I have more than usual to be thankful for this year.
The first thing that jumps to mind is that I AM SO VERY THANKFUL I AM NOT WORKING RETAIL ANY MORE. ESPECIALLY RIGHT NOW.
Thanksgiving is one of the more challenging periods of the retail year, after Easter (by far the worst) and Christmas (which would be the worst were it not for the fact that it starts in four days and runs until New Year's Eve). For reasons unknown, they always seem to schedule a grocery inventory the week leading up to Thanksgiving, too, which just compounds the misery. I made a point of en-joy-ing my job ("en-joy"--"to inject joy into something")...but sometimes it would take several shots a day, especially around this time of year.
I'm not sure what the next epoch of my life will hold...but it won't be retail. And that's a good thing. It's not called the accidental career for nothing--you stumble into it, and it's beastly hard to get out of its mindset. (That's why I am taking French: I will be fluent, I hope, a year from now--a real selling point to my next boss, or so I hope.)
I should actually thank Sobeys for my time there. It was a job I basically walked in and demanded, and from that point to the last day there was more good than bad in it. Yes, I had my share of bad days--who doesn't? But with a very few exceptions, the people at my store were worth getting out of bed each day (or night) for. Some of them have even remained friends. I miss you guys. I really do.
I'm to the point now where I can thank Sobeys for letting me go, too. It only came a year to eighteen months earlier than I was planning to leave myself, but beyond that, I had a lot of growing to do, and my dismissal gave me time to devote to it. That may sound odd, a 42 year old guy admitting he had a lot of growing to do. Guess what? I still do. But these past few months have meant nothing less than a redefinition of self. Those are always painful...and always necessary.
In no order whatsoever...
My cats certainly don't understand "thank you" and I only kid myself into thinking my dogs (well, Tux) does...but I'm thankful for each of them. Usually. Bubbles has vampire teeth and Mooch has a sandpaper tongue; Tux is grabby and Peach is *sigh* Frisbee-fixated....but all in all they're each of them a net contributor to the joy that is in this house. You people without pets--how do you do it?
Alexa: As I write this, your sister is still Lilygagging around, delaying her zeroth birthday party as long as she possibly can, it seems. But for right now this is about you: you're special, you're adorable as all get-out and I'm so thankful to have such a worldly niece (at all of two and a half). Can't wait to get you on a piano. Won't be long now--I was only a few months older than you when I started, and I can tell you've got music pouring out of your soul.
Yes, I'm about to thank a bunch of completely inanimate objects. I have read several stunning books this past year, among the very best of them S.M. Stirling's Dies The Fire. I'm currently reading the second novel in the Saga of Recluce and enjoying it as well.
I'm thankful hockey's back. I can now count among my friends and loves a Habs fan, a Sens fan, an Isles fan, a Devils fan, and (whew) a couple of Leafy freaks like me. It's going to make for an interesting year as crow is served to somebody each and every week.
Other friends and loves, old and new--one of them old and new. You know who you are. I am blessed beyond my capacity to express (in fact, usually beyond my capacity to believe) to have each of you in my life. You have seen me through some exceptionally difficult times and I'm stronger for it. I love you all. Thank you. So very much.
I'm going to single a couple of you out here for special recognition (sorry, sorry)--Nicole, thank you. For granting me occasional access to an actual piano, something I haven't had for many years and which was, unexpectedly, a real need there for a while. For the loan of the Recluce books already mentioned. And for being such an all-around wonderful person. Take a bow, would you?
And Craig--thank you for the music (as always), the support (as always) and the feeling like a quarter century of lost contact never even happened. You, too, are a great person. Greater than you know. Yes, take a bow...and then blow a fanfare. For an UNcommon man.
Thank you to my readers, who keep me writing--1409 posts and counting!--and who keep me centered. My very personal blog entries haven't deterred any of you--in fact, they seem to be my most popular. I'm very grateful to each and every one of you.
And finally--last but the furthest from least--to Eva. I have watched this past year as your body has shrunk--dramatically--and your heart has grown--just as dramatically. You have shepherded me through some rough patches this year, without hesitation and with your trademark compassion. I could not be prouder of you; I could not wish for a better, more understanding or accepting wife, because I don't think she exists. I love you more with each passing year.
Thank you, one and all. Happy Thanksgiving.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Wednesday, October 08, 2014
I Didn't Want To Write This...
I didn't want to write about this. The topic disgusts me. But it was made clear to me yesterday that I wasn't thinking straight about it, and in cases like that I feel compelled to write...
Jennifer Lawrence.
I respect her as an actress, tremendously, and as a person, tremendously. I'm actually a little in awe of her. One reason is that she is so genuinely in awe of other Hollywood stars, most of whom she has either eclipsed in fame and acclaim already, or whom she will eclipse over the course of her career. She strikes me as one of the few authentically humble movie stars out there, and she's very well grounded. That's very rare in a city that tends to inflate heads until they're balloons. And that pops more than a few of them, come to that. And any woman who suggests, on the subject of relationships, "Isn't boring so much better than passion?"--that's a woman I get. (I'll try to forgive her taste in...uck!...reality television.)
Given my enormous appreciation of Ms. Lawrence, I expressed some real chagrin that she should be naïve enough to put nude pictures of herself in the cloud, where (she had to have known) they would inevitably be hacked and spread all over the Internet, along with the photos of over a hundred other celebrities.
I wasn't blaming her for the propagation of those pictures. Or so I told myself. I was (and am) adamant that the men who did this should be caught and punished. Harshly. And I bitterly, bitterly lament that part of (especially male, it seems) human nature that is irresistibly drawn to nude pictures. I can't over-stress this. I know I'm a rare bird, but I feel tinges of guilt just Googling articles for this blog, on the grounds that in some tiny way I'm perpetuating the cult and culture of celebrity. And I would have to be put at gunpoint to Google naked pictures of her or any other person, celebrity or no.
In fact, I'm often caught completely flat-footed when pics and videos of celebrities having sex make the rounds. Paris Hilton video? Never seen it, never will, and I can assure you with absolute certainty that I wouldn't even recognize the woman if she suddenly shimmered into being in front of me. The same goes for any other celebrity whose sexual hijinks have been shown to the world. I'm apparently not of this world. Fine by me.
In even mentioning that Ms. Lawrence was somehow remiss in storing nudie pics in the cloud, I was, in fact, blaming her for what happened after she did it. By the way--even "what happened" is a weaselly kind of phrase here. "What happened" was that a woman was violated.
And what I was saying was
if only those pictures hadn't been there to begin with, this never would have happened.
if only she hadn't been stupid enough to PUT those pictures there, this never would have happened.
Which takes the blame completely off the asshats who actually stole the pictures and posted them, not to mention the millions of people who have looked at and kept them--every one of which, as far as both she and I are concerned, is guilty of a sex crime.
It wasn't my intent to take the blame off the men who did this. At all.
Credit card systems get hacked, don't they? If somebody runs up a huge bill on my Visa, am I to blame for having my Visa information stored online behind something I had trusted to be secure? Visa doesn't think so...why should I or anyone else?
As a wise friend pointed out to me, this isn't much different from asking what the rape victim was wearing, as if that had anything to do with her rape. You can say that women shouldn't walk around seedy areas at night dressed in skimpy revealing attire. That's even true, sadly. But why is it true? Because men feel entitled to commit criminal acts. The problem here is not the woman or what she's wearing...the problem is and remains those criminal acts, and anything else we bring up sounds awfully like we're covering for them, doesn't it?
The fuckers even hacked her Wikipedia page to include the explicit images--the offline equivalent would be not just stealing the pictures, but pinning them up in every grocery store, library, and community center in the world. I can't begin to tell you how utterly fed up this makes me. It's hard sometimes to remember that not everyone acts so deplorably.
-------------
The site I frequent even more than Facebook is Reddit. It bills itself as "the front page of the Internet" and as such, anything that is anything online makes it to Reddit in short order. Nude pictures of celebrities are no exception. Their presence on Reddit set traffic records for the site. They tried to ban the forums that these images were being posted in. It proved completely ineffectual: it was like a giant game of whack-a-mole, or like cutting off a head of a Lernaean Hydra. if you're mythology-minded. They couldn't keep up with the propagation of the images across the site. There have since been two more waves of what has been dubbed "the Fappening"; doubtless there are more to come. I feel helpless just writing that. This is not a game and it is not funny. It's a crime and it needs to be treated as such.
But Ken, haven't you always said "it's just skin"?
I have, and taken out of context you might think I have no problem with nude pictures on the net. Not true. It's not my skin, it's theirs. They own it. No one else does. No one has the right to share, distribute, or even look at such things without explicit permission. If a celebrity appears nude in a TV show, film or video, that's by consent and much different from those images being stored in what's supposed to be a secure server.
If you're someone who has looked at these pictures, or who God forbid has copies of them, shame on you. You may as well have stolen them yourself, and if I could, I'd spread your most intimate information--images, financial records, health records, whatever might make you see sense--all over the net. I'd do it gladly, with relish. Where's Anonymous when you really need them, anyway?
Looks like they're working on it...
Jennifer Lawrence.
I respect her as an actress, tremendously, and as a person, tremendously. I'm actually a little in awe of her. One reason is that she is so genuinely in awe of other Hollywood stars, most of whom she has either eclipsed in fame and acclaim already, or whom she will eclipse over the course of her career. She strikes me as one of the few authentically humble movie stars out there, and she's very well grounded. That's very rare in a city that tends to inflate heads until they're balloons. And that pops more than a few of them, come to that. And any woman who suggests, on the subject of relationships, "Isn't boring so much better than passion?"--that's a woman I get. (I'll try to forgive her taste in...uck!...reality television.)
Given my enormous appreciation of Ms. Lawrence, I expressed some real chagrin that she should be naïve enough to put nude pictures of herself in the cloud, where (she had to have known) they would inevitably be hacked and spread all over the Internet, along with the photos of over a hundred other celebrities.
I wasn't blaming her for the propagation of those pictures. Or so I told myself. I was (and am) adamant that the men who did this should be caught and punished. Harshly. And I bitterly, bitterly lament that part of (especially male, it seems) human nature that is irresistibly drawn to nude pictures. I can't over-stress this. I know I'm a rare bird, but I feel tinges of guilt just Googling articles for this blog, on the grounds that in some tiny way I'm perpetuating the cult and culture of celebrity. And I would have to be put at gunpoint to Google naked pictures of her or any other person, celebrity or no.
In fact, I'm often caught completely flat-footed when pics and videos of celebrities having sex make the rounds. Paris Hilton video? Never seen it, never will, and I can assure you with absolute certainty that I wouldn't even recognize the woman if she suddenly shimmered into being in front of me. The same goes for any other celebrity whose sexual hijinks have been shown to the world. I'm apparently not of this world. Fine by me.
In even mentioning that Ms. Lawrence was somehow remiss in storing nudie pics in the cloud, I was, in fact, blaming her for what happened after she did it. By the way--even "what happened" is a weaselly kind of phrase here. "What happened" was that a woman was violated.
And what I was saying was
if only those pictures hadn't been there to begin with, this never would have happened.
if only she hadn't been stupid enough to PUT those pictures there, this never would have happened.
Which takes the blame completely off the asshats who actually stole the pictures and posted them, not to mention the millions of people who have looked at and kept them--every one of which, as far as both she and I are concerned, is guilty of a sex crime.
It wasn't my intent to take the blame off the men who did this. At all.
Credit card systems get hacked, don't they? If somebody runs up a huge bill on my Visa, am I to blame for having my Visa information stored online behind something I had trusted to be secure? Visa doesn't think so...why should I or anyone else?
As a wise friend pointed out to me, this isn't much different from asking what the rape victim was wearing, as if that had anything to do with her rape. You can say that women shouldn't walk around seedy areas at night dressed in skimpy revealing attire. That's even true, sadly. But why is it true? Because men feel entitled to commit criminal acts. The problem here is not the woman or what she's wearing...the problem is and remains those criminal acts, and anything else we bring up sounds awfully like we're covering for them, doesn't it?
The fuckers even hacked her Wikipedia page to include the explicit images--the offline equivalent would be not just stealing the pictures, but pinning them up in every grocery store, library, and community center in the world. I can't begin to tell you how utterly fed up this makes me. It's hard sometimes to remember that not everyone acts so deplorably.
-------------
The site I frequent even more than Facebook is Reddit. It bills itself as "the front page of the Internet" and as such, anything that is anything online makes it to Reddit in short order. Nude pictures of celebrities are no exception. Their presence on Reddit set traffic records for the site. They tried to ban the forums that these images were being posted in. It proved completely ineffectual: it was like a giant game of whack-a-mole, or like cutting off a head of a Lernaean Hydra. if you're mythology-minded. They couldn't keep up with the propagation of the images across the site. There have since been two more waves of what has been dubbed "the Fappening"; doubtless there are more to come. I feel helpless just writing that. This is not a game and it is not funny. It's a crime and it needs to be treated as such.
But Ken, haven't you always said "it's just skin"?
I have, and taken out of context you might think I have no problem with nude pictures on the net. Not true. It's not my skin, it's theirs. They own it. No one else does. No one has the right to share, distribute, or even look at such things without explicit permission. If a celebrity appears nude in a TV show, film or video, that's by consent and much different from those images being stored in what's supposed to be a secure server.
If you're someone who has looked at these pictures, or who God forbid has copies of them, shame on you. You may as well have stolen them yourself, and if I could, I'd spread your most intimate information--images, financial records, health records, whatever might make you see sense--all over the net. I'd do it gladly, with relish. Where's Anonymous when you really need them, anyway?
Looks like they're working on it...
Monday, October 06, 2014
STUPID! STUPID! WHAP WHAP WHAP!
Yesterday we went to Stratford to see Lily Hopf starring in The Nice Niece 2.
Lily, however, has other ideas, to wit: she's staying right where she is. She's overdue at this point, her mom is proclaiming things like "out, out, damn tot!", and dad is trying to figure out how she got in there so easily but won't come out.
So instead it became a visit with older family, not to mention Alexa, who is adorable as always. She has this little Etch-a-Sketch type drawing toy that she was giving me for a while, asking me to draw a happy face. The same happy face. Over and over again. She never seemed to get tired of it, nor did she tire of running in circles through the house, with me alternately chasing and being chased. "Uncle Ken" is a hit in that house. It's so cool.
And she's well-enough behaved that it's still possible to have adults conversing around her, which is wonderful and a testament to how she's being raised.
We're afraid Lily is going to be the anti-Alexa, a demon-child. I hope for Jim and Ally's sake that this isn't the case, but given the number of angels I've seen with fallen siblings...I don't know.
We got into some pretty good conversation, and Jim announced his Nerf Bat hypothesis. This is a fusion of the philosophies of Bill Engvall and Tim Nutt.
Jim believes that everybody in the world should be given a Nerf bat. Whenever somebody within batting range said or did something stupid, whap! with the bat. Not hard. Just a quick tap to maybe re-arrange your brain matter a bit.
On hearing this, my mind skittered back to childhood and I heard, clear as a bell, the stupid parental questions I used to not be allowed to backtalk replies to. Oh, it was so difficult, sometimes.
Do you want a spanking?
Hell yeah, mom, I'll take two of 'em!
What do you think you're doing in there?
Uh, I know what I'm doing in here...a better question would be, "what do YOU think I'm doing in here?
Or I'd come downstairs at night, all pee-jayed up with teeth brushed and bladder tapped and say:
Good night, Mommy.
And every single time I did that she'd say Are you going to bed?
No, Mom, I'm going out to paint the town red. Where are the car keys?
Of course, you can't take a Nerf bat to your parents, right? Mine would probably have responded with a real bat. But really, there's stupidity everywhere and some of us really could use a visit from Mr. Nerf.
I'm certainly not excluding myself in that. Hell, I should have a retinue of sluggers surrounding me, waiting to whap me one every time I say or do something dumb, because Eva has work to do and her arms would get tired after awhile.
Stupidest things I've ever done? You mean, besides almost drowning in a septic tank? Or besides going in to university for English without the slightest thought as to what I would do with that degree? The first stupidity was by far the most traumatic experience of my life, and the second has had the deepest, widest and longest-lasting implications.
Many of my stupidities come from absent-mindedness. Like the time back in university when I went to class without a critical textbook. This was early in first year, before I realized that the professors read the textbooks to you verbatim and you don't need to be in class. Anyway, I realized halfway to the Arts Building that I didn't have this textbook, so I turned around and went back to my dorm. I unlocked my door, threw my keys and book bag on the bed, retrieved the textbook from my shelves, and spent half an hour looking for the keys I had just had in my hand.
I'm famous for this sort of thing. I took summer school in the summer between grade 10 and 11. No idea why--it sure wasn't my idea to take math, let alone graduate a year early, but that's what I was doing.
It was a hot, hot summer, '88 was. For three weeks the temperature didn't go below 18 at night, and the daytime highs--I still have the diary wherein I wrote all this stuff, for reasons even more inexplicable than my taking math at summer school--were mind-meltingly stumid. (Stinky + humid.)
One day my stepdad decided to meet me at the door when school let out at noon. He didn't bother to tell me this. He should have bothered to tell me this.
I walked out, my brain leaking algebra all over the place. It felt like I was trying to walk through wet gauze. I was very much looking forward to getting on my bike and pedalling home just quickly enough to give my face some kind of breeze.
Psst...kid!
Nobody ever said psst...kid! with anything healthy in mind. Fuck, I was far enough from any school door at this point that I'd be tackled long before I could make it to safety. The only thing to do was to get to my bike and somehow get it unlocked (that was going to be interesting)...I could outrun Ben Johnson on my friggin' bike, steroids or not.
I walked faster.
PSSST! KID!
dead i'm dead i'm dead dead dead thudded in my head with my pulse.
I had my keyring out five paces before the bike rack. In the kind of smooth motion I can normally only manage if I'm drunk, I dropped to one knee, unlocked the bike and pulled it out of the rack while vaulting up on it--all in one motion. A part of me way below the flight/flight reflex was kind of impressed.
KENNY!
OH SHITFUCK HE KNOWS MY NAME I AM SO SO DEAD
Curiosity, that thing that kills cats, forced me to snap a glance over my shoulder as I got my bike moving. A drop of sweat ran into one eye and some quadratic crap ran into the other, and all I saw was a tall guy on what looked like a
JESUS CHRIST HE'S GOT A BIKE TOO TENSPEED NONONONONO
My bike at the time was a Supercycle six-speed with big knobby mountain bike tires. There was no way I could outrace a ten-speed on pavement. No point even trying. I run all kinds of routes through my head, trying to maximize my bike's off-road advantage.
Fuck it, I'll just tear ass across this field and play it by ear from there.
Kenny! It's John!
I wracked my brain for Johns. I couldn't think of a John who might want to beat me up--the only John I knew, really, that summer was my...
John?
And that's when the Nerf bat should have come out.
He rode home with me--thirty five minutes of easy pedalling. By the time we made it home, I think he'd stopped laughing.
I've walked past Eva more than once. If I'm not expecting to see something or someone, I won't see it or him. Everybody glad I don't drive?
And that's just the Head In Clouds Syndrome stupidity. I have other kinds, too--the kind that plagued me this past summer, for instance, that insisted in a very loud and very persuasive voice I was worthless and useless and that I should just --
Never mind, that voice is gone, now. It was pretty stupid while it lasted, though.
I'm still stupid, though. I'm a husband, it goes with the territory. Husbands, you know what I'm talking about, right?
Our first Christmas together, money was rather tight, and we had a $25 budget to spend on each other. At that time in my life, I was still very much certain that anything worth giving to somebody you even liked, let alone loved to pieces, was by definition worth considerably more than $25. In a gesture I'm sure she thought was helpful. she gave me a list of suggestions.
I looked at this list, nonplussed. That wasn't how Christmas worked in my family. I mean, sure, when you were young, you addressed your letter to
SANTA CLAUS
NORTH POLE
CANADA H0H 0H0
with a list of all the stuff you wanted (and why did I never question that? He saw me when I was sleeping and when I was awake and he knew if I'd been bad or good but he didn't know what I wanted for Christmas?)
Anyway, as I was saying, yes, as a kid you wrote Santa, but in my family, at least, my parents knew what I liked/wanted (and later) needed./wanted without me having to write out a list. And if I paid attention, I'd get some ideas for them--but really, I was just supposed to know them well enough to know what to get them. Asking "what do you want for Christmas?" was unthinkable because it meant I didn't know, which meant I didn't care about them enough to know.
Besides, if I bought her something from her stupid list, then she'd know what she was getting. What fun is that? Might as well not even wrap it.
So I got her
a cheap knock-off version of this thing that, for a wonder, I found fo $24.99. The little card that came with it said that in China, dogs symbolized loyalty and unconditional love and blah blah blah this is still the ugliest thing EVER and what were you thinking and I gave you a LIST!
See? A few good whaps would have cleared that right up.
I like Jim's idea, I really do. But I'm a little worried about it. Anybody who's been bulled knows that even Nerf can hurt if it's whipped hard enough at your head. ("Murderball" was taken literally when Kenny was playing.) You give everybody Nerf bats and...I just can't help it...
...I'd be a little nerfous.
Lily, however, has other ideas, to wit: she's staying right where she is. She's overdue at this point, her mom is proclaiming things like "out, out, damn tot!", and dad is trying to figure out how she got in there so easily but won't come out.
So instead it became a visit with older family, not to mention Alexa, who is adorable as always. She has this little Etch-a-Sketch type drawing toy that she was giving me for a while, asking me to draw a happy face. The same happy face. Over and over again. She never seemed to get tired of it, nor did she tire of running in circles through the house, with me alternately chasing and being chased. "Uncle Ken" is a hit in that house. It's so cool.
And she's well-enough behaved that it's still possible to have adults conversing around her, which is wonderful and a testament to how she's being raised.
We're afraid Lily is going to be the anti-Alexa, a demon-child. I hope for Jim and Ally's sake that this isn't the case, but given the number of angels I've seen with fallen siblings...I don't know.
We got into some pretty good conversation, and Jim announced his Nerf Bat hypothesis. This is a fusion of the philosophies of Bill Engvall and Tim Nutt.
Jim believes that everybody in the world should be given a Nerf bat. Whenever somebody within batting range said or did something stupid, whap! with the bat. Not hard. Just a quick tap to maybe re-arrange your brain matter a bit.
On hearing this, my mind skittered back to childhood and I heard, clear as a bell, the stupid parental questions I used to not be allowed to backtalk replies to. Oh, it was so difficult, sometimes.
Do you want a spanking?
Hell yeah, mom, I'll take two of 'em!
What do you think you're doing in there?
Uh, I know what I'm doing in here...a better question would be, "what do YOU think I'm doing in here?
Or I'd come downstairs at night, all pee-jayed up with teeth brushed and bladder tapped and say:
Good night, Mommy.
And every single time I did that she'd say Are you going to bed?
No, Mom, I'm going out to paint the town red. Where are the car keys?
Of course, you can't take a Nerf bat to your parents, right? Mine would probably have responded with a real bat. But really, there's stupidity everywhere and some of us really could use a visit from Mr. Nerf.
I'm certainly not excluding myself in that. Hell, I should have a retinue of sluggers surrounding me, waiting to whap me one every time I say or do something dumb, because Eva has work to do and her arms would get tired after awhile.
Stupidest things I've ever done? You mean, besides almost drowning in a septic tank? Or besides going in to university for English without the slightest thought as to what I would do with that degree? The first stupidity was by far the most traumatic experience of my life, and the second has had the deepest, widest and longest-lasting implications.
Many of my stupidities come from absent-mindedness. Like the time back in university when I went to class without a critical textbook. This was early in first year, before I realized that the professors read the textbooks to you verbatim and you don't need to be in class. Anyway, I realized halfway to the Arts Building that I didn't have this textbook, so I turned around and went back to my dorm. I unlocked my door, threw my keys and book bag on the bed, retrieved the textbook from my shelves, and spent half an hour looking for the keys I had just had in my hand.
I'm famous for this sort of thing. I took summer school in the summer between grade 10 and 11. No idea why--it sure wasn't my idea to take math, let alone graduate a year early, but that's what I was doing.
It was a hot, hot summer, '88 was. For three weeks the temperature didn't go below 18 at night, and the daytime highs--I still have the diary wherein I wrote all this stuff, for reasons even more inexplicable than my taking math at summer school--were mind-meltingly stumid. (Stinky + humid.)
One day my stepdad decided to meet me at the door when school let out at noon. He didn't bother to tell me this. He should have bothered to tell me this.
I walked out, my brain leaking algebra all over the place. It felt like I was trying to walk through wet gauze. I was very much looking forward to getting on my bike and pedalling home just quickly enough to give my face some kind of breeze.
Psst...kid!
Nobody ever said psst...kid! with anything healthy in mind. Fuck, I was far enough from any school door at this point that I'd be tackled long before I could make it to safety. The only thing to do was to get to my bike and somehow get it unlocked (that was going to be interesting)...I could outrun Ben Johnson on my friggin' bike, steroids or not.
I walked faster.
PSSST! KID!
dead i'm dead i'm dead dead dead thudded in my head with my pulse.
I had my keyring out five paces before the bike rack. In the kind of smooth motion I can normally only manage if I'm drunk, I dropped to one knee, unlocked the bike and pulled it out of the rack while vaulting up on it--all in one motion. A part of me way below the flight/flight reflex was kind of impressed.
KENNY!
OH SHITFUCK HE KNOWS MY NAME I AM SO SO DEAD
Curiosity, that thing that kills cats, forced me to snap a glance over my shoulder as I got my bike moving. A drop of sweat ran into one eye and some quadratic crap ran into the other, and all I saw was a tall guy on what looked like a
JESUS CHRIST HE'S GOT A BIKE TOO TENSPEED NONONONONO
My bike at the time was a Supercycle six-speed with big knobby mountain bike tires. There was no way I could outrace a ten-speed on pavement. No point even trying. I run all kinds of routes through my head, trying to maximize my bike's off-road advantage.
Fuck it, I'll just tear ass across this field and play it by ear from there.
Kenny! It's John!
I wracked my brain for Johns. I couldn't think of a John who might want to beat me up--the only John I knew, really, that summer was my...
John?
And that's when the Nerf bat should have come out.
He rode home with me--thirty five minutes of easy pedalling. By the time we made it home, I think he'd stopped laughing.
I've walked past Eva more than once. If I'm not expecting to see something or someone, I won't see it or him. Everybody glad I don't drive?
And that's just the Head In Clouds Syndrome stupidity. I have other kinds, too--the kind that plagued me this past summer, for instance, that insisted in a very loud and very persuasive voice I was worthless and useless and that I should just --
Never mind, that voice is gone, now. It was pretty stupid while it lasted, though.
I'm still stupid, though. I'm a husband, it goes with the territory. Husbands, you know what I'm talking about, right?
Our first Christmas together, money was rather tight, and we had a $25 budget to spend on each other. At that time in my life, I was still very much certain that anything worth giving to somebody you even liked, let alone loved to pieces, was by definition worth considerably more than $25. In a gesture I'm sure she thought was helpful. she gave me a list of suggestions.
I looked at this list, nonplussed. That wasn't how Christmas worked in my family. I mean, sure, when you were young, you addressed your letter to
SANTA CLAUS
NORTH POLE
CANADA H0H 0H0
with a list of all the stuff you wanted (and why did I never question that? He saw me when I was sleeping and when I was awake and he knew if I'd been bad or good but he didn't know what I wanted for Christmas?)
Anyway, as I was saying, yes, as a kid you wrote Santa, but in my family, at least, my parents knew what I liked/wanted (and later) needed./wanted without me having to write out a list. And if I paid attention, I'd get some ideas for them--but really, I was just supposed to know them well enough to know what to get them. Asking "what do you want for Christmas?" was unthinkable because it meant I didn't know, which meant I didn't care about them enough to know.
Besides, if I bought her something from her stupid list, then she'd know what she was getting. What fun is that? Might as well not even wrap it.
So I got her
a cheap knock-off version of this thing that, for a wonder, I found fo $24.99. The little card that came with it said that in China, dogs symbolized loyalty and unconditional love and blah blah blah this is still the ugliest thing EVER and what were you thinking and I gave you a LIST!
See? A few good whaps would have cleared that right up.
I like Jim's idea, I really do. But I'm a little worried about it. Anybody who's been bulled knows that even Nerf can hurt if it's whipped hard enough at your head. ("Murderball" was taken literally when Kenny was playing.) You give everybody Nerf bats and...I just can't help it...
...I'd be a little nerfous.
Friday, October 03, 2014
So We're At War Again
"He's just a peacenik and she's just a warhawk
If I said you were crazy, would you have to fight me?"
--Moxy Früvous, "The Gulf War Song"
So we're at war again.
Yippee.
Over a century of intermittent conflict in that part of the world, not to mention a decade of usually-on-again airstrikes...we've finally made it to the point where more airstrikes are necessary.
I have both peacenik and warhawk friends. My proposed courses of action will offend both sets. Let's just say that this middle way we've embarked (yet again) on is beyond pointless. One look at modern history should spell that out quite clearly.
You know why it doesn't? Because we've lost our taste for war.
The U.S. pretends it still has one--it seems as if the media in that country are never truly happy unless the American military is off bombing people, preferably brown people. But the fact is airstrikes aren't war. Airstrikes look like war, sure: stuff blows up real good, body parts fly everywhere, and if your aim is good you can massacre the enemy without too much chance of getting massacred back. That's become the point of "wars" nowadays--go out there, inflict maximum damage, but get everyone home safe...as if war is actually a school picnic.
"The enemy" sees this hesitation to actually commit Western lives to the conflict...and laughs at it. We're seen as weak. Never mind our overwhelming technological superiority, we're seen as weak because we won't back up our airstrikes with anything meaningful.
Let's go back to the Second World War. That was widely viewed as an existential conflict, a battle to the death between the forces of tyranny and freedom. In that war, airstrikes had two purposes. One was what we would today call terrorism. Both sides engaged in it--the Germans bombed London repeatedly, the Allies basically incinerated Dresden...and of course there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the grandpapa and grandmama of air strikes. (Did you know Hiroshima was purposely left completely unscathed until the Enola Gay, because our side was curious to see just how much damage one nuclear bomb would cause?)
The other purpose of an airstrike used to be support. You might send some planes to drop ordnance and "soften up the target", or you might call in airstrikes to support your actions on the ground.
That's right--on the ground. Because if you truly believe--as many claim to--that the fight with ISIS is a civilizational conflict worth dying for...you put your mouth where your money is, not to mention the rest of you. Airstrikes alone won't win a war, not unless you're willing to recreate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and nobody should be willing to do that. The West hasn't fought a real ground war since Viet Nam--the ghosts of which are still circling uneasily today. The United States managed to win every major battle in that war militarily, while losing the war politically and strategically (Viet Nam went communist after the Paris Peace Accords, as did Laos and Cambodia). Why did the U.S. lose a war in which it won every significant military battle? Several reasons, but the biggest one was public opinion. From the outset, there were many opposed to foreign involvement half a planet away, and the opposition steadily grew as more and more of the 58,000 American casualties came home in body bags. America was relearning a painful truth: war, real war, kills people. What was seen as regrettable but necessary in World War II had become simply unacceptable as the Viet Nam war drew on.
Jump forward to today. Once again the U.S, and now Canada, is involved in a war half a world away. This is properly seen as a battle in a wider war against Islamic extremism that has taken center stage in the aftermath of 9/11. Because the ensuing conflict has been horribly mismanaged--America has a unique talent for picking the wrong proxies in any conflict, it seems--all we've done is create more and more people to take up arms against us.
If you don't believe ISIS poses an existential threat to your way of life, simply dropping a few bombs and smart missiles on them is the simplest way I can think of to make sure they will, eventually. It's funny how this works, but when you hit people, for some weird reason they want to hit you back. I'm not sure why it is that our leaders seem so blind to this simple fact of human nature.
Look, I'm not denying for one second that ISIS is evil. They also have delusions of world domination (though at present they can't even maintain their supply lines and operate two countries over from their base). They are undoubtedly guilty of horrible atrocities.
But if you're going to base your decisions on who and what to go to war with on atrocities, ask yourself why the West has stayed almost completely out of central Africa where millions have been slaughtered. Ask yourself why there seems to be no will to combat the Mexican drug cartels, whose methods of control and intimidation could teach ISIS a thing or two. And then ask yourself, seriously, what threat ISIS poses to Canada or the United States. The great fear I've heard is that they will export terrorism to our shores. Maybe they will and maybe they won't, but surely there are better ways to combat terrorists than to make more of them?
I'm willing to listen to reasons why we should fight ISIS. If we are going to fight, though--let's FIGHT. None of this half-assed drop-a-bomb-on-'em-and-run-away-with-our-contrails-between-our-legs bullshit. I'm all for peace, but if war is necessary, let's show 'em what war is.
Who's with me? Nobody? Didn't think so. Truth is, I don't see ISIS as anything close to a Nazi-level of threat at the moment. They might get that way, though, if we keep poking them. I'll let Moxy Früvous close this out:
"And history seems to agree
That I would fight you, for me
That us would fight them, for we
Is that how it always will be?
If I said you were crazy, would you have to fight me?"
--Moxy Früvous, "The Gulf War Song"
So we're at war again.
Yippee.
Over a century of intermittent conflict in that part of the world, not to mention a decade of usually-on-again airstrikes...we've finally made it to the point where more airstrikes are necessary.
I have both peacenik and warhawk friends. My proposed courses of action will offend both sets. Let's just say that this middle way we've embarked (yet again) on is beyond pointless. One look at modern history should spell that out quite clearly.
You know why it doesn't? Because we've lost our taste for war.
The U.S. pretends it still has one--it seems as if the media in that country are never truly happy unless the American military is off bombing people, preferably brown people. But the fact is airstrikes aren't war. Airstrikes look like war, sure: stuff blows up real good, body parts fly everywhere, and if your aim is good you can massacre the enemy without too much chance of getting massacred back. That's become the point of "wars" nowadays--go out there, inflict maximum damage, but get everyone home safe...as if war is actually a school picnic.
"The enemy" sees this hesitation to actually commit Western lives to the conflict...and laughs at it. We're seen as weak. Never mind our overwhelming technological superiority, we're seen as weak because we won't back up our airstrikes with anything meaningful.
Let's go back to the Second World War. That was widely viewed as an existential conflict, a battle to the death between the forces of tyranny and freedom. In that war, airstrikes had two purposes. One was what we would today call terrorism. Both sides engaged in it--the Germans bombed London repeatedly, the Allies basically incinerated Dresden...and of course there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the grandpapa and grandmama of air strikes. (Did you know Hiroshima was purposely left completely unscathed until the Enola Gay, because our side was curious to see just how much damage one nuclear bomb would cause?)
The other purpose of an airstrike used to be support. You might send some planes to drop ordnance and "soften up the target", or you might call in airstrikes to support your actions on the ground.
That's right--on the ground. Because if you truly believe--as many claim to--that the fight with ISIS is a civilizational conflict worth dying for...you put your mouth where your money is, not to mention the rest of you. Airstrikes alone won't win a war, not unless you're willing to recreate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and nobody should be willing to do that. The West hasn't fought a real ground war since Viet Nam--the ghosts of which are still circling uneasily today. The United States managed to win every major battle in that war militarily, while losing the war politically and strategically (Viet Nam went communist after the Paris Peace Accords, as did Laos and Cambodia). Why did the U.S. lose a war in which it won every significant military battle? Several reasons, but the biggest one was public opinion. From the outset, there were many opposed to foreign involvement half a planet away, and the opposition steadily grew as more and more of the 58,000 American casualties came home in body bags. America was relearning a painful truth: war, real war, kills people. What was seen as regrettable but necessary in World War II had become simply unacceptable as the Viet Nam war drew on.
Jump forward to today. Once again the U.S, and now Canada, is involved in a war half a world away. This is properly seen as a battle in a wider war against Islamic extremism that has taken center stage in the aftermath of 9/11. Because the ensuing conflict has been horribly mismanaged--America has a unique talent for picking the wrong proxies in any conflict, it seems--all we've done is create more and more people to take up arms against us.
If you don't believe ISIS poses an existential threat to your way of life, simply dropping a few bombs and smart missiles on them is the simplest way I can think of to make sure they will, eventually. It's funny how this works, but when you hit people, for some weird reason they want to hit you back. I'm not sure why it is that our leaders seem so blind to this simple fact of human nature.
Look, I'm not denying for one second that ISIS is evil. They also have delusions of world domination (though at present they can't even maintain their supply lines and operate two countries over from their base). They are undoubtedly guilty of horrible atrocities.
But if you're going to base your decisions on who and what to go to war with on atrocities, ask yourself why the West has stayed almost completely out of central Africa where millions have been slaughtered. Ask yourself why there seems to be no will to combat the Mexican drug cartels, whose methods of control and intimidation could teach ISIS a thing or two. And then ask yourself, seriously, what threat ISIS poses to Canada or the United States. The great fear I've heard is that they will export terrorism to our shores. Maybe they will and maybe they won't, but surely there are better ways to combat terrorists than to make more of them?
I'm willing to listen to reasons why we should fight ISIS. If we are going to fight, though--let's FIGHT. None of this half-assed drop-a-bomb-on-'em-and-run-away-with-our-contrails-between-our-legs bullshit. I'm all for peace, but if war is necessary, let's show 'em what war is.
Who's with me? Nobody? Didn't think so. Truth is, I don't see ISIS as anything close to a Nazi-level of threat at the moment. They might get that way, though, if we keep poking them. I'll let Moxy Früvous close this out:
"And history seems to agree
That I would fight you, for me
That us would fight them, for we
Is that how it always will be?
Thursday, October 02, 2014
Thoughts on a Scary Topic
...Ebola.
It's funny, you know. When it comes to my own world, I'm far too quick to read doom and gloom into it. In the wider world I strive for balance. Of late--meaning through this Breadbin's duration--that has meant, more often than not, wading through gloomy waters, for the simple reason that our society has up until very recently been afflicted with a case of irrational optimism. Roughly two hundred years spent vacuuming up ancient sunlight has blinded our civilization to certain home truths: one, we live on a finite earth; two, we are consuming finite resources on that earth at a rate commensurate with one and a half earth's worth of population; three and most pertinently, the last ten or so generations of humanity are a huge anomaly in the historical record of our species (which stretches back some 5300 generations).
There are many people who believe that what has happened to information will soon happen to power, i.e., it will become virtually unlimited and trivially cheap. So help me, I've actually had someone point out how little energy their Android uses and how much it does with that little energy as proof that we are becoming super-efficient. This is an example of incredibly blinkered thinking.
Yes, your phone uses almost nothing...in and of itself. But the internet you access with it?
A lot. Up to a tenth of all the electricity produced, globally, in fact. Data centers use as much energy as small cities, and there are hundreds of thousands of data centers in the world. Information may long to be free, but the electricity is not cheap.
There have been many advances in things like solar power over the years. None of them really mean a whole hell of a lot, for many reasons, but the biggest one is ERoEI: Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Theoretically, the sun provides us with more energy than we could ever use. Reality intrudes, however, when you look at all the energy you have to expend to harvest solar energy. Look at this chart. It really tells a couple of tales. One, you'll note that hydroelectric power is still the best return on energy invested out of the bunch; coal isn't far behind, because we largely abandoned large-scale coal (at least in the West) when oil supplanted it. Oil used to have a truly remarkable ERoEI--you'll note from the chart that it is shrinking, and the rate at which it is shrinking is accelerating.
Note this does not mean we're going to "run out of oil". We will, however, and sooner than you think, run out of cheap oil. There will come a point when oil's ERoEI is 1:1--the energy you put into the system of extraction equals the energy you get out of it and no more.
At that point, we're fucked. Unless we figure out how to run our server farms on hydro and coal, Solar ain't gonna cut it, I'm sorry to say.
What does any of this have to do with Ebola? I'm getting there. The point is to try and get you, dear reader, to think systemically. Our world is so hellaciously complicated and we feel so infinitesimally small in it, that it's hard to even comprehend the various interlocking systems that make it up. Quite understandably, we tend to think only of the little part of the world we can see and hold. That part, not-so-coincidentally, is made up mostly of machines: the rise of oil has allowed us to outsource first our physical labour, and later our thinking.
But the world is not a machine, nor even a group of them: it is instead a living system.
Our entire culture is oriented toward machines, not living systems, and what defines a machine is precisely that it’s meant to do exactly what it’s told and nothing else. Push this button, and that happens; turn this switch, and something else happens; pull this trigger, and the buffalo falls dead. We’re taught to think of the world as though that same logic controlled its responses to our actions, and then get blindsided when it acts like a whole system instead.
--John Michael Greer
I don't often directly quote the Archdruid whose report you'll find in my sidebar, mostly because once I get started doing that it's kind of hard to stop. If you don't read him...you should. His mind is both wide and deep and even if you disagree with his thinking on any issue, you'll really have to think to articulate why.
If you reframe your thoughts of the earth so that it and everything in and on it constitutes a single, interconnected living system...within that framework it's all too easy to see our civilization, which is not in harmony with nature in any meaningful way, as living on borrowed time. Periodic pandemics are part of the natural order of things and we're overdue for one. Perhaps Ebola is it.
I can hear the scoffing from here. "Ebola is a western African problem, nothing we have to worry about here." I've been hearing that since February. (The underlying, totally unconscious racism inherent in that statement is truly appalling: you'll never hear anyone say it's only a bunch of niggers, but they may as well. How do you think our media would be covering this Ebola outbreak were it centered somewhere in Europe, or in Florida, maybe? Or California. Do you think spokespeople would get away with saying it's really only a Californian problem, the rest of us don't need to concern ourselves with it?)
"Ebola hasn't killed very many people." Strictly speaking, true. Malaria has killed more people since the weekend than Ebola has in the entirety of its known existence, and you don't hear daily malaria updates. But that's partly because malarial infection rates are close to a constant and the rate of Ebola infection is doubling every twenty days. At that rate, the projected number of cases by January, 2015 will be 1.4 million. Probably not a good idea to do the math after that, not if you want to hold on to your sanity.
"But Ebola is only spread through contact with bodily fluids over a comparatively short period of time". Again, true, and thank Whatever for that. This virus is too virulent for its own good...it kills people before they get a chance to infect lots more people.
Here's the thing, though. By now I'm sure you've heard that a man infected with Ebola waltzed through a Dallas airpot, cha-cha'd into a local hospital, was promptly misdiagnosed and sent on his way with some pointless antibiotics, only to find himself back in hospital a few days later and very sick indeed. Nobody asked him until comically late in this dance routine just where he'd come from, either at the airport or the hospital, and ha-ha, sources now tell us he's come in contact with about a hundred individuals. That they know of.
Again, the chance of actually infecting these people is pretty low. They could have shaken his hand, even given him a hug, without being at risk. And now he's safely in isolation.
What if he didn't get back to the hospital in time?
What if there's another breach like the ones at the airport and the hospital? Really, that's just shoddy. A man presents at a hospital with Ebola-like symptoms and nobody thinks to ask him if he's been anywhere near the outbreak lately? That kind of nonchalance could conceivably get people killed.
But the thing that really gives me pause is the Hajj.
The Hajj is the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. It is mandatory if you're one of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. Not everybody makes that trip each year, of course, but a sizeable fraction of them do--and then they go home again, spreading anything they may have picked up with them. Completely unknowingly, in the case of Ebola: its incubation period is between 3 and 21 days, meaning you might contract the disease and wander all over the place for up to three weeks before you get sick. It's important to note you're not contagious during this period...but it does suggest that cases of Ebola will start popping up like popcorn all overt the world right about soon.
But Ken! Guinea and Liberia are nowhere near Saudi Arabia!
No, they aren't. The major outbreak is on the other side of the continent, not even close to Mecca. But Sudan is, and over a month ago Sudan banned all reporting of Ebola. Why? Who knows. South Sudan is listed as among the countries dealing with the contagion. Sudan isn't. But there's no media reporting in Sudan, and there hasn't been for over a month. I find that highly suspicious.
Per Wikipedia, 97% of the population of Sudan is Muslim and thus must take the Hajj at least once in their life as a condition of their faith. It's not far, not for them.
I'm not saying there is a seething mass of Ebola-in-waiting descending on Mecca as we speak. I'm saying it only takes a few cases to cause some serious disruption. And as for our thinking that our high tech health care systems over here can deal with an Ebola outbreak? Not on any serious scale, they can't. Most hospitals don't have adequate isolation wards to deal with anything like this. And Dr. Human Error seems to be everywhere, just when he's not needed. Granted it's Fox News drumming up fear, but North America's Patient Zero supposedly puked "all over the place" on his way to hospital (for the second time). Lovely news. Just lovely.
I am not telling everybody it's time to PANIC!!!! I'm suggesting that you ignore things like this at your peril: that the insulating sense of superiority we have cultivated here in the West is largely illusory. The earth is a living system, after all, and living systems have immune systems of their own.
It's funny, you know. When it comes to my own world, I'm far too quick to read doom and gloom into it. In the wider world I strive for balance. Of late--meaning through this Breadbin's duration--that has meant, more often than not, wading through gloomy waters, for the simple reason that our society has up until very recently been afflicted with a case of irrational optimism. Roughly two hundred years spent vacuuming up ancient sunlight has blinded our civilization to certain home truths: one, we live on a finite earth; two, we are consuming finite resources on that earth at a rate commensurate with one and a half earth's worth of population; three and most pertinently, the last ten or so generations of humanity are a huge anomaly in the historical record of our species (which stretches back some 5300 generations).
There are many people who believe that what has happened to information will soon happen to power, i.e., it will become virtually unlimited and trivially cheap. So help me, I've actually had someone point out how little energy their Android uses and how much it does with that little energy as proof that we are becoming super-efficient. This is an example of incredibly blinkered thinking.
Yes, your phone uses almost nothing...in and of itself. But the internet you access with it?
There have been many advances in things like solar power over the years. None of them really mean a whole hell of a lot, for many reasons, but the biggest one is ERoEI: Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Theoretically, the sun provides us with more energy than we could ever use. Reality intrudes, however, when you look at all the energy you have to expend to harvest solar energy. Look at this chart. It really tells a couple of tales. One, you'll note that hydroelectric power is still the best return on energy invested out of the bunch; coal isn't far behind, because we largely abandoned large-scale coal (at least in the West) when oil supplanted it. Oil used to have a truly remarkable ERoEI--you'll note from the chart that it is shrinking, and the rate at which it is shrinking is accelerating.
Note this does not mean we're going to "run out of oil". We will, however, and sooner than you think, run out of cheap oil. There will come a point when oil's ERoEI is 1:1--the energy you put into the system of extraction equals the energy you get out of it and no more.
At that point, we're fucked. Unless we figure out how to run our server farms on hydro and coal, Solar ain't gonna cut it, I'm sorry to say.
What does any of this have to do with Ebola? I'm getting there. The point is to try and get you, dear reader, to think systemically. Our world is so hellaciously complicated and we feel so infinitesimally small in it, that it's hard to even comprehend the various interlocking systems that make it up. Quite understandably, we tend to think only of the little part of the world we can see and hold. That part, not-so-coincidentally, is made up mostly of machines: the rise of oil has allowed us to outsource first our physical labour, and later our thinking.
But the world is not a machine, nor even a group of them: it is instead a living system.
Our entire culture is oriented toward machines, not living systems, and what defines a machine is precisely that it’s meant to do exactly what it’s told and nothing else. Push this button, and that happens; turn this switch, and something else happens; pull this trigger, and the buffalo falls dead. We’re taught to think of the world as though that same logic controlled its responses to our actions, and then get blindsided when it acts like a whole system instead.
--John Michael Greer
I don't often directly quote the Archdruid whose report you'll find in my sidebar, mostly because once I get started doing that it's kind of hard to stop. If you don't read him...you should. His mind is both wide and deep and even if you disagree with his thinking on any issue, you'll really have to think to articulate why.
If you reframe your thoughts of the earth so that it and everything in and on it constitutes a single, interconnected living system...within that framework it's all too easy to see our civilization, which is not in harmony with nature in any meaningful way, as living on borrowed time. Periodic pandemics are part of the natural order of things and we're overdue for one. Perhaps Ebola is it.
I can hear the scoffing from here. "Ebola is a western African problem, nothing we have to worry about here." I've been hearing that since February. (The underlying, totally unconscious racism inherent in that statement is truly appalling: you'll never hear anyone say it's only a bunch of niggers, but they may as well. How do you think our media would be covering this Ebola outbreak were it centered somewhere in Europe, or in Florida, maybe? Or California. Do you think spokespeople would get away with saying it's really only a Californian problem, the rest of us don't need to concern ourselves with it?)
"Ebola hasn't killed very many people." Strictly speaking, true. Malaria has killed more people since the weekend than Ebola has in the entirety of its known existence, and you don't hear daily malaria updates. But that's partly because malarial infection rates are close to a constant and the rate of Ebola infection is doubling every twenty days. At that rate, the projected number of cases by January, 2015 will be 1.4 million. Probably not a good idea to do the math after that, not if you want to hold on to your sanity.
"But Ebola is only spread through contact with bodily fluids over a comparatively short period of time". Again, true, and thank Whatever for that. This virus is too virulent for its own good...it kills people before they get a chance to infect lots more people.
Here's the thing, though. By now I'm sure you've heard that a man infected with Ebola waltzed through a Dallas airpot, cha-cha'd into a local hospital, was promptly misdiagnosed and sent on his way with some pointless antibiotics, only to find himself back in hospital a few days later and very sick indeed. Nobody asked him until comically late in this dance routine just where he'd come from, either at the airport or the hospital, and ha-ha, sources now tell us he's come in contact with about a hundred individuals. That they know of.
Again, the chance of actually infecting these people is pretty low. They could have shaken his hand, even given him a hug, without being at risk. And now he's safely in isolation.
What if he didn't get back to the hospital in time?
What if there's another breach like the ones at the airport and the hospital? Really, that's just shoddy. A man presents at a hospital with Ebola-like symptoms and nobody thinks to ask him if he's been anywhere near the outbreak lately? That kind of nonchalance could conceivably get people killed.
But the thing that really gives me pause is the Hajj.
The Hajj is the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. It is mandatory if you're one of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. Not everybody makes that trip each year, of course, but a sizeable fraction of them do--and then they go home again, spreading anything they may have picked up with them. Completely unknowingly, in the case of Ebola: its incubation period is between 3 and 21 days, meaning you might contract the disease and wander all over the place for up to three weeks before you get sick. It's important to note you're not contagious during this period...but it does suggest that cases of Ebola will start popping up like popcorn all overt the world right about soon.
But Ken! Guinea and Liberia are nowhere near Saudi Arabia!
No, they aren't. The major outbreak is on the other side of the continent, not even close to Mecca. But Sudan is, and over a month ago Sudan banned all reporting of Ebola. Why? Who knows. South Sudan is listed as among the countries dealing with the contagion. Sudan isn't. But there's no media reporting in Sudan, and there hasn't been for over a month. I find that highly suspicious.
Per Wikipedia, 97% of the population of Sudan is Muslim and thus must take the Hajj at least once in their life as a condition of their faith. It's not far, not for them.
I'm not saying there is a seething mass of Ebola-in-waiting descending on Mecca as we speak. I'm saying it only takes a few cases to cause some serious disruption. And as for our thinking that our high tech health care systems over here can deal with an Ebola outbreak? Not on any serious scale, they can't. Most hospitals don't have adequate isolation wards to deal with anything like this. And Dr. Human Error seems to be everywhere, just when he's not needed. Granted it's Fox News drumming up fear, but North America's Patient Zero supposedly puked "all over the place" on his way to hospital (for the second time). Lovely news. Just lovely.
I am not telling everybody it's time to PANIC!!!! I'm suggesting that you ignore things like this at your peril: that the insulating sense of superiority we have cultivated here in the West is largely illusory. The earth is a living system, after all, and living systems have immune systems of their own.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Full Disclosure
We weren't going to make it to see Craig this time.
My friend Craig--professional trumpeter, music-man and all-around wonderful person--was performing in The Addams Family at the Grand Theatre in London. Since he lives in London, this is what he'd doubtless refer to as a "preferred gig", a run that comes complete with seeing his wife and son every morning and going home for a nap between matinee and evening performances if he wants to.
Since I don't live in London, actually seeing this performance looked unlikely. At almost the last minute a Saturday-sized hole in our schedule opened up and, Craig re-jigged things so we could attend with his family, and...what better way to spend a Saturday night?
I was going into this one almost blind. My cultural tapestry is riddled with holes you could drive a truck through: one of them is The Addams Family. The first show was before my time; the second one is background nattering every once in a while, not because Eva watches it, exactly, but because it's on one of the channels she watches. (My wife is a strange person, as I think I have made clear). There are very few shows that manage to snag my attention and that hasn't been one of them.
No, my only real exposure to the Addams Family comes by way of the most profitable pinball table of all time. I was an aspiring wizard once: if you ever wondered how it's possible for a man to go into first year university with ten grand after all expenses were paid, and come out stone flat broke, without doing drugs of any kind--that was one reason. I bet I spent at least five hundred bucks in quarters that year. At least.
Anyway, after a straight-out-of-first-year-university supper at Burger King at Oxford and Highbury--and we only ate there because we couldn't find the Swiss Chalet that was signed and which I sorta-kinda remembered being on Highbury someplace--we found our way to Craig and Nicole's. Oh, the perils of navigating a once-familiar city that is no longer half as familiar as you kid yourself into thinking it is. Very soon it was time to head downtown, to the Grand Theatre.
I hadn't been in the Grand since Agnes of God in...holy crap, Google says 1985. Grade seven, that would have been. It doesn't seem to have changed much. We sat second row balcony and the place was packed.
As Eva and I perused the program waiting for the house lights to dim, I confess--full disclosure--I was a little chagrined. I'd understood that the show was this year's rendition of the High School Project but hadn't fully grasped that everyone on stage and almost everybody offstage was, in fact, a high school student. Craig himself was mentoring a tenth grade trumpeter in the pit (there was also a student violinist); the cast and crew hailed from all of the Catholic and most of the public secondary schools in London and area. (Nobody from my two London high schools, but a couple from my actual alma mater, Ingersoll District C.I., which raised my eyebrows a bit.) They put on one full production on the main stage each fall and one springtime show in the smaller McManus theatre, and it really is a high school musical. They're overseen, of course, but cast and crew are all kids.
Eva and I sat there, in the middle of an audience full of mostly family and friends of the performers, and felt --again, full disclosure--a bit put off. I've seen high school productions. Been in a few of them. Not to put anyone down, but...unless you're a friend or family, you're not likely to appreciate them overmuch.
So I thought to myself. Then the curtain went up.
I'm not going to tell you that everybody gave a stellar performance. That would be a lie, and lies just get you in trouble...one of the morals of this musical. But there were several real standouts--the female cast in particular, a couple of which have a future in theatre that could be their present at this point. The dance numbers were well done, as was the stagecraft, and you couldn't help realizing what talented kids can do given the run of a full professional theatre.
The play itself was creative, with pop culture references scattered throughout. Truth be told, I listen to these things more than I watch them...the music was really impressive, and challenging. Craig's an old hand at musical theatre scores at this point, and was, as always, fantastic. His second was great, too, for fifteen, and almost great enough I could drop the qualifier. Craig has been playing trumpet since he was knee high to a valve and he agreed with me, afterwards.
Listening to Craig at these things is going to become an expensive hobby, I can tell. First Cabaret and now The Addams Family...and somehow I think whatever I see next, iTunes will have the Broadway recording of as well.
Some of the music really spoke to me:
Move toward the darkness
Don't avoid despair
Only at our weakest
can we learn what's fair
When you face your nightmares
Then you'll know what's real
Move toward the darkness and feel
Full disclosure ...I had a great time. Thanks for the opportunity, Craig. Looking forward to the next one.
My friend Craig--professional trumpeter, music-man and all-around wonderful person--was performing in The Addams Family at the Grand Theatre in London. Since he lives in London, this is what he'd doubtless refer to as a "preferred gig", a run that comes complete with seeing his wife and son every morning and going home for a nap between matinee and evening performances if he wants to.
Since I don't live in London, actually seeing this performance looked unlikely. At almost the last minute a Saturday-sized hole in our schedule opened up and, Craig re-jigged things so we could attend with his family, and...what better way to spend a Saturday night?
I was going into this one almost blind. My cultural tapestry is riddled with holes you could drive a truck through: one of them is The Addams Family. The first show was before my time; the second one is background nattering every once in a while, not because Eva watches it, exactly, but because it's on one of the channels she watches. (My wife is a strange person, as I think I have made clear). There are very few shows that manage to snag my attention and that hasn't been one of them.
No, my only real exposure to the Addams Family comes by way of the most profitable pinball table of all time. I was an aspiring wizard once: if you ever wondered how it's possible for a man to go into first year university with ten grand after all expenses were paid, and come out stone flat broke, without doing drugs of any kind--that was one reason. I bet I spent at least five hundred bucks in quarters that year. At least.
Anyway, after a straight-out-of-first-year-university supper at Burger King at Oxford and Highbury--and we only ate there because we couldn't find the Swiss Chalet that was signed and which I sorta-kinda remembered being on Highbury someplace--we found our way to Craig and Nicole's. Oh, the perils of navigating a once-familiar city that is no longer half as familiar as you kid yourself into thinking it is. Very soon it was time to head downtown, to the Grand Theatre.
I hadn't been in the Grand since Agnes of God in...holy crap, Google says 1985. Grade seven, that would have been. It doesn't seem to have changed much. We sat second row balcony and the place was packed.
As Eva and I perused the program waiting for the house lights to dim, I confess--full disclosure--I was a little chagrined. I'd understood that the show was this year's rendition of the High School Project but hadn't fully grasped that everyone on stage and almost everybody offstage was, in fact, a high school student. Craig himself was mentoring a tenth grade trumpeter in the pit (there was also a student violinist); the cast and crew hailed from all of the Catholic and most of the public secondary schools in London and area. (Nobody from my two London high schools, but a couple from my actual alma mater, Ingersoll District C.I., which raised my eyebrows a bit.) They put on one full production on the main stage each fall and one springtime show in the smaller McManus theatre, and it really is a high school musical. They're overseen, of course, but cast and crew are all kids.
Eva and I sat there, in the middle of an audience full of mostly family and friends of the performers, and felt --again, full disclosure--a bit put off. I've seen high school productions. Been in a few of them. Not to put anyone down, but...unless you're a friend or family, you're not likely to appreciate them overmuch.
So I thought to myself. Then the curtain went up.
I'm not going to tell you that everybody gave a stellar performance. That would be a lie, and lies just get you in trouble...one of the morals of this musical. But there were several real standouts--the female cast in particular, a couple of which have a future in theatre that could be their present at this point. The dance numbers were well done, as was the stagecraft, and you couldn't help realizing what talented kids can do given the run of a full professional theatre.
The play itself was creative, with pop culture references scattered throughout. Truth be told, I listen to these things more than I watch them...the music was really impressive, and challenging. Craig's an old hand at musical theatre scores at this point, and was, as always, fantastic. His second was great, too, for fifteen, and almost great enough I could drop the qualifier. Craig has been playing trumpet since he was knee high to a valve and he agreed with me, afterwards.
Listening to Craig at these things is going to become an expensive hobby, I can tell. First Cabaret and now The Addams Family...and somehow I think whatever I see next, iTunes will have the Broadway recording of as well.
Some of the music really spoke to me:
Move toward the darkness
Don't avoid despair
Only at our weakest
can we learn what's fair
When you face your nightmares
Then you'll know what's real
Move toward the darkness and feel
Full disclosure ...I had a great time. Thanks for the opportunity, Craig. Looking forward to the next one.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Trigger Warning!
TRIGGER WARNING: The following trigger warning will mention several triggers. The mere sight of these words is toxic to some people, and therefore those people should stop reading now and go to bed. Unless something really awful happened to them in a bed once, in which case I apologize for not posting a trigger warning about the word "bed". I am sincerely sorry for any offence I may have caused and I will undergo sensitivity training forthwith.
TRIGGER WARNING: The word "rape" will appear in this post more than once. So will the words "gay", "trans", "man", "woman", and, oh, yeah, "polyamory"--trust me, that last one's there for a good reason, even if I can't figure out what that reason is--and if any of those pixel-patterns are traumatic for you, please retire to your safe space at once.
------------------
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
-------------------
Polyamory has come a long way since the early nineties when the word was coined. I only need look at my own coming-out process for proof of that.
Coming out of any closet is a scary proposition. Announcing to the world that you are different, and not just different but proudly, defiantly different--who wouldn't feel butterflies? And yet, for me at least, the reactions have been almost universally positive. Not one friend disowned me. Nobody told me that I was to keep my mind and my hands off his wife or girlfriend. Many people were excited and happy for me; many others were carefully neutral, which amounts to the same. I only fielded a couple of viscerally negative reactions and even they weren't as negative as they might have been.
Anyone who has no idea what I'm talking about--go here and check this out.
I was prepared for much worse. Misunderstandings still abound about what it means to be poly--hell, the community itself has half a hundred working definitions, which doesn't help. But the rest of the world is apt to miss the common threads of honesty, trust and transparency that run through all those definitions. They're also unlikely to understand that "loving many" doesn't mean "desiring everyone"--in that way, poly is a lot like bisexuality. Regardless, I didn't face anything I couldn't handle. Could be that I wrote my coming-out post well enough to sufficiently lessen people's concerns. Could be that I'm just blessed with very good friends. I lean towards the latter explanation, myself.
My friends are as understanding as they can be--much thanks--but it's critical that people in a fledgling community band together, and so I have begun to seek out other poly people. Searching them out online is easiest: us polys don't t generally go around waving flags.
To that end, I joined one open international forum that has a few hundred Canadians on it, as well as a closed group on Facebook. And it's this Facebook group that has triggered (sorry) this post.
Closed groups are invite only: you click "Join Group" and wait for an admin to admit you. It took about twelve hours before I got my invitation. In that invitation was an admonition to read and comment on the rules thread before posting or commenting on any other thread--the Facebook equivalent of an end user license agreement.
This one was surprisingly long. There were more than two full screens, not just of text, but of text with links to more text--"Thou shalt not do such-and-such" and here's why.
It was immediately clear that this group is heavily moderated. The consequences for disobeying any of their rules were instant banishment and removal of the offending content. Moderation is a good thing in internet forums...in moderation. You want to keep the trolls down to a dull roar and combat the spam-bots. But this went way beyond anything that could be reasonably expected...by me, at any rate.
First rule: no cruising. Well, that's perfectly acceptable--I'm here to talk about polyamory with like-minded people and, well, yeah, meet some, for online values of "meet". I've said repeatedly that polyamory isn't about sex and "cruising' is the last thing on my mind. Okay, that's fine--so are all the sub-rules to this rule--no unsolicited friend requests, no 'stalking' and so on.
Second rule: treat everyone with respect. Well, yeah. Unless I'm treated otherwise, respect online is my watchword. Okay, so I agree to all this, I'm ready to join up, right?
Not even close.
The third rule was "do not put down anyone's polyamory". Okay, I have a wee problem here. I know that the monogamous world is full of people who think polyamory is a symptom of the moral decay of the universe, and poly people are exceeding wary (and weary) of being told they are evil degenerates. Further, there are many possible polyamorous configurations, any of which may work (or not) for the people involved, and just because you're in a polyfidelitous triad doesn't mean the non-hierarchial polycule across town is doing it wrong; and neither is the solopoly girl in the next town over, and for those of you who think I just lapsed into Martian, there's an exhaustive glossary here, which you are under no obligation to look at as it's tangential to my point.
My point being there are lots of right ways to do poly-there are also ways that are very, very wrong. (pdf) And if I see somebody screwing up, or about to screw up, their relationship and hurt any number of people including themselves, you're damn right I'm going to call them on it.
Moving on.
"Check your privilege". So help me, I had to look that up using the link provided, not because I had no idea what white privilege or male privilege or hetero privilege was, but because I couldn't figure out what the hell any of that had to do with polyamory. No matter, there would be zero tolerance for posts exhibiting privilege--they and their posters would be forcibly removed.
"You are not allowed to discuss Dan Savage in this forum". Wait, say what? Dan Savage is--well, I won't say he's a hero of mine, but I respect him highly, both for his It Gets Better Project and for his humorous, earthy and usually dead-on advice column. Still, maybe there's something I don't know about him, some awful thing he did that makes him persona non grata. Better click the helpful link to find out what it is.
Oh dear Gawd.
Repeated Use of the 'T' Word--spelled "t****y" on the site, because "tranny" for "transexual" is obviously grossly insensitive. Clap the man in stocks. He was also berated for his "sex-positivity", which led one woman to feel she could not say no to any sexual request. I've been reading Savage Love almost since its inception and I can state with absolute assurance that Dan Savage understands and respects people's right to say "no" to anything they are uncomfortable with.
There are a large number of other gripes, all of which have to do with Dan Savage's opinions that somebody obviously disagreed with. How sad, that somebody's response to an opinion they disagree with is to try to remove it from their sight. I just bet the next rule is going to be about
"You must post trigger warnings if you discuss anything offensive or traumatic. This is a safe space. Failure to do so upon request will result in immediate banishment and removal of the offensive content."
Sigh.
Okay, I'd better get my feelings clear out front here. If you have been raped, abused, assaulted, bullied, exploited or hurt in any way at all, I'm here to lend as much support as I can give. I have been through my own dark hells, and I empathize with those most of you who have been in hell--or who are still there, for that matter. I care. I really do. Often too much--it's a failing of mine. If you suffered something traumatic, and you are beset by flashbacks and other personal demons because of it--please, seek the help you desperately need and make steps towards healing. I'll help as best I can.
But I can't make it didn't happen.
I can't assure you that from this moment on you're never going to be hurt again and I certainly can't
remove the trauma and all its associated words from your sight. At some point you have to--ahem--suck it up, buttercup. As bad as whatever you went through was, you are not alone in your hurt and you are not entitled to live off it indefinitely.
I've longed for warnings myself--usually when somebody posts one of those horrific animal-abuse stories on Facebook "to raise awareness"--gee, thanks, I knew bad shit happens to animals already and I didn't need the visual reminder. And I would also expect some kind of warning before a graphic image or description is displayed. But what any of that would be doing in a forum dedicated to multiple committed loving relationships is a mystery for the ages. Apparently there's so much of it in there that the mods can't deal with it on a case-by-case basis but instead have to post extensive warnings against it and require strict compliance as a condition of joining.
It's not that I want to go out there and deliberately offend, let alone hurt, anyone. It's that I feel very much like these kind of restrictions make it impossible for an honest, frank discussion on anything at all. If you are so terrified of being offended and hurt that you have to remove all possibility of either--what, pray tell, are you doing on the internet?
\
TRIGGER WARNING: The word "rape" will appear in this post more than once. So will the words "gay", "trans", "man", "woman", and, oh, yeah, "polyamory"--trust me, that last one's there for a good reason, even if I can't figure out what that reason is--and if any of those pixel-patterns are traumatic for you, please retire to your safe space at once.
------------------
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
-------------------
Polyamory has come a long way since the early nineties when the word was coined. I only need look at my own coming-out process for proof of that.
Coming out of any closet is a scary proposition. Announcing to the world that you are different, and not just different but proudly, defiantly different--who wouldn't feel butterflies? And yet, for me at least, the reactions have been almost universally positive. Not one friend disowned me. Nobody told me that I was to keep my mind and my hands off his wife or girlfriend. Many people were excited and happy for me; many others were carefully neutral, which amounts to the same. I only fielded a couple of viscerally negative reactions and even they weren't as negative as they might have been.
Anyone who has no idea what I'm talking about--go here and check this out.
I was prepared for much worse. Misunderstandings still abound about what it means to be poly--hell, the community itself has half a hundred working definitions, which doesn't help. But the rest of the world is apt to miss the common threads of honesty, trust and transparency that run through all those definitions. They're also unlikely to understand that "loving many" doesn't mean "desiring everyone"--in that way, poly is a lot like bisexuality. Regardless, I didn't face anything I couldn't handle. Could be that I wrote my coming-out post well enough to sufficiently lessen people's concerns. Could be that I'm just blessed with very good friends. I lean towards the latter explanation, myself.
My friends are as understanding as they can be--much thanks--but it's critical that people in a fledgling community band together, and so I have begun to seek out other poly people. Searching them out online is easiest: us polys don't t generally go around waving flags.
To that end, I joined one open international forum that has a few hundred Canadians on it, as well as a closed group on Facebook. And it's this Facebook group that has triggered (sorry) this post.
Closed groups are invite only: you click "Join Group" and wait for an admin to admit you. It took about twelve hours before I got my invitation. In that invitation was an admonition to read and comment on the rules thread before posting or commenting on any other thread--the Facebook equivalent of an end user license agreement.
This one was surprisingly long. There were more than two full screens, not just of text, but of text with links to more text--"Thou shalt not do such-and-such" and here's why.
It was immediately clear that this group is heavily moderated. The consequences for disobeying any of their rules were instant banishment and removal of the offending content. Moderation is a good thing in internet forums...in moderation. You want to keep the trolls down to a dull roar and combat the spam-bots. But this went way beyond anything that could be reasonably expected...by me, at any rate.
First rule: no cruising. Well, that's perfectly acceptable--I'm here to talk about polyamory with like-minded people and, well, yeah, meet some, for online values of "meet". I've said repeatedly that polyamory isn't about sex and "cruising' is the last thing on my mind. Okay, that's fine--so are all the sub-rules to this rule--no unsolicited friend requests, no 'stalking' and so on.
Second rule: treat everyone with respect. Well, yeah. Unless I'm treated otherwise, respect online is my watchword. Okay, so I agree to all this, I'm ready to join up, right?
Not even close.
The third rule was "do not put down anyone's polyamory". Okay, I have a wee problem here. I know that the monogamous world is full of people who think polyamory is a symptom of the moral decay of the universe, and poly people are exceeding wary (and weary) of being told they are evil degenerates. Further, there are many possible polyamorous configurations, any of which may work (or not) for the people involved, and just because you're in a polyfidelitous triad doesn't mean the non-hierarchial polycule across town is doing it wrong; and neither is the solopoly girl in the next town over, and for those of you who think I just lapsed into Martian, there's an exhaustive glossary here, which you are under no obligation to look at as it's tangential to my point.
My point being there are lots of right ways to do poly-there are also ways that are very, very wrong. (pdf) And if I see somebody screwing up, or about to screw up, their relationship and hurt any number of people including themselves, you're damn right I'm going to call them on it.
Moving on.
"Check your privilege". So help me, I had to look that up using the link provided, not because I had no idea what white privilege or male privilege or hetero privilege was, but because I couldn't figure out what the hell any of that had to do with polyamory. No matter, there would be zero tolerance for posts exhibiting privilege--they and their posters would be forcibly removed.
"You are not allowed to discuss Dan Savage in this forum". Wait, say what? Dan Savage is--well, I won't say he's a hero of mine, but I respect him highly, both for his It Gets Better Project and for his humorous, earthy and usually dead-on advice column. Still, maybe there's something I don't know about him, some awful thing he did that makes him persona non grata. Better click the helpful link to find out what it is.
Oh dear Gawd.
Repeated Use of the 'T' Word--spelled "t****y" on the site, because "tranny" for "transexual" is obviously grossly insensitive. Clap the man in stocks. He was also berated for his "sex-positivity", which led one woman to feel she could not say no to any sexual request. I've been reading Savage Love almost since its inception and I can state with absolute assurance that Dan Savage understands and respects people's right to say "no" to anything they are uncomfortable with.
There are a large number of other gripes, all of which have to do with Dan Savage's opinions that somebody obviously disagreed with. How sad, that somebody's response to an opinion they disagree with is to try to remove it from their sight. I just bet the next rule is going to be about
"You must post trigger warnings if you discuss anything offensive or traumatic. This is a safe space. Failure to do so upon request will result in immediate banishment and removal of the offensive content."
Sigh.
Okay, I'd better get my feelings clear out front here. If you have been raped, abused, assaulted, bullied, exploited or hurt in any way at all, I'm here to lend as much support as I can give. I have been through my own dark hells, and I empathize with those most of you who have been in hell--or who are still there, for that matter. I care. I really do. Often too much--it's a failing of mine. If you suffered something traumatic, and you are beset by flashbacks and other personal demons because of it--please, seek the help you desperately need and make steps towards healing. I'll help as best I can.
But I can't make it didn't happen.
I can't assure you that from this moment on you're never going to be hurt again and I certainly can't
remove the trauma and all its associated words from your sight. At some point you have to--ahem--suck it up, buttercup. As bad as whatever you went through was, you are not alone in your hurt and you are not entitled to live off it indefinitely.
I've longed for warnings myself--usually when somebody posts one of those horrific animal-abuse stories on Facebook "to raise awareness"--gee, thanks, I knew bad shit happens to animals already and I didn't need the visual reminder. And I would also expect some kind of warning before a graphic image or description is displayed. But what any of that would be doing in a forum dedicated to multiple committed loving relationships is a mystery for the ages. Apparently there's so much of it in there that the mods can't deal with it on a case-by-case basis but instead have to post extensive warnings against it and require strict compliance as a condition of joining.
It's not that I want to go out there and deliberately offend, let alone hurt, anyone. It's that I feel very much like these kind of restrictions make it impossible for an honest, frank discussion on anything at all. If you are so terrified of being offended and hurt that you have to remove all possibility of either--what, pray tell, are you doing on the internet?
\
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Was I born too late? or too soon?
I certainly don't feel as if I was born at the right time.
There is no doubt civilization has evolved markedly over the past century, in many ways besides the obvious technology. We have come a long, long way. There's a black man in the White House, a reality unthinkable as little as forty years ago: what's even more amazing, in the light of history, is that people are disappointed with him and it has nothing to do with his skin colour.
Gay people are increasingly free to be who they are and love who they will; "bastardy" is a concept out of time that would need to be explained to many people, and then further explained why it was once considered such a stain on one's life. Information, which always longed to be free, is freer than it has been at any time in human history. Superstition is slowly being supplanted by science, in a process that started centuries ago.
And yet, you can turn every one of those undeniable accomplishments on its head. That black man in the White House presides over a country with Ferguson, Missouri in it; a country with the city of New York in it. New York, you'll recall, is the place where more young black men were detained and frisked in 2011 than there are young black men in New York City. Racism is very much alive and thriving in the U.S; it hasn't even lessened much, in places, just been driven underground, where it bubbles up like a sulphurous spring every now and again.
There is still a long, long road for gays to travel before they are considered equal, both in the United States and certainly in many benighted areas of the world. The "family' is a quaint old thing hardly applicable to certain communities: children grow up without the presence and sometimes the knowledge of their fathers, to their profound detriment. A concerted effort is being made to lessen the flow of information, and in any event most of that information is noise and not signal. Governments in both Canada and the U.S. are infected with a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism, while abroad ISIS carries out barbaric and terrible acts in the name of superstition.
It's a complicated place, the world.
It's not that I long for a simpler time. The past was not simple, it was a different kind of complex. I don't mean to romanticize the past...actually, for all the horrors of our present, I think I'd rather stay here than find myself in a world where a toilet, or two people in a bed, can't be shown on TV. I'd last fifteen minutes in the fifties before I'd be locked up on obscenity charges. But there is a quality of the past that appeals mightily, and that I don't think I'm romanticizing at all: seriousness.
For all the serious issues facing us in 2014, and there are a multitude, society today seems frivolous.
The decline of education is particularly worrisome. Every now and again you see eighth grade tests from 1912 or 1895 going around Reddit or Facebook, and you look at them and know you'd fail them. Snopes argues that this does not imply educational standards have slipped. I beg to differ.
I hate math--advanced math, at any rate. Its utility was never explained to me and thus it lacks relevance to my life. But "kitchen-table arithmetic" is relevant to everyone's life and it's the sort of thing few high school students can do without mechanical help.
("But why is that important, Grandpa? I've always got my phone on me and it has a calculator function!") Yes, and how do you know your output matches your input, sonny-boy?
It just seems so...silly. Hollywood keeps making the same movies over and over again. There's lots of decent television on, to be sure, but there's still so much reality tripe, and the latter has completely overcome channels like TLC (which used to be called "The Learning Channel", let's not forget). Popular music is full of AutoTune: actually singing songs yourself is passé. From Instagram to Vine to Twitter, the overwhelming imperative in our society is to communicate your thought in as little time as possible. This does not lend itself well to serious thinking. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it's the enemy of analysis.
What troubles me is the proliferation of celebrity culture. Now, celebrities are not new. They date back into prehistory. But never have they been so scrutinized by so many for so little. The obsession with celebrities has overtaken us to the point where we actually look to them for guidance on issues well outside their purview.
I just cited one (among many) who use their fame towards a higher end, and there are celebrities who are extremely intelligent, deep thinkers. But that is not what they are known nor revered for, and that troubles me. There was a time when intelligence had popular value. That time has all but passed.
Most ominously in Canada of late, we find ourselves with a government that distrusts, perverts, and outright ridicules science--in fact, our Prime Minister refers to science in the terms one usually reserves for some sort of crime. (I trust this attitude will be thoroughly repudiated at the polls next year--but believe me, the coming Canadian election will be the dirtiest in our history). It's all I can do sometimes not to retreat into a past when political antagonists still respect for each other (usually), and who debated the issues of the day more rationally than we see today.
-------------
And yet...there are many times I find myself musing I was born too soon...perhaps far too soon.
I do believe that in some respects, I'm ahead of my time. On a personal level, the polyamory I so deeply identify with is roughly where homosexuality found itself in the early 1970s: just starting to take its first tentative steps into wider recognition, but beset on all sides with misunderstandings and condemnations. I suspect--I hope-- that forty or fifty years hence, polyamory will be seen, both legally and socially, as something utterly unremarkable. I'm going to do my part to bring that about.
Globalization has made the world smaller, but it needs to be smaller still--very much so. There is but one human race, and we are all part of it; perhaps in the (probably very distant) future we will truly recognize this and act accordingly. Sadly, I'm not at all sure the world isn't about to get a whole lot larger. I believe the cheap oil is running out, and oil is the lifeblood of our world as we know it. Even renewables need oil to get off the ground--you can't as yet make a solar cell without input from oil, for instance (people tend to forget that the manufacture of anything is a complex system that depends on oil for its transport, among other things).
Still, I'd welcome this development. If we can't have a one-world government, we can--and I suspect will, by and by--have a multiplicity of local governments that are more likely to have our interests in mind than the remote and insanely convoluted governments we're stuck with at present. I think we're in for some very rocky times before things settle down--the storm before the calm, if you will--and I'm torn between hoping I'm dead long before things get too interesting and hoping I'm somehow alive to see how interesting they get.
In the end, of course, I was born exactly when and where I was supposed to be--or it wouldn't have happened. It's my charge in life to couple the best of what I know of the past to the best I can imagine for the future, and thus continually re-create myself in the next greatest version of the greatest vision I ever had about who I am.
Join me, won't you?
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Snarkery: another ramble
Oh, I'm in a ranty mood today.
Paulina Gretzky's pregnant. The Great One is going to be a grandpa.
WHY IS THIS NEWS?
In my world, newspapers would not report the successful birth of human beings, let alone their successful conceptions, no matter how famous some relative of theirs might be. Paulina Gretzky is a DD-level Hollywood starlet; somehow I don't think she's the famous relative. Her father was a sports star of some repute, I understand. Big whoop. The achievement we're reporting here is accomplished every day by thousands and thousands of people worldwide. Some of them have fathers (and mothers) who were genuine heroes. Don't see their names in the papers, do you? Your little lump is going to be loved every bit as much as Paulina's will be, and isn't that what really matters?
I started racking my brain for exceptions to this rule and Eva immediately suggested royalty. William and Kate's ripening second kid may someday have some entirely ceremonial power by virtue of being distantly descended from people with absolute power...
(Yeah, I have a bit of a problem with the Divine Right of Kings, too.)
It all boils down to two precepts of mine:
1) we're all special, but none of us are inherently any more special than anyone else;
2) even the most public personality deserves her privacy.
Celebrities of whatever stripe are people. It sounds ridiculous, but I think this is often forgotten. I'm not even going to get into the nude photos leaking all over the place--the very topic, or rather, the ravenous appetite, disgusts me beyond all reason--the instant a celebrity comes off screen, or off the field, or whatever, she is "just" another person: special, of course, but no more special than you or I.
This is just like that impossible thing you say about not being attracted to bodies, right? You're a huge Toronto Maple Leaf fan. I bet if you met Phil Kessel, you'd be gobsmacked.
Nope.
Wouldn't even recognize him. Or any other Leaf. I know their names and their numbers and their stats, sure. The rest is irrelevant unless I somehow become friends with one of 'em. Isn't it?
The same holds true for Hollywood. There are actors and actresses I respect--some for their acting talent, sure, but I'm more likely to respect them for what they do off screen--
a-ha! so you do notice what famous people do in their downtime!
No, actually I try really hard not to. But the media covers these people like a blanket, and so every once in a while I'll see one of them deflect their celebrity to a higher cause. (No, I am not going to write about the aftermath of that speech!)
One of the most powerful passages I have ever read is the following:
--Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God, Book II
(link to full text)
Fame, in our society, accords power. I think Emma Watson--and more than a few other celebrities--
choose "power with" rather than "power over"; these people have demonstrated that they use their fame towards a larger end. This, to me, is far more worthy of attention and respect than anything Watson or anyone else does in the course of their profession...and it's certainly more newsworthy than a marriage, a divorce, a birth, or fer cryin' out loud a conception.
------------------
DON'T TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO HEAR.
Don't even weasel-word between what you think I want to hear and the truth. This bullshit's everywhere and I'm perpetually battling it.
...We will keep your resume on file for future consideration...
ˆ
Not that I've had that one recently, but it came to mind. Has ANYBODY ever got a call out of the blue a year after they applied somewhere and got a letter like that in response? "Hello, sir? Yes, you submitted a resume to us on Novemberary the 33rd of last year and I just wanted to let you know that a position better matching your skills and qualifications has come available?"
Pshaw. Tell the truth. We will keep your resume in the circular file for future consideration as compost.
Actually, I'll go you one further with the job market: often, positions are posted pro forma. The desired candidate is already known before the job is posted, but you're not allowed to say this, for some reason: you have to go through this elaborate game of pretending to accept resumes from other people that you're not even going to look at. Who does that serve, exactly?
Thinking back to our failed adoption bid, we were told we weren't going to be allowed to adopt children because--I'll never forget this--"your house doesn't feel like a house with children in it".
(In other words, apparently you can't adopt kids unless you already have them.)
That fresh bullshit still rankles eight years later. It was obviously fake on at least two levels--one, of course our house "didn't feel like a house with kids in it" because there weren't kids in it at the time, and two, Tom the Friendly Social Worker cooked up all kinds of praise before he served us that plate of bile. "You two are extremely intelligent and quotable; I like your philosophy of childrearing; you're open to birth parents, you're extremely honest and forthcoming"...and on and on for about fifteen minutes: all the reasons we should have children, but...can't. It's bullshit and while I've mostly gotten over it, it recurs like acid reflux whenever I get to reflecting on topics like this.
I'm really weary of lovely words that prove to be nothing more than wind--promises that both parties know (or at least one of them should know) will never be kept, beautiful sentiments that will blow away if I make any effort to reciprocate. I heard such things many times this past summer; I never want to hear them again. Sadly, I'm sure I will, because society runs on them.
This conflicts with something I've written before and often about having no expectations, and I've had to amend that as I've grown up a little. I expect, and feel I have a right to, the truth... especially when it comes to people's feelings and intentions towards me. This is probably at least as naive as having no expectations at all, since we're all continually being told one truth and shown another...
(Wow. I wrote that more than eight years ago. Time's fun when you're having flies, said the anteater.)
I think now that there are certain minimal expectations I have of people, at least when they lay claim to me in some capacity. I expect to be paid by an employer. I expect a friend to make some effort to see me. That kind of thing. Reasonable? I think so.
The way I've come to define it is that if you want a relationship to last, both parties have to take for granted that it will. This is NOT the same as taking the relationship for granted.
Obviously, you can't take a relationship for granted. Relationships take work, on both sides. It doesn't feel like work when the relationship is close, because it's choices freely and joyfully made--but it is effort, at least. No, taking the fact of the relationship for granted is a different proposition entirely. It means that the thought of dissolving the relationship is not a valid thought. If both of you come at it from this angle, your friendship/marriage/what have you will most likely endure. The moment one of you stops taking the fact of the relationship for granted...it's probably doomed.
I like to know where I stand, even if you have to kick me to the ground to let me know. I'll crawl away licking my wounds, to be sure, but better to crawl away and stand another day.
Paulina Gretzky's pregnant. The Great One is going to be a grandpa.
WHY IS THIS NEWS?
In my world, newspapers would not report the successful birth of human beings, let alone their successful conceptions, no matter how famous some relative of theirs might be. Paulina Gretzky is a DD-level Hollywood starlet; somehow I don't think she's the famous relative. Her father was a sports star of some repute, I understand. Big whoop. The achievement we're reporting here is accomplished every day by thousands and thousands of people worldwide. Some of them have fathers (and mothers) who were genuine heroes. Don't see their names in the papers, do you? Your little lump is going to be loved every bit as much as Paulina's will be, and isn't that what really matters?
I started racking my brain for exceptions to this rule and Eva immediately suggested royalty. William and Kate's ripening second kid may someday have some entirely ceremonial power by virtue of being distantly descended from people with absolute power...
(Yeah, I have a bit of a problem with the Divine Right of Kings, too.)
It all boils down to two precepts of mine:
1) we're all special, but none of us are inherently any more special than anyone else;
2) even the most public personality deserves her privacy.
Celebrities of whatever stripe are people. It sounds ridiculous, but I think this is often forgotten. I'm not even going to get into the nude photos leaking all over the place--the very topic, or rather, the ravenous appetite, disgusts me beyond all reason--the instant a celebrity comes off screen, or off the field, or whatever, she is "just" another person: special, of course, but no more special than you or I.
This is just like that impossible thing you say about not being attracted to bodies, right? You're a huge Toronto Maple Leaf fan. I bet if you met Phil Kessel, you'd be gobsmacked.
Nope.
Wouldn't even recognize him. Or any other Leaf. I know their names and their numbers and their stats, sure. The rest is irrelevant unless I somehow become friends with one of 'em. Isn't it?
The same holds true for Hollywood. There are actors and actresses I respect--some for their acting talent, sure, but I'm more likely to respect them for what they do off screen--
a-ha! so you do notice what famous people do in their downtime!
No, actually I try really hard not to. But the media covers these people like a blanket, and so every once in a while I'll see one of them deflect their celebrity to a higher cause. (No, I am not going to write about the aftermath of that speech!)
One of the most powerful passages I have ever read is the following:
Practice saying this ten times each day:
I LOVE SEX
I LOVE MONEY
I LOVE ME!
I LOVE MONEY
I LOVE ME!
· Here are some other things you are not supposed to love. Practice loving them:
POWER
GLORY
FAME
SUCCESS
WINNING
GLORY
FAME
SUCCESS
WINNING
THE ADULATION OF OTHERS
BEING BETTER
HAVING MORE
KNOWING HOW
BEING BETTER
HAVING MORE
KNOWING HOW
KNOWING WHY
· KNOW GOD
· Yet I tell you this: love, love, love, love the things you desire – for your love of them draws them to you.
· These things are the stuff of life. When you love them, you love life! When you declare that you desire them, you announce that you choose all the good that life has to offer!
· Yet do not choose sex instead of love, but as a celebration of it. And do not choose power over, but power with. And do not choose fame as and end in itself, but as a means to a larger end. And do not choose success at the expense of others, but as a tool with which to assist others. And do not choose winning at any cost, but winning that costs others nothing, and even brings them gain as well.
· Go ahead and choose the adulation of others – but see all others as beings upon which you can shower adulation, and do it!
· Go ahead and choose being better – but not better than others; rather, better than you were before.
· Go ahead and choose having more, but only so that you have more to give.
· And yes, choose “knowing how” and “knowing why” – so that you can share all knowledge with others.
· And by all means choose to know God. In fact, choose this first, and all else will follow.
(link to full text)
Fame, in our society, accords power. I think Emma Watson--and more than a few other celebrities--
choose "power with" rather than "power over"; these people have demonstrated that they use their fame towards a larger end. This, to me, is far more worthy of attention and respect than anything Watson or anyone else does in the course of their profession...and it's certainly more newsworthy than a marriage, a divorce, a birth, or fer cryin' out loud a conception.
------------------
DON'T TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO HEAR.
Don't even weasel-word between what you think I want to hear and the truth. This bullshit's everywhere and I'm perpetually battling it.
...We will keep your resume on file for future consideration...
ˆ
Not that I've had that one recently, but it came to mind. Has ANYBODY ever got a call out of the blue a year after they applied somewhere and got a letter like that in response? "Hello, sir? Yes, you submitted a resume to us on Novemberary the 33rd of last year and I just wanted to let you know that a position better matching your skills and qualifications has come available?"
Pshaw. Tell the truth. We will keep your resume in the circular file for future consideration as compost.
Actually, I'll go you one further with the job market: often, positions are posted pro forma. The desired candidate is already known before the job is posted, but you're not allowed to say this, for some reason: you have to go through this elaborate game of pretending to accept resumes from other people that you're not even going to look at. Who does that serve, exactly?
Thinking back to our failed adoption bid, we were told we weren't going to be allowed to adopt children because--I'll never forget this--"your house doesn't feel like a house with children in it".
(In other words, apparently you can't adopt kids unless you already have them.)
That fresh bullshit still rankles eight years later. It was obviously fake on at least two levels--one, of course our house "didn't feel like a house with kids in it" because there weren't kids in it at the time, and two, Tom the Friendly Social Worker cooked up all kinds of praise before he served us that plate of bile. "You two are extremely intelligent and quotable; I like your philosophy of childrearing; you're open to birth parents, you're extremely honest and forthcoming"...and on and on for about fifteen minutes: all the reasons we should have children, but...can't. It's bullshit and while I've mostly gotten over it, it recurs like acid reflux whenever I get to reflecting on topics like this.
I'm really weary of lovely words that prove to be nothing more than wind--promises that both parties know (or at least one of them should know) will never be kept, beautiful sentiments that will blow away if I make any effort to reciprocate. I heard such things many times this past summer; I never want to hear them again. Sadly, I'm sure I will, because society runs on them.
This conflicts with something I've written before and often about having no expectations, and I've had to amend that as I've grown up a little. I expect, and feel I have a right to, the truth... especially when it comes to people's feelings and intentions towards me. This is probably at least as naive as having no expectations at all, since we're all continually being told one truth and shown another...
(Wow. I wrote that more than eight years ago. Time's fun when you're having flies, said the anteater.)
I think now that there are certain minimal expectations I have of people, at least when they lay claim to me in some capacity. I expect to be paid by an employer. I expect a friend to make some effort to see me. That kind of thing. Reasonable? I think so.
The way I've come to define it is that if you want a relationship to last, both parties have to take for granted that it will. This is NOT the same as taking the relationship for granted.
Obviously, you can't take a relationship for granted. Relationships take work, on both sides. It doesn't feel like work when the relationship is close, because it's choices freely and joyfully made--but it is effort, at least. No, taking the fact of the relationship for granted is a different proposition entirely. It means that the thought of dissolving the relationship is not a valid thought. If both of you come at it from this angle, your friendship/marriage/what have you will most likely endure. The moment one of you stops taking the fact of the relationship for granted...it's probably doomed.
I like to know where I stand, even if you have to kick me to the ground to let me know. I'll crawl away licking my wounds, to be sure, but better to crawl away and stand another day.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Random ramble: good/bad life update
MUNCH PUNCH
Eva and I went to a munch last week, a couple of days after we got back from our cruise.
A munch is just a meeting of like-minded people over food, usually held at a restaurant or bar. This one was at the Huether Hotel, a place I hadn't been to since my first week in this city almost twenty five years ago. There are dozens of them monthly in our city alone, covering every conceivable interest; it seems like a good way to get out of the house and meet people. Eva had been to a completely different munch a couple of weeks before, and had a great time. This one was something we would share, and hopefully enjoy. It was also my first opportunity to put my words from the last blog into practice.
It did not go well. At all.
I guess it says something that I'm willing to put myself out there and meet people. Though I have to tell you, the mere thought of walking into a room full of strangers with the express intent of making them not-strangers ties my stomach in knots. It's another one of those glaring contradictions: put a piano in that room and I'd play it, happily; give me a speech to make to the group and I'll carry it off without a hitch, but ask me to interact socially with any of them and...let's just say it took more courage than you'd think for me to walk into that room. More than I thought I had, actually--I almost chickened out of it several times. In the end I realized that I was never going to get over this social block if I kept it right in front of me, so I meekly and tentatively stepped over it.
The munch was held in a long and narrow space. Two rectangular tables filled most of it. We got there a little late and the first table was full, so we started the second.
There were about twenty people there all told, which was twice as many as I was expecting. Everyone seemed to know each other, or at least know a large segment; there was a lot of hugging and enthusiastic greeting as each party came in.
The host of the munch greeted us, shook my hand, and returned to his conversation. Everyone was neck-deep in conversation--nobody so much as made eye contact with Eva or I. We nibbled on some garlic bread and waited for some sort of acknowledgement. Nothing came.
I thought about how I could insinuate myself into some conversation--the ones going on around me, to the extent I could hear them and make them out, sounded quite interesting--and then realized how rude I would appear if I tried. Everyone was so intent, so focussed on the people around them that breaking that focus was unthinkable. And so I sat and stewed. Despite my best efforts, awful thoughts rushed in.
You were afraid of this? This is your normal leper shunning, nothing you haven't lived through countless times before. Gotta admit we didn't expect this shit with Eva here--that repulsive forcefield you carry around with you is even stronger than you thought it was, if it so effortlessly overcomes your wife's charisma. Look at those people over there--they're standing, and have been for the last half hour, rather than come over here and sit next to you and pick up whatever disease it is you have.
And so on...my mood got worse from there, and after an hour of complete isolation we just got up and left. I was in a foul, foul temper: angry, bitter, depressed, and totally and completely self-centered. It didn't occur to me to comfort Eva at all, which is unforgivable--she was right there with me and experienced exactly the same ignorance I did, but I was so caught up in my own drama about this that I ignored her myself entirely. It turned out, of course, that she was feeling the same hurt and neglect I was (although nowhere near to the same degree, rejection not being as big a bugaboo for her as it is for me.)
Now, I hasten to tell you I didn't expect a grand hurrah when I came in. Best case scenario, I thought the host might silence everyone and let us introduce ourselves--I'd gladly do it for both of us if Eva wanted me to, that's public speaking and I can do that. Barring that scenario, I thought somebody--anybody--would notice us looking all newbie like deers in the headlights and come over and introduce themselves.
Didn't happen. Nobody made the slightest move; hell, nobody even looked at us. You get to musing on existential questions at times like this: are we here? Are we invisible? And I was so terrified of making an ass of myself that I sat, immobile...making an ass of myself.
It turns out that I did pretty much everything wrong.
The best advice I got was this:
Actually, admitting I'm unsure of myself is ever so much easier than acting as if I'm sure of myself.
Staying away after one bad experience is the worst thing I could do. We need to go back, possibly several times, so our faces look familiar. And yes, we need to actually approach people. I can't expect strangers to do it for me, and I shouldn't expect Eva to do it for me either. We're a team.
WE'RE A TEAM
Shortly before our cruise, our washer died in the middle of a load. This is one of life's serious annoyances--things like this never seem to happen when they'd be easily accommodated, and a washer is one of those things you kind of need.
A dear friend offered the use of hers, which was really nice, but her life is beyond busy and we really didn't want to impose, there being a laundromat just around the corner from our house.
Advantage laundromat: you can do ten loads in the time would take to do one at home. Disadvantage: it costs, it's tedious, and you can't exactly leave and make lunch the way you would at home.
There's not much choice for appliances in this town: if you don't want to pay an arm and a legging, you're stuck getting your washer at The Brick.
Oh, how I hate The Brick.
The day before the cruise, we went in to the nearest Brick to us, an almost brand new store that wasn't around when we had that linked experience. There was a washer there for $348. By itself. Like holy crap, grab that before they tack a 1 on the front of the price.
"Oh, don't buy that one", the woman told us. "It's broken. It's been broken for weeks."
Plus five points for honesty, considering the tag didn't say anything like "AS IS". Minus twenty million points for WTF?
She left and said a salesman would be with us shortly. My guts were acting up, since I was getting on a plane in less than twenty four hours. A man appeared, greeted Eva and I, and directed me to the customer restroom.
Then he walked away...without serving Eva at all.
The Brick.com it is.
We found that if you buy a washer, you may as well buy a dryer as well: the pair deal makes the dryer about a third of what it would cost on its own. Plus, with my luck, we'd get the washer installed and the dryer would die the following week. There was a nice GE pair on sale.
We paid extra for the disposal of our old washer and dryer and the hookup of the new one, remembering this. My father had rained blood, sweat and curses all over our basement getting the damn pipes to fit properly, and Eva and I wanted no part of a similar experience.
The pair was delivered last Friday, of course after Eva had gone to work. The litany of excuses started immediately. 'We will be unable to hook this dryer up because the vent to the outside is too small, it's exactly the diameter of the pipe." This was, of course, the problem my father had, and why we were paying them rather than doing it ourselves. How they determined this by eye alone was a mystery, but since it was true, I couldn't exactly call them on it. They explained that they are only contracted to do simple hookups, and this didn't qualify. Then they announced they couldn't take our washer away because it was wet and too heavy and had soap on it which was too slippery which constituted a serious safety hazard and blah blah blabbledy blah.
I don't like confrontation. I don't do it well. It was patently obvious I wasn't going to get the services we'd paid for. What I should have done here was refused to sign the paperwork, or at least amended it to show that the washer and dryer were not delivered (they were left in our basement, but not in the laundry room since the old washer was in the way) nor installed, nor was the old washer removed. Instead I signed their damned paperwork as it stood just to get them out of the house, and resolved to at least start the process of doing their work by myself.
It wasn't easy.
Silly of me, I know, but I hadn't realized there was water in the washer's innards when I'd unplugged it for removal. There was none in the tub itself where the clothes go: it was all somewhere else. I tipped the washer on its side to drain it. Very little water drained. The rest of it just sat there, sloshing at me from somewhere while I swore at it.
I slowly and oh-so-painstakingly righted the machine and dragged it out into the basement proper. That took about twenty minutes to accomplish. If you Google "how much does a clothes washer weigh", you will get numbers that aren't even close to what this one does, especially with water sloshing around in it. Trust me on this. I was angry enough -- at the Brick and at myself -- to carry that washer up the stairs, but not stupid enough to try...especially not without a dolly (which the Brick people had effing taken with them, crisse de câlice de tabernac d'osti de sacrament. Moving the new washer and dryer in wasn't much easier. They're both half again the size of the old ones, and they barely fit through the door. But I managed it.
The next day, Eva and I tackled installation.
I am proud to say it took under an hour, washer and dryer both, and it only involved one expletive-filled do-over moment. I can thank my father for laying some of the groundwork here--we cannibalized parts of his setup. I can also thank this stuff. But mostly I can thank Eva for her patience and understanding as her sad sack of a husband tried his best to contort himself into laughably small, dark spaces and fail to perform the simplest tasks. A handyman I'm not. Inverting Red Green, at least my wife finds me handsome.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
A Key To Ken
I mentioned in one of those cruise recaps that I came to an epiphany in Key West.
I am a man of contradictions. I'm fairly intelligent (he said, modestly), but at any time I'll unwittingly do something ridiculously stupid. I'm extremely empathetic, but even more absent-minded, which can make me appear rude and uncaring at times. My heart is an open book (actually, it's more like a library), but around strangers I tend to seal myself off. And I thrive on touch...but only if I know you.
I can explain all those contradictions, and they all make sense in the context of who I am. But I became aware of one in Key West that makes no sense at all. Oddly enough, I've written about both halves of this contradiction several times...but never linked them.
We were on the trolley tour and the guide (who was a real hoot) was talking about Fantasy Fest, an annual celebration very much like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. This one happens to feature a hundred thousand naked people.
Well, not quite naked: going around in public without some kind of covering is still obscene (sigh). But during Fantasy Fest, we were told, body paint is a covering. "Once a month," the guide said, "somebody misses their cruise ship here. At the end of October, it happens intentionally."
I turned to Eva and said "cool".
And it is. Were it not for the alcohol that would turn the swinging dicks into a bunch of swinging dicks, I'd be booking a return engagement in Key West for the end of next month. Hell, I'd participate. Eva would paint me gold from bald head through Buddha-belly to toe tips and I'd sit in full lotus...okay, that part wouldn't work. But...yeah. I like it.
I'm not, as I have said repeatedly, a naturist. I actually like the feeling of comfy clothes on me, for one thing; for another, my body lacks suitable pockets; for a third, it's either too damn hot or too damn cold around here to be nude most of the time. But I have no problem whatsoever with the philosophy behind nudism. It is, as I've said, just skin, and we all have it. No big deal. I could get up right now, disrobe, and walk down the street in the altogether, except the human body we all have is considered indecent for some reason I'll never really understand. I can write about this for an hour, but you've read it all before.
But I have a profoundly negative body image. It's been polished to an ugly sheen over decades.
This next part: I'm not fishing in the pity-pool, okay? The fish you catch in that pool are sunfish: they look nice, but they're nothing worth keeping. These are just hard, cold, dry facts.
I get a lot of compliments from people, and they feel good. Everybody likes compliments, right? Here are the sorts of nice things I've heard from people just recently:
"You're a really likeable guy. You're capable of talking about a wide range of things."
"You're kind and generous..."
"You make me laugh...
"You help me see myself better, know myself better. You are so fearlessly self-aware that you make others so as well."
(Not as self-aware as you think. Keep reading.)
I could go on, but even things like that make me feel a little uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to hear them. I even happen to agree with them. I just don't feel right repeating them.
But to make a point: all of these are inner-things. So is virtually every other compliment I've ever received in my life. I married the first person who ever said something nice about the way I looked. Took me a long time to realize she was serious. At first I thought she was full of shit. Then I thought, "well, it's nice that she thinks that way." And fifteen years later I'm still in that second stage. Only because it's hard to take the word of one person -- even Eva -- over the non-words (and more than a few disparaging words) of several hundred others going back a long, long way.
This is the root of my social anxiety: the iron-clad conviction, reinforced over years, that I am physically repulsive. It's why I'm so much cooler online. (That song...that video...the guy in it even looks a little like me at that age.)
I never misrepresent myself online. I just discard that repugnant outer shell and let my inner qualities out where people can see them. That I've had a fair share of success with people this way tells me that yes, I do have those inner qualities...but it also suggests (to me) that my appearance negates every last one of them.
You've heard all this before, as well. It's tiresome, I know. I'm tired of it too. But it's why I'm so uncomfortable out in public where people can see me. I have to forcibly and repeatedly remind myself that (a) Eva never knew me online, and she married me and doesn't seem to have any problem being seen with me; (b) I have other friends who don't act as if I'm radioactive. Sometimes it even works, for a while. But most of the time I feel like the Phantom of the Opera and I want to hide myself away lest somebody look at me and unconsciously --sometimes quite consciously, I'm convinced -- recoil. No surprise I was obsessed with the Phantom of the Opera when I was a teenager. I memorized the entire piano score, put it on tape, and presented it to the girl I was also obsessed with at the time...a girl who, in today's parlance, had kicked me so deep into the friendzone that I was barely even on the field, in favour of your standard hunka hunka burning love (who treated her like shit, I might add).
Anyway.
This is not the normal mindset of someone who says he could walk around buck naked without a care in the world.
If I really feel this awful way about my physical appearance, how is it that I can bare all of it without blinking? That makes no sense at all. What makes even less sense is that I'd never so much as noticed the glaring contradiction.
It went off like a bomb in my head when I did notice it. I immediately set about thirty mental tracks to figuring out (a) how this had evaded notice for so long and (b) how I could resolve it, preferably in a way that helped my self-image.
I eventually decided (a) didn't matter, but (b) mattered a great deal. And what I've come to is this. I don't care how other people look--never have, never will. If someone is beautiful inside, it makes them beautiful outside, to me. And if someone is ugly inside, she could be Miss Universe and I wouldn't look twice at her. I've always been convinced that this attitude makes me pretty much alone in the world, given just how much value our society seems to place on the outermost layer of a person.
You've heard me say, many times, "mine is not a better way, mine is only another way?" In this, and almost this alone, I say, no, "mine is a better way". If everyone really thought the way I do on this it would heal so much pain...
...including mine. Not once have I ever thought to apply this to myself.
I've always tried to focus on other people's pain to avoid dealing with my own. I specialize in self-image problems. You think you're ugly and worthless? Come to me, I'll convince you otherwise. Countless times I've offered advice and emotional support (that's another thing I'm great at, I'm told) that really, honestly helped people...and would have helped me if I'd ever bothered to notice what was spilling out of my mouth or fingers. If I ever tried to do such a thing, I'd scoff at myself. It's different with you, I'd say. YOU'RE ugly. Not like ____ at all. When's the last time you ever heard somebody say otherwise? She just heard otherwise...from you. Because she's beautiful, and YOU'RE...
Cue self-destructive mental loop.
So.
I'm not capable of adopting that macho strut that alpha males have mastered, the one that says I'm going to rape you later and you'll thank me after I'm done and beg for seconds. That kind of self-confidence is well beyond me: also, I find it disgusting. But I can adopt my I-don't-care-what-you-look-like attitude to myself. I think I do it without thought every time I think about walking around naked. It's just skin.
So maybe I can walk around in clothes pretending I'm naked.
It strikes me as beautifully ironic, proof of how gloriously ass-backwards I am. Most people, I think, could only walk around naked themselves if they could first convince themselves they're fully clothed. Me, in order to feel comfortable walking around fully clothed, I have to pretend I'm naked.
I am a man of contradictions. I'm fairly intelligent (he said, modestly), but at any time I'll unwittingly do something ridiculously stupid. I'm extremely empathetic, but even more absent-minded, which can make me appear rude and uncaring at times. My heart is an open book (actually, it's more like a library), but around strangers I tend to seal myself off. And I thrive on touch...but only if I know you.
I can explain all those contradictions, and they all make sense in the context of who I am. But I became aware of one in Key West that makes no sense at all. Oddly enough, I've written about both halves of this contradiction several times...but never linked them.
We were on the trolley tour and the guide (who was a real hoot) was talking about Fantasy Fest, an annual celebration very much like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. This one happens to feature a hundred thousand naked people.
Well, not quite naked: going around in public without some kind of covering is still obscene (sigh). But during Fantasy Fest, we were told, body paint is a covering. "Once a month," the guide said, "somebody misses their cruise ship here. At the end of October, it happens intentionally."
I turned to Eva and said "cool".
And it is. Were it not for the alcohol that would turn the swinging dicks into a bunch of swinging dicks, I'd be booking a return engagement in Key West for the end of next month. Hell, I'd participate. Eva would paint me gold from bald head through Buddha-belly to toe tips and I'd sit in full lotus...okay, that part wouldn't work. But...yeah. I like it.
I'm not, as I have said repeatedly, a naturist. I actually like the feeling of comfy clothes on me, for one thing; for another, my body lacks suitable pockets; for a third, it's either too damn hot or too damn cold around here to be nude most of the time. But I have no problem whatsoever with the philosophy behind nudism. It is, as I've said, just skin, and we all have it. No big deal. I could get up right now, disrobe, and walk down the street in the altogether, except the human body we all have is considered indecent for some reason I'll never really understand. I can write about this for an hour, but you've read it all before.
But I have a profoundly negative body image. It's been polished to an ugly sheen over decades.
This next part: I'm not fishing in the pity-pool, okay? The fish you catch in that pool are sunfish: they look nice, but they're nothing worth keeping. These are just hard, cold, dry facts.
I get a lot of compliments from people, and they feel good. Everybody likes compliments, right? Here are the sorts of nice things I've heard from people just recently:
"You're a really likeable guy. You're capable of talking about a wide range of things."
"You're kind and generous..."
"You make me laugh...
"You help me see myself better, know myself better. You are so fearlessly self-aware that you make others so as well."
(Not as self-aware as you think. Keep reading.)
I could go on, but even things like that make me feel a little uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to hear them. I even happen to agree with them. I just don't feel right repeating them.
But to make a point: all of these are inner-things. So is virtually every other compliment I've ever received in my life. I married the first person who ever said something nice about the way I looked. Took me a long time to realize she was serious. At first I thought she was full of shit. Then I thought, "well, it's nice that she thinks that way." And fifteen years later I'm still in that second stage. Only because it's hard to take the word of one person -- even Eva -- over the non-words (and more than a few disparaging words) of several hundred others going back a long, long way.
This is the root of my social anxiety: the iron-clad conviction, reinforced over years, that I am physically repulsive. It's why I'm so much cooler online. (That song...that video...the guy in it even looks a little like me at that age.)
I never misrepresent myself online. I just discard that repugnant outer shell and let my inner qualities out where people can see them. That I've had a fair share of success with people this way tells me that yes, I do have those inner qualities...but it also suggests (to me) that my appearance negates every last one of them.
You've heard all this before, as well. It's tiresome, I know. I'm tired of it too. But it's why I'm so uncomfortable out in public where people can see me. I have to forcibly and repeatedly remind myself that (a) Eva never knew me online, and she married me and doesn't seem to have any problem being seen with me; (b) I have other friends who don't act as if I'm radioactive. Sometimes it even works, for a while. But most of the time I feel like the Phantom of the Opera and I want to hide myself away lest somebody look at me and unconsciously --sometimes quite consciously, I'm convinced -- recoil. No surprise I was obsessed with the Phantom of the Opera when I was a teenager. I memorized the entire piano score, put it on tape, and presented it to the girl I was also obsessed with at the time...a girl who, in today's parlance, had kicked me so deep into the friendzone that I was barely even on the field, in favour of your standard hunka hunka burning love (who treated her like shit, I might add).
Anyway.
This is not the normal mindset of someone who says he could walk around buck naked without a care in the world.
If I really feel this awful way about my physical appearance, how is it that I can bare all of it without blinking? That makes no sense at all. What makes even less sense is that I'd never so much as noticed the glaring contradiction.
It went off like a bomb in my head when I did notice it. I immediately set about thirty mental tracks to figuring out (a) how this had evaded notice for so long and (b) how I could resolve it, preferably in a way that helped my self-image.
I eventually decided (a) didn't matter, but (b) mattered a great deal. And what I've come to is this. I don't care how other people look--never have, never will. If someone is beautiful inside, it makes them beautiful outside, to me. And if someone is ugly inside, she could be Miss Universe and I wouldn't look twice at her. I've always been convinced that this attitude makes me pretty much alone in the world, given just how much value our society seems to place on the outermost layer of a person.
You've heard me say, many times, "mine is not a better way, mine is only another way?" In this, and almost this alone, I say, no, "mine is a better way". If everyone really thought the way I do on this it would heal so much pain...
...including mine. Not once have I ever thought to apply this to myself.
I've always tried to focus on other people's pain to avoid dealing with my own. I specialize in self-image problems. You think you're ugly and worthless? Come to me, I'll convince you otherwise. Countless times I've offered advice and emotional support (that's another thing I'm great at, I'm told) that really, honestly helped people...and would have helped me if I'd ever bothered to notice what was spilling out of my mouth or fingers. If I ever tried to do such a thing, I'd scoff at myself. It's different with you, I'd say. YOU'RE ugly. Not like ____ at all. When's the last time you ever heard somebody say otherwise? She just heard otherwise...from you. Because she's beautiful, and YOU'RE...
Cue self-destructive mental loop.
So.
I'm not capable of adopting that macho strut that alpha males have mastered, the one that says I'm going to rape you later and you'll thank me after I'm done and beg for seconds. That kind of self-confidence is well beyond me: also, I find it disgusting. But I can adopt my I-don't-care-what-you-look-like attitude to myself. I think I do it without thought every time I think about walking around naked. It's just skin.
So maybe I can walk around in clothes pretending I'm naked.
It strikes me as beautifully ironic, proof of how gloriously ass-backwards I am. Most people, I think, could only walk around naked themselves if they could first convince themselves they're fully clothed. Me, in order to feel comfortable walking around fully clothed, I have to pretend I'm naked.
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