It's Coming....

Time to Rock

I find time is at a premium lately. I get home from work at 6:30 in the morning, have breakfast/supper, spend an hour or so reading the paper/people's blogs/various sites of interest to me, and then I go to bed. I get up in time for supper/breakfast, clean up after that (how two people generate quite as many dirty dishes as we do is a mystery I'd dearly like solved). After that there's maybe an hour or two to relax before work. Not much time to blog. In fact, it's a fair bet that if you see a blog from me during the week, it's written at a time I should be sleeping, and therefore is substandard.
I do find with this Sleep Number bed I'm able to get by on less sleep. I'm averaging 6.5-7 hours a day, where I used to need 7.5-8. Pretty happy with this bed so far. I knew I would be: the kicker is durability. If it lasts eight years or so (it's rated for twice that), I'll be overjoyed. If, however, we're replacing it in four like we've had to with our last two mattresses, I'll be pissed.
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A song from way back that periodically runs through my brain:

"The Rock" (Harry Chapin)

The rock is gonna fall on us, he woke with a start
And he ran to his mother, the fear dark in his heart
And he told her of the vision that he was sure he'd seen
She said: "Go back to sleep son, you're having a bad dream!"
Silly child--Everybody knows the rock leans over the town
Everybody knows that it won't tumble to the ground
Remember Chicken Little said the sky was falling down
Well nothing ever came of that, the world still whirls around

"The rock is gonna fall on us," he stood and told the class
The professor put his chalk down and peered out through his glasses
But he went on and said; "I've seen it, high up on the hill
If it doesn't fall this year then very soon it will!"
Crazy boy--Everybody knows the rock leans over the town
Everybody knows that it won't tumble to the ground
We've more important studies than your fantasies and fears
You know that rock's been perched up there for a hundred thousand years

"The rock is gonna fall on us," he told the magistrates
"I believe that we can stop it but the time is getting late
You see I've done all the research, my plans are all complete."
He was showing them contingencies when they showed him to the street
Just a madman--Everybody knows the rock leans over the town
Everybody knows that it won't tumble to the ground
Everybody knows of those who say the end is near
Everybody knows that life goes on as usual round here

He went up on the mountain beside the giant stone
They knew he was insane so they left him alone
He'd given up enlisting help for there was no one else
He spent his days devising ways to stop the rock himself
One night while he was working building braces on the ledge
The ground began to rumble the rock trembled on the edge...

"The rock is gonna fall on us! Run or you'll all be crushed!"
And indeed the rock was moving, crumbling all to dust
He ran under it with one last hope that he could add a prop
And as he disappeared the rock came to a stop

The people ran into the street but by then all was still
The rock seemed where it always was or where it always will be
When someone asked where he had gone they said: "Oh he was daft.
Who cares about that crazy fool." And then they'd start to laugh.

But high up on the mountain
When the wind is hitting it
If you're watching very closely
The rock slips a little bit

Sometimes I feel like the silly child, the crazy boy, the madman. Actually, to be honest, a lot of time that's how I feel. My view of the world and most people in it runs towards the negative, and I often think I see whole regiments of rocks poised to fall on us.

But, you know, this ol' race called Human has dodged bullets before. More than once we've come within hours (minutes?) of blowing ourselves to Kingdom Come. So far, humanity's sanity has prevailed. There's no doubt we have the collective ingenuity to solve just about any problem that confronts us. The only kicker is, we have to recognize the problem. And that's where I think we often fall flat on our faces.

More as time permits...

A Streak of Tears

The woman who was to be my wife came with two cats. My eyes lit up when I first saw them, which probably earned me some points. It certainly raised my already sky-high estimation of Eva. Simply put, I've never met a cat lover I didn't get along with.

Nor have I met a cat I didn't love, or who didn't love me. Admittedly, sometimes it takes some time for the cat to realize it loves me. But give me two days with anything of the feline persuasion and I'm golden.

Eva's two cats couldn't be more different. B.B. (short for "Bug-Butt", because she used to run around like she had one up there) was an undersized kittenish cuddle-slut embodying absolutely everything cute about cats. Streak, named prosaically for her markings and her tendency (as a kitten) to move like lubed lightning, was an altogether different beast: regal and aloof, she doled out affection on her own terms, and only if she judged you worthy of it.

I was not worthy, at least at first. A previous boyfriend of Eva's had played more than a few rounds of "let's scare the cat", which gave Streak a surly disposition, particularly towards anything male. With Eva watching, I got down on hands and knees and ever so slowly approached, holding out a hand for Streak to sniff. She stood there stoically, consenting to let me pet her for a few strokes before lashing out with a barbed claw. I withdrew hurriedly and tried again later. And again. And again. Before too long, I'd won her over and was rewarded with the kind of deep-throated purr normally heard on more mechanical objects. Like Harley-Davidsons.

Another conquest. Two of them, actually, because Streak was a long-standing litmus test for relationships with Eva. (I don't count B.B: you win her affection by looking at her.)

Eva's not a hundred percent sure when Streak was born. It was either 1989 or '90, she thinks...well before she was transferred to Vancouver. It was on the left coast that Streak proved herself a devoted mouse-ripper and connoisseur of cockroaches. I hasten to add the vermin were not a result of sloppy housekeeping but rather a function of piss-poor pay: to live in Vancouver on what Eva was making automatically relegates you to the Downtown Eastside, one of Canada's least charming neighbourhoods (unless you consider underage whores and endemic drug use charming). At any rate, for some time it was Eva and Streak against a hostile world.

Then came B.B. Eva rescued her, pathetic and tiny, from a shady pet store-cum-kitty mill and brought her home. Her arrival activated Streak's every motherly instinct: despite having been spayed years before, she let the kitten suckle. The two have been inseperable ever since. Streak served as mentor to the kitten (I still think of B.B. as a kitten, even though she's fifteen or so herself now), teaching her many things, some of which she'd have been better off not learning.

For instance, Eva had one of those touch-lamps next to her bed. You know the kind, with three settings: dim, bright, spear-your-eyes-out-of-your-head-Mommy-wake-up-and-feed-us. Streak knew, and taught B.B., the power of three...tap...tap...tap. Mommy would wake up, tap the lamp off, and a few minutes later: tap...tap...tap.

Streak would only drink water out of a glass on the coffee table, and that glass had to be pink. Put water on the floor and she'd splash it around contemptuously; put it in some other colour of glass and she'd die of thirst before she'd deign to drink.

Shampoo intoxicated her. Freshly cleaned hair was a Streak-magnet...you'd be inundated with tiny ticklish kitten-kisses.

Her biggest culinary joys were limp French fries and vegetable thins.

Intelligent she was, eccentric she was...the final adjective to describe our grey elephant has to be tough. She had tough skin, for one thing; in her younger years she actually enjoyed light to moderate whack-a-cat. But more than that, her demeanor shouted toughness: don't mess with me, you. Don't mess with my B.B., either.

Streak seemed ageless, eternal, unchanging. Until the last few months. Tux was the first to sense something: he whined piteously at us every time Streak appeared. I don't speak Dog, but it sure sounded like Mommy/Daddy, a member of the pack is hurting. For her part, Streak--who has always hated dogs--actually would let either of ours get right in her face without the slightest reaction.

Things devolved from there. Lately, Streak gad taken to spending pretty much all her time curled up in her chair downstairs, hardly eating or drinking. When she seemed to forget how to use her litterbox--when we observed her jumping off the coffee table and landing with a horrible awkward thump--we were certain it was time to send her on.

We didn't want to. What we wanted to do was to turn back the clock a few years. Sadly, we don't know how to do that. And so we gathered our Streaky-cat up today and took her for a short car ride to our vet's. She miaowed pathetically, but beyond that there was next to no fight in her. The same cat that would have made you pay for putting her in a car a couple of years back just laid there, trembling slightly. I could have done without the miaows...every last one sent a jab of guilt straight down my gullet, not to mention Streak's huge eyes fixed on me, imploring. Where's my house? Where's my B.B.? Where am I?

Eva got out of the car on shaky legs and went in to make sure they were ready for us. They were. She came back out, gathered Streak up by the scruff of the neck, carried her in and put her on the table. Streak gave one last little scratch, then simply laid still. The vet came in and explained the procedure: a sedative injected first, then, when Streak was "beyond knowing her circumstance", the actual lethal injection.

Streak didn't even seem to notice the injection. Or the vet, for that matter. My heart broke a little then. This wasn't, couldn't be the same Streak. Our Streak would have torn this guy a whole new throat.

While we were waiting for the sedative to take effect, we asked whether B.B. would likely follow her life's companion anytime soon. The vet softly told us that many people wondered that, and it had been his experience that on the contrary, the surviving cat generally flourished. "Cats are not sociable by nature," he said, "and there are often little frictions between cats that you don't see."

You haven't seen Streak and B.B., I thought but did not say. The only friction between those two happens when they're cleaning each other.

After several minutes, the vet affixed his stethoscope to Streak's chest and listened. Her heart beat remained strong, and she was still looking around a little. We petted her. I thought I detected the tiniest purr, but that was probably wishful thinking. Still, she seemed a long way from sleep.

The vet injected her again. Within a minute, she vomited--very hard to watch, let me tell you--and almost immediately after that she fell asleep. Another needle.

Streak died as she had lived: tough to the end. The vet actually had to go and get a second dose of that lethal concoction because after ten minutes or so Streak's heart was still beating. "Strong heart in this old girl", he said. How could I tell him that her heart was the only thing still strong? How could I tell him that it would remain strong even after it finally stopped beating? How could I tell him it was my heart I was worried about?

After some interminable time, our Streak gave up the ghost. I actually felt a little better after she'd gone--the kind of better you feel after you've done a hard but right thing. But that's only on top. Underneath, I'll be mourning our plushtoy for a very long time to come.

R.I.P. STREAK BREADNER 1989(?)-2007

BEAMED FROM THE BRIGHT CATTERY IN THE SKY

(Michael Hatwell, The Cat Magazine)

"praedilecta Sappho ibi nuper ascensa sic loquitu"

In case you have been wondering

Just how I am getting along

In my new surroundings

Or worry whether I have learned to cope

With the easy rhythm and pace

For which this place is renowned

Then listen: I have been chasing little mice again

Sweeter, lighter, infinitely more fragrant

Than any I ever brought into the bedroom

For your pleasure

In the old days.

That having been said,

I wouldn't for all the world wish you to infer

That they stint the grub up here:

Admittedly

The celestial fish are not especially exciting

(Their natural zodiac ripeness has had to be homogenised for the general run of feline palates)

But on the plus side

The nice cat-lady who comes round,

All gowned in blue (my favourite colour)

And with glory crowned,

Pours out a warm and creamy whiteness

That is literally

Quite heavenly.

Someone usually remembers

To cut my claws

And tickle my ear

So that side of things is catered for,

One might say,

Adequately enough.

I think of you sometimes

Certain that you will come one day

To take me on your knee

And talk to me the way you used to.

When that day comes I shall let you know

Loudly and unambiguously

That things round here have finally begun to go

Really very well indeed:

I shall add to ordinary space and time

My own particular dimension

Of thick, soft-throated sound.

Prejudice Aborted

I read Michael Coren every Sunday, usually as an exercise to see just how high my blood pressure can go before I explode. About four times a year I find myself agreeing with what he's writing and invariably at those times I'll think 'even a stopped clock is right twice a day'.
You see, Mr. Coren is a devout Catholic, with all that entails. He rails against the secularization of society in some form every week, usually finding a way to work gay marriage into the mix. While I certainly don't believe our society is healthy, I just as certainly feel his prescription is worse than the disease it purports to cure.
Imagine my shock, therefore, to read his column this past Sunday...on the hot-button topic of abortion, no less!...and come away from it with my mind reeling, thinking you know, he's actually got a pretty good point there.

Now, I've always maintained that, as a man, I have no right to an opinion on this issue--which should tell you in a nutshell what my opinion is. If pressed, I'd say I'm pro-choice, with some reservations. I don't think abortion is a legitimate contraceptive device, for instance, nor do I believe third-trimester terminations are acceptable (save in cases where the mother's life is threatened), on the grounds that the child would probably survive outside the womb and therefore ought to be given the chance. But other than that, I'm pretty much pro-choice. I've always felt Spider Robinson had it right when he said "I routinely ignore...any Pro-Life advocate who has not adopted and raised at least one unwanted child, to adulthood, and through college. No excuses for economic hardship: no excuses, period. Put up or shut up."

Your ardent pro-lifer will say that I'm basically pro-infanticide, which I've always thought was patently ridiculous. I don't believe life begins at conception, not any life worth living, at any rate. Whenever I'm confronted with someone who does believe this, I ask them if they'd like to go back and live in their mother's womb for awhile. After the obligatory Hollywood Squares answer of "heck yeah, who wouldn't", I've yet to get a positive answer out of anyone.

So here's Michael Coren along to demolish my construct. His argument, summarized, is that some people--normally pro-choice--have got their knickers atwist because of the cultural practice of aborting unwanted female fetuses. Oh ho, says Coren, abortion's all fine and dandy until sexism enters into it. Then all of a sudden it's not a fetus in there, or excess tissue, or what have you, it's a little girl being killed.

Now as I'm reading this, I'm frantically adding "abortion as gender selection" to my little list of unacceptabilities. Having added this thought and patted it into place, I figure I'm done, I've patched up that little hole in my mental dyke.

It started leaking immediately. It was the image of that little girl that did it. Because no matter what your reason for having an abortion (and you may feel you have a very good one), that little girl's still in there. You may not be killing her off because you don't want a girl...but you're still killing her off.

The only remaining defense I have for abortion is overpopulation and its attendant poverty. I still think it's a handy one to keep around--especially since it's something most North Americans, with their precipitously declining birth rates, rarely think about or consider a problem. I still don't think it at all humane for a child to be born into extreme poverty...but then again, as I'm always saying in my law and order posts, poverty never made anyone a criminal. Many people have risen out of the depths of poverty, single parenthood, or any other argument I can make for the sanity of abortion to make vast contributions to their world.

In short, much as I hate to admit it, Michael Coren's right and I've been wrong.

Don't worry, folks, I'm not on my way to murder an abortionist. I haven't crossed over to the dark side...I'm not ready to prosecute any woman who dares to have a miscarriage. In fact, this whole idea of being pro-life is rather new on me and my brain is still trying to formulate defenses for old prejudices. That none of them have held under scrutiny doesn't mean one or more of them won't.
But in the meantime I really must give Mr. Coren some credit. He's not just made me think, but made me think hard thoughts and come to surprising (to me, at least) conclusions.

Throw the Dog a Pun

It truly is the dog days of summer. Siriusly. I'm pooched for blog ideas, and when one does come along, I lack the energy to pursue it. What can I say...I'm a Terrier.
Been Shepherding my wife around to various shops. I tend to stay in the car and Rottweiler Highness conducts her business. Sometimes I actually have to go in and Springer loose. I just want to Pinscher (my nails, they're Shar-pei?) because Mastiff back acts up after awhile. Just not used to sitting still over that kind of time Spaniel understand.
Enough of that, Ken. Whippet.

On the reading docket right now: Perdido Street Station, by China Mie'ville. This book started out a bit slow, but it's rapidly ascending through pretty good into holy crap this is freakin' amazing.
Offhand, I don't think I've ever read anything so dark. This novel gets under your skin and lurks there, caressing your brain in profoundly disturbing ways. Mie'ville plumbs his thesaurus at every turn describing the filth of his city, New Crobuzon, until you can actually feel its grime and rot and smell its decay. He populates his city with the weird, the fantastic, and the utterly terrifying (one creature is so menacing that demons run in fear from it!) And wonder of wonders, he actually gets you caring about these things. I never thought I'd find myself connecting emotionally with a character who has the body of a woman and the head of an insect, for instance. Not to mention accepting her fully human lover. Mie'ville introduces themes of abandonment, bigotry and political corruption without treading on the toes of his plot. Truly phenomenal: I just hope it ends well.

Nothing else of note to write: just thought I'd better check in to this here Breadbin and let you know we're still kicking.

On this long weekend that isn't...

I hope all you people out there are enjoying your long weekend. If you can find it in your heart, please spare a thought for those less privileged...those of us in the retail industry, by and large.

As I wrote a couple of years ago, this one doesn't count. Pretty much every store is open this Monday, for reasons that escape me.
For the most part I love living in Canada and consider this country to be one of the world's finest. But that doesn't mean it's perfect, and one of the ways it falls woefully short of perfection is its paucity of paid holidays. We just don't get enough of 'em. Not only do we have to go all the way from New Year's Day to Easter without a break, we only get two real holiday weekends in calendar summer.
Business types fret about our declining productivity vis-a-vis the United States, and occasionally you hear about our deficient standard of living (everywhere but in the Calgary-Fort McMurray corridor, where the average income is ten percent higher than America's average). I just want to slap these people senseless. So what if people here in Canada are much more likely to buy a Civic or a Corolla over an Accord or a Camry? Our smaller cars are better for the environment, especially given the distances many of us drive. (I know, I know, commuting is evil...but we have counties in Ontario the size of some U.S. states, and our country is so vast we usually measure distance in driving time.)
And it's not as if compacts and subcompacts have tramp chairs or something. Our Echo is quite comfortable, even over long drives.
There is an unhealthy emphasis, in my opinion, on materials over experience and environment when we rank standards of living. I could easily live in a double-wide trailer, so long as the view out its window included water. Most of the "stuff" I have I don't need and wouldn't miss overmuch if suddenly I didn't have it. This attitude is utterly foreign in many areas of the U.S., where, let's not forget, the first order of business post 9/11 was to spend! spend! spend! "or the terrorists win".
Debt is now a status symbol, not just in the United States but increasingly here in Canada, too. When did this happen, exactly, this going out in public with your financial fly down and bragging about how well you're hung? Let me tell you something, when the interest rates start to go up a lot of people will find themselves well and truly hung.

...And they will go up, trust me. The recent volatility in the stock market is a precursor of things to come: indeed some economists are forecasting that recession is not just possible but imminent. Granted, the same economists have been forecasting imminent recession for years now, and that wolf hasn't shown. But they keep on about it not out of some perverse desire to frighten, but because much of the economy, particularly in the U.S., is built on sand. Don't think them insane just because they natter on about insanity.

It may appear that I've wandered far away from where I started this post. Not so much. I work in retail, an industry that's inextricably tied to the wider economy. When food prices soar, disposable income (already at a premium) is reduced even further, an ill economic wind. But I'd argue that we could all do with a little less spending and a hell of a lot more saving. I won't mind: I work in a discount grocery store...my job is fairly recession-proof.

No, I'll go further: I'd like to see us redefine the economy. I'd like to see a decline in productivity (within reason) as cause for celebration, not alarm. In France, all workers are guaranteed 30(!) paid holidays a year. How many days are guaranteed in the United States? Zero. And in Canada, while at least we get some paid vacation, it's nowhere near what France enjoys.

Why? The article linked above makes a convincing case that it's because of rampant consumerism. People may claim to highly value their time off, but their actions show they're more concerned with one-upping their neighbours: bigger house, bigger SUV, bigger wide-screen TV...For that, they need money, and to get money they need to work. A lot. The average American male works 100 hours more a year than his father did; the average female, 200 hours more a year than her mother. The entire culture is geared around spending ever-increasing sums of money: it is widely reported, for instance, that it costs over a quarter of a million dollars to raise a single child from birth to age 18. There are families that barely make that much money in eighteen years, yet they manage.

If we really valued our time as we claim to, we'd have no problem, for instance, taking a 20% cut in pay in return for a three-day weekend every week. Nearly all of us could save 20% of our monthly expenses if we were honest with ourselves.

The coming market correction will restore some sanity to the economy. How's about we restore some sanity to our lives?

Songs About Me?

I used to want to live in Toronto. What was I, nuts?

I spent the first nine years of my life in Bramalea, a suburb of Brampton, which used to be a city in its own right and is now pretty much glommed on to the whole Greater Toronto Area. We moved to London when I entered Grade IV, and after living in what seemed like every neighbourhood on that city's west side, we eventually relocated to Ingersoll for my final year of high school.
Ingersoll was my first exposure to small town life and I vowed within a week of moving there it would be my last.
I still remember touring the pitiful downtown area on one of my first days there. Cool, there's a music store!...wait a second..."Open 10:00-4:00, closed Mondays." It was the kind of town where the sidewalks rolled themselves up shortly after dinner. Nothing made a point of happening pretty much daily, so by way of counterpoint, the local teenagers would populate the weekly police docket in alarming numbers. Nothing serious, so long as it wasn't your car that got bashed or your house that was robbed. Surveying that docket over the first month or so, looking for patterns, I quickly counted myself lucky to live where I did: the petty crime never got within four blocks of me.
Once I started in at the local high school, I found another thing about small-town life to detest. There being nothing ever going on (see above), those not disposed to illegality instead concentrated their efforts on finding out every last detail about everyone around them. What they couldn't find out, they'd make up. The grapevine was relatively fast...relativistically fast, I'm trying to say: news had a way of spreading across town before it happened, by some process still unknown to science. It was unsettling, especially since I'd just come from the kind of high school that let everyone pretty much be themselves...no nosy questions, very little psychodrama, next to nobody ostracized.
It took me months to fit in at all, and secretly, I always wanted out. Back to the big city, where all the action was.
I harboured that dream right up until just before I met the woman I would marry. By that time (1999), the crime rate in Toronto was starting to get worrisome...the "action" tended to be the pump action of a shotgun. Also by that time, I had seen several lifetimes' worth of university students majoring in drunkoholism with a minor concentration in rude, obnoxious barfery. It slowly began to dawn on me that most of these "people" (and I'm using that word in its loosest sense) were bound for the Big City themselves. Whatever way they were headed, I told myself, I would go in precisely the opposite direction.
Settling down into married life, I slowly realized: not only am I not the urbanite I always thought I was...the thought of subjecting myself to the tension of big city life actually frightens me a little.
My friend Jay worked, at one point, in one of the highest skyscrapers in Toronto. I'll never forget the day I bussed into town and met him for lunch. Noon. Entire regiments of officepeople were letting out, cascading down the escalators in a flood tide. The very air hummed with stress: it was palpable and deeply disturbing, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. It was the first time I understood the truth behind the cliche: sometimes you can cut the air with a knife.
Five whole minutes of that left me slightly nauseous. Imagine a lifetime.

When we drove down to my Dad's winter home in Destin, Florida this past February, we went equipped with about twenty hours of comedy routines I'd burned, as well as a CD by Trace Adkins, given to us by our friend Sue. Trace has the deepest voice this side of Crash Test Dummy Brad Roberts, and he sings a mix of boozy ("Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" being his biggest hit) and soft, introspective ballad "Metropolis", "My Way Back"): the music resonated with me the way nothing had for years. The very first track ("Songs About Me") is a justification of country music, and seemed to be tailor-made for a skeptic like me. Long story short, I found myself enjoying pretty much every track on the album. In the days of the downloadable single, you have to admit that's pretty much unheard of.
Halfway through Alabama, tired of talking (we saved the comedy routines for the trip back), I asked if I could turn on the radio. Spinning the dial, I was faced with a choice: get SAVED! BY! JEEEEEE-ZUSSSSSSSSSSS! on a dozen stations, or listen to country music on the other dozen.
I've been saved before: eventually you go moldy. So: country. The very first song I heard in its entirety was Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts (first line: "Way on down to Southern Alabama with the guitars jammin', that's where we're headed")
Well, yup, that's where we were headed. About ten bars in, Eva said "turn that up, I like this song." No problem: I didn't just like this song--the last time a song had turned me into an instant goofy pant-drumming fool was "Joyride", by Roxette, way the hell back in first year university.

Once we were home again, I threw myself into this unexplored genre of music with a will. I've since found several more artists I love, most notably Brad Paisley. Here's a guy who does it all: hilarious songs like "Online", uplifting songs like "The World""...and instrumentals like "Throttleneck" that show this guy can flat out play guitar.

It took me a while to figure out why I've fallen in love with this music. After all, the standard country lyrics don't describe me well at all: I don't drive a car, let alone a pickup truck; I've spent next to no time on farms; I'm anything but a cowboy. I'm definitely not "Rough and Ready" (Trace Adkins again):

Mudgrips - white-tip
Cigar stickin' out of my face
Earnhardt racing sticker on the window
Banged up fender
4x4 - straight pipe roar
Primer and rust all over the door
Scarred up knuckles, Mack belt buckle
White t-shirt - Ain't afraid to work
Got a "what-are-you-looking-at-asshole" smirk
Cold beer, hot wings
Wranglers, Skoal ring
Get just what you see
Gun rack, ball cap
Don't take no crap
Ain't a pretty boy-toy
I'll rock you steady
Rough and ready

But even though I don't fit the country-boy mold to the letter, I am one in spirit. I do have a very strong streak of independence, of not caring what the world thinks, of going my way. I also have a great deal of respect for people and things that came before me, a trait I see mentioned over and over again in country music. Many songs make a point of referencing other artists: I like that sense of camaradarie.
And I like a story well told...which is what a lot of country ballads are. (I defy you to listen to this one without tearing up a little).

Don't be surprised to see me out in the country by the time I retire. I'm countrifying by the day, and I'm glad.

Tory, that idea stinks.

.

I'm a lifelong Conservative. Raised in the Reform school, I've been getting progressively more, well, progressive the older I get. I almost voted for Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals last provincial election.

Almost. His platform looked pretty good, if I could get past that icky Liberal thing. What really impressed me was the (now infamous) quote "I won't cut your taxes. But I won't raise them either."

I can't tell you how shocked I was to be impressed by such a thing. I jerked my political knee right out of its socket a long time ago repeatedly calling (screaming, whining) for lower taxes. Now here was a politician actually announcing he had no intention of cutting taxes (at all! at all!) and I'm thinking of voting for him? That's like a quintessentially straight guy suddenly contemplating a gay lover.

In the end, I voted Conservative, but not out of any great love for Ernie Eves: I was really casting my vote in favour of my MPP, Elizabeth Witmer, who had done what I considered to be a commendable job. But to this day I remember my hesitation in the voting booth.

You see, McGuinty seemed so honest...

Cue guffaws of laughter. Has there ever been a politician less honest than Dalton McGuinty? He's broken practically every promise he made in that campaign. Some of them he's broken repeatedly. Every year, the date to close Ontario's filthy coal-fired electricity plants gets shoved back eighteen months, for instance. It'd be one thing if there was a plan, any kind of plan at all, to replace that power. Then Dalton could announce "there's been some delays in the construction of the new nuclear facilities: we'll have to rely on our coal plants until they're up and runnning." But there are no new nukes. Instead, we will make up that shortfall in power by purchasing from the U.S...from coal plants considerably dirtier than our own. Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

The list of broken promises goes on and on. He was going to roll back tolls on Highway 407--they've gone up six or seven times. Highway 407 has simply got to be the most expensive toll road in North America. You can travel the entire Ohio Turnpike for less than the cost of traversing Toronto.

(High tolls may be a good thing, although gas taxes are supposed to serve that function. No matter: the promise was made.)

They promised balanced budgets, then promptly ran a deficit. They promised ministers would take a pay cut for running a deficit. Never happened. You name a promise, they shattered it. The biggie, of course, was that new health tax they brought in almost immediately, while simultaneously delisting (privatizing) several medical services--two broken promises in one!



But see, says McGuinty, that wasn't a tax, it was a "premium". I don't know, Dalton...whether you call it an anus or a rectum, it's still an asshole.



There's another provincial election FINALLY coming up in October. Ever since that first big promise turned out to be a lie, I've been counting the days until I could boot McGuinty in his metaphorical ass (rectum, anus). My wife feels even worse: she did vote for him in 2003. Between the two of us, we wish we could cast about thirty million ballots.



But what always happens to me politically is happening again. I really wish that just once, just once, I could unreservedly vote for someone, rather than having to vote against somebody every frigging election. I voted for Harper, despite some serious misgivings, because I just couldn't bring myself to reward Martin's Liberals for AdScam. (Actually, I can't believe anybody could convince themselves to trust that gang of thieves, but lo and behold many did.)

Now it's happening again. I'm not sure I like John Tory much.

Oh, he would have made a great mayor of Toronto, I think. Certain much better than his Blondness, union shill David Miller. But Premier of Ontario? I don't know.



Consider his latest: he wants to divert funds out of the public education system to fund faith-based schools.

This is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. What I find most amazing is that Tory's actually lauding this as an inclusive policy. How's that again? We already have one too many religious school systems in this province. How does further segregation bring people together?
Parents who send their children to faith-based schools think this is great news, of course. They've been arguing for years that they're subsidizing, through their taxes, an educational system they're not using, and that they shouldn't have to pay twice. Which sounds fair--until you stop and think about it for, oh, half a second.
Nobody forced these parents to enroll their kids in religious schools: it was something they freely chose to do, knowing full well the costs involved. Having moved next to an international airport, do you complain to the media about all those noisy planes? Having accepted a job that pays a certain wage, do you turn around and strike for a higher wage?
(Wait a second. Don't answer that.)

My view, for what it's worth, is that in a country which claims to support the separation of Church and State, the State has no business propagating the claims of any particular Church, particularly not to its children who are too young to understand what they're being taught.

In other words: one public system.

This has nothing to do with my (admitted) disdain for organized religion. Religious faith ought to be a private matter between a person and his/her god(dess)(es). By all means, teach children about religion--it has been, and continues to be, one of the most important influences on society. But teaching one particular religion over another denies a child the opportunity to choose for herself what to believe. It also goes a long way towards preventing interaction between children of different faiths...surely not something a multicultural society ought to encourage.

It's sort of like politics, now that I come to think of it. Would you send your kid to Republican school? Hell, even if I was an ardent Republican, I wouldn't do that.

I believe the appeal of faith-based schools is rooted in fear...fear that your child might grow up to stand for something different than you. So long as that child has come to her beliefs honestly, why should that matter? I submit it doesn't...and I certainly don't think money should be stolen out of the public education system just because some parents disagree with me.

Economoron

Does anyone know where I can get a good ultra-beginner's-level introduction to Canadian economics?
This is one area I find myself woefully deficient in. You name it, I don't understand it. For instance:

Today it was reported that the Toronto Stock exchange was down nearly 400 points, the steepest one-day decline in some seven years. A variety of reasons were given. Retail sales are sharply higher; the price of oil has dropped considerably; there is some fear that interest rates will rise to "cool off" the economy.
Why would we want to "cool off" the economy, he asks, stupidly. I thought a hot economy was a good thing--for us plebes and the fat cats running the show. But no, supposedly this "hot economy" phenomenon inevitably leads, through yet another process I don't comprehend, to "inflation"--which in economic speak seems to be the equivalent of "the deepest darkest depths of Hell". One person speculating that inflation might rise causes a mini-panic.
Inflation: as far as I know, it means prices go up. So long as wages keep pace, what's the big deal? And if they don't keep pace, it means employers are simply pocketing more profit...doesn't it?
Another definition I've read: inflation is the process by which your money deteriorates in value. Fair enough, except money doesn't have a value in real terms, not since the world abandoned the gold standard. Money is just paper.
So are shares, and it astounds me to think how many shares there are in any given company. I'll hear something like "quarterly profits were $7 million, or twelve cents a share"--my God, that's a lot of shares.
Company stocks, I've noticed, always go up when (a) there's a merger in the works or (b) they lay off a bunch of people. Following that logic, there should be one company producing everything in the world, employing only robots, and its shares would be infinitely valuable.
The above is proof positive that the stock market cares little for the peons that actually drive any given company.
Bonds, mutual funds, GICs, annuities...the complexity goes on and on. This is all stuff that should be taught in school, part of a "Life Skills" curriculum that ought to be mandatory.

Meantime, I'm an economoron.

Bye, Atus

I'm baaaaack...
Okay, so I'm two days early. And my mission to get something in the mail en route to publication, fame, and fortune has hit a little snag. I still think it something of a minor miracle that I (mostly) managed a month without blogging. Even more surprising, to me at least, was that I rarely even thought about blogging, or regretted not blogging. It's certainly easy to fall out of habit.
My story, tentatively titled "Sleeping Like The Undead", is about two-thirds done. It concerns a couple (much like Eva and I in an alternate universe: all my couples tend to be) who go out and buy a bed ("write what you know!") only to find it turns certain people into vampires. The premise, I grant you, sounds flatly ridiculous. But I happen to believe that one mark of a good story is convincing a reader to accept the flatly ridiculous. Stephen King is a master at that sort of thing, and while I am no Stephen King, I'd like to think I've learned something from the man.

Like King, I believe that stories are not so much created as they are uncovered. When I set out to write a story--or a blog entry, for that matter--I almost never know how it's going to end, except maybe in the vaguest of terms. Heck, sometimes I don't even know what's in the middle.

This vampire bed story zipped along tickety-boo until I realized I was going to have to write (gasp!) a sex scene.

There's no getting around it. There's no considering getting around it. It didn't occur to me at the outset, but as I dug up more and more chunks of story, it slowly dawned on me that a sex scene was going to serve as a crucial plot point.
And then I got to that crucial plot point, and froze. Shit, I thought, I don't even have the slightest clue how to write this.
Oh, a boilerplate sex scene I could envision in my sleep...and often do, ha-ha. But it is required that this sex scene be (a) plausibly "hot" (not necessarily explicit, but arousing) and (b) written from a female perspective.
The first stipulation's not that difficult, if I'm writing for a male audience. Just ask any woman: it's pathetically easy to excite a man. But (b)'s got me utterly flummoxed. I've read everything from fluffly Harlequins in which the descriptive power yields an uncontrollable urge to laugh hysterically--"he thrust his purple-helmeted warrior into her moist cavern of love"--all the way up through Black Lace and Herotica to Nancy Friday (whose supposedly non-fictional catalogues of woman's fantasies are, quite frankly, disturbing). None of this has given me a handle on writing a believable sex scene from a woman's point of view.

Once upon a time, a whole three months ago, this situation would have resulted in my putting the story aside and donning the "see? see? you'll never be a writer" hairshirt for the umpteenth time. Now it means a little pause while I consider my options. Remove the sex scene and I might as well firebomb the whole tale. I tried writing it from the husband's point of view, which was much easier but just didn't work in context. I can only see one viable option remaining: lower my expectations. Maybe I can't get every woman who reads my story to feel lusty, but I can poll my wife on her favourite sex scenes and write something that will affect her just a little bit.

Meantime, I'll be going to the library some time in the next little while to peruse a copy of Writer's Market. My stories, both "Sleeping Like The Undead" and "Market Share" (check the index at left for July 2006: it's a story in five parts) will be residing in slush piles long before we see slush piles out the window.

**************************

Not much happening in the real world of late. The Sleep Number bed has yet to arrive our house...the one they shipped us from Ottawa or wherever showed up at the Sleep Country warehouse damaged, so its brother's coming next weekend.
I'm back on night shift, after much agitation. (Days are unbearably agitating, and so I agitated our District Manager until he forced our store manager to reinstate the night crew.) Eva's almost done the final volume of Harry Potter, which got here at ten o'clock (I'd be neck-deep in it right now myself if she hadn't slept for a couple of hours before embarking on it). I'm also reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a weighty tome that is by turns fascinating and almost impossibly boring--the catch is that it can be both on the same page.

Hey, I did a blog.

*smile*

This one doesn't count

Just popping in to say--okay, the writing's going so-so, one story just needs some polishing and the other's almost done, and I'll have both in the mail...to somewhere...before I do a real blog entry on July 23.

But why I'm really here: another friend of mine has joined the blogosphere.

I haven't seen Melanie in about fifteen years, but we've kept in touch. She's a woman of many talents. I first met her in the intermission of a Kiwanis Festival concert--she was playing clarinet on a devilishly hard piece called Hounds of Spring. Her band did quite well, as I recall, certainly better than the orchestra I was a part of.
She put her clarinet aside some years ago in favour of stained glass--which was at first a hobby and has now become a career. I could write pages on how phenomenal her work is...or I could just direct you to her site, where you can see for yourself.

Check it out, and bring your sense of wonder.

Hiatus

Dear Readers,

I have a few story ideas percolating around in my head. Unfortunately, every time I resolve to get them out of my head, I'm almost instantly distracted by all manner of possible Internet diversions.
Don't write that down...you could fire off a blog entry, hell, even two, in half the time it'll take you to dig that story out of your cranium. Then you'll feel like you've accomplished something today.
Go play Peggle instead...you've only got two levels left before you're a Grand Master, after all.
Look at that blogroll. I wonder who wrote what today.

So I'm going to try something radical, at least by my standards. I'm not going to blog for the next month. I know myself well enough to go I can't go cold turkey, at least not without really irritating my wife. Accordingly, I've decided on a couple of rules.

1) I can still read other people's blog entries, but will refrain from commenting on same. Reason being those comments often turn into their own blog entries, and I'd rather keep my mind focused if at all possible.
2) In the event of anything sufficiently serious occurring--by which I mean the sort of thing that makes front page news worldwide--I hereby release myself from all blogging constraints.

If I ever want to get something even a little closer to publication, I'm going to have to learn to devote some time to the process.

I'll miss you, folks. But I'm doing this for my own good.

The Beddy-Blog

Let me first tell you this: we love our Georgia Peach.
That's her name, usually, Georgia Peach, or just Peach or Peaches. But in the manner of parents everywhere, we reserve the right to call her by her proper name when she's in trouble.
We love our Georgia, yes we do. But love is not wholly incompatible with feeling like you want to reach out and strangle the damned dog.
Take the time I woke up to an odd crunching noise, just forward of my ear. Georgia was merrily munching away on...a stick?
Where the hell did she get a stick?
I reached out and inserted a couple of fingers into our puppy's enormously cavernous jowls. Rooting around for a while, becoming positively beslimed, I eventually dug out a four-inch length of white wire I couldn't immediately identify.
Until I noticed a wire-shaped hole in the electric blanket. Which, by the way, was plugged in. How the lights didn't go out in Georgia I have no idea.

I got a belt last month. A nice wide one, a belt which actually seems to do an adequate job of keeping my pants from shimmying down my legs. (Georgia may be a peach: I'm a pear, myself.)
Said pear foolishly left his belt where the peach could get at it, and found it in pieces. Our Georgia's what the puppy toy industry refers to as a "power chewer". Actually, more than once we've brought home something with the word "durable" written seventeen times on the packaging, only to have her chew right through it in five minutes flat.

I won't mention the four pairs of slippers. Oh, I just did. Okay, I really won't talk about her predilection for Eva's lacy underthings. Or the fan cord she ripped through. Or...or...or...

We love our Georgia.

The worst thing she got into? One morning Eva got out of the shower and entered the bedroom to find our puppy chewing her way down through the top of our mattress. Stuffing had spilled out everywhere. Tux was cowering by the foot of the bed, as if to say Mommy, that's not me. I'm not doing that. Just so you know. My sister's being a BAD DOG.

No kidding.

When I first moved in with Eva, she slept on a narrow futon that made old pull-out sofa beds seem cloud-soft by comparison. After two nights on that thing, I informed her that we were going to go out and buy a new bed. Today. Now. (How many couples do you know who were out buying a bed together two days after their third date?) Anyway, we got ourselves a very thick King Koil that was guaranteeed for twenty five years.
It lasted four...and the last six months were sheer agony for Eva and not far off that for me.
Nonplussed, we found ourselves in Sleep Country one day. We were just scoping out prices, trying to determine how many banks we'd have to rob to get a quality mattress. Honestly, we had no intention of buying a bed that day.
The Sleep Country girl explained to us that no mattress is meant to last a quarter century: the working life of a good mattress is seven or eight years, and the fine print of any warrantee of longer duration would prove that. Just try to return a bed after more than five years. If it's not in mint condition, so solly, Cholly.
Okay, said my wife, but I'm fat. I need a good mattress, and I'd like it to last at least a little while.
Invariably, whenever Eva comes right out and says she's fat, people are taken aback. I've never quite understood that, because unless you're blind it's pretty obvious she's telling the truth. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not exactly skin and bones myself. When it comes to mattresses, that quite simply means that the $199 special won't cut it.
We bought a bed that day, of course. They get you to lay down, you've lost: wave the white pillowcase and reach for the wallet. We selected a top-of-the-line Simmons BeautyRest. The mattress itself is two feet thick, the foundation that again, and it all rests on a wooden frame Eva fashioned out of two-by-sixes, putting the whole thing that much higher still. Lovely durable construction, that bedframe, all the better to drop on your bare foot.
That bed's served us well for...about as long as the last one did. Now, of course, it's got a Georgia-divot in her side and the top is wearing right out. That's it: next bed's made out of something more permanent. Like diamonds. Or taxes.
So once again we sallied forth into Sleep Country, once again with no intention of buying a bed today.
We are the proud owners of a Sleep Number bed, arriving our home next month. (We got a great deal on one that's currently in an Ottawa warehouse.) I'll be happy if this lasts even close to half the eighteen years it's rated for. (The 'Sleep Expert' explained in great detail how this bed differs from everything else in the industry: it is, essentially, a very high-tech airbed, adjustable to recreate anything from a feather-bed to concrete...and while you can wear out springs and coils, it's kind of hard to wear out air.)
I'm a 65; Eva's a 50, maybe a titch lower. She reported, after five minutes of laying on the bed, that her back pain had almost entirely abated. That made it a no-brainer as far as I was concerned. It was only a little pricier than the last bed we bought, and they assure us this bed will last longer. It is, apparently, designed with heavy people in mind.

More care will be taken with this bed, in the hopes it'll pay us back. We got a mattress pad this time, and I will be making sure the bed's made...it was the exposed, worn out, hanging-together-by-a-thread mattress top that so tempted our Peach to go digging.

Oh, yeah, and it's a king size...which means there'll be room for everyone.

Including Georgia.

Uh, um, aahh...oh, yeah! Piss Off!

Avid readers: do you ever survey your library in search of something to curl up with and think nah, I just read all this?
Well, right now I'm thinking, nah, I just wrote all that.
Seriously. Oh, there are lots of things I could write about, but the frame of mind I'm in right now, they'd all come out either depressingly boring or boringly depressing.
Take Jim Balsillie's upcoming battle royale with the National Hockey League, for example. As a hockey fan who is sick to death of 40 years of Maple Leaf mismanagement, I'd love to write about what will soon be the Hamilton Predators. But the NHL's management makes Toronto's look like, well, RIM's. I highly doubt there will be a team in Hamilton, or anywhere else north of 49, any time soon. Gary Bettman would rather have a failing American team than a successful Canadian team.
Depressing. And, if you're not a hockey fan, boring.
I asked my wife for a blog topic. She thought for a second and then said "Is Canada's greatest natural resource now water?"
Yike. Research required there, not to mention where the hell does she get these thoughts?
(If it isn't yet, it will be: you'll see water wars waged worldwide within a few decades.)
Depressing. Boring.
I could write about how I've discovered Facebook--how three people from various points in my past all nudged me (same week) into joining, and how I've since discovered and reconnected with people I haven't seen in years. But since it seems like everyone else is joining either Facebook or Myspace, my story's boring in the extreme, right?
I could wax political, but I've been there and done that; I could tell you about my work, but (a) it's boring, (b) it's depressing as hell and (c) I don't want to be fired.

I know! I haven't excoriated the CBC lately.

In the wake of the gang raid that 'took down' the Driftwood Crips street gang, the CBC television reporters showed their typical colours. Every question was directed against the police: either questioning why so many had been arrested, wondering about the racial makeup of the officers ("why were there so many white officers arresting black suspects?"), even at one point asking the chief to tell them about the "terrified children" who watched the raids net parents and siblings.
Yeah. Because living under perpetual threat of gang warfare isn't in the least terrifying. It's only really scary when the police come.
As my longtime readers know, I am the son of a career peace officer, now, thankfully, retired. My dad never fired his weapon in all his years on the force, a fact he and I both take pride in. Of course, he spent the majority of his time far removed from the mean streets of Toronto (when he worked those streets, they were nowhere near as mean).
My dad's choice of career colours my thinking, as my more perceptive readers may have noticed. I don't like criminals. Even moreso I hate people who seem as if they do like criminals. Such people include the majority of the Canadian media and practically every member of what we call our justice system. (That street gang? They weren't 'taken down' at all. At most, eleven months and countless person-hours bought the Jane-Finch ghetto maybe a week of comparative peace.)
When my father was my age, he'd already been on the O.P.P for fifteen years. I can assure you I wouldn't have lasted half that, had I followed in his footsteps. I probably would have killed myself by now. I mean, here's a job that, to my mind, is noble and distinguished (and monstrously underpaid, but that's another post...) But it seems these days as if everybody's on the I-hate-cops bandwagon. Most of the teenagers I work with think police are something less than vermin. The Toronto Star is forever suggesting that cops ought to be teddy bears/social workers/anything but what they are, people charged with 'Maintaining the Right', as the RCMP's motto goes. I admire the hell out of anybody who can keep themselves centered in the face of such blatant and ridiculous opposition.
And the CBC? It can take its agenda and shove it. Sideways.
Incidentally, here's another example of CBC doctrine at work. "Happiness is paying your taxes, study suggests", goes the headline. Well, now, I had to read that, because nobody I know enjoys paying tax.
The study they cite had absolutely nothing to do with taxation. It monitored brain response to charitable giving--which is a red-headed Swede if ever I saw one, a Norse of a different colour. Participants knew their 'money' was going towards a food bank. A food bank. That's a wee mite different from a bloated government bureaucracy, no?
But according to the CBC, happiness is paying taxes. It is, of course, un-Canadian to wish for lower taxes; to do so is greedy and selfish and...naughty! You are Canadian, you will bend over and YOU WILL LIKE IT!

I guess I had something to write about after all.

Quickblog

Our air conditioner is making our bedroom a livable place. In fact, it's kind of hard to leave it.
You know what I don't get? Government agencies telling me to set my a/c at 26 degrees. Now what, I ask you, is the point of that? Ours is set at 20 degrees--68 Fahrenheit--you know, room temperature. 26? That's almost as hot as our room gets. If you're supposed to keep your a/c at 26 degrees, you might as well just buy a dehumidifier instead.
There are certain things I'm willing to pay for. Willing to pay a lot for. And very high on the list is a good night's sleep. If I could, I'd get a couple of industrial air conditioners and set the temp at about 12 in there. Then I'd really sleep well.
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It's been a week here in the Breadbin. My mother-in-law underwent exploratory heart surgery yesterday. Nothing like that to ratchet up the stress...and it certainly didn't help that she's deathly allergic to the dye they had to use. Nor did it help that, despite being scheduled for 9:00 a.m., she didn't get into surgery until after 2:00 p.m. Emergency cases kept coming in and getting slotted ahead of her...you'd really think there'd be a separate stream for things like that, but...oh, yeah, this is Canada, eh?
Anyway, the good news is only one artery's blocked. The bad news is the muscle underneath it is dead. So there's not much they can do. It's a good thing my wife's family has a habit of outliving people's expectations.
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Last Friday, when I got home from the last night shift I'm going to work until September (yes, we'll have a night crew again, as soon as we can find and train some honest people!), I made a deal with myself that I could go to bed as soon as I finished moving the bedroom around. There was a little more work than I'd bargained on, but what really slowed me down was dropping the damn bed on my foot. Entirely new curse words were invented and strung together at high volume. For the better part of a day walking was beyond me; the only reason I'm semi-ambulatory now has something to do with a whole lot of ice.
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I hope something happens outside this house soon so I can blog about it!

Consequence free?

In my early childhood, at least, I was raised according to the "that'll learn ya" school of parenting. Touch a hot stove --> get burned --> "That'll learn ya not to touch hot stoves". This accomplished a couple of things. One, it made me extremely sensitive to cause-effect relationships. "Consequence" was not a concept that needed explaining in my house. Two, it initiated a loop that eventually made me into something of a bubble boy. I was cursed with a vivid imagination, and it imaginated all sorts of outcomes to the simplest of actions. If, for instance, I should dare to climb a tree, well, than certainly I will fall out of the tree and suffer pain unendurable. This equation was of the 2+2 variety in my mind: axiomatic, unquestionable. The fact the equation would have been valid a great deal of the time, due to my absentminded fogbound dreamy nature, simply reinforced my own perceptions and the perceptions others had of me. I was not a child who tested his limits.
Such tests were forced upon me from time to time. Yet even when I passed them, the dominant emotion I felt was rarely any species of triumph or pride: instead, I usually felt a sort of giddy relief that that nightmare was over. I can tell you right now that even if I had ever climbed a tree and made it back to terra firma intact, I would have never climbed another. Why should I? There are so many safer ways to get a nice view. Tempt fate twice?

There are all sorts of things I've never done in my life because my resident risk analyst deems them either dangerous, or simply not worth it. Incidentally, I've been drunk all of once, and the first order effect of drunkenness, for me, was to take that risk analyst, gag and bind him, and shut him away up in some corner of my brain where I couldn't even hear his screams. I found myself in a situation I wouldn't have ever considered were I sober, and since then I've treated alcohol like old nitroglycerin.

There remained lessons to be learned, of course. One comes to mind from fifth grade. My teacher that year was Mr. Sackville--probably the best teacher of my elementary school career, not least because he wasn't afraid to put me in my place.
I don't remember what the project was, but I dilly-dallied about it. The Monday deadline came and went, and Mr. Sackville threatened me with a zero if I didn't turn the thing in. My mother freaked. I still remember her French-Canadian accent, which only came out when she was angry: "If something is due on a certain due-DATE, you will hand it in on that due-DATE." Despite her anger, it was all I could do not to laugh. Hey, Mom, you got the emPHAsis on the wrong syllAble, there...
Thus chastised, I set to work with a will. It was a large project and it took me three nights to finish it. Paging through the completed project Thursday morning before placing it on Mr. Sackville's desk, I admired my writing--some of the best stuff I'd ever done, in my not so humble opinion. That'll show him, I thought to myself. A-plus for sure.
It wasn't until the next Monday that I got my project back. The teacher had written words of high praise on the cover sheet and there was a nice big circled "96%". Beneath that, in smaller handwriting, was another line: "-15% x 4 days late = 36%."

I cried.

Now, Mr. Sackville saw to it that my intransigence didn't jeopardize my final grade that year. But that's not the point. I didn't know that until I got that final grade. And believe you me, I never turned another assignment in so much as a minute late...not even in university, after I had fallen out of love with the classroom.

I said all that as preamble. What you see up there is an anachronism. Sometimes I feel like the last of a breed.

Did you know that in Ontario classrooms, tardiness in turning in assignments is not to be penalized? This goes hand in hand with the prevailing educational attitude that no student must ever fail, at anything, lest he consider himself a failure. Give a child a mark of, say, 30% and more than likely the principal will raise it to a pass.
Today's Toronto Star has a long article discussing this phenomenon. In it, one educator says that the onus is now on the teacher to teach rather than the pupil to learn. "The teacher used to say, 'Look, I taught it, you just didn't learn it. My job is done: you try again'...now we know that if it didn't work the first time, more of the same isn't going to work." There is no such thing as too much help, says the article.
Bull. There is so. When you don't enforce deadlines--which are an unavoidable fact of life outside of school--who exactly does that help? When you give a failing student a passing grade, who does that help? It sure doesn't help the student, who is assumed to understand certain concepts by virtue of that passing grade.
But according to research done at Queen's University, students who fail more than one grade nine course are more likely to drop out of school.
So what? I know several high school dropouts. A few of them have gone on to attain multiple diplomas, degrees, and designations. Others haven't, but have instead become happy, well-adjusted (and very well paid) tradespeople. There is nothing wrong with dropping out of school so long as there are alternatives available. And should the student choose not to accept any of those alternatives? Then there ought to be consequences to that choice, too.

I'm very much convinced that the overwhelming sense of entitlement many of today's youth have can be laid at the feet of educators afraid to educate them in the realities of life (sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug) and parents who are deathly afraid their little ones might not succeed at every last thing they try.

I've always wondered at the typically teenage dismissal of consequences. What causes a fifteen-year-old to steal a car and drive into a taxicab at an estimated 160 km/hr, killing two girls (who, ironically enough, took a cab because they felt the transit system wasn't safe) not to mention himself? Did that outcome not even occur to him? Why do so many teens think that drugs which have been proven potentially lethal won't affect them? Kids have always had these sort of attitudes. It's only recently that adults seem to have bought into this themselves, in their absolute refusal to set consequences for their children's actions. The above incident was called an "accident" in print. God, I hate that word. Most traffic "accidents" aren't. The very word denies the near-inevitable consequence of driving irresponsibly.

It's everywhere. Those kids I wrote about last post, who stole about $3500 worth of cigarettes? Both of them have been in trouble with the law before. One of them has been my pet project over the last several years. I kind of knew that without my efforts he'd wind up in a life of crime. Turns out that's going to happen despite my best efforts--which leaves me profoundly disappointed. Because now it falls to the justice system to straighten him out, and we all know how well that works. "Stop! Or I'll say 'stop' again!"

Our whole Canadian society is built on abdication of responsibility and dismissal of consequences. Whenever anything even remotely disturbing happens, you can count on a Canadian to announce the government should do something. In the aftermath of the "accident" alluded to above, for instance, there were immediate calls for a review of police chases, on the grounds that the police were chasing the car at at the time. Never mind that they were well back, travelling considerably slower than the young criminal. Never mind that, I say, it has to be someone else's fault because it can never be our own.

When there are no meaningful consequences to one's actions, there is no deterrent to wrong action and no reason to assume responsibility for right action.

Consider the environment. Not all that long ago, pollution of most kinds was perfectly acceptable, even a badge of progress. And why wouldn't it be? Belch a huge amount of crap into the atmosphere and the wind would blow it all away as if it never existed. A few people downwind would get sick and die. At first, nobody thought to connect this with the air they were breathing, so polluting was still okay. Then it was discovered that air pollution could kill you--and air pollution was still okay so long as it only killed other people. (Don't think for a second that people don't actually rationalize like this...) Now we're quite probably on the cusp of seeing wider, deeper and more unpleasant consequences of our environmental attitudes...and there are STILL people out there dismissing it all out of hand.
And what really scares me is that we forgot to teach the people we've entrusted with fixing our mistakes in this arena about consequences. We also forgot to teach them about personal responsibility.
Oh, global responsibility they get. The world has a responsibility to crown them, adore them, coddle them. Don't do any of that to their satisfaction and you're 'dissing' them...which in certain circumstances can get you killed. In their world, respect is assumed, not earned. In fact, if this goes on it's a good bet the word 'earn' will drop right out of the language.

I wasn't raised perfectly--who was? But I thank my parents, all of them, for giving me a sense of consequence and responsibility. It kept me out of trees, sure, but it also kept me honest.

Bachin' It/The Experiment Ends

I won't be working any more night shifts for the foreseeable future.
Which is really too bad, as I have enjoyed them immensely. There's a sense of importance that washes over you at three in the morning, as if it falls upon you to bring the sunrise. What's more, I was able to get vast amounts of work done, much more than I've ever managed in daylight. No customers will do that.
So why are there no nights in my future? Not through any fault of mine, believe me.
We had a sizeable theft last Tuesday night. I was there at the time, busy like a little beaver in my dairy aisle, while this was going on at the other end of the store. Didn't see or hear a thing. Two of my fellow workers were caught on tape and summarily fired and charged. (I know you're supposed to say 'allegedly' in cases like this, at least until the suspects are convicted, but the camera tells no lies.)
Rumours of additional hanky-panky concerning still other members of the night crew forced my boss's hand. No more nights. Which really bites. (Hey, Ken, you're a poet and you don't know it...your feet show it, they're Longfellows.)
So now I'm not back to work until Monday morning. Eva's up at her best friend's cottage in Wasaga Beach, having a girls' weekend. I'm here with the menagerie, trying to figure out how to plan my sleeps now so as to 'flip' for Monday morning. Oh, and there's a buttload of cleaning to do around here, too.

I Don't Get It

Much as I would like to, I can't claim to have been born without jealousy installed. It occasionally rears its ugly green head, masquerading as free-floating insecurity, and it always takes me some time to determine what it is. Why, that's jealousy! Get it out of your head! Jealousy, to me, is almost the most irrational emotion imaginable: feeling pain at another's happiness.
(And before you ask, I shall answer: yes, I have, for example, deliberately set up a girl I wanted dearly for myself with a good male friend of mine, on the grounds he was probably better for her than I would be. More than once I have done this. It never took, but it wouldn't have bothered me if it had.)
I've said before that jealousy is corrupted envy. Envy, a perfectly natural state of mind, is wanting something someone else has. Jealousy is wanting something someone else has, such that they can't have it any more. It's a petty and yet supremely damaging emotion, and whenever I feel it, shame is hot on its heels.
But there is one emotion I think of as more irrational than jealousy, more terrible in its implications, both for the self and for others. And it's sort of related. It's called schadenfreude: not pain at another's happiness, but happiness at another's pain.
Schadenfreude is, of course, a German word. It's often said that only the Germans could come up with such a concept and feel it worthy of a single word...an assertion that, besides being deeply racist, is also flat wrong: there are similar terms in at least seventeen other languages, from Arabic to Hebrew, from Greek to Gaelic. Which points to schadenfreude being a universal human emotion.
Not in my universe.
I can honestly and sincerely say I've never felt it in my life. To me, there is no more succint definition of evil than finding somebody else's pain worthy of celebration or merriment. I've often found myself in debates with people who find pain funny. I never win these debates, but it isn't for lack of trying:

Would you find that funny if it happened to you?
But it didn't happen to me. That's the point! [chuckles]
Yeah, but what if it did? She didn't find it funny, did she?
Of course she didn't, she's crying! [laughs uproariously]

It's all I can do not to stare at the person at this point as if they'd grown hooves and horns. And then I'm invariably told to "lighten up"...which I take as a command to pretend someone else's pain isn't real.

Sorry, I can't do that. I've never found pain--physical or emotional--at all funny when I've experienced it. I have no reason to think someone else's pain is any different than mine.

I can trace this strangeness in me--a strangeness which, by the way, I think is perfectly normal; it's the rest of the world that's screwed up--way back into early childhood. Remember the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show? I hated him, and would burst into tears as he whipped kitchen utensils around, utterly careless of who or what he hit with them. Any child of a particularly messy divorce might be able to sympathize...but I honestly think I would have been appalled even if I hadn't seen stuff flying around my own kitchen on occasion. Pots, after all, hurt.
This gradually evolved into a hatred of violence in any and all its forms, something which I still harbour deep within me. Growing up, I often felt compelled to hide this hatred from other kids my age, to fit in. Sometimes it was impossible. I remember a movie night at my first job, a little staff party held for some reason or other. The movie was Die Hard, and I think I made it through the first 45 minutes before quietly slinking away. Part of my disgust revolved around the fact that seemingly every other guy in the room had at least one girl to cuddle--yep, jealousy, I was incredibly immature then--but a deeper part was concerned that anybody could cuddle up while watching the gore onscreen.
I'm sure a psychologist would have said I had difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. Bullshit. I knew perfectly well that the blood and guts on TV weren't real. What bothered me...what revolted me...was the idea that somebody would (a) want to portray such madness as if it was, and that (b) dozens (no, millions) of people would find such a spectacle entrancing.

Things have progressed. It's not enough any more to show blood and viscera. In torture porn like Saw and Hostel, I understand people get ripped apart. Eyeballs pop like grapes. And teenagers watch all this and think it's hysterical. They actually cheer, I'm told, as if dismemberment was a sporting event. (It goes without saying I haven't seen any of these movies. You have to pay me an awful lot of money to sit through just one of them.) You wonder why there's so much violence in certain segments of society? I'm positive the movies are part of it...but what I'd really like to know is how children get so desensitized to acts of unspeakable carnage as to eventually find them laugh-out-loud funny. I wonder how gut-bustingly funny it'd be if their guts were busted. Or those of their friends.

To this day, I suffer from a lack of schadenfreude. Yes, suffer is the operant word...because the pain and misfortune of others is so...damned...inescapable. You can't avoid it on television...I sometimes think it's the only basis for TV comedy. It's as if TV writers sit amongst themselves and think "well, we're stuck for a joke, here, so let's inflict some pain on this guy." Again, yes, I know television characters aren't real--but so what? Why is fictitious injury funny? I don't get it.

I don't think I ever will. Actually, I hope to God I never do.

500 and counting

Welcome one and all to my 500th post.
When I started this blog a little over three years ago, I had little idea where it would take me. Five hundred posts, well over a million words, and untold skullsweat later, I'm still not sure.

The nicest thing about Blogger, for me, is the chance to be an editorialist without all that tedious drudgery of being a lowly reporter. No, better yet...I don't have an editor. Doubtless that has led to some rambling, out-of-focus posts, not to mention a small mountain of typos (I'm particularly negligent at closing brackets. But ask any professional writer to name the bane of his existence and chances are it's Mr. Bane, his editor. The nerve of those people--who would try to temper my love of the emdash--who would dare to tell me I use more italics than Cosmopolitan. I know the job of an editor is to make a writer's message clearer, but for a stream of consciousness writer like me, that's akin to telling me what and how to think, and I resent that more than anything.
This blog has witnessed a host of world events. Some momentous ones, like the tsunami and hurricane Katrina), dominated my thoughts for days or weeks. Others were forgotten almost as soon as they had been committed to screen.
Unlike many bloggers, I made a decision early on to alternate political with personal posts. The Breadbin has seen a slow but steady evolution in my politics, even as it has catalogued my biggest biggest ups and downs. But the most important function of the Breadbin in my life is to keep me balanced...and to promote balance around me whenever I get a chance.
This blog has exposed me to other bloggers whose missives I read routinely and whom I count among my friends (hi, Peter!) I tied it to a group blog which has, in spite of being rather dormant of late, provided me with lots of food for thought. And the mere fact I have a blog means I've had to scrounge endlessly for stuff to write about, menaning in turn that I have learned a lot.
I have put more effort into this blog than maybe anything else in my whole life (with the exception of my marriage, of course). A friend of mine once had to delete her blog and start over. At the time, she had put about as much into her blog as I have now into mine. I don't know how she did it. The idea of all these thoughts, emotions, words going poof! fills me with horror. Even at gunpoint, I'd hesitate before I hit that delete key.
Because this blog has been my truth. Not the truth--one of the things the Breadbin has reinforced is that there is no such thing--but my truth, and I types it as I sees it.

Thank you, everyone, for reading my ramblings, for sticking with me, for commenting and making your presence known. Writers write to be read: an audience is our sunshine. This ongoing document just wouldn't be the same without you.