like I'm bearing a dead horse -- go back through this Breadbin and I've probably said this half a hundred times -- but love, actual love, is unconditional. That means it's permanent: it doesn't fade, it doesn't sour, it most certainly doesn't eventually turn to hate.

I still think Shakespeare said it best, in Sonnet 116:

...Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. 
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

So what does this mean for relationships that do fade, or go sour? We've all had them, right?

 In the first case, it means that in the interest of love, you've seen fit to dissolve the relationship. This is very common and absolutely nothing to be ashamed or guilty of. It's so common, in fact, that often it's not even a conscious decision. Not every partner or friend is meant to share the entire road with you.  Friends and lovers drift in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, and that's perfectly okay. So long as you've served each other to the best of your ability over the night, or month, or decade you've known each other, you've done your job.
It's not a mistake to marry such a one, either. Yes, in marriage you make a vow, and vows are supposed to be kept. But if both of you agree that your lives are no longer served by your relationship, a vow can become counterproductive. Marriage is not a prison and spouses are neither wardens nor prisoners. If one or both of you feels trapped to that kind of extent, what you're in is not a marriage and should not be treated as one.

Which is not to suggest in any way that bumps in the road should kill a union. Far from it: in many ways they can make a marriage stronger. I'm talking about the kind of existential dread that leads one spouse to wake up one day and say I don't love you and I'm not sure I ever did. And note there the actual disavowal of  love.  In such a case no one's purpose is being served by a continuation of the marriage: not the husband's, not the wife's, definitely not the children's, and not even the deity (if applicable) Who was party to the contract in the first place.

And when relationships go sour? I'd suggest that the driving force in those relationships was not, could never have been, love. Because love is that "ever-fixed" mark, that unconditional emotion that does not judge, does not condemn, does not punish. (To reiterate another point I've made many times, this is why the concepts of "Judgement Day" and "Hell" are wholly incompatible with an omnibenevolent Deity: either the deity or the judgement and hellfire simply can not exist.)

The state most often mistaken for love, in these cases where the "lovers" end up murdering each other or each other's reputations, is simple jealousy. Simple, wrongheaded, awful jealousy, the kind of emotion I'd scrub from the human palette if I had the ability. Jealousy is possibly the most soul-destroying, senseless and disgusting emotion it's possible for a human being to feel. It's monstrously arrogant, for one thing: who are you to feel pain at another's happiness? Who are you to treat your partner as a possession? What gives you the right to exert control over another adult's path in life and love?
It's no coincidence that the few times I've found myself feeling that emotion, I was sick to my stomach. It corrodes everything it touches. It dehumanizes. You get the picture.

But like hatred, it's disconcertingly common in the world, to the point where many people believe it necessary for a healthy marriage! I figure the only way someone can mistake jealousy for love is if he or she has never experienced love. And that thought is, for me, sad beyond contemplation.

I find it very difficult to conceive of a world wherein I felt indifference towards my wife, and flatly impossible to imagine hating the woman. If she were to announce tomorrow that she was leaving me, you can bet I'd put up a fight--but if she made it clear enough that leaving me would best serve her, the fight would go out of me. I'd be deflated, bereft beyond coherence, and I don't want to write about this any more--but hate her? Never. I don't have it in me.

Vacation Rambles

has come 'round at last. 

You've heard it all before, and doubtless experienced it yourselves: each vacation is more necessary than the one before; each respite is rehearsal for retirement; and damnitall, they go by so fast.

Recycling a couple of my favourite aphorisms:

"Vacation is what you take when you can't take what you've been taking any longer."

--Anonymous

"A vacation consists of two weeks which are too short after which you are too tired to return and too broke not to." 

--also Anonymous. Prolific and profound, that person.

This particular week-and-a-bit away from the grind was supposed to happen a month ago, in my break between classes. Unfortunately that week coincided with university exams and all our part timers requested and got time off to study, leaving me virtually the only one available and scuttling my plans. Scuttled plans are nothing new to me, but still, this rankled. I was ready for this week off a month ago, and that month took about a year to go by.

One friend of mine is in Berlin, or maybe en route to Prague, today. Another pair of friends are on an anniversary trip that has incorporated Hawai'i and Las Vegas. My vacation plans, alas, are considerably more humble.

I have French class tonight and on Wednesday night I face down the first test I've taken in nearly twenty years. Just a simple vocabulary test, nothing onerous. Truth be told, I wish I had the opportunity to pay, say, half the tuition, sit the final exam, and if I pass it, gain credit for the course. But that's me, always looking for the easy way out. 

On Thursday I'm off to my Dad and Hez's place Up North -- capitalization deliberate -- for a few days in which I hope I can stay awake. This is, as always, a trip I'm looking forward to.  I expect I'll be thoroughly buried in NHL playoffs--my dad's an even bigger fan of the game than I am--and thanks to the Toronto Maple Leafs' series-tying win the other night, there'll be a game on Friday night that father and son can sit down and enjoy (or stand up and curse, as the case better not be). 

Other than that, my plans basically involve the square root of frig-all. Maybe I'll try for the cube root this time. If that sounds boring....you're not me.

I was up at 5:15 this morning...meaning I slept in for all of fifteen minutes. I can refuse to set my bedside alarm, but I'm helpless against my inside alarm. No matter, though: I like getting up at that hour.    Once I've showered and dressed, I'll step out into the peaceful crispness to retrieve the newspaper which is invariably somewhere down by the sidewalk. I'll pause, recite a few incantations under my breath, raise my hands to the heavens and summon the dawn. That's right, I'm why the sun came up this morning. It's a heavy responsibility, but somebody's gotta do it.

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I've promised a couple of people blogs. Ally: the topic you've set for me is very important and extremely depressing and I promise I will write on it at some point relatively soon, but quite frankly I'm the farthest thing from in the mood to do it today. Chris, I promised you a reading list. That, too, is forthcoming, sometime this week. If you're desperate for something to read, pick up John Dies At The End by David Wong: I think you'll be glad you did.)

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The year proceeds apace. Big changes are afoot chez Breadbin. The smallest change is probably the portable dishwasher scheduled to land here in the next couple of weeks.
Amongst all the houses I've lived in--well over thirty--very few have had dishwashers. I've been the dishwasher for a goodly chunk of my life, and I'm not a very good one, if you have to ask. Cleaning, cleaning, I hate cleaning things that just end up getting dirty again. I hate any repetitive tasks like that...if it didn't involve so much pain and expense, I'd laser off all my hair so I wouldn't have to deal with it again. I'd be the kind of rich douche that would, in Paul McCartney's words, be breaking dirty dishes up and throwing them away. I haven't made my bed since I lived at home and had to, reason there being that c'mon, who's going to see my bedroom today? Outside of my fantasies, I mean? So this dishwasher will be a welcome addition to the Breadbin, for me because duh and for Eva because the outside of things will be clean.

Then there's the machine Eva's getting:

I understand there's a little game on this thing in which you're a fish dodging sharks. Who says fitness can't be fun?

This will help with Eva's ongoing weight loss/life transformation. She's gone eight months without smoking a cigarette and this time I know it'll stick. She's also lost a fair bit of weight already in the process of losing a great deal more. While her weight doesn't matter to me, her health emphatically does. I couldn't be prouder of her.

Towards the end of this year, I'll be getting braces. Or at least starting the mouth reconstruction I'll probably need in advance of getting braces.

This is more than three decades overdue and it's entirely my fault. I was slated to get braces at roughly the same time I got glasses and I flatly and emphatically refused. My parents relented after a while and thirty-odd years later I can truthfully say I wish they hadn't.

Oh, I had my reasons, and they were a nine-year-old's damn good reasons: Glasses caused me enough grief on the playground as it was. I viewed braces as the icing on the turd.  Try a little irony, Ken: it's good for the blood. As it turned out, without braces my teeth went hideous on me and I might as well be eating a shit-cake every time I open my mouth. I've rooted out many of my insecurities, or Eva's rooted them out for me, but my misshapen, malformed and malodorous teeth are a huge one and it's past time I did something about it. 

I'll be getting the InvisAlign braces that are supposed to be less painful. This is good, of course, as my philosophy on pain is best summed up as "no pain, no...pain!"...but the truth is I owe some pain as penance for my pigheadedness back when I was nine. Once my mouth is fixed, I hope my self-consciousness  (which really has been, and is, crippling) will be fixed too.

If all this wasn't enough, we're also undergoing what will be referred to in the history of our lives as the Great Purge. 

We've tried this before, by means of garage sales. They haven't gone all that well. So this time the decent stuff is going to Value Village and the rest is getting binned. 

There's a lot of "rest". Our home is not something you'd see on Hoarders, far from it, but it is...cluttered. The basement is cluttered in the extreme. We've accumulated almost fifteen years of C.R.A.P. (Cheap Random Assorted Product) and it's gotta go. Too many times we've hesitated on the "maybe someday we'll need this" principle. You know what? If someday hasn't come up by now, then someday is Neverary 22nd. 

I'm riding Eva's bike on account of having blown a tire (leave my personal life out of this, would you?) I've grown to really like the riding stance on this thing. Having never really driven, I can't  say for sure, but I suspect it's similar to the feeling drivers get transitioning from a compact car to an SUV. I feel like I command the road. It's called a 'comfort' bike for good reason.

And that's life in a nutshell. There are other things going on around here, some of which I'll be writing about later on...but for now I'm just going to enjoy my vacation.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

There's been quite a media hullabaloo over the the revamped DSM-5, the so-called 'Psychiatrist's Bible', and the way it demonizes normality.
For instance, grief is now considered a mental illness...if it lasts longer than a fortnight.. You read that right: If your life partner up and dies on you, you'd better be over it in two weeks or else you're mentally ill. If your child dies, don't be such a Debbie Downer: hey, in two weeks you can start trying for another one!
Or let's say you've got cancer. If your doctor thinks that your cancer is bothering you a little too much (because after all, it's only cancer), presto! You've got cancer and you're sick in the head.
Then there's 'Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder', which is what your kid has when he throws a temper tantrum. I'm sure pills for that 'disorder' will be forthcoming and that may please some harried parents. But most of us -- including, you'd hope, most psychiatrists -- recognize that kids are not little adults and that their moods are dysregulated and disruptive on occasion because they're, um, kids.

To their credit, many professionals are boycotting the DSM-5 on the grounds that it makes damn near everybody, including the psychiatrists, mentally ill. But it's still going to be the go-to reference for the American Psychiatric Association. This bothers me on several levels. (I'd like to tell you it enrages me but you might decide I'm crazy).

First, of course, it means that I'd pick up any number of mental illnesses as if by magic. Hell, just the other night I found myself crying for no reason I could readily discern. While I'm pretty sure that's fairly common, its very commonality doesn't seem to shield it from classification as a mental disorder any more. I'm down at least as much as I'm up and a lot of times I'm just meh and if I'm not happyhappyhappy all the time, somebody somewhere is going to conclude I'm sick and need medication? That's enough to give me a case of disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.

Second, and much more critically, I'm sure Big Pharma is welcoming this new manual with open arms. Feeling down? Pop a pill. Been a week since the funeral? Pill time! Can't reason with your two-year-old? Shove a pill down her throat.
I'm a guy who has to be motivated to take muscle relaxers or acetaminophen. Spare me your goddamn happy pills, okay?

Third, and most alarmingly, this will inevitably make life even more of a living hell than it already is for the fairly large number of people out there are are suffering from actual mental illnesses.

I know and love quite a few of them. The misconceptions people have about the mentally ill are soul-destroying. All but the most debilitating cases of mental illness go without notice. Odds are very good that a friend of family member of yours has a diagnosed mental illness. We don't treat physical illness as a lessening of the person, so why are we so quick to judge mental illness that way? And what happens to chronic depressives when grief is suddenly a mental illness?
A probable answer to that lies in the ADD/ADHD controversy that is seeing more and more kids on Ritalin because they won't sit still in class. Gee, when I was growing up, it was the kids who did sit still in class -- like me, for instance -- who were treated as if they were buggo.
But there is such a thing as Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder. As overdiagnosed as it undoubtedly is, there are definitely legitimate cases of it out there. I'd imagine their illness is belittled at every turn. "Oh, it's all in your head".

It's all in your head. If I could expunge one phrase from the English language, that'd be right up there near the top of the list. Every time I hear of someone saying that I want to find them and punch them repeatedly in the face as hard as I can, and then inform them sweetly that the pain they're feeling is all in their head.
This goes for physical illnesses too, of course, the invisible ones like fibromyalgia and lupus and chronic migraine and chronic fatigue and so many others that have been misdiagnosed over and over as mental illnesses. "You don't look sick to me!" If you hear that often enough, I bet you start questioning your sanity just a wee bit. Why won't the world acknowledge this illness, which is part of who I am? We're told over and over not to appear weak. Do you have the slightest inkling of the amount of inner strength it takes to get out of bed for some people? To go to work and carry on a normal life? To stay on a relatively even keel in the face of physical and/or emotional pain so monstrous it would reduce most of the it's all in your head people to quivering wrecks?
People living with these diseases and disorders are heroes in my eyes. If that makes me crazy, then you can send the men in the white coats to lock me away.

The Annual Toronto Maple Leaf Analysis, PRE-PLAYOFF EDITION

Playoffs. Us long-suffering Leaf fans can be forgiven a little giddiness and confusion...aren't those things for other teams?

Not this year. For the first time in this Breadbin's history, the Toronto Maple Leafs are in the playoffs.

The wags will tell you it's because the season was short this year, and being as Toronto is only capable of playing half a season, well, it stands to reason. To which I say: so what. Every other team played the same 48 games, and for once the Leafs are at or near the top of the league in categories other than giveaways and goals against.

Without further ado, the grades:

GM DAVE NONIS B

A gentle breath of fresh air after Burke's bombastic boorishness (though ya gotta admit ol' Burkie was entertaining as hell), Nonis seems to be all about removing obstacles for his players to succeed. The team was beset with a LACK of success going into the season, LACK standing for Lombardi, Armstrong, Connolly and Komisarek; all four were traded, demoted, or waived, Nonis' trade deadline performance was underwhelming,  and the active search for goaltending statistically, Luongoly inferior to the goaltending he already had,  was infuriating. In the end his saner side prevailed and the team was able to take its first playoff steps.

HEAD COACH RANDY CARLYLE B+

The consensus, going into the season, was that this was not a playoff team. Unproven goaltending, suspect D, a historically bad PK...a real longshot to make the dance. I'll get to the other things in a minute. That bad PK? From far and away the worst to second-best in a season. That's what an actual coach will do for you. (No offense to Wilson...or rather, all offense to Wilson, who treated the defensive zone like it was radioactive.)
Moreover, Carlyle has established a team identity and promoted cohesion up and down the lineup. These guys play for each other. It's good to see that. I suspect Carlyle will garner a couple of Adams votes (although this year, Paul MacLean in Ottawa owns that award).
To some extent, there are smoke and mirrors involved here. The team's PDO, an advanced stat that essentially measures luck, is the highest in the NHL; its Fenwick percentage, which is a measure of puck possession, is the lowest. In other words, this team is content to let its opponents have the puck, play with the puck, shoot the puck...so long as they do it from non-scoring areas. Toronto is insanely opportunistic: many times this year they've won despite being handily outshot.
Carlyle deserves points for keeping the team on an even keel, which is not easily done in this market. He's known when to lighten up and when to peel paint off the walls, Keeping him from an A grade is his team's maddening inconsistency. They can play with, and beat, any team in the league...and then the next game they can look like they did last night, absolutely horrible.
GOALTENDERS

JAMES REIMER 19-8-5, 2.46 GAA,  .924 SV%,  5 shutouts A
These are better than league average numbers across the board, something the Leafs have not seen since Eddie Belfour. Reimer is a solid goalie who reads plays well, has a knack for picking the puck out of traffic, and rarely gets rattled. His rebound control is still occasionally shaky and puck handling is not his forte, but when he's on his game he's very good verging on spectacular. If not for him, this is not a playoff team. (By the way: THIS IS A PLAYOFF TEAM.)

BEN SCRIVENS  7-9-0, 2.69, 9.15, 2 B
The goalie with the bizarre glove stance. Scrivens was a respectable backup who kept the team in the hunt when Reimer was lost due to injury. Ben plays big in the net and is acrobatic with very quick lateral movement. Good showing.

DEFENCEMEN

DION PHANEUF 9-19-28 A-
The Leafs Captain can't seem to get the respect he's due. He's top ten in the league for points by a defenceman; he plays by far the toughest minutes on the team. We can debate the letter on his sweater until the end of time but the fact of the matter is, he's doing his job, and doing it well.

CODY FRANSON4-25-29 A-
Outpointed Phaneuf, good for #8 in league scoring amongst D even though he's second pairing. His defensive zone play still needs some work: he has to remember to keep moving his feet. But all in all this has been a season of sweet redemption for Cody, who was inexplicably benched for most of last year.

CARL GUNNARSSON 1-14-15 B-
Played most if all of this season hurt, and you could tell: it affected his mobility and at times his decision making. Reliable stay-at-home D who is steady but not spectacular.

JOHN-MICHAEL LILES 2-9-11 C
has not been the same player since he suffered his concussion last season. By all accounts he is a dressing room leader. Likely traded this off-season.

JAKE GARDINER 0-4-4 (12 GP) D+
Don't give up hope on Jake. He's the best skater in the D-corps by far and he showed last year what an offensive threat he can be. But this year has been a write-off. Prone  to lackadaisical defensive play and stunning blunders. He's in that awkward place where careers are easily derailed: too good for the AHL but with loads to learn to be effective at the NHL level. Previously this exact position was inhabited by one Nazem Kadri, who has busted out with aplomb. Let's hope Gardiner does too.

MICHAEL KOSTKA 0-8-8 C+
Carlyle paired him with Phaneuf for some time, and so he played hard, hard minutes, performing reasonably well for a guy who'd never seen the NHL before. However, he was totally miscast as a PP QB and really doesn't belong on the first pairing. He does have offense he hasn't shown: last year he was a one-man Marlie wrecking crew, which is probably what motivated the Leafs to pick him up in the first place.

KORBINIAN HOLZER 2-1-3 D-
Not ready for prime time despite having performed admirably for years at the AHL level. With lots of work on his skating he could contribute: he has a nifty mean streak that earned him the nickname "Bullholzer".

MARK FRASER 0-8-8 B
Unsung defensive stalwart with a nasty side, he plays a simple, no nonsense stay at home game and relishes clearing the crease. This is another type of player the Leafs have not had on the roster for years. Was at or near the top of the +/- standings for much of the year. Not a fast skater, he relies on smart positioning to separate man from puck. He, like Franson, can be beat with speed to the outside, but together they made a decent second pairing.

FORWARDS

PHIL KESSEL 20-32-52 A
When will Toronto fans fully embrace the superstar they have here? Yes, I said superstar. Phil Kessel is an elite player that has outscored all but three other players over the past three seasons. Playing in the media fishbowl that is Toronto, you'd think more people would notice that. Did Burke overpay to get him? Undoubtedly. Has Phil lived up to his end of the trade? Abso-friggin'-lutely. Besides the patented shot and the exceptional passing, Phil has noticeably elevated his backchecking this year and is now, dare I suggest, a complete three zone player.  He's led the team each year in scoring. Bravura performance. Now if we can just keep him away from that 6'8" block of Kryptonite called Zdeno Chara...

NAZEM KADRI 18-26-44 A
Hello there Nazem Kadri. I have written some disparaging words about you and I have been forced to eat every one of them. Pierre McGuire coined the nickname 'Nifty Mittens' and you do have those. You managed to finish top twelve in NHL scoring despite playing only 16:03 a game. Impressive. (Then again, there's an argument to be made that the reason you have all those points is because you've been shielded from top-echelon competition.) You also have a nice mean streak to your game and you draw penalties like nobody's business. You remind me of a budding Doug Gilmour. Higher praise I'm not sure I know how to give. Here's to a long and Cupful career as a Leaf.

JAMES VAN RIEMSDYK 18-14-32 B-
His prior high water mark for goal scoring in an 82 game season was 21 goals. So for him to pot 18 in 48 isn't bad. When he plays the power forward role Carlyle envisions for him, he is VERY effective: many of his points came from a few feet in front of the net. Unfortunately, this is not a game that James wants to play very often and he spent long stretches of this short season off the scoresheet and in the doghouse. Career could go either way.

TYLER BOZAK 12-16-28 B

Tyler is very hard to grade because he's still playing in a role (first-line center) that is unsuited to his skill set. He shows flashes of vision and his faceoff skills are best on the team, but his BFF status with Kessel leads him to look for Phil when he should be shooting himself, and he's largely predictable on the puck (except in shootouts). He will be seeking a hefty pay raise and to some extent he deserves one, but going forward you have to think Kadri will be Kessel's center. Bozak's future as a Leaf is in question.

NIKOLAI KULEMIN 7-16-23 B
Two years ago Kulemin scored 30. Last year he scored 7 in 70 matches and never seemed to find his game. This year he settled in somewhere between the two extremes. He's the defensive conscience of the top six and he always has done a lot of the little things well, but you'll likely never see 30 goals out of him again. He has a lot of value to this team, but it's the kind of value apparent to coaches and few others.

CLARKE MACARTHUR 8-12-20 C-
Another player who excelled two years ago (playing with Kulemin, as it happens). Clarke was wildly inconsistent this year, with long periods of near-invisibility. MacArthur is the quintessence of "average".

JOFFREY LUPUL 11-7-18 (16 GP) A+
Could he have scored his pro-rated 92 points in a full season? Doubtful, but I'd hesitate to bet money against it. Beset by injuries including a concussion and a broken arm from a Phaneuf slapshot, Joffrey was the heart and soul of this team while he was in the lineup and he showed astonishing chemistry with Kadri. I won't suggest Lupul is the second coming of Wendel Clark...they are totally different players. But Lupul does have something no other Leaf since Clark has had: a primal, unrestrained joy at being a Toronto Maple Leaf. No disrespect to Phaneuf, but Lupul is this fan's idea of a captain. Also, he's Eva's "cutie patootie", whatever that means.


JAY MCCLEMENT 8-9-17 A+
Kessel, Kadri and Lupul light the lamp. Reimer is ultimately the last line of defence and he had a very good season. But you could certainly make a case for Jay being the MVP of this team. He is a huge reason the penalty kill went from laughable to highly laudable. He never takes a shift off and he rarely makes a mistake. If people weren't blinded by offensive numbers, McClement would be given the Selke this summer: he has logged more PK time, on  (again) the second-best PK corps in the NHL, and the next 18 players on that list are defencemen.
If the Leafs actually do keep progressing into legitimate Cup contenders over the next few seasons, it's a safe bet McClement will be part of it all.

MIKHAIL GRABOVSKI 9-7-16 D
Last year was Kulemin's lost year. This was Grabovski's. I'm not sure what happened here but Mikhail's wheels have fallen off and the passion is gone from his game. Carlyle asked him to be a defensive forward and he failed. I'm almost certain his time as a Leaf is done, but odds are they won't get as much as they could for him because of the hefty contract he failed to live up to this year.

LEO KOMAROV 4-5-9 A-
One of the most hated players in the league. I love this guy. Joe Bowen repeatedly informed us this year that Komarov would be just as effective without a blade on his stick He's a hitting machine and he hits hard. But he's not dirty...just annoying as all hell (if you're on the other team). You'd like to see a tad more offense out of him but even without it, he's a player you just have to keep.

FRASER MCCLAREN 3-2-5 B-
As a pure goon, he gets an A: he doesn't lose many fights. As a hockey player...well, he skates well for a man his size and he can cycle better than you'd think. Hands of stone, though...which you don't want ro get hit with.

COLTON ORR 1-3-4 B-
Goon #2. I've elevated his marks simply because he appears to have learned how to skate over the past year. One of these two players is superfluous, to my mind.

The team as a whole is too inconsistent to expect to survive the first round of these playoffs. Most teams making it in after having missed for a long time are fodder for the perennial contenders. But anything can happen and this Leaf fan is just elated to see his team in the game.

GO LEAFS GO

Boston, Toronto, and What We're Up Against

Three times I have started to write this blog. Three times I have deleted it and started over.

Boston is not an easy thing to write about. First, there was for quite some time a serious lack of credible information. Conspiracies breed like rabbits in an environment like this, especially since there are many people with political agendas perfectly willing to twist what facts there are to fit their narrative. I like to think I'm not ready for a tin hat, but I am willing to entertain the notion that things aren't always as they appear. Entertaining that notion has led me into some pretty dark places over the past few days, let me tell you. I won't link--these people don't need the attention--but there are more than a few people convinced the Tsarnaev brothers were framed, that this was actually an inside job perpetrated or at least aided and abetted by the U.S. government.

There's a kind of logic in the insanity of that assertion, the same kind that sustains the 9/11 "truthers". (Indeed, many of the same elements are present, including a mysterious Saudi allegedly wined and dined by the government in the immediate aftermath and then discretely flown out of the country.) Certainly the people who believe things like this take it as read that their government hates them. At the very least, they believe that the U.S. government secretly likes acts of terror being perpetrated on its own soil, the better to keep the citizens in line. Whip a little Patriot Act on 'em. Reintroduce CISPA
...and keep reintroducing it until it passes. Eventually the government will have the police state it yearns for.
It's seductive, this state of mind. Knowing The Truth (tm) gives you a real sense of power, especially when you're surrounded by ignorant sheeple who won't wake up. It also makes it easy to fit future atrocities, whatever they may be, into your head: no need to flail around for answers, The Government Did It.

(Of course, it follows that you can substitute "The Government" for your bugaboo of choice. I'd be more inclined to believe the conspiracists, whatever their truth, if I didn't invariably detect pre-existing antipathy towards whoever their idea of the guilty party is.)

The ever-changing reports out of Boston pose their own problems for somebody who prides himself on getting it right. Just today we learn from the surviving Tsarnaev brother that further attacks were planned in New York City. This is interesting for two reasons. It renders conspiracy theories null and void, of course. But it's also interesting because four days prior we were told Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might never speak again. That's quite the misdiagnosis. .Almost enough to turn me back down the conspiracy trail...never mind.

The third factor that makes Boston difficult to write about: once again, people have died in the name of jihad.

We're not supposed to acknowledge this, even though the people who are planning and carrying out these attacks have no trouble whatsoever citing jihad as their motivation. To be honest, I'm not sure why this is. Certainly it can't be out of a fear of giving offense...do we really care so much for the feelings of those who wish us dead? If so, maybe we deserve everything being done to us.

A chilling glimpse into the mind of a jihadist came this week here in Canada. Working off a tip from the FBI, Canadian authorities foiled a plot to blow up a Via Rail train en route from Toronto to New York. One of the accused questioned the authority of the court, saying that the Criminal Code of Canada is not a holy book.

This is what we're up against, folks: people who not only are out to kill us, but who believe it's their holy duty to do it and that any laws standing in their way are irreverent and thus irrelevant. We're up against a faith that does precious little to root out its extremists. To be fair, it's hard to blame them: moderate Muslims, those who view the call to jihad as a metaphor and nothing more, are at least as hated by the fundamentalists as us infidels.

Spare me, please, the protestations that Islam means 'peace' and that it is a religion of peace. Islam means 'submission', and the radical Islamists believe they are called by Allah to fight the dar al-Harb (the 'house of war', i.e. the world not under Islamic rule) into that submission. This website shows their efforts towards world "peace", which are ongoing.

All that said, the threat of Islamic terrorism, or indeed any kind of terrorism, should not be enough to keep you housebound. I almost never agree with Ezra Levant on anything at all, but he couldn't be more right here. Why was Boston shut down? Was it really necessary to paralyze a great American city just to find two whacko brothers? I think not. What kind of message does this response send to aspiring terrorists? As Levant notes, the marathon bombings, while tragic, were extremely modest on the terrorism scale--the kind of thing Israel deals with on a daily basis. But America--America, the big, the bold, the brash, the beautiful!...wigged out. C'mon, America. You're better than that and you know it.

Back here in Canada: Justin Trudeau, newly minted Liberal leader, has earned predictable scorn for musing about the 'root causes' of terrorism. Our Prime Minister scolded him, saying "now is not the time to commit sociology". (Aside: very telling choice of verb from a man who has given us every reason to believe he hates and fears science. To me it sounds as if "sociology" is an atrocity like murder, which is something you also "commit".)
Needless to say, I disagree with the idea that we should not examine the root causes of any problem in order to solve the problem. But it is fair to note that poverty, an oft-cited 'root cause', isn't one. The Tsarnaev brothers were nowhere close to poor. Osama bin Laden was obscenely wealthy and many of his most devout Saudi followers are, too. You want root causes? I wrote about them seven years ago:

Here's Hussein Massawi, a former leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah--a group which shares ideals with al-Qaeda--on the reason for terrorist attack: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."

There are those who earnestly believe 9/11 was the opening salvo in a war of civilizational dominance. I don't believe that. Even with religion as a motivator--and it's a hell of a motivator--any cause that insist you kill yourself in order for it to be fulfilled is doomed. Given the choice of life versus seventy two virgins, even most Muslims will pick life.
(Another aside--Such a weird, weird belief that is. I mean, I could dive right into those 'appetizing vaginas', but 'eternal erection'? No, thank you. And who's going to be better in bed, a virgin or a woman who knows what she's doing? Even if you pick the virgin...there's only 72 of them. Of course, being as they're all ninety feet tall, it'll take you a while to climb each one. And you're probably going to get repeatedly grossed out on the way up because they're all "transparent to the marrow of their bones." Yeesh. If you're sexually aroused by any of the foregoing, could you please do me a favour and step away from me? Thanks.) In summary then: these terrorist attacks are likely to continue for some time. The attackers are highly motivated, and they believe they are doing God's work. However, the overblown response to each attack plays right into the terrorists' hands, and the media frenzy doesn't help either. It would probably be a good idea to adopt the British maxim...

Turning against each other by blaming our government, or liberals, or conservatives, or anyone other than the terrorists, is likewise counterproductive. Yes, as distasteful as the Left may believe this to be, we are in fact at war with a perverted ideology that wishes us dead. But no, contrary to what many on the right will tell you, a Muslim is not a suspect by virtue of his faith.

Trudeau, Take Two

In a stunning victory predicted by no one, some nobody named Justin something-or-other came out of nowhere to become the leader of the federal Liberals. I mean, seriously, Justin Trudeau? Who dat? The media has been strangely silent.

Even my non-Canadian readers can probably recognize the sarcasm. The truth is that the Canadian media has been all over Justin Trudeau like white on snow for years and the leadership convention the Liberals held was a waste of everyone's money and time, because Trudeau's coronation was assured the moment it became clear Michael Ignatieff would lose the last election--which was about thirty seconds after the writ dropped.

The Liberals, the once (and future, so they devoutly believe)  Natural Governing Party of Canada, have veered wildly between a farce and a tragedy since they were inexplicably (to them) booted from office in 2006. The sense of entitlement, and their refusal to recognize same, positively oozed out of the party over two ensuing elections: the reaction to each loss was a kind of comic bewilderment. How can you elect those...barbarians? They figured if only they had the right figurehead leading the party, they'd be welcomed back with open arms. To that end, they first tried Stephane Dion, on the grounds that their last major success story, one Jean Chretien, was almost as incomprehensible to half the country.Dion bombed. So they moved on to Michael Ignatieff, a Serious and Intelligent Personage who had neither the patience nor the ability to engage in political warfare. Ignatieff seemed to believe that his job was to teach Canadians the right and proper (Liberal) Way, and the condescension was palpable.

Stephen Harper, who has condescension down to a fine art in other contexts, made light work of Ignatieff and his party in the last election: for the first time ever, the once-proud, still far too proud, Liberal Party of Canada was reduced to third party status.

Enter Trudeau Junior.

Polls seductively suggested that with Trudeau as leader, the Liberals could not only get back into power, they could do so with a majority. The Liberal rank and file, forgetting that polls are fickle things, endorsed Justin with a will, despite knowing precisely dick-all about how the man proposes to govern the party and the country.

This was actually smart politics on Justin's part: a blank slate can be filled with whatever people want on it. But now he has to illustrate some substance behind the style, or Harper will eat him for breakfast and shit him out by lunch time.

Trudeau's biggest problem is his party's irrelevance over the past near-decade. Harper has shifted the political climate rightward and the political clout westward. (It would not surprise me in the slightest to see Harper agitate for the capital of Canada to move to Calgary.) And  and Trudeau is a name to strike hatred into the hearts of a substantial subset of the western population.
The  Liberals are also not popular in Quebec, where the surname Trudeau has a pointed history. The trick Justin's going to have to attempt to pull off is to make the electorate forget his last name. That might be difficult, since the name and a full head of fluffy hair have propelled him to where he is.

If I sound disdainful of the Liberals, that's because I am. They've made it very hard not to be. If I sound like I relish the thought of endless Conservative governments...trust me, I don't.

I initially supported Harper. I'll admit it freely, not just because you can see the support by visiting old Breadbin posts. I still don't think the man is as evil as he is commonly portrayed, and I don't automatically oppose everything he proposes, or does, for that matter.  But quite frankly, any good the man does is more than offset by his autocratic governing style and his complete disdain for science, facts, and reality itself.  We need a new government in this country. Don't believe the attack ads insinuating that only Harper's Conservatives know how to run an economy: historically, the economy has done better under left-leaning governments in democratic countries, and with a few notable exceptions, Liberals and New Democrats leave the books in better shape than they found them.

Had Jack Layton lived, I truly believe he would have been our next PM. But his successor, Mulcair, has failed to capitalize on the momentum that carried the NDP to Official Opposition status and his chances are essentially nil. I don't hold out much hope for the Liberals, either, especially since I think Trudeau will garner just enough support to effectively split the anybody-but-Conservative vote. That will allow Harper to cruise up the middle to another majority.

Unless the Liberals and NDP unite.

There's been some babble about this possibility, but Mulcair shut it down when the NDP success looked like it might continue and you can damn well bet Trudeau won't entertain the notion when the polls tell him he can win on his own. After years of thought, I still can't decide how I feel about the prospect of a united left. I've watched the American two-party system falter and I've noted with alarm increasing polarization of politics here in Canada. The last thing I want to see in this country is two political parties. That is, it's the last thing I want to see until somebody tells me the only alternative is one-party government under Harper's Conservatives...

I want to see Justin Trudeau beat all expectations. I don't think he will.

Amanda Todd, Take Two

*administrative note: I'll be tackling Trudeaumania and the awful events in Boston over the next four days.

I don't think Margaret Wente gets it.

In response to the question "what to do about Rehtaeh?" -- a question many Canadians are asking themselves -- she opines,

"The first thing to do is to resist the urge to vigilante justice[...] Rehtaeh could be your daughter--but those boys could be your sons. Let's not ruin more lives with a rush to judgment."

Really. Margaret? You, a conservative who champions the notion of personal responsibility, are asking us not to "ruin more lives" just because the people whose lives we're thinking of ruining merely gang-raped a 15-year old girl and then plastered her all over the Internet?
Forgive me --no, don't--but wouldn't you say those boys ruined their own lives?  I would. I would say that those boys followed up one illegal act (underage consumption of vodka) with a much, much more serious offense that the police original deemed not to be criminal, despite Rehtaeh being a minor. (The case has since been reopened; unlike Ms. Wente, I hope justice prevails.)

As much as I love the Internet and respect its power for positive change, there are times, quite a few of them in fact, when I want somebody to pull the plug and shut it down for good. I wrote in my most linked post...

no matter how far or how fast the Internet evolves, it's important to remember: even though it has its sharp edges (or perhaps because it does), the 'Net is merely a tool.

...but sometimes I confess I want to take the tool out of the tool box.

The problem is the anonymity that hiding behind a screen provides. It allows a girl, as Wente notes, to become a 'triple victim'. First the rape, traumatic enough; then the sharing of the lurid images; then the inevitable cyber-catcalls of 'slut' and demands for sex. There's nothing about this case that isn't sickening. And I assure you it's more common than you know. Right now, there are girls all over the country going through the same thing Rehtaeh did. Hell, just look at Amanda Todd...who wasn't gang-raped, but suffered the full force of cyberbullying for years just because she bared her breasts online.

I don't know the answer. I wish I did. Part of me wants to question where the parents were, the ones who allowed children access to vodka and who weren't around to stop the ensuing horror before it could begin. But even I, sheltered boy that I was and sheltered man that I am, recognize the naivete in that sentiment: boys will find places to party and -- as much as I hate it -- they'll also find a way to get drunk. Put a girl in that situation...

Which isn't to say "boys will be boys", a phrase I cordially detest. You can't dismiss gang rape with that kind of petty nonchalance. You just can't. I want consequences, meaningful consequences that show the disgust society holds for rape. Spiritually, I know I'm supposed to tell you that the young rapists deserve forgiveness and a chance to make some good out of the lives they've ruined for themselves...and in my higher moments I'm willing to concede this is possible...but only after the magnitude of their wrongdoing has been expressed. Repeatedly, so as there's no question in their minds.

The rape, as repugnant as it is, isn't what has horrified me most about the Rehtaeh Parsons case. The online sharing of the photo and subsequent ugliness makes me question the sanity of the perpetrators, and the non-reaction of the world at large makes me question my own sanity. Does nobody else wonder about the kind of people who would not only rape a girl, but would brag about it, with photographic proof? Does it not strike anyone else as utterly monstrous to treat a victim of rape as a potential sex toy?

I mean, to me, rape is worse than murder, in the sense that there are (a very few) defences for murder. I can't think of any possible justification for rape, in any circumstance, ever. To first perpetrate and then perpetuate that rape is...words fail me.

I was talking to a colleague at work the other day, a father with young children in school. He tells the me school environment has changed beyond all recognition since we were in it. The word 'faggot', once a schoolyard staple, is all but unheard of. People's hateful attitudes towards difference of all kinds have been taught out of them, for the most part, he alleged. I thought  yeah, sure, they just wait until their targets are home alone and online.

Which is probably true, but it just shifts the onus on to the parents. What's unacceptable face to face should be just as unacceptable online. Perhaps more unacceptable: online, after all, you don't have to have the courage of your convictions. You can hide behind a screen and be as vicious as you like.

I'm not sure there's a way to remove the essentially anonymity of the Internet, but only on a case-by-case basis. If there is, that's obviously the route you want to take. But in the meantime, education is the best way to go. That and making an example of the occasional monster. That part's critical.

The Facts Of Life

Yesterday's blog was not up to par, for which I apologize. Though I haven't succumbed to the allure of Twitter--truth is, I don't even feel it--it seems like I'm having some trouble lately organizing my thoughts into coherent sentences and then organizing the sentences into coherent paragraphs, which is, to my mind anyway, the defining characteristic of a Twit.
I feel random thoughts tugging me in all directions (how exactly did that Blue Jays reference get in there yesterday, anyway?) Distractions, distractions everywhere. And the blog journeys are getting shorter and shorter as my mental fuel economy declines. It's probably time for a mental tune-up.

What I was trying to say yesterday was concisely and elegantly put by Russell Brand in an otherwise very critical eulogy" in The Guatdian
which accuses the deceased of destroying the British idea of community:

"This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.

An aside (see: distractions!) English could really use an antonym for eulogy. That word derives from Greek, essentially 'well-speaking', and there are an awful lot of so-called eulogies out there that criticize the deceased rather than praising him or her. Malogy? Maybe.

Anyway, I wanted to delve a little into another comment I found in my web-wide peregrinations yesterday, this on a forum where speaking ill of Maggie Thatcher would get you tarred and feathered and probably banned:

It seems that any politician that asks for any level of personable accountability and responsibility is reduced to a greedy bigot.

Why have conservative principles become so hated by so many?

If "THE FACTS OF LIFE ARE CONSERVATIVE" are we seeing a first world attitude that says - screw the facts, someone is going to be accountable for me and it won't be me?

Facts are difficult things. THE PEOPLE'S MONEY WILL RUN OUT.

--"JMM"

It seems to me that both these contradictory phrases are true, depending of course on how you see the world. Liberals and conservatives routinely accuse each other of being blind, after all.

Are the facts of life conservative? Being a liberal, I find it hard to even parse that sentence,so I'll turn to someone else to articulate the argument for me:

BEHAVIOUR HAS CONSEQUENCES

"Western Chauvinist" assures us here that the plight of black families (to the extent that there are black families in America) is all the fault of liberal "compassion". I've heard this argument my entire political life--that offering a hand up to people simply creates dependency.
To some extent this is true: simply giving money to people tends not to accomplish a whole hell of a lot. But that's not an argument against giving money to people. It's not an either-or system here, it's "both-and". Give money, yes, and give more. Give wisdom. Create esteem. Not just self-esteem but esteem in community. If you want prosperity, you need community--short for 'common unity'. Remove that sense of common unity and you create an every-man-for-himself ethos that makes a very few people fantastically rich and the rest of us dirt-poor.

LIFE IS NOT FAIR

Our blogger here adds that no amount of progressive government will make it so. Again, true as far as it goes. The first part is an important lesson that used to be offered starting in kindergarten; the second part is being put to the test in educational institutions all over the place...as when everyone wins a medal simply for trying and no one is allowed to fail at anything, ever. This is creating a generation of people who can't cope with inevitable failure, and I'd suggest this in and of itself is monstrously unfair.
But two wrongs don't make a right. And the problem again here is that society is not, or ought not to be, a zero-sum game. We have set it up, and conservatives want to keep it, so that for every winner there must be a loser. This need not be the case, and it's a relatively simple fix: rather than examining every scenario and situation with a view to what benefits me, try asking yourself what benefits most people.
This used to be standard operating procedure. It still is, in places that haven't lost themselves in the ethos of extreme capitalism. And it creates a society in which a few rich people are a little poor, and the vast majority of poorer people are substantially richer. You'll never eliminate all the unfairness, but mitigating it is absolutely crucial...especially if you're one of the fat cats. Because the lower class scum will only stand so much enforced inequality before they rise up and come for your head...behaviours have consequences!

COMMON SENSE IS INDISPENSABLE

Indeed it is. When you kill people's families with bombs and drones, common sense suggests those people will hate you, for instance. If you mock people's beliefs and assert your own superiority at every turn, common sense suggests that you'll be ignored at best.
These are not the examples Mr. Western Chauvinist has in mind, of course. I have to admit I particularly love the example he cites, that you can't spend your way out of debt.

FDR's New Deal was an attempt to solve the Great Depression, and it failed. Or perhaps it didn't: there's an argument to be made that without it, the effects would have been considerably worse. However, the New Deal was more than an economic stimulus package. It was an attempt to preserve confidence in American institutions. In that respect, it worked very well.

There is an increasing distrust in America today. Few trust the government; fewer still trust Wall Street; it seems that American citizens increasingly distrust each other. Washington has a moral obligation to reverse this by any means necessary, because the logical outcome of a continued decline of trust is...too hideous to contemplate. That, too, is common sense.

THERE AIN'T NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH

This maxim was popularized by one of my literary idols, Robert Anson Heinlein. I disagree with a fair bit of this author's politics, but he's one of the people who has profoundly shaped my mind.
TANSTAAFL is central to our current ideas of economics, and it's rigidly true in the context of the zero-sum game we have set up.
Canadians often brag about their 'free' health care. Of course, we understand that our health care system is not free, per se: it's paid for through taxes, distributed amongst the Canadian population as a whole.  This is an example--at least as far as I'm concerned--of a common good: better that everyone pay a little than a few people pay a hell of a lot. The extent to which you agree with that statement is a reliable measure of your compassion.
I find it very interesting that Western Chauvinist cloaks his conservatism in Christian theology, when even a cursory reading of Scripture will convince you beyond doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was anything but conservative, socially or otherwise. Look at the people He hung out with: utter rubbish as human beings, right? He thought otherwise, and that's at the core of His message to the world: we are all one. Why else are we told to love our neighbours as ourselves and even to love our enemies?

HUMAN NATURE IS FALLEN

I disagree. Sure, there is evil aplenty in the world...but less and less of it as time goes by. We think humanity is at the pinnacle of its evolution, that we know it all, that we're invincible. These are adolescent traits. We're an adolescent race, going through the throes of civilizational puberty. We've got a lot of growing up to do. But we also have come a long way, in some cases in a very short period of time. Look at marriage, for example. A generation ago it was unthinkable that two men or two women who love each other could or should get married...and the option is increasingly available to them today. Every poll shows that the younger generation is more tolerant, more compassionate, and more determined to make a better world than received wisdom would have you believe. The oft-cited anger and apathy of the young is a direct result of the magnitude of the task we've set them.

"The trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money"--attributed to Margaret Thatcher

Let me know when Norway runs out of money, okay?

The conservative brainwashers will tell you that socialism has never worked and can never work, because it runs contrary to the greedy and us/them view of the world they mistakenly call "human nature". They're also quick to tell you to look to history: socialism, they say, has failed every time, and liberals, they tell you, think it will work this time because they haven't tried it yet and they know better.

Hogwash.

It's true that pure communism has never worked, and it's certainly arguable that it can't ever work on anything more than a  limited scale. But the same can certainly be said of pure capitalism. The tendency towards extremes is one of the most troubling aspects of today's society, in my view. Each side works assiduously to reject the slightest taint of the other, and blames any perceived injustice on the prevalence of the other's point of view.
The reality is that socialism and society come from the same root for a reason. This was recognized in ancient Rome...Marcus Aurelius tells us that which is not good for the bee-hive can not be good for the bee. I've little doubt this sentiment is much older than a mere nineteen hundred years...because behaviour has consequences and common sense is indispensable.

America fancies itself the most prosperous nation in the world. By most measures, it's not. By some measures, it's not even in the top ten.  (Unfortunately to a certain breed of conservatives, the degree of MURICA FUCK YEAH! is not one the metrics used to measure prosperity...)

There are other measures of prosperity besides material wealth. This is something held as self-evident outside some benighted corners of the United States of America.

The "facts of life are conservative" crowd have no answer for the miracle that is Bhutan. This tiny nation, poor by standard measures, is, as nations ago, deliriously happy. Its quality of life is improving rapidly, no thanks to austere conservative principles designed to impoverish the many for the benefit of the few.

There is nothing sufficient compassion can't solve. I truly believe this, and that's why I'm a liberal.

I'm Resigning From the Human Race

...because I obviously don't belong in it.
The vitriol surrounding the death of Margaret Thatcher is a frightening thing to behold. "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead" is #27 on the British iTunes download chart this morning. It isn't because The Wizard of Oz aired in Britain last week.
In several Internet fora I have posted the following:

You know, folks, it's okay to dislike, or even to hate, Margaret Thatcher's policies from her time in office. It is not okay to hate *her*, and it is *certainly* not okay to cheer at her death.

Some people have agreed with me. Some. But there's been quite a bit of this:

Yes you can, she was innately evil and any hatred is justified. Who cares if someone is a human being if they're utter rubbish as one?



I'm reminded of the death of Jack Layton and Christie Blatchford's nasty anti-elegy penned before the body was cold. You don't have to be liberal or conservative to be rude and unseemly: just human, it seems.

There really is no middle of the road any more, is there? People are either loved or they're hated. The love is eternal and the hate is hellacious. I feel weird every time I have a "meh" reaction--which is pretty often, because let's face it, the majority of the world is kinda meh as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe that's why I'm having trouble dealing with the world lately. It's hard to stay on an even keel when everyone's battering you with expectations at every turn. The Blue Jays are 2-5 to start a 162 game baseball season in which, if you believed the hype, the team was supposed to go 324-0. Accordingly, the world is ending: everybody out of the pool and off the wagon, okay?

American politics keeps on keeping on: the country's going to hell in the proverbial handbasket and it's all the fault of the Republocrats.

It comes out most when a politician dies, for some reason. The time to publicly rejoice or lament a politician, in my view, is when he or she passes from elected office, not from life. But in the case of Thatcher, Layton, Chavez...you get the distinct impression that if these people weren't dead, a vast number of people would be more than happy to kill them.

Indeed -- and I don't mean to be alarmist -- I'm getting that distinct impression more and more often of late, that the only thing holding us back from widespread violence is social convention. Which may or may not be fraying.

So I hereby submit my letter of resignation from humanity. It's been an interesting time in the company of humans and I have learned a great deal that will benefit me in future endeavours. I'll still be around to keep an eye on you, though: you humans are simply to unstable for me to be able to afford not to.