D A N E A T K I N S O N B L O G

incurable disease

2008-02-24T13:05:00.002-05:00

I think we carry a lot of subconscious stuff about our bodies, and most don't consciously deal with this relationship to themselves as well as they should. A lot of people project what they want or need coming from something or someone external when yet it's something far different than that. Now more than ever, I think I'm closer to just recalling the absence that something is missing. I don't know what it is, but it's there, it's my own personal story about the absence of order or the absence of self-awareness which will allow me to feel more at home in the world. Yesterday there was a unquestionable whole about myself that I had to deal with in regards to the relationship between my body and the world... so, I had a tattoo done. One of soon to be many I'm certain. It was quite exciting.

I should be painting right now. But I’m not. I'm blogging. I’m lazy like that. I haven’t picked up a tube of paint and painted anything since early this week. Not that I’ve forgotten, just that I really should be putting some time in brushing up. To be honest, sometimes it’s fun.

Weekends of random disappointment and pleasant surprises. This may come as no surprise, but art without the benefit of outside funding is not financially viable. It is a frightening prospect especially for those who deviate from urban pop-art to say... my work for example, that is entirely edgy but simultaneously three-dimensional. Even to the most principal expert, or most passionate of artist, none of the above at all have a lavish means to an end in the pursuit of this interest. But when you have an implicit understranding of this and remain incurable to your ambition of creating... you'll be more effective in your own uniqueness and content in your own excellence.

The latest show I had at the Mercury Lounge did not have one of the most successful sale results in my 5 month history. But if the success of the last art show can be measured in more than dollars than I must say that it was another big hit... oh hell, who am I kidding. Despite the turning in circles along with the scratching of heads with respect to people trying to find meaning and intent in my artwork, I did receive plenty feedback from other artists alike. Unfortunately, there is always going to be this schizophrenic approach to the focus of my art. I really find it spreads the quality of work way too thin.

I remember when I was a first time participant in Ottawa's art scene, through this duration I have had a lot to absorb and still a lot to overcome to finally observe significant changes in myself. You can say I've been going from being quiet and observing to being very involved in participating and creating. When it comes to selling my work, it's one thing to have the ability to produce it but it's entirely another realm when it comes to describing it. For some it's not so hard, for others it becomes this inexplicable element. For art to be bought into, your role is to imbue some kind of poetic content and social mission upon others. Otherwise what you've produced is a shell without a soul. If you have courage of your convictions, very few people will disagree with you. If you really believe in what you speak of, the world listens and generally follows suit. I haven't had many very good experiences that way. My biggest failing at life is my inability to have sufficent faith in myself and in humanity to believe that it can make a difference. People skills, go figure.

gloomy kids rejoice

2008-01-28T14:46:00.000-05:00

'Sorry to have kept you waiting'. These are the words of a formulated apology, to myself and to others. I've been perpetually trying to catch up rather than lead at my own life as I chronically lag behind these foreign components of a machine. I've been encountering a number of people and I've been nothing but bogged down and reduced to simple assertion throughout various situations. Perhaps, for now it would be for the best if I step back and gather myself until I get the answers right.

When this year had opened I had the intention of cultivating myself. Surely, I am by all accounts a bundle of nerves, rooting with insecurities and vulnerablities. A month ago from today I was moved to the conclusion that my relationship with Sharon must end. For months it was led with the sort of analysis of contempt. A poor and bitter guy weighing in on the prosperous and confident girl. Despite the superficial differences, we were becoming more and more distant. There was a constant emphases on changes round the clock.

All the arguments were moot. Even in the ways we faltered from one another. She was raised in affluence and would not accept what her parents did or have them projected into her own traits. I can see she is looking for a much better deal than what she put up with. Call it the mechanisms of control, government, bureaucratic guidance, big industrial combines, parents, whatever you want to call it, she is running away from it and open to reaching her limits whether it brings her half way across this forsaken world or not. In time I found us missing. When it came down to it, I was considerably tired of the bickering, tired of the dependence... just overall tired and ready to consider other options. So we called it off on a mutual decision, and after a month, in contrast or comparison, she is on the verge of even more rapid changes than even I can demonstrate.

Now, somehow I feel as though I'm moving in a direction of more and more frustration. Everynight, when I come home my body falls apart. Everyday, when I'm awake my body cries like a child experiencing something terrible, a challenge to innocence.

Overwhelmingly enough, I wish I could say that my first experience in displaying art at the Mercury Lounge for Collective Seen VII was uplifting and driven by experience. But what can I say, it was a night for the Gloomy kids to rejoice in what was our own depressing disintegration of ourselves with the use of music, poetry and artwork. I would explain to some of them that I overtly tried to paint the darkest images I could imagine. Besides my art allowing some people to wallow in grief, obviously most of them did not get the message. In fact, I don't think too many people can relate to my art that's purely a release of negative energy. But what I don't get is how people can be devoid of all the suffering and morbidity in my work and read things only at face value, for example, the zipper mouth on rhytidectomy is about as much anyone can say they like. I know I'm in need of developing my capacity of Emotional Intelligence (EI). Something about my interactions with others doesn't seem entirely human, it's just that I don't think life is all that it's cracked up to be and whenever I share that with someone I receive a real lack of empathy. I need a connection. Without it I'm lost.

As an artist you sacrifice a lot of yourself. My health is diminishing at a crazy rate. The longer I get into this routine, my body goes with it. If only I could take another breathe to elaborate on my thoughts. But I'd rather contemplate the detrimental red button. The red button that is ready to go self-destructive to paralyzing extremes, rather than converting these impulses into a tool of realized art.

basement art attack

2008-01-14T23:11:00.000-05:00

I'm not even sure if I sleep anymore. I believe that I only shut my eyes only to begin a mental breakdown just inside of me. It leaves me feeling sick and tired in so many ways that it can be very hard to embrace any new grounds at all really. As a result, I'm not that engaged into the aspects of anything exterior. For instance, the political art world. I think I am becoming more and more familar and yet more foreign to it at the same time. It's difficult to explain. As I warned, no doubt the exhibition became the version most believed to be accurate in my last post.

Last Saturday evening I arrvied at the Babylon Nightclub for Bonanza II. It was my 3rd show and 2nd art display at this venue since September 2007. Given the likelihood of the scenario, first you may think 'Yeah, Babylon Nightclub, what a drabby layout.'. In all the honesty and forthrightness concerned, you would wonder: who is this guy thinking he could get involved into the 'art world' through a such place that mainly caters to... alcoholics? I do have to say, a plethora of people do actually attend whether they cater to the toxic beverages or not... but personally I'm not seeing how it attributes easily to the sale of art. Some would be especially hard pressed to believe anything of a completly different visual motif would come to life straight from the depths of a nightclub. But if you have attended or have the intention of doing so, it can't be argued that there is a wide range of young and very talented artists right here in Ottawa that can or already are generating a stir in the world of artistic expression and exploration. Today, it is places like these where on occassion, you can find a generation of new artists.

So you know, my prints are now available: 4" x 6" in. ($20) and 11" x 14" in. ($40) sizes. I have to thank the professional effort by my print-photographer, Andre Paquette who has done a amazing job this past week. Anyone who has seen my paintings would realize that there are a lot of layers to be lost if one were to only stare at just a photograph of them. Despite the heavy texture he still managed to retain the purity of my work quite well. To each of you who appreciated my art display, I can't thank you enough. Be sure to get in touch or make it to my next show. I have a couple in arrangement perhaps this month and in February at the Mercury Lounge. I'll post more information when I get the details. Until then, it's in and out on a routine basis. Patiently waiting...

the chat function

2008-01-04T14:30:00.000-05:00

The new art show at the Babylon Nightclub is approaching and I’m back once again. I’ve been sick and bedridden for sometime now so I haven’t been able to produce as much work over this past month as maybe one should. Surely, the holidays are to blame in all this. I want to say I look forward to more further opportunities for the public to have meaningful input. Basically, I see the art show in this type of venue especially, as more of a chat function than a art gala. It works fine, sure, but once I try to sell my art somehow I end up in the hole. But I have to admit, for all the advances I’ve made in my social strata it’s not such a pain in the ass. Now for some exciting news for those of you interested in bringing my art home, finally your chance has arrived....prints of all my latest works will be ready shorter than you think.

jump the gun

2007-12-24T23:59:00.000-05:00

Not a soul has yet to touch base, stop in or say hello in order discuss the artwork at all really. If I were to look forward to big things in 2008, that would be one. -- Earlier, I was talking with someone, and I was asked what holiday gifts I would be spending on this year? I said my income and I share a very delicate relationship so as a result I haven't bought a single gift at all, quite frankly. I'm actually in the middle of a attempt to save my earnings. When asked how I was prepared to, I grew quiet. I realize there are things I cannot ignore and see no other alternative. This is about building endurance and becoming more familiar with the luxary of leisure, as it were. I find I am now a willing participating in a insurance test. At times I say, look at those suckers, why take more risks by scheduling a inflated amount of commerce at this time of season? I thought why not do some less obvious things. But after all is said, the only answer left to this solution is to live vicariously through others. -- One of the two house dogs has become abnormal in appearance as of late. Over the years, this dog and I have shared a very dark element so you can say I have grown attached... only that I'm afraid now it has become more and more uncomfortable than I can perceive. Especially tonight. A few blood vessels had ruptured along its head, the unusual eye, the skin tissue along its ear bleed immensely. It bounced between all four corners of the room until my brother and I were able to restrain it in order to simply disinfect and wash it adequatly. We have been scrubbing the blood off the walls, floor, furniture and ourselves for what seems to be hours. I'm moved to chills. I kid you not. This Holiday... Most will think about the good things. Let us not jump the gun.

solitary life

2007-12-18T22:51:00.000-05:00

There are many problems posed by the social environment we live in, especially in my very own. There are many things I have seen and just as many things I have found disposable. There are also many things I find that cannot go on without a astonishing amount of deep consideration. I do not know how it is for many, but for myself a social environment is something that is virtually non-existent, mainly because I live a.... I suppose... a comfortable... solitary life. Alike the air I breath, inhale and exhale, everything comes and leaves. Forgetable as any recognition just as my own interal respiratory system venting that of myself. It is a notable search as fruitless as any bleak embrace within the night life leaving my head cracked open with shit in the skull the next morning.

It has been a month of becoming more influenced with a new idea, yet in a way also returning to a very old idea. A mind divided into facilities, divided again into dozens of more distinct capacities each critically noted but without any conclusions. In my mind, I often find myself alone in a woodland destination pairing space and content. There are cedars, challenging paths and breathtaking lookouts. I see this and think to myself, maybe if more trees were cut maybe that would make room for better parking.

I realize all this before I awake from a couple of hours sleep and the regulation takes over. But now, at this moment, the night has come yet once again and as I try to compose a post in my head - I realize I may just fall short one, maybe a few hundred words - then I originally imagined dictating to someone else with eyelids. It doesn't take more than a dozen blinks before I find what I've been trying to say before I fall asleep will not make itself out anyway. Soon it is another morning. Another you evaporated completely. And just like my flickr account, this file will be unable to reach contact with the database server. No image. No identity.

This January I'll have my next art show, put that on the event list will you. It will take place at the Babylon Nightclub on Saturday, January 12th, 2008. Inexpensive, informal, and accessible to patrons and newbies alike, all can enjoy a night of the arts and music to their hearts desire. It’s pretty cramped in here so I hope before the time comes that I'll be able to display at least two new paintings before the date as mentioned.

underwent

2007-12-04T23:41:00.000-05:00

During the wintertime it seems difficult to do anything. With hibernation in effect, here is a little information you might find valuable while reading at home. My hands are incredibly shriveled into the likes of peanut shells after washing my artists brushes with brush cleaner and preserver for the past half hour... Unfortunately, many of us wouldn't consider that sentence anything literally worth reading... so if you've already come to a stop I'll understand... any further and I'll be surprised to know you're still reading. Afterwards, I'll have you know that while I was sorting through the refrigerator I had meet one of the most defined characteristics of our country and our people. No it wasn't a relationship with the wilderness of the great outdoors but a cold, self-abandoned, premium bottle of beer. Following the chance encounter, one of my easily learned special skills known as consuming came into effect.

A single dark glass bottle for killing brain cells. A stress reliever after another busy day of work, warding off the devil for only a little longer. A personal fantasy of the slightest sophistication, class and sensitivty in a man... A faint memory of caveman behavior is always good.

I'd like to post more regularly but the fact that I don't doesn't bug me much at all as it used to. To tell you the truth, when I look back half the time... I find I don't even concentrate on what I am doing. But when I am speaking my mind, especially online, some may come to perceive it as just another desperate attempt in seeking attention. I wouldn't exactly describe it in that manner but rather as a tool of social construction. Now being a blogger, regardless of how often you spend time deconstructing your whole-self, you do spend a considerable amount of time, I don't care how, virtually creating your lifestyle as you see fit or wearing your honesty at the mercy of a bullet. The immediate response, now don't get me wrong, unfortunately see's this as an act of seeking fame. Now as I appear in representation, just as contradictory it may seem like any public school teacher I've had growing up (i.e: In light of how often I was made comparison to the mentally retarded despite my continual academic achievements through out grade school. Beats me.) "I am not used to people. Period." You can quote me on that one. Diagnosed with a cognitive disorder, hyper-sensitive to the teeth and with as much anxiety to fill a band-wagon; I can say that I've never been a fan of attention to tell you the truth.

Last Sunday, my Vernissage at The Buzz Restaurant was a willful commitment to a circumstance that is the need to get my stuff (my artwork) out. As far as I've found, you meet a group of people who are looking at your artwork, who as you may find sometimes are not a representative part of your work that you had produced... but they become your fans and you get locked into it to some extent and you play into it as well. Ultimately you have no clue. No idea at all. Of what that brings out. I had no clue of what I was doing, maybe it had more to do with the alcohol more than anything but it was and still is a whole new experience for me. I wouldn't call these art exhibitions of mine the validation of my work but rather a considerable step forward in encouragement. And when I think back on it, it's nice to know I'm hitting the mark and that this is only the beginning.

dear jared

2007-11-28T23:43:00.000-05:00

Dear Jared - To some extent I could understand what you had said but what do you you really mean, The Best Christmas Holiday Season Ever? I myself am displaying my artwork at a Ottawa venue. With a Vernissage coming this Sunday, that in itself serves several potentials; as material, context, and room for more experimental space. But am I ready? Far from it. You can add that to this seasons unpredictablity. As for you my ol'friend, How or what are you ready for this holiday season?

the monstrous dark

2007-11-28T21:36:00.000-05:00

A chance to encounter a partially demolished portal. In it there exists the behavioural sub-conscious incorporated into our every day cerebreal construct. The all seeing and all knowing origin of it that one may call infancy. Which most of us forget entirely. When a child for instance, sees for the first time a great painting or a listens to a symphony for the first time, something is born. Naturally a sensation is captured, all else whether it was a visual element or a rhythm becomes unmanageably ghost-like. The essence of innocence before the awareness of premonitory vision filled with anxieties...

Soon I'll encounter another evening where I'll discover objects floating amongst one another in my nearby space. They're all barely perceptible, as believable as it seems, to the fantastical nature of considerable visceral debris, glitter, and unexpected. As such, I imagine I'll re-conceive the settings and questions of both our expectations. That of my paintings seemingly born out of the monstrous dark that I've affirmed in myself. Works verging on the insanity of a deadly disorder. In thoughtful silence, it's not surprising to think that these works are based on dangerously oversensitive emotion substantiated from death and rejection. What else can it be clearly derived from, really? Other than the augmented symbols of my mortality.

for your consideration

2007-11-26T01:32:00.000-05:00

And here I was thinking that I was all set to retire for the evening. At least, that was the idea before actually finalizing my latest painting called... well, I'm not sure yet but for now I've named it she. I for one am unable describe what seemed to spur me on in this shocking and yet almost perverse image at this late hour. From what I figure, my own ability during the process of these latest developments in my paintings are kind of opaque in the end especially after so many of these things are layered together into them... it gets a little complicated. It gets a little dicey. This last piece of artwork was far more progressive than any of my last attempts and I'm interested in messing with even more innovative ways of approaching my art in the near future. I'll explain further as soon as my eyes and thoughts become clearer.

(edit: she has been re-titled as crystalization)

dear samm

2007-11-21T21:39:00.000-05:00

Dear Samm - I simply wouldn't describe myself as someone to be missed dearly. But thanks anyhow for adding that element to your message. How have I been? That question among others always seems to come as an inconvenience since I can't always say that I've been. Not really. Most would answer with 'I've been well...', that tends to be the medium. But if you consider shattered glass getting into your eyes a problem, yeah, I've been plauged my whole afternoon. Y'know. I hope you're doing well and feeling fine yourself.

rise of the new

2007-11-14T23:35:00.000-05:00

Wow, how about that. I say, a month without any entries whatsoever. I have got to hand to it to the subtle number of changes from otherwise ceaseless interests in various forms to casually leading visitors that I cannot help but likely factor into my regular aspect of self conduct. My sincere apologies to whomever had visited without finding any satisfaction in reading my past and present entries. To your interest, just today I've been able to accumilate nearly all of my compulsively created and completed works in order to display them at The Buzz Restaurant on 374 Bank Street. I along with 2 other up and coming local artists including Cristin Price and Jennilee Murray will be featuring our works for a Vernissage on Sunday, December 2nd 2007 from 7:00 pm to closing. Entrance will be FREE so do not hesitate to bring yourself along with your friends. It will be a great show but I warn you, do not attend until the special date as listed, I am producing works as we speak and I do not intend to have my full up-to-date collection available for your viewing pleasure until the date as specified. Keep reading for further notice. Thank you.

shows

2007-11-02T23:33:00.000-04:00

d a t e	s h o w s
FEB.17.08	Mercury Lounge 56 Byward Market Sq.Side Door - Upstairs Ottawa, ON, Canada	Bands, Beads & Brushes Single night featuring live local bands and local artists. Organized by Marcus Lamoureux
FEB.03.08	Oh So Good 25 York Street Ottawa, ON, Canada	Two month display featuring prints of Dane Atkinson's paintings. Organized by Marcus Lamoureux
JAN.27.08	Mercury Lounge 56 Byward Market Sq.Side Door - Upstairs Ottawa, ON, Canada	Collective Seen VII Arrangement of artists and artists works. Organized by Robbie
JAN.12.07	Babylon Nightclub 317 Bank Street Ottawa, ON, Canada	Basement Artists presents - Bonanza II Single night featuring live local bands and 25 artists from across Ottawa. Organized by Marcus Lamoureux
DEC.02.07	The Buzz Restaurant 374 Bank Street Ottawa, ON, Canada	Vernissage Art Show featuring original artwork by 3 talented up & coming local artists that included Cristin Price, Jennilee Murray and Dane Atkinson. Vernissage on DEC.02.07. Exhibit displayed from NOV.15.07 - JAN.02.07. Organized by Marcus Lamoureux
SEP.15.07	Babylon Nightclub 317 Bank Street Ottawa, ON, Canada	Basement Artists presents - Bonanza Single night featuring live local bands and 25 artists from across Ottawa. Organized by Marcus Lamoureux

artwork

2007-11-01T19:59:00.000-04:00

Dane Atkinson, Outsider (2007) 14" x 18" inches. Mixed Media on Canvas.

Dane Atkinson, Crystalization (2007) 16" x 20" inches. Mixed Media on Canvas. SOLD.

Dane Atkinson, Affliction (2007) 10" x 12" inches. Mixed Media on Canvas.

Dane Atkinson, Homunculus (2007) 24" x 36" inches. Mixed Media on Canvas.

Dane Atkinson, Rhytidectomy (2007) 24" x 30" inches. Mixed Media on Canvas.

Dane Atkinson, Gasmasks (2007) 24" x 30" inches. Mixed Media on Canvas.

dear sharon

2007-10-18T21:30:00.000-04:00

Dear Sharon - At first I thought to myself Sombrero?. I couldn't really understand why of all things would you think I'd be interested in one. I have nothing to do with any hot mexican jazz.

good times with weapons

2007-10-16T21:19:00.000-04:00

There is something in the air. I can taste it on my unintended tongue. Something like a sodium cocoyl isethionate... stearic acid, something like a coconut. Sodium tallowate, sodium isethionate, sodium stearate. Aqua. There's a cocamidopropyl betaine cocoate or kernelate, parfum of some kind, sodium chloride? Tertrasodium! Tetrasodium etidronate.

Dissects of oneself on a steady day by day basis. Yourself teetering between some pretty terrifying and depressive evenings where sleep is slowly but surely a long distance away. This past week I’d like to tell you about things. Unfortunately they didn’t happen. I spent most of my time in bed for the better part of the week. My dependence on this website and for it to be running as something more functional is a struggle. If you're familiar with keeping websites up to date, you may know of the constant tapping on the head. The endless lack of concentration. That especially if you're me. After finishing an entry... honestly, I couldn’t see myself the next day doing the same as last, I couldn’t see myself later that same day.

And then, one night in October like today, I have a few beers and climbed the stairs to the tiny room that housed my bed and my ancient cpu. I had taken a few moments to check my e-mail and facebook, both are covered in cob webs. To tell you the truth, instead of blogging I'd rather be sorting out my priorities instead of having the echo inside of me began to grow louder and louder.

The other night I remember having this very lucid dream. To say the least, it was a nightmare unfolding with realizations of my self destructive behaviour. Stubbornly I told my disheveled self, despite the fact that you're suffering from an ever growing deterioration of a mental state and sheer exhaustion it's best if you continue to exhibit your talent in art no matter how despicable, or unhappy you may be. You play on it, man.

dear chris

2007-10-11T23:59:00.000-04:00

Dear Chris - Some people are more dignified when getting a taste of their own medicine. It happened so simply. Right before my body gives out I gave a speech that I imagined most people with guns love so much. I mean, talk about humility. To tell you the truth I would probably still be upset over the whole incident if it hadn't been for the immense reaction.

scorched earth

2007-10-08T19:39:00.000-04:00

There is a place where time doesn't move the same way as it does here. Giving all the details about it is frustrating but I'll pick up somewhere. The other night I went out with my ol'friend, Mooky. I thought it best to go out for a movie and let him fill me in on his life. You see, him and I have been friends for as long as I can remember. I was in early grade school, attending a birthday celebration at his house for his younger brother at the time when we had first met.

I can remember it was hard to talk to people. I felt the opposite of something I wasn't in any hurry to get to. When I got really lost on my way to the bathroom, I found myself somewhere really gone far astray from the rest of the party. I had walked into a room with a mouth full of whatevers, observing a two-deminsional land that seemed to wobble. I being the neighbourhood action figure junkie and him being all things computer games you can say we became very familiar with one another. It was a match made in all forms of combat entertainment.

"What is this?" I asked. "Scorched Earth" he replied with a fierce concentration remaining on the game, the slightest miscalculation meaning oblivion. "...This ain't too bad, actually." I said. How I miss those things I used to have, the little things we all used to have. To be able to make small talk, to joke, to go through the mud or sand instead of the mines or traps.

Haven't all the pressures, I can say that the familiarity is what makes me more comfortable. Yet as I sit here with everything bored, suffering from a severe pain within my left arm as I type this with only my right hand, I can say that even thanksgiving day, no matter how quiet or bitterroot the cherry pepper with betel nut is, it is a lot less accommodating.

Sometimes days off like these are often filled more than we care to think, which I’m not a fan of as it tends to detract from the ability to relax. But for the most part they pass pretty quickly. You sort of fall into an unconscious state of mind given how busy things are otherwise.

bewildering charm

2007-10-03T23:37:00.000-04:00

What a crying shame, it has been over a few days and there's nothing I can say or do but crawl to a halt at times. A life in painting can be sometimes comparable to molasses. That's very unfortunate especially if your days are determined by a exterior motif. Would you think it reasonable to blame speed and stability or time and effort for such indignation?

Before getting inextricably tanlged, tomorrow evening I'm eliminating any strange gain on a new art piece in favour for the bewildering charm of drunk mindless people. None to worry. Given what I spend the majority of my time on, and elsewhere, you’d think it a possibility that I might bring something else up other than making art. And yet I am always surprised when people find it shocking when I say, in the wriest smile, that doesn't really exist in the world... I'm painting the town red. Later on I may reflect on this and offer a new observation but until then I just gotta remain cognizant of the fact that the bare essentials i.e: a pair of lungs and spine, amongst other things, will somehow keep me able to record another reaction to my surroundings.

As a side note for viewers and artists alike, it’s important for you to remember that there are events to attend this October. The following local art shows that will capture both your attention and imagination. Having said that, I'm not a part of the presentations myself (lest to my knowledge) but if you're interested in the attending along with, drop me a line.

The Heatskores" - Zaphod Beeblebrox
Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 8:00pm
Blend of music and art with Toronto band "The Heatskores", Ottawa bands, "Hell Bros" and Vanier Shank and Goddamn Goddamns. Aswell, you'll have the pleasure of seeing several artists and photographers.

Vernissage - The Buzz Restaurant
Sunday, October 14, 2007 at 6:00pm
Mix and mingle with three emerging local artists.

bitter orange

2007-10-01T00:25:00.000-04:00

Cheer up. I’ve been telling myself that for years with thoughts of how that might help intergrate myself back into the public realm of society. At times I've wanted to spell that as - FutureShop. But we all know that is not a good idea if I wish to remain sufficient in my own development. An interesting and 'new' computer? A surround sound system, perhaps? Maybe even, dare I dream, my very own apartment? Let me tell you, I don't do well with large purchase commitments. I'm without the economic background. I'm in a deep seeded need to stockpile my savings, pay off my debts, and live as modestly as I can before something say terrible happens. But like anyone, I make exceptions for certain things and that my friends, is extremely detrimental. You need to register with PayPal, I tell myself. You need to allow that thing to happen, man. You need to have a productive state.

It has always been about the productive state. But if you call quality time with loved ones (i.e: a walk in the park with the girlfriend or a game of golf with the brother) counter productive then your rigor is by far unbelievable. Yes, besides that, there are a lot of other things that do go on behind the scenes that result in what others will not get to see or read about on the net. But it comes with the territory, man. I make impractical decisions based on those factors.

Last night I experimented with a new art piece and tried a few different techniques but had a insufficient outcome that continued to allude me. My work has been very slippery and almost a elusive quality in the hours spent on it during my frustration. There were many details I had squeezed together, most were happening so fast it's as though they were as frequent flashes from Britney Spears getting out of a limo.

Within the confines of my own room I yelled incoherently and screamed overwhelmingly. That kind of thing you can expect to happen with someone carrying a higher disposition in regards of their art. There are days where all I'm doing is sliding across my room long and searchingly. Sometimes my mind wonders if the complex and travelling ideas of mine are the same roads that people will visit during it's conveyance.

For anyone who knows me well, I'm someone who doesn't like to spend much time talking as opposed to doing. You can attest to that especially outside of my blog. As a workable archetype, I do trust that most I've met do their best to judge people by what they do instead of what they say. I think we can all agree to that, how people spend far too much time pointing anonymous fingers, talking about the lives of other people just as they do art and knowing nothing about it far too often enough. I have always found it odd that so much time is spent both admiring and admonishing the completely strange. Either way, be it love or hate, people are still focusing on someone or something they really don't know. That is how it has always been. That is always how it's going to happen. Far too much emphasis on the importance of nothing we could grasp to begin with. Creating the frenzied state in which we now voyeuristically live.

Somehow, on some level, I sense a subtle distinction made between double standards and hypocrisy... when, come to think of it, one such as myself has a facebook account along with a weblog that you are now visiting... I've gotta go.

skewered on the end

2007-09-24T22:48:00.000-04:00

My goal has always been to highlight the darkest aspects of our world. As I sit here, I figure it is Evil. It is as Evil as one can get, is it not? Enduring empty hours spent in futility. Finding it difficult at this time to become something of a refreshing being. I seem only capable of getting online to check email and what not rather than doing nothing at all. Being here in the now and concentrating on the next show has left me somewhat ironically, fatigued in excuse.

Things are going to change soon, I always state, yet most of the attributes have yet to start running (i.e: paypal or photos of my artwork). I have to admit, I don’t know, there’s just something about doing artwork, that for me, feels a lot more like layering bricks with cement. It will make your structure last longer. Sure. But, let me say this, because it is impossible to really understand if you're a complete stranger to art. From the on set of compiling the right tools and allowing the ideas to clarify, in my case, I have already spent an hour... maybe two if a extended moment is in session. While in the painting process, let alone passing judgment constantly on the artwork, before you know it the inherent art piece has changed (again, maybe twice or three times even) and has already ate away through an entire nights sleep or weekend.

Many of you might see it as wholly negative to have this attitude on a daily basis, but I am somehow of that nature, nothing could be further from the truth. If I were not to spend as much time writing on this website, facebook, or other I would be doing my artwork. At times even I give into the fatigue or concern before I even have the chance to address my issues head on without fear or how I might portray it at the time.

I imagine the ghosts that drop by my room are off doing post-summer things. As for me, I cannot argue, I suppose if I had a more eventful day there would’ve been a little more activity, but I am off getting heavier and show no sign of letting up. Anyway, for those of you who want to know what I did this weekend, I attended Chris Stewarts' house party on Saturday. He, along with his wife Allison had recently overcome what I consider to be impossible. To explain it without providing more than the necessary context, they remade their whole Bathroom and I along with many others were invited to take part in the celebration.

Make no mistake about it, fun times were had by all. I had my first s'mores marshmallow sandwich roasted directly over an outdoor fire in his backyard. It was a real treat. Please note: If you saw, or yet to have seen the photos direct from their bathroom, it's just pretend. As if all my gentlemanly graces had vanished. I do warn you, some of the photos I had taken are nothing short of appalling. Come to think of it, for some it definitely may work in more ways than I can imagine. So, if you do see it, please leave a comment.

an application of this

2007-09-19T22:37:00.000-04:00

I die in my mind. I die while watching a woman paint. Her cadmium covered fingers roaming across her lips with a lit cigarette, barely perceptible to the underlying cause of her dementia. She stumbled upon herself infront of her semi-visible, ephemeral construction of scribbles. She kept stumbling as if she were unimpressed with everything. She was not laughing. She was not talking. She was not loving. She was not looking. She is re-conceived from both our expectations while in her own conscious and bodily relationship. I thought of the people who would be still alive. They would remember how I was an ass to be around. They would remember how I was not fun at all. Worst of all things. To poison me with whatevers.

behind the bridge

2007-09-17T22:06:00.000-04:00

I believe we develop our diseases for honorable reasons. It's our body's way of telling us that our needs - not just our body's need but our emotional needs too - are not being met, and the needs that are fulfilled through our illnesses are important ones

-- (qtd. in Siegel 1998, p 240).

With the mediated quality of technology, modern thought has a way of interpreting itself. Naturally, not everything I say can be taken for granted or the medium of my message be entirely omni-present. It's important that I emphasize that these entries can develope from being a illustration on a event or situation to sometimes being a very emotionally disturbing thought or reflection. In all my years, I've come to know my thoughts are particularly disconnected from any individually accessible universe. In fact, if anything should be taken into consideration it is the cognitive disorders of mine and the confusion that is persistant in my attitude to life.

Sometimes I have a neural fiction perpetrated by senses. It is presumably there for my own good, that is, for the greater good of my selfish genes, which is probably one reason why I'm stuck in this illusion that I cannot dispel at will.

Sometimes, when I'm in my room I try find out what the world looks like from my left eye, in order to do that I close my right eye. When both of my eyes are open, I cannot help seeing a single, integrated panorama. The visible world appears as if it is seen from a vantage point situated inside my skull, behind the bridge of my nose. Of course, this is where "I" hole-up. This, at it were, is really where it seems to be. Maybe, I think to myself, I could see bits of brain and bone. Instead, it looks like the entire front of my head is missing. The illusions persist. I shut the world out altogether. This total sensory deprivation.

ground to a halt

2007-09-16T22:56:00.000-04:00

In bed I struggle to focus. I bulge my eyes out and keep beneath the surface, waiting for it to get colder, for the air to thin out to preempt imploding. I'm caught between a rock and hard place, surrounded by people who are supposed to care but find it too much of an inconvenience. She sleeps a lot, but really doesn’t.

The coffee and tea. The bodies and excuses. The sycophancy shared with so many, perhaps none more so than myself. The enormous collection of imagery and music brought together at the not-so-natural gallery of the Babylon Night Club yesterday night.

I have always found this universe outside my own largely disturbing and grotesquely misinformed in some form or other. I had a hard time justifying how any of my paintings, no matter their current meaning, what their incarnation should be to others. In most cases, the work was left to be interpreted by everyone from the art connoisseurs, the regular club goers, to the habitual gossipers. I gather that the images in that case became something other to my understanding.

It's sometimes hard to escape those thoughts. The course of today ground to a halt, a conscious effort made to relax yet to have been found. A mind today, tired as may be, kempt in tracking those reactions. What amazed me over the night were the few people, those who on occasion took it upon themselves to acknowledge my artwork. The friends, the family, and the new faces. Some were interested in my methods of application or the materials I had used for my kind of spontaneous aesthetics. For the most part, adhesive glue helped put-together most of these three-dimensional paintings. It doesn't get any easier than that. I must admit.

To those who approached my art and I without any intimidation or fear of hurting any foolish optimism, or rather just hope...

I Thank You.

flight 604 to paris via cairo

2007-09-09T20:55:00.000-04:00

Shortly after takeoff, a charter plane disappears from the radar screens and plunges 148 people into the Red Sea. The result of all our days spent on the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. There are no potential terrorists. There are only technicalities. We are victims of our own process that does not follow any guidelines. We are accidents waiting to happen and ready to expose the inner workings of our own casualty.

There is a dense fog that completely envelopes everything, it leaves only grainy residuals of noisemakers and useless cast-offs. From awakening in the early morning at a hotel suite in the downtown core, I was frozen into submission. Physically, mentally, and painfully exhausted away from anything at all imaginative or reasoning.

Yesterday was Sharon's birthday party, one she felt would appeal more to the inebriated. There were many highlights, including a notably suggestive embrace between she and her guy-friend. Amongst other depections of 'harmless' fun my response did not fashionably contend. The air that filled the room was something that made my respiratory system nearly malfuncton, so the balcony was in order for some necessary ventalation.

In the end, it was clear that something is on the rise. For what? It remains to be seen, however that is not the question. It is how the artist will respond.

basement art

2007-09-07T23:32:00.000-04:00

Look at what I found on the door step of my second home. A copy of Upfront - Ottawa's Independent News, Music, Art & Culture Magazine. Inside, a interview with Marcus Lamoureux, where on page 25 he mentions Dane Aktison (who is he?) as a fellow participant in his newly established music and art show at the Babylon venue. Despite the fact there's no way around the typo, it will not stop a considerably fun and informative read. Look for your free copy of the September 2007 Issue at your local... shop. In the meantime, here's is an excerpt written by the art columnist, Morgan Cook...

Lamoureux's events are a great way to check out "basement art" and the undiscovered. Expect a wide variety of unconventional work using an even wider variety of media. Even more, they are a great place to connect and meet with other artists and musicians. Many venues are willing to take a chance on a band that's just getting started, Zaphod's offers Monday nights and opening bands are always needed. But for artists finding an appropriate venue when you haven't developed a CV of exhibitions, got your website going or maybe you produce "unconventional work", can be very daunting. Lamoureux's shows offer artists a great opportuinity to get out of the basement and start selling work. He feels "my mission is to help new artists and photographers show and exhibit their creative works." The only problems he encounters are when the artwork doesn't get the respect it deserves. Because the events are held in dark bars and people are drinking and enjoying the music, works have been damaged in the past. So on September 15th when you're moshing and pogo-ing your ass to Machine Gun Dolly remember you're at an art show goddamnit!
-- Upfront Magazine. Basement Art. Pages. 24-25. (click here to read article)

Reading the article, I suppose the question can't be helped about what makes a most effective scenario for new and upcoming artists to display their artwork. Obviously, some risks have to be taken. Babylon is located downtown on Bank Street, also known as the urban planners worst nightmare. I especially find on a late Saturday night, the place is fallen rampant to a depressing statistic of homelessness and drug abuse. Unless you’re inept, exploring here you'll be subjected to a number of imposing storefronts and shady individuals. Irresponsible levels of drinking? All to common here amongst the other dilemmas in the world. If a Artist like myself truly is in search of meaningful return, it's not merely to have others look at what one could bestow in amazement but to have them become a part of the creation process and inspire a new world of change built from there.

diagram of the psyche

2007-09-06T23:07:00.000-04:00

If one might be tempted to see the artists exhibition next Saturday at a advanced ticket price, I regret to inform you that I'm all out of tickets. Do not take this as a sad sign. Over the course of this weekend I'll have a myriad amount of tasks to complete that include a encounter with the curator. I'll see if he could spare a few more tickets for sale at advanced prices.

As the show-time increasingly closes-in on me, I must say that I'm marvelously curious to see how volatile I may become. The body of work I'll display is large in scale but few in number rather than the suggested higher quantity of yet smaller presentations. This doesn't worry me as much as facilitating the more analytical. If there is uncertainty, I may gesture to a display chart showing a diagram of my own psyche... A bibliography is in order.

buttons incite anger

2007-09-05T23:17:00.000-04:00

This entry is character emphasis. I'll start by saying I look like total shit. In fact, I look like total shit most of the time. It is an aspect of myself that I embrace more than ward off. If you recall the off topic stuff prominent in most of last years entries, it's gone. It was just heading somewhere nasty after some had commented in disinterested satisfaction. Disinterested satisfaction as a result has become something more of a function I familiarize with in everyday life. Some people have to try it out to figure that out. How quaint a notion. Enough Neo-hippy philosophy for ya? Anyway.

From time to time I talk all night long with friends, family, co-workers, loved ones, and strangers. Sometimes not even at all. Evidently enough, on particular occasions, I push some buttons, incite anger, intrigue, frustrate, debate or engage in a heated argument. Again, I'll contradict myself, as I and everyone else contradicts each-other. You might fail to see another’s side of things, then come around and consider it later- enough so that in your next discourse with someone else on the topic, you might take it as your side instead. We are all seemingly infinite in that way. Over the course of our lifetimes we may inhabit many positions and never feel as if we’ve found ourselves.

So go ahead and judge everyone against your current ideals, and equally judge yourself against them too. Give pause and consideration to whether your beliefs serve you- if your find fault, be courageous enough to change them. Do not accept anything as a given, but always instead strive to apply what you know, and absorb what you don’t.

rhytidectomy

2007-09-04T20:47:00.000-04:00

As flat and commonplace I found acrylic it to be, I simply became more and more interested in using heavy amounts of texture to create a seductive form of complex imagery. As I intergrated away from the more traditional application I was spurred into creating an even more decorative piece I call Rhytidectomy. It was intially inspired by a glimpse of The Joker from one of my favourite comic books/films, Batman. What I implemented into the painting were mainly the features that facinated me most and I contrasted these elements from the rest with great importance. You can say it kind of took on a life of it's own unlike the character villian itself because of my need to combine materials (i.e: thread for sewn facial details and a zipper across his lips). It is now a harbinger of thoughts and feelings symbolically more akin to find a narrative device. If you're interested in discussing my piece further, please feel free to contact me through e-mail.

Rhytidectomy
Prints (w/Mat) are Available for Sale:
Print measuring 04" x 06" - Price: $20.00 CDN
Print measuring 11" x 14" - Price: $40.00 CDN
Original Canvas 24" x 30" - Price: N/A

a new beginning

2007-09-03T00:05:00.000-04:00

The darkly painted and unconventional imagery is what Dane Atkinson has recently debuted within the art world. The Ottawa artist is emerging with a variety of pieces that captivates and invokes curiousity. Though the subject matter may appear to be something out of a science fiction novel or fanatical nightmare, it still invites the audience in and wills you to stay.

Born to a mother of First Nations descent and a father of Jamaican and British descent, Dane Atkinson has and continues to explore aspects of himself. Like his work, he is still in an act of transfiguration. The journey has only begun and with both himself and his work, great, new adventures lay upon the horizon. -- Writes a Supporter.

Hello, Thank you for visiting. I could go on on how special it is to have some of you here with a part of me today but I'm not going to, just as I imagine you will refrain from lamenting over your thoughts to share on my new reproach to blogging in the following. It's not unlike bloggers or plain website developers to get lost in the drivel of madness or be caught in a storm from which they did not perceive. Since November of last year I've obviously taken a shameless amount of time off from recording my thoughts or provoking panics in order to capture some more private space.

Coming back here I'll have you know that I'll soon be incorporating a number of new elements that will broaden my interpretations of internal suffering for your viewing pleasure. Soon enough one may only need to take a brief look to find that my own artwork; that includes paintings and drawings. Through time I'll attempt to detail my whole spectacles and allowing you the viewer to give feedback or...for some strangers... engage in freakish behaviour outside the normalcy of the everyday.

My previous employment at the Federal Governments' Justice Department was how I described, a "lightening speed waltz of bureaucracy". The short-lived tenure left me tired and particularly discomforted. Sometime after I followed a new trend, one called facebook (feel free to look me up - daneatkinson@hotmail.com) and greeted a new phase of challenges. For instance, I began painting again. This time I'm experimenting with a new aesthetic using a rich amount of various polymers to calcium carbonate and matting agent (modeling paste) in creating works that are especially visual effects-driven.

Recently, Marcus Lamoureux (local artist/art curator) had expressed interest in having my artwork on exhibition from September through until January at various locations here in downtown Ottawa. I've been punishing myself in-between the night and day to produce new visions for display at The Babylon Night Club.

Babylon Bonanza - Art & Music Show
Date: Saturday, September 15th, 2007
Time: 8:00 PM - 2:00 AM
Tickets at the Door - Price: $15.00 CDN
Tickets in Advance - Price: $10.00 CDN (available through myself)

altitude adjustment

2006-10-04T03:26:00.000-04:00

You know I've got a feeling this is going to end badly and and I've got to tell you why. I've got to tell you why and I mean, who, first, first of all, who, who goes to the middle of nowhere? Who sends someone to do shit in the middle of nowhere? I can tell you this. Someone is having a laugh at my expense, and meanwhile they're all proably sitting around at their mobile truck in the parking lot of some Wendys eating flat bugers and cold fries and they've all got iced drinks and they've blind folded me and they've put me out here. I don't know where I am. I'm wandering around lost. Why? Why am I even telling this? I don't even know if they can hear me.

After wishing myself luck on my continued adventure you can say the intrepid travelers you can say are clearly said off in our own different very different directions. I mean I cut me. I cut myself. I cut me the corners. The corners of options you see and plow over the sidewalks where where we dump our trash. Shoes, baby strollers, tires, refrigerators, chairs, diapers, all piled into a six-foot-tall tribute of fickle tastes and and poor and poor craftsmanship this is the place where the creatures of the night made their home in a mess of tight recesses. Besides me feeding on dead carcus something has come to my attention. It has made the tentative plans to meet me before I head back to the corner. I could feel it staring at me as I kneel between these overgrown weeds through the roots exploding between the cracks in the pavement. It can fly and sing but yet it croaked at me in a crooked tree. It lives in the heart of it all, there in it's straining to retain some dignity. Very much unlike yours truely. That's right that right's laugh it up because the show closes early tonight. That's right.

If I've found something anything of interest it's that if you walk right around this corner here, over here it opens up to a really big waterfall and you can go right underneath it and you can underneath it you come right out the other side. It's kind it's kinda like a disneyland attraction. I've never been to disneyland. I'm just. I'm just going to keep walking here and see if I can find some kind of look out to work it out. Oh just. Oh that's great. Oh fucking great, thank you. That's, yeah. Now what would be super is if a whole flock of birds flew over me right now and just pile shit on me. That would be awesome. That would that would be great I think. The sound of thunder and the rain oh that's great too. I've got electronic equipment. In this storm maybe I could get eletrocuted and everyone back at the place would find this even more hilarious. Who knows what the problem is? You know I mean really whatever it is, there is more than one. I mean, look, for one I have this box of unused condoms. They're green. Green and orange. Any bids? Oh wait wait, they're expired.

living in the dark

2006-09-28T23:55:00.000-04:00

By it's own seemingly horrible choice a arboreal, 'bushy-tailed mother squirrel' spends most of it's time crying outside my window sill. Shivering in the rain day-in and day-out, ever since the contractor had sealed the dilapidating roof above our heads. Unconscious or conscious as I stare at this 'bushy-tailed mother squirrel', I see my very own relfection of living doomed to a lonely and miserable existence. Am I prepared to have her nest of young die for my own gratification? I have pondered as the sounds build higher and the guilt rises to the panic in these walls and ceiling above. Would you complain? Would you mind? Would you care what happens outside your room? Would I put anothers needs before mine, should I sacrifice myself for the sake of others to re-open this gate? Is that love or altruism? Or would I just thank good fortune? The dead quiet restores.

Every morning darkness is swallowed by dawn. The musky air gathered by everybody wriggling together, had to move, tried to catch eye, but seeming pointed towards looking away. Through the glass you can see the street outside, sunshine paling beyond the shadow silhouette of the rooftops. A vehicle barrelled down, brakes singing, paused at the junction and drove off again.

Unless you're kinda lost, you probably would have a hard time imagining what it's like to live life far beneath the surface, as a pale boneless creature, a floating stomach in watery darkness. A life that is as difficult to take in as it is to take out. One side that is light, smooth, squeamish in texture and the other completely accustomed to living in the dark. In a place as dark as the sea where the inside is mess of gills and filaments, a fleshy-bits of explosions, cells within cells in which other cells sit for a long time decomposing. Truly this is where the evilness would lay in store, away from these benign brown eyes under long lashes.

Note the reflection of where I am now. Note my withering expression in a distaste of uncertainties. This is where I have always started. Somewhere, as someone worked in secrecy throughout his life, used to the transforming of his eroding environment into a pandemonium. Thought over with enough time that has passed. What do I do now?

Insignificant changes are one thing. We all have them and we can live with it without even stepping back for a moments time. Major changes, of the sort, violate the clock of internal consistency. As a reclusive man kept mainly to himself who cannot even reroute an exit node before leaving towards the big white building. To a place where things, as in education; is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty in discovering a model on how to get rich programming a consciousness to run ads for some serious income. I'm back-peddled on sensitive subjects, a million more times than one may desire. So, how about this self-made custody? How about the shock of realizing what I've exactly been doing for years now. You'll have to take three showers after finishing before you start to feel clean again, let me assure you.

epic sense of struggle

2006-09-27T02:17:00.001-04:00

In the walls. In the walls and through the ceiling the voices are quickly, quietly lost in dust. I'm covered in everything, either cynically irresponsible or completely crazy. I know what the problem is. They say they're rodents. I beg to differ.

I'm under considerable stress to make the frayed ends of my life come together. I'm not sure if this is what a licensed psychiatrist would recommend... "Take your life and call me in the morning." I don't know. Maybe search for a second opinion. The problem is you and I would have never have gotten along famously unless I was for one, namely a beautiful female into gratuitous flashing just for the hell of it.

The problem is admission. Popcorn and a drink at a movie theatre ususally costs more than $20 dollars.

The problem is I do not even have a job to allow such occasions i.e: the one listed above.

The problem is the pen is mightier than the sword but the bullet is mighter than the pen and the educated lawyer is mightier than the bullet.

The problem is the press cares what the public thinks about them which is why the public only reads the paper for on average 2 minutes a day, a.k.a when they're taking a crap.

The problem is the public only listens to the president or prime minister on average of 20 seconds a day and not-to-secretly think he's full of crap.

The problem is the people really don't think that they can do much better.

The problem is that people seriously don't care what others think.

The problem is people straight don't give a shit.

It adds up. Then there's you and me. Common ground possibly established if you've read thus far, let us awake and make the mundane profound. For this second I am sending out an open call welcoming "whatever will mail and commentary" The green light to forum in traditional two-dimensional format.

These are the notes that will outlast my very being after my death. It'll show what I was going through in my movements before the one day that I die. It is the inspiration going through me to create something current out of my immediate environment that I cannot stomach enough in time to turn it around and make precious. A time other than this, that revolves around a chance and the psyche in such surrealism.

Then again, I could tell you about the time I had seen Canadian stand up comic (of Anglo-Indian descent) Russell Peters perform live right in front of my eyes, could have but didn't. I had a vision quest and saw a river made of diamonds next to a highway of sulphuric exhaust. Should have but no slice. Encouraged physical education in youth to battle obesity while at the sametime walking my dog using the invisible leash. No dice. Drowned myself in a juvenile intellect that has little need or regard for anything resembling actualities beyond perhaps a life to lose in a callow engagement. Altogether unromantic and devoid of any epic sense of struggle. Scratched.

unburdened

2006-08-31T16:31:00.001-04:00

It feels like nothing is and it's everything I've been. The radio isn't friendly with the cop out thin line of friends and strangers not so very fine. The feeling I understand of what's going on leads to how I am no more. I am a lost cause to myself, others, and to this blog. So this is how it'll be. Wrapped in tin foil. Not to spoil.

Although I must say this whole understanding that dates way back when... gives me a way to explain the strange ways people behave when talking about these hidden issues. I think there are basically a couple kinds of people. One group wants to believe in a world where miraculous things can happen. This belief inspires them and moves them and makes them feel like their life has meaning. They feel attacked by the other group, who doesn't feel the need to believe in things for which there is no evidence, or even for which there is evidence to the contrary. Of course, the second group feels put upon by the first group because they just can't imagine making any kind of decisions based on beliefs which are demonstrably false.

Both groups are right. People will be less likely to feel attacked if they're allowed to believe whatever they want to believe, and they'll be less likely to be attacked if they don't insist on suggesting their particular beliefs make good public policy.

People can sometimes resent scientists for "taking the magic out of the world" for centuries. It's no difference today, but somehow we've gotten the idea that it's not ok to hold irrational beliefs because they make us feel better. People have been made to feel ashamed of their beliefs and have responded by concocting things to justify themselves.

But let's not lose the plot here: the most important thing for some people is to continue to believe the things that make them feel better. It used to be that you could believe whatever you wanted to, but still function as a good public servant, and no one made you feel silly or challenged your right to sit on a school board because you could keep things separate. Scientific theories were best for science class, evidence(or, at least anectdote) based policy was best for public decisions.

How do we get back to that? How do we do the opposite of what happens in the middle east and tears whole societies apart? Well, first, we have to make sure everyone has permission to believe whatever they want, without being ridiculed or threatened. Then we have to make sure that decisions about the world are based upon sound evidence.

That's the route to consilience. The other way leads to madness and the truth... of ourselves.

If I'm to find myself in the near future reminiscing about last night's trip to the cafe and how much time I spent in some character, as opposed to the strip of carbon-copy, boringly and predictable populate surrounding me, maybe I'll blog about it.

Years ago it would have been impossible to envision a massive amount of time spent in waste in front of screen continuously typing what is now a undeniable loss in my minds own bewilderment, and while those who visit have still no clue as to what I am or once was, quite a few of us that have lived a considerable amount of time recognizing that we have become side from a few considerable things something almost diametrically opposed to our former selves.

May the grit and diversity, all but memories now, be swallowed up by the boring unoriginality that has gripped this poor native son. In many ways, I feel I have become one-dimensional, a playpen for the ever-expanding monotone of those who climb ladders constructed of low self-esteem away from real potential opportunism in self-realization and self-standing. I am a stranger to myself and alone in this phenomenon of mine.

Holding the phone, I look out my bedroom window, conversation diverting to the progress of my departure into a dead star. How are things going? I'm asked. I stood there, prisoner to a moment of extreme sadness, one that can only be described as the recognition of something special forever lost. It is a terrible conclusion to come about and even more so to convey in words. But there it is. Here I am.

odds and ends

2006-08-18T23:59:00.000-04:00

After emerging from years of seclusion in blog form and determined not to get trapped into criticizing the demise of my myself in the first 20 minutes of any discussion, I certainly find more comfort here where I take my time to explain why I am not an individual who's able to exult his education for I indeed have the very bare minimal. Nor am I accomplished at writing as typically revealed throughout the twists of sorts in my blog. I am merely a loner at odds with the world gradually closing. The blog I am is self-therapy for recognizing the underlying reality of situations I'm coming to terms. It does a fair amount concerning, but as I've also noticed, it also does really little to defuse the tension from burning me alive inside.

These past few weeks I had dropped my tools and cracked a cheap beer to celebrate the lesser degree of life of not selling off some freedom by the hour. As the deficit rose, I've been out of work for nearly a month and unable to do what I thought I would be. In dire need of a shower, shave, and a haircut, what with the summer settling in and out of the mess of me. The mental gymnastics encouraged my isolation into someplace you're not interested in finding and all too ready to immediately dismiss.

Prospects of further employment and established interviews are set for next week so I can actually say the dust may settle. I hope to say there is lots of content yet to come, but what I really mean is I think it's time for me to pull back the curtain and hope that people like you enjoy what I've done thus far. Some words are probably broken, or look weird, but I've tested myself for sometime now and it looks pretty good to me. Maybe I'm crazy, who knows. If you have problems, it'll help me if you were to drop a line and tell me. Until then, bookmark the site and pass the URL on to friends and neighbours, ex-lovers and therapists, your mom and the guy who sells you your drugs. Have a good weekend folks.

the willing participant

2006-08-17T23:08:00.000-04:00

Personal functions aside, I take incidents only at hints of the possibilites of the dark side of mine. In a attempt to cocoon the kind of enigma that does provide a alternative perspective to help train the mind to establish deeper thought and meaning while reading - if you're one who reads into everything of mine but is lost, maybe you deserve not to know something you couldn’t realize. All I can say is, every word rang true in the perspective from which I see it.

As I got up this morning and opened the windows. A fog of wasted years, wasted savings, wasted work and planning all come to fold. Don’t think for a second that I am so stupid to believe myself innocent. I am the willing participant of my own life, and couldn't have it any other way. But I could have pulled the ripcord long ago. That admitted; also never assume for a moment that I am anything other than a complete idiot.

Right now, as I am sitting back and laughing about all of these past entires I think, "Man, that was about Wookie Space Pirates. What was I on?". At any rate, one could guess at the number and nature of people all they like to eventually find we are a public of practiced minimalists brought to face value. We're all methphorically challenged these days and obviously an allegory for situations can be the collapse of the whole house of cards for one who prefers a manner of direct indication.

In a vision of the philosophical "when a tree falls in the forest" number. I thought of a world in bed and what it is like when there's no one around. This cover up to fall off the face of the earth. In a dreadful, ugly thought of how I can't remember what you looked like in the sort of way, where the sun swallows me up high above the clouds. Miles over mountains in doses prescribed for the condition I am not proud of. Target practice on the self by the other, anguish, the pain and insomnia of suffering worse than any case, the radiant indulge of self sweet sweet escapes that keep me tired and walking around. Tired of the futile effort of the ceased to be. Desperate to try to find restful sleep. Fascinated by the construction within a construction, pitched in a small tent for sleep, pitched in a larger tent for enclosure. Cut with a piece of memory foam to fit the inside. These are the days of keeping the company offline on my way out to mutilate nightmares, curled up together among the cushions, completely awake, listening, and trying to talk myself to sleep.

In a while I imagine myself soaring into the clouds over miles and miles of dark, dipping below the surface into a world of infinite peace and darkness. A place where, respite our imagination that had once worked when younger, we're slowly learned to putter around and to remember breathing.

that thing over there

2006-08-16T23:30:00.000-04:00

The Associated Press ran an interesting headline this morning - Bush Sees No End to War on Terrorism. In the article, the President is quoted as saying…

"America is safer than it has been, yet it is not yet safe. The enemy has got an advantage when it comes to attacking our homeland: They got to be right one time and we’ve got to be right 100 percent of the time to protect the American people."

The ‘100 percent of the time’ that the President is referring to cost the lives of 110 Iraqi civilians a day in the month of July alone, which now holds the record for being Iraq’s deadliest month. Ironically, pro-war pundits would argue that those deaths were the result of sectarian strife - despite the fact, of course, that Iraq was invaded under the pretense of having something to do with September 11th, among other ridiculous and now denied claims, and that the current state of civil war in the country is a direct product of the ineptitude and sheer arrogance of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation. I’ll not even bother getting into the war crimes that have been committed by US personnel, among them the premeditated and repeated rape and murder of a child, or their blatant disregard for the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, and international law.

These days Iraq is back-page news. Give it another year and it’ll become ‘that thing’ that’s happening ‘over there’. We’ll talk about it over Starbucks, interspersed with pathetic diatribes about celebrity break-ups and the rest of the shite that seems far more important to us than actually discussing the very troublesome realities of living in an age in which a perpetual war is being waged against an ambiguous enemy that, despite our vast and menacing capabilities, cannot be subdued – forget the gross rise in global defense spending and decline of human rights standards.

Likewise, Afghanistan has become another convenient sinkhole that keeps the wheels greased and turning back in the land of domestic bravado. Speaking of which, despite the claims being made by military Grand Pubahs, many within the ranks of the Canadian Forces about to be deployed are anything but supportive of the mission. In the words of one anonymous officer…

"…at first they told us that democracy was the goal. And now that there’s an elected government we’re just wandering around in the hills waiting to be shot at. We have fire superiority when we’re engaged – that’s true - but nowhere near the sort of belief or conviction of the guys we’re fighting. We’re not there trying to change anything. We’re just there now trying not to get killed."

Kids in school had best actually start paying attention to 1984 when it’s thrust upon them. After all, they may very well end up living, and dying, in a chapter of it. In the meantime, I’ll have a no-foam, double shot, latte with a side of who gives a flying fuck what the cock sucker (insert celeb name of your choice) did yesterday with his/her entourage, thank you.

great depression of the mind

2006-08-15T21:30:00.000-04:00

In my never ending question to optimize my wasted time, I've cotemplated what activities would allow me to be as productive, and comfortable as possible, I've done some work on it lately. Early this year I had intorduced some new furniture items to my bedroom to give myself more space. I was finding that I was too often bumping into things or running out of walking room and that this was fairly constantly raising my stress levels. The new layout position is quite nice, it looks a lot like a futurists bedroom. The reorganization and decoration definitely give it a different ambiance which is a welcome change.

I've also adopted a view of my life as going in expansions and contractions. Basically, during periods of expansion, I rapidly take on new items, experiences, and ideas. During periods of contraction, I digest and integrate these new things into my existing world view and state of existence. I scale back a little bit from the myriad of ventures currently engaged in to have the energy to solidify a base so I can reach out again. The general goal is that this way one can continue to grow while not accumulating things in disjoint layers that would allow it to fall apart.

Integration is key.

But all in all, I feel intergration has it's own course, it needs to jump past the occasional state of genuine fear that powerfully effects our own identities significantly. FDR once said "only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He was referring to Great Depression economics, but we'll ignore that part and take it with its general cultural usage.

One method of treating fear and phobias is to expose a person to the object of their fear and when they see that in spite of the exposure, nothing bad happens, they can begin to decouple the fear and the object in their mind and eventually the fear or phobia is gone or reduced to manageable levels.

In contemplating how to overcome some of my fear-laden inhibitions, I've thought sometimes that if I just exposed myself to whatever it is then I could treat myself that way. Then I realized why this plan has never really been actualized to conquer any of my fears.... I'm afraid of fear itself. I've had enough anxiety and paranoia before to know that there certainly is a physiological correlate to anxiety/fear.

I'm terribly jealous of life and afraid of death (don't worry, I won't try to conquer that one via exposure). Whenever I think about exposing myself to some of my other fears to conquer them, my thoughts fixate on the anxiety and fear that will be generated from this exposure. Approaching exposure of various items has confirmed to me that the anxiety and fear will be present. Each step closer brings me closer to the moment of truth. Either I will reach the peak and see that nothing too bad happened and I will begin recover or my heart rate and blood pressure will soar and every capillary in my body will simultaneously explode. Okay, okay, that's an exaggeration, but my mind still thinks of the of the death it all as a real possibility. So, I guess the real question is: is it worth risking death to subjectively truly live?

killing on high school

2006-08-14T15:13:00.000-04:00

You don't have do be from Venus to argue that the warriors from Mars have seriously miscalculated what it takes to achieve peace and security on Earth. Military superiority can be used for many things, but arguably not for defeating religiously or ideologically fundamentalist movements for whom chaos is a hotbed, fear a source of energy, humiliation a source of legitimacy, provocation a calculated strategy, and terror a favoured weapon. At any rate, not if military superiority is legitimized as a means to spread and defend freedom and democracy (which is still how US military superiority is legitimized), meaning it cannot reasonably be used for the destruction of civilian populations not prepared "to do our will". What the militarily superior Rome could allow itself to do, what Tacitus described as solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant ("making a desert and calling it peace"), the militarily superior US cannot do without destroying the political foundations of its dominance

War recruiting in schools. Killing on high school curricula : Canadian high school students can now earn credits (and cash) learning to shoot machine guns...

The federal government of Stephen Harper, along with school boards across the country, is sending teenagers a decidedly mixed message these days. On the one hand, kids are told to stay away from guns in their communities, a warning that’s backed by a law-and-order agenda of prison, prison, and more prison for any kid who screws up. However, if you DO like guns and want to learn how to kill people in communities half a world away, you can actually earn not only high school credits, you can also get paid for it. Increasingly, through the auspices of high school co-op placement programs, 16-year-olds can sign up with Canadian Armed Forces, an outfit whose big boss, General Rick Hillier, makes no bones about goals and benchmarks: "We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people." - read more.

Never too young to get out of the stress test of exams. Why not shoot a round of country farm newborn babies while you're at it to keep your head away from crying overnight.

visible rites of passage

2006-08-12T21:40:00.000-04:00

This weekend we started having a garage sale. Yeah I know, it’s alot of work, but junk does often have the tendency of piling up. It’s true what they say, we’ve become a throw away society. A society of rampant consumerism, consumerism without purpose, simply to buy things for the sake of buying things. The only thing that holds people content is a certain amount of drug taking and buying things to simply take home and watch it dispose of itself before your very eyes to be bought, destroyed, recycled, and bought again. I can’t afford it anymore. It’s almost to the point where whatever I buy, I think about what it's going to cost and how I will eventually get rid of the item, and then tack that on to the price. I’ve tried to blame the situation on the basement not being large enough, but today I realised that, in the end, I’m the one to blame.

I've never experimented with buying or selling on eBay, nor did I take this as an opportunity to start. Through speculation, I'm not sure, but I think you can print out shipping labels and leave the packaged item on the porch and the post office will pick it up and mail it, without you ever having to speak to an actual person. I’m the one not putting the crap to good use, which is why I’ve decided not to sell. I took it out of the box, dusted it off and figured these things must still be good for something, so here I am blogging about it.

Eventually I said forget the hassle of a garage sale and give the old stuff away to the Salvation army or Goodwill store. It helps others and the profits from such places as the Salvation army continue to help maintain a Soup kitchen for the homeless. The garage sale is just one of the only visible rites of passage in modern suburban life of haggling with neighbours over the price of twice-used power tools and never-used souvenir T-shirts.

At the end of the day you'll find letting the public peruse your purchasable goods can lead to such courageous acts of self-realization. Shed your possessions for the greater good! I qualified the thought of it when I attended the film, Buddhist Trilogy at the Bytown cinema after closing shop and found that if Buddha owned a blender that "works pretty good, but doesn’t really fit right on our counter," well, he’d do the same.

days of diversions

2006-08-11T19:02:00.000-04:00

It is said that I mysteriously disappeared and am now assumed dead. Anyone of mindful curiosity (and internet) would know this is not entirely true. For those of whom are out of touch, I'll have you know I have been unemployed for the past 2 1/2 weeks. When my job at justice ended, I was yet to have found a job that, in my view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid. So instead of heading to work, I've filled my days with diversions: playing the guitar, reading novels, writing about an artist who is incoherent and delirious, fallen into a mute trance, oblivious and unresponsive to everyone. Essentially all activities once relegated to spare time.

I'm open to anyone who's willing to catch up or bring up a few targeted prospects for optimizing my financial income to my attention. In the meantime, here are... Ten Reasons Not to Have a Job. Steve Pavlina provides ten good reasons not to have a job ever. A must read.

motion sickness

2006-08-09T23:30:00.000-04:00

I'm neutralized in empty thought. Legless and on a chair. A million miles from nowhere. How could intense natural development be of use if you purposefully play yourself down? A reason for a friend with a mandatory assignment to inject on the situation and ask if there would be a difference if he were to invite me on a road trip measured miles across broken parts of land. Tinkering with the idea of it, I realized the gung-ho beats the cold turkey. And there was a ferry ride.

I borrowed a seat for five hours heading north of the capital. Doing it by the numbers. There was work to be done and it was time to make a change. Change. A word invented to provide high drama, moments of hilarity when you least expect it, and with in many aspects an altogether elusive and unattainable destination full of hills and sidewinders extremely effective in capturing your curiosity along with what you just ate. Hold me up. Phase me out.

Motion sickness.

dedicated to the distinction

2006-08-08T22:15:00.000-04:00

Laying off the fraught over with severe anxieties and sadness that has left me in a nervous exhaustion, these days, I'm felt powerless in having to learn to live with my indifferences regarding something that I have always considered quite essentiual part in our commitment to the world. A healthy mind for a healthy lifestyle. At a time I sought professional help, it wasn’t something that was an option. And as the months progressed everything slowly slid further into a dark fog from which I have so far been unable to emerge.

I’ve essentially been holding my thoughts in, in regards to subject matter building on constructive critcism, most often it is useful and intended to help one improve on something, often with an offer of possible solutions. What I believe I'm trying to say is, we're all essentially very nice people with good intentions, indeed, said to come up with the best and brightest of outcomes in all our most hopeful of dreams. Note incurred with an error in judgment I might add, an entire bunch of us tend to do it or deal with it at some point and time, it is social error, life-style.

The future. Tomorrow. In this particular life-style I describe the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once living, and happiness is but a memory. It is a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from the life-style we may be used to living, it is only faster. It may take place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.

If anything I refer best to transcending youthful adolescents. It is not at all a mockery as it is a acceptance of our growing idenities, happy of hearing we're dedicated to the distinction of ourselves.

Remnants of my past, parts of it a distant memory, I played with comforts in comrades whether or not they were beings with existence in their dark reconciliation. I witnessed them being run over, maimed, destroyed - but they continued to play. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it.

Something like giving your life away. Something like the weekend. Something not. Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy but I forget how. It's a lost art. Maybe there's an instruction manual on it. Achieved ruin of the walking brain-dead.

little love

2006-08-07T17:05:00.000-04:00

The sensation being described here is not exactly nostalgia, but it’s close. I understand it directly because I’m living in it right now. With the following aspects pertaining to myself and my experiences, you'll find you can’t help but feel hopeless when you realize that an important person in your life is gone forever. Truly we all have to learn to walk away with what’s left of ourselves and never look back. To look back is to remember and to remember is to never forget.

I never sleep, but certainly when I happen to it’s difficult to wake up in the morning and think beyond the confusion and tension that grips me on a daily basis. I know that it will one day subside, perhaps not entirely, but were I to impart any advice to you given my experience - make sure that there is love in your life. Test it to its limits and ensure that it is not something easy to walk away from. Over time I've found that there are those that would claim love and at the same time claim they need space - know that is not a sign of love more than it's a hypocracy. True love really isn't real when a person has the inability to simply be honest and straightforward, to admit that their understanding of love is limited. True love lost, or the loss of love is not something replaced within a year, months, or even weeks. And if someone that has claimed love can so easily abandon their feelings and look to secure greener pastures or bluer skies with little regard for the heart, then they were never to be trusted. You may think I'm speaking of someone else. Although you may be right to say the least. I'm not.

I am not so jaded to think that people can’t endeavor to change, or to right those wrongs committed, but it is so rarely done these days that to expect it, or even hope for it, is usually time and energy wasted. But that should never deter us from wasting a little time now and then. I wish nothing but happiness for all here, and even for those who will never come again.

marked loser for life

2006-08-04T00:53:00.000-04:00

If you are politically correct you really do not want to proceed past this sentence because you’re going to get really pissed off. Here is the straight dope from the heart that pulls no punches as a prime example of why I’m a loser.

I’m not going to give you the intimate personal details so don’t bother asking. I’d venture that most of the men in my position, who are not alpha males, that I’ve been friends with also know that feeling to one degree or another but we don’t talk about it. Men are taught from birth to be tough and not talk about their feelings, and except under exceptional circumstances, are punished many ways if they do.

It’s politically correct in modern society to paint men as brutes. Callous, misogynistic, abusive creatures whose only goal in life is winning and when it comes to relationships, the belief of winning can only be accomplished by dominating women, preferably by physically abusing them. There’s no question that some men are that way but the vast, overwhelmingly vast, majority are not. That vast majority of men are really ordinary people who want to love and be loved, who want to be respected and treated kindly, the same thing that apparanty women want. Funny how that works.

If you’re a woman you can not imagine what it does to a man to be treated to the kind of abuse that society expects men to be. Strong. In command. There are a thousand ways to punish a man who is not, all of them designed to make him feel a failure. So many I’ve known, myself included, have suffered enormous amounts of emotional abuse, sometimes at the hands of the woman they loved. So why do they stay in the relationship? Some of the same reasons women stay in abusive relationships: insecurity, love, fear of failure, children (men do not stand a chance in a custodial battle), financial reasons, broken spirit. Many in such relationships live lives of quiet desperation, sick at the thought of staying, afraid to leave, afraid if they do they’ll never have another partner, marked loser for life, some invisible cabalistic signal planted on their forehead that only women can see and immediately reject them as a loser not worth her attention. Oh, most guys in my place have experienced that feeling well, but we don’t talk about it.

When you take emotional abuse into the picture in male- female relationships the rate of abuse is pretty even on both sides. When it comes to physical abuse women are much more the victim than the abuser, but when it comes to emotional abuse it is very much the other way around, but we’re not allowed to acknowledge that in this society. In this society, in the 21st Century, only women and children are allowed to be named victims of abuse and that is not healthy for our society. How do you think men feel knowing that they can’t even open their mouths about it without being made to feel like a failure.

I'm in a relationship and I'm not alone but I’m a loner. Once you get past what I've described, I'll have you know I choose my friends and companions very, very carefully. Anyone who acts in that manner simply is cut out of my social circle instantly so I don’t really see them much anymore. Guys like me are very easy to abuse. We love fully, unconditionally. We care deeply for our partners and we do not like confrontation, in fact we avoid it at all costs. That’s what happens to non-alpha type males in this society, if you can’t strut your stuff and rise to the top of the pecking order you better be non-confrontational or you’ll be destroyed. That makes it very easy for women to abuse us as in me included, emotionally, making us feel even more like a loser.

This is a very sick society. Both genders are basket cases and I’m not optimistic about the chances for change. There are too many forces in society that need this for their own sustainability and those are the forces that rule this society: money, power, big business, social status. I no longer have time for people, male or female, that treat others that way and in this society that makes me a loser, but I’d rather be a loser than walk over other people for whatever reason. I’ve known plenty of couples over the years and it has always been the woman who was the real abuser in this way. In some cases, I’m sure some of the men must have been real stinkers behind closed doors as well - you can’t fight the odds. But when it comes to public degradation and disrespect, it happens way more than my stomach can handle.

When it comes to me, women make me feel defensive, maybe even a little less open towards consummating shared relations. Things such as speech difficulties that are just par for the course I live with. SO I just relax and try my best to nod and smile when someone says something to me. But the fact that my inner monologue is just as poor as my outer one will always be freaking me out enough as it is. So trying to make sense of anything will simply be a waste of time. There's really nothing I can do about it but bother to live with it and let bygones be bygones. Yet preferably, when this occurs I try to remain calm, locked in a room without windows, sharp objects, or lava lamps.

utilize a mental construct

2006-08-03T23:45:00.000-04:00

I give into the trouble. The trouble of sputtering synapses that are here in my brain -- my therapist says that makes me a thousand miles long and a foot deep. I acknowledge that most stay away from such occurances by being constructive and forward looking in their discourse. However, I have always made an exception.

Yeah, it's tricky buisness all right. You've got to watch your back before you get smacked. At the same time you could miss that you've got to watch yourself all around and with good, solid reasons... not to run into a variety of extremely stupid things. Things like lawn chairs or the shallow limitations to specific job pools.

The good example of how best to utilize a mental construct had asked if I were available tomorrow for a round of golf, dead broke I said, 'Starting this weekend I'm afraid I will be too busy playing a pretty good drunk. Although, being truly drunk is always more fun. I'll have to settle. Settle with things like Spam. I have a gun and I took all the bullets out of the gun except one. I spun the thing around and pointed it at my head and said all the spam in the world are messages from the aliens. Should I or should I not pull the trigger?' I asked. 'I've always loved Russian Roullette...lets see how lucky you really are?' a talented kick in reply. Check me tomorrow. I said.

toying of potential ways

2006-08-02T23:00:00.000-04:00

The toying of potential ways of making a living are made of cut and dry leaves. Everyone is equipped with personal pursuit. Mine is of my Gift, that uniquely being art as I'm good at it and wanting to enjoy doing that has been beckoning me as a purpose. Purpose in itself is painfully far from being close to accepting or being truly realized. Everyone has the potentially life-changing, important opportunity awaiting -- all of which carry enormous stress, which I have always handled badly. At a time I thought I lacked courage, but now I realize I wasn't equipped for the journey, my constitution wasn't up to it, and my body was telling me so every way it could. What appeared to be procrastination, or opportunity squandered, was in fact the instinct of self-survival doing my 'thinking' for me.

What's more remarkable is that my passion in art has been shifting dramatically and inexplicably over the last few years -- to aesthetic conveyances that are much less ambitious and stressful, more peaceful, more local and more personal. My instincts are driving this, and my brain has, as always, been slow to catch on.

Looking back at all these changes, all of which had people doubting my sanity, I realize now that I've been trying to start taking much better care of my myself, and that does happen to need recovery especially at regular intervals due to lifes various exhautions.

When I started the blog I knew something was very wrong, but wasn't sure what it was -- just that I needed to figure it out. As the saying goes, "Regret and fear are twin thieves that rob us of today". Leaving my conflicts behind me is a necessary and liberating step, but if I know myself well -- I need to work hard and quickly to find something fulfilling and valued properly for those I hold closest to me and inevitably with introspect -- to help myself heal.

This is the internal analogue of course, the way I use it is very different from the external space under my care. But whoever said it would be easy? This will be a lifelong program. We can never hope to understand let alone undo all the damage we so called civilized humans have done and are still doing to ourselves, but we can learn and remediate and improve through trial and error, one tiny bit at a time. There are hundreds of possible elements to a treatment, only by working painstakingly, while being holistic and modest in embracing complexity we become a little more complete at the end of our day.

the malady of discontent

2006-08-01T22:43:00.000-04:00

I walked in the rain, further and further into the unknown. The humid air mustering foul smell from every direction that one can only wonder what is keeping everyone waiting for great big ball of gas to go off. Besides the idea of your insides being cut open like candy and the in's and out's of your oxygen quietly guiding you behind the scenes of all your lifes' decision-making until the disease hits you, is it quite possible that we are all consciously motivated to do what we never really want or have to because of it? How does one experience living within us, more or less instinctively without our understanding or of why we're still doing what is leaving us as disgruntled, underutilized but none the less extraordinary people, in constant conflict with a self-constructed intellectual ghetto?

For me, a number of unfulfilling or unappreciated stress related problems this past year have left me already coping with the malady of discontent in a number of ways I could possibly conceive of handling (and yes, even some things I haven't told you about, dear readers) I don't consciously give up soft drinks, caffeine or (most) alcohol. My instincts at work, I've been only enabled to strongly mitigate the debilitation of this stress through the positive affirmation of those closest to me.

Perhaps, this 'psychological' disorder that has been plaguing me all in this time with endless coping and forced adaptation and struggle is the same demonic creature of culture sickness that has already been wreaking havoc on everyone including my system. Since I can remember I've been always hit with some constant force that has left me at some level of a disappoint to a lot of people including myself. I don't think it's likely that the causes of these 'psychological' anxieties and/or diseases are principally genetic (though a predisposition to contracting them may be -- that's not the same thing). I also don't think it's likely that the causes of these diseases are bacterial, viral, parasitic, or prionic in origin (though exposure to such agents could catalyze onset of the diseases). I believe the causes are likely to be environmental, the chemical cocktail of artificial toxins we eat, drink, wash, breathe, brush up against and otherwise take into our bodies every second of every day. Those who are skeptical that the same poisons that are destroying the soil, the water, the atmosphere and global ecosystems everywhere are also destroying our bodies' microspheres, should review the case against tobacco.

It is quite likely that even when these hypotheses of environmental cause of most remaining illness and disease have been compellingly argued, we will not be able to do much to prevent or 'cure' our bodies of what we have been doing to them. We're too late to save our planet from the scourges of war, famine, and global warming. And we'll likely be too late to save our bodies from the man-made painful, wasting deaths that are quietly wreaking us.

But at least we'll have tried, and at least we will know. We will know, for example, that the executives of ExxonMobil and Monsanto and Koch Industries and the rest of the world's megapolluters will ultimately be remembered in history as the most monstrous, willful and indifferent mass murderers of this civilization they have so effectively and greedily exploited. Just as Big Tobacco, with the armies of expensive lawyers and the politicians in its back pockets, will never pay for its crimes against humanity, and just as ExxonMobil will for the same reason never pay for any of its other environmental holocausts, we are going to have to settle for knowing, not retribution, compensation or even remediation from the corporate monsters killing us all.

pink insulation blankets

2006-07-29T14:28:00.000-04:00

For an opening I'll have you know that I've locked myself in a room again. What room is for you to figure out. I kid you not, there's no false modesty veering from the downright tender disgust, dangerously on edge and less than charming presense of mine. I can't decide right now whether I want to swallow an enitre bottle of aspirin or cement myself in a tub of lukewarm water.

No self-censorship and that's refreshing in this era of over-marketed boring pretty popsters whom walk amongst ourselves candidly confessing "they're working hard and doped up on themselves near death again.".

I am ashamed by the external vibe of misconception the bloggers receive by the latched view that we sit down on a regular basis and for periods on end think of new ways to contrubute to our own virtual arrogance. Coping with shit as one will, whether it be physically or emotionally, yes, I'm quite sure there a lot more healthier ways than this practice of escapism from the empty promise of our own demise. Comparisons not indicated, it's really all preference of substances, all really the same old shit. Inherently, your insanity is yours to deal with anyway you like whether it'll be through critical or chemical filtration, internal conflict, or a walk through the park. Amgamated or not, when it comes to blogging, every once in a while there’s something dually impressive and frightening about being able to haphazardly conjure thoughts about it all. It makes for the inception of what is uneasy, so it's really hard to put any stock on that.

Now where am I? A long way down somewhere... for a rather nice change of pace. Just yesterday, I must admit to an almost drug-like fascination to Lemonade Tycoon. It's laid back, light fun, and has some nice replay value. You may find yourself playing this instead of the standard time-waster, Solitaire. That said, I admit, I am a video game aficionado of sorts and have been since the avail of the Atari 2600 and the Coleco vision.

I remember years ago when it was always fun in some sort of fashion for me to see a little bit of pressure fly over the shoulder of my father, a trucker whom invited me a number of times to join him at a local establishment where he really liked to play pac-man. We would sit across from one another at this loosely reconditioned arcade machine designed as a mahogany table with a glass overtop. I can recall the dimly lit, slow-going yet graphic atmosphere even this day. The fragrant smell of pastry doughnuts and cigarette smoke made for a fuel of fire that had distinctly drawn aging patrons to integrate themselves to this place. I listened to pac-man's music as he puffed his cigarette at the game control. It was challenging but user-friendly; and the ghosts were very life-like or death-like as a ghost is not alive where the phrase life-like would then not apply.

The notion of eating pills literally and/or metaphorically in order to progress to more complicated mazes of eating more pills pretty much somes up my life and the struggles in just about everybody's life as far as I see it. Anybody who misses the symoblism and life application to that better pick it up before they're out of touch. In my case, I find myself in a position where I want to quest for building myself and becoming more intellectually stronger and more articulate. Some find me, as a blogger, more heading in the direction of a politically heated weapon, always in vain response to a government that operates outside the truth with an arsenal of lies and denial... but really the fact of the matter is, I find most truths based on ourselves and how we see ourselves living and that really is the one we should really see ourselves exploring and more often.

I'd like to hook my head up to the flood of information and find clarity in understanding the current predicament of our planet, but I find often there are errors and misleading information, and the excessive coffee leaves me witless and tranced by nightmares lying in bed without sleep. And sometimes in days like these I wonder how to manage with the same thinking and how my eyes, deeper and darker than ever, may be wearing due to being idle in front of a monitor too long.

I've obviously taken it upon myself to disregard the relevence of posting so often this month, I might as well continue to do so until the beginning of August. Just wanted to say I played Lemonade Tycoon, I had great time... and don't you think I don't know why the gaining of any other information from this post is completly worthless against those who control the distribution of it.

loose edifice

2006-07-26T17:44:00.000-04:00

Despite popular belief, I haven't killed this blog. I didn't want to see more than a week missing from the archives, so here's a totally uncreative post. I'm here. Wonders never seem to cease. I'm still here. Terribly dehydrated, but still here.

It's hard not to just be sweating profusely in days like these where you've got to find yourself in some other way, to get out of it, or else you're all nothing for the forms of things barely recognizable whom pay tribute to your casualty. A bit showy as things may appear from this observant point of view from a far, I've been socially dead for years.

When it comes to the depiction of accumilated thought altogether, I'm aware the entire atmosphere goes stale when you're away from the blogosphere especially for some time. That may very well be an entire eon for those determined to conduct a proper investigation and get into the bottom of the whole affair of what loose edifice I happen to conjure. But it's alright, as you already know, every now and again I will see you sooner or later. So thank Oil and Freedom. They're Great. So you shouldn't ask so many questions.

Dear Colleagues, I wanted to take a moment to let you know that I am leaving my position at Justice. From what I've come to understand, it usually is pretty easy for all things to end. Even if you hate your job (haha. joke). But what is altogether different and most difficult is the road we've all been down of saying farewell. In a trail of tought I'll help to maintain a positive outlook while I am paving the way to move onward, I will never forget how I have enjoyed my tenure here in the lightening speed waltz of buerocacy and how I appreciated having had the opportunity to work with each of you especially. Thank you all for the support, guidance and encouragement you have provided me during my time here and although I may not give mention to names because who enjoys lists anyhow, I would like to say I will miss all of you as my colleagues and Justice. I am looking forward to a new phase of challenges. Thanks again for everything. Yours truly,Dane

"Well, you ain't lookin' so good." I said to myself while seized in sweating eyes burning hot in their sockets. Well there's not much else to expect when you've been lying on the shelf of waved expiration. I was coming down with what turned to be utter exhaustion from a long and trying year at work. I'm now a snub-nosed automatic lying in with the faint tackle for the next crooked job offered.

This past week my sense of boredom that encompasses the whole ordeal was illuminated only by the minor plans set to excite by go-carting in Gatineau with the guys on what was a mammoth nerve wrecking experience on the fast lane.

And just the other night, I went out for a walk with the hot asphault scraping beneath my paper feet. Following the trip I suffered from a severe migraine that had me shuffled in the dark, threadbare and afraid to go into pieces. Nearly dead, I melted down with a low and bitter smile twisted on my abused face. It was then I felt a strange glow in these dark eyes staring into my own singing baby lullaby. I was renounced for a conscious worth eternity.

Resolve proves weak especially these days. Once I have the option to chemically alter the feelings that disturb me with beer and cheese, then my decision not to medicate, to keep slogging on through work that in itself, becomes an equally "artificial" choice not of my gifted radiance, heck hath no irritation for the interruptus. I feel no need right now for tremendous import from point A to B as I'm deciding to remain in this state not so fraught with complication, largely due my internalization of insensibility. It is one of those decisions that is really beyond choice.

Sooner than I'll realize, the responsibility will trump the desire and I will simply opt for some inexplicable reason that I found my way and leave still sick and exhausted, and to my list of ailments I could add a little touch of mild depression and disgust.

winked out and died forever

2006-07-18T12:59:00.000-04:00

I am, in truth, something of a delightful mystery to me. Perhaps that's why I never bother to make contact with anyone. I day dream and engage in illusionary conversations with myself in the bathroom mirror more and more often everyday while I am brushing my teeth or shaving my face without reason to ruin it with reality.

I have have not been called by my proper name since I can remember. I have not been called by my proper name by anyone. Every time I hear my name off another tongue I would watch as the letters slip from the lap of their lips and strand down into a dissimilar list. I am unformed. This is not a moment of peeve as one would put it so bluntly. This is as it were something as ceremonious as the coronation of a king gone backwards. A bizarre mixture of moments on a string, as if I were a puppet lightly lifted and persuaded by a giant hand, I turn to face dangerous directions as it would be.

Over the years I formed a habit of twitching my head to check all fours corners of delusional paranoia. I would twitch to make sure I'm caught up in some boring passage as I would sit and look up and down deciding which direction to set out. Would I be pressed against a window sill? Would I be the clock on the wall? Would I be basking in the common perception of rubbish as I would be what most believe themselves to be overwhelmingly happy? No. I'm crazier than a shit house rat deeply flawed than symbolized true beauty and genius. That’s something very rare in the world today – sometimes I think I am to be celebrated for the products of ones own undoing.

Obscured by the shadows of trees to the field as open as a faggot, I had walked my dog (or rather, he had walked me) through a suburban park this past weekend long overdue. I had been pondering antidotes in a monopoly, all the while attempting to convince myself that I am not going mad despite the fact that I think I am. I am ending but am I beginning too? Fortunately, according to authorities on the subject, I’m not allowed to think that and have it be true. What is there to say but what a relief.

For no reason beyond the unreasonable, what lies on the surface has become something that I’ve grown to despise out of convenience. When you come from a train of introversion you come from a world of those who find it the easiest thing to declare difficulty, in my case being that I really show no promise. My work and my dedication to giftly prospects have been admittedly, quite average and a mop up close to none but that hasen't stopped me from falling passionately in love with the lifestyle surrounding it. My joys lay in the atmosphere of it all and the trials of experience put through in a foolish attempt to gain some insight into the human condition not realizing that those who'd come prior had left repeated warnings not to bother.

Does it matter to me that I don't understand a great deal of what those that I associate with talk about? What matters most is only taking part in the births of ideas. Whether they were well founded ideas or not I could have known or cared less. But time always runs out on youth faster than you expect it to.

One evening I'll overhear the voices patronizing me in the toilet, they will not realize that I'll be in a stall. And it'll strike me then that I have run out of myself without my knowing. I'll foolishly declare no one hears me or cares, but I imagine I will go on none the less.

It is said that when you’re on the road to going mad you don’t notice it, but then again you cannot be mad if you think that you might be. When on the field of research the opposite is to be found true. When you’re going mad you’re quite aware of the fact that you are - you just can’t stop it. And when the day comes that you find yourself wholly consumed by madness, you’re the only one that knows what sanity actually is. I am often asked what I’m to do. Looking questionable myself, my usual answers are typically boring, primarily because I am living in entirely unpredictable times.

amateur choreography

2006-07-14T12:52:00.000-04:00

I have very little time for independent thought as of right now... but I see this as a opportunity to entertain some of the prominent visitors of whom are just as much a nerd as I am. Despite a few of you having your ill-conceived notions of Star Wars or just plain despise imitated lightsaber duels, get a grip and please excuse the temporary link dump to the following video feed - but I must argue, it is one of the best pieces of amateur choreography I’ve seen yet. Really.

vacuum of numbness

2006-07-12T20:23:00.000-04:00

Nobody knows what they want anymore. Everyone drifts aimlessly from one end to the next as we eventually find ourselves converging in a world of paradox. Not bound by the confines of traditional denominational religions, yet not confident enough to have an independent thought in that thick, vacuous skull of ours, we dabble in trendy philosophies and mysticisms. The game ends when manufactured 'cool' is no longer sucked from the teat of some MTV or other media source long enough to realize what dumb son of a bitches we are.

I too am part of this hidden demographic, and I blame convex volumetric fog renderings and bilinear interpolated textures. Since when did it become acceptable for me to devote my time to rendering shadows, atmospheric scattering, ambient light effects, and all this other superfluous bullshit that much like game coders keep adding to their engines so they can win some imaginary pissing contest. Nobody cares about graphics if the game plays like shit. Same goes for all else.

I'm bored to tears with nearly all my xbox video games and the predecessors before it from Sega to Sony. Especially when it comes to shooters, changing the theme from one time period to another isn't enough anymore. Did someone beat someone else to the punch on that killer WWII shooter being made? Wait, wait, don't worry, just take the same concept, change a few textures, and call it Battlefield Vietnam. No one will notice. Hell, why not Battlefield Iraq.

So after all this, I've utilized a few video game ideas of my own not with the imaginary life of a has been but never was game entitled 'The Sims' but across the game 'Far Cry Instinct' where I've been developing my very own arenas in a first person shooter for plenty nights. I can say it's finally beginning to scare me.

"Have you ever wondered, watching Star Trek the Next Generation, why they even bother exploring strange new worlds? Why don't they just spend all their time in the holodeck having sex?" -- read more

...I just think of it as a funny concept worth reading. Back on hand, If you consider yourself in a similar situation, I warn you, before you may know it you're about to have spent the next 10 years of your life amassing a small investment while the rest of your time is punctuated in meaningless drivel and mindless entertainment while your hairline recedes. On and on, day in and day out you wonder why you have that one problem: why can't you get laid?

Repugnant as one may become, you go on an adventure from one bar to the next trying to piece together the social life you've neglected by being a self-hungry prick. Outside of your left behind virtual persona, the real challenges include overcoming the social stigma caused by years of driven self-loathing. Ultimately you suck down 9 millimeters of cold hard lead when you decide to take the easy way out like the compromising A-1 chicken shit you always were.

For the most part, all of us in our worldly culture never cared. We are daily surrounded by inestimable wonders, yet seem to find them too trivial for our attentions. Destruction fills the ever expanding vacuum of numbness within us, as if a game, as if lauded over by those that it cannot touch. Newspapers and websites are filled with cracked windows butted up against adverts for new cars. This is the world created for us and whether we buy it or sell it, save it or waste it, spend, bide or kill it, on your way to forgotten you become a miniscule blurb as everyone continues to assume that time is an objective, measurable flow of befores and afters interspersed with the transient now. For the most part we have forgotten the meaning of authentic existential time.

Here I am, playing again. Past times they say. Truth is, it's nearly all I have for fun. But hey, there’s always tomorrow, not to mention the undying belief that it can end tomorrow. Right?

culprit of the times

2006-07-10T13:13:00.000-04:00

We are passing one another in a weird phenomenon of our own. We live in a world that is smaller now than ever before. Here we are, a myriad amount of us congregated in densely populated urban establishment and centres. Nerveless and incompatible we are apart in aloof dignity.

It's funny how I for my sometimes immerse myself in places I often despise and entirely live in contradiction of my own explainations, this past weekend, my words would have lasted were it not for me being invited to spend the night out with a fellow few. We went out on the attempt to squeeze ourselves into the sorts of places that are so loud that you can’t make out a single word that anyone says. Perplexed, I questioned if this were proper for meeting people. Although I may be a factor without having everyone in my surroundings to blame for the less than social occasions, I too consider myself far from saving any silence, a cynical culprit of the times in reclusive body. But it seems to me, even as though I am infeasible without a sense of reason for wanting to frequent these places alike, it may also be precisely why I am not to expect to carry on what could be construed as an adult or otherwise intelligent in-depth conversation with another for rapport. That’s probably why some of the most overtly sexually attired men and women on the planet are found in these places that are so loud that it’s next to impossible to hear yourself think.

More important than the obscuring of your own thoughts and reducing the opportunity for great "connections," the thing about bars and or clubs is how they foster the ability to be who you think you should be. You can dress up, have a cold one and laugh, leaving everything serious at home and play. It’s temporary companionship for when you maybe don’t want something meaningful. For those who look for something more in a night out to the bar... I think that’s often because nothing else has worked. We live in a culture where irony and sarcasm are cool and to be genuine and express affection ‘too quickly’ suddenly means you’re desperate and undesirable. If going out or dating have become all about playing games, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that people dress up as prostitutes in the hopes that they’ll win something real with longevity.

disintegration of music

2006-07-07T12:58:00.000-04:00

When expressing myself through art when painting on canvas, drawing on paper, or by writing in my journals, most often I listen to the sounds I hear, when that isn't an option and the peace that holds needs interuption... I decide to play some music. Odds are that most of my favourite music will have a big dynamic range and affect on me -- it'll be whisper-quiet in some parts and booming loud in others. As I create I pick up new nuances every time I listen.

Yeah, never was fan of much dance, rap, or the hip hop music. Now and again, my neighbour just another room away from me listens to something else radically different. The dynamic range is gone, the entire track is loud all the way through. The sounds are mostly of genres not of my taste but I’m only thankful it’s not the top -10 track on pop radio. I must say, it is a lot more intense, and it "grabs" more quickly the first time when heard. Every time I ask, (more likely complain) is it still rewarding to listen to it over and over again, more and more often?

Nope, says a writer at Stylus magazine. In this amazing and lengthy piece, he argues that the loudness wars are destroying music. Record labels for decades have tried to make records louder, on the mostly-correct theory that louder music is more likely to pull you in on first listen. But the way you make music louder is via "compression". In a normal recording of music, the loudest parts -- the peaks -- are much higher than the quietest ones, the valleys. Compression shrinks the difference between the peaks and valleys, so there's less dynamic range; this frees up more room up top so you can boost the whole volume of the entire song.

Take nearly any track recorded in the early 80's and you can see the wide dynamic range if say you listen to the available remix (remastered as they say) from todays standerd, you'll find it is compressed to make all of the sound-wave big and louder. The author also argues that the jump-the-shark moment for the recording industry was ... Oasis. In 1987, the average album like Appetite for Destruction by Guns 'N Roses had a dynamic range of 15 decibels. Oasis' 1994 Morning Glory had a range of a mere... 8 decibels -- compressed to make it louder and louder.

So what? Why does this hurt music? Because of the psycho acoustics of how loudness and quietness affects us. When a song has less dynamic range, even if it's louder we are -- paradoxically -- more likely to tune it out, as the author argues. It's worth reading his entire essay, but here are some excerpts:

One result of [overcompression] is that modern CDs have much more consistent volume levels than ever before. But when is it desirable for music to be at a consistent volume? When it's not being actively listened to; i.e. when it's intended as background music.

Music isn't meant to be at a consistent volume and flat frequency; it's meant to be dynamic, to move, to fall and rise and to take you with it, physically and emotionally. Otherwise it literally is just background noise ...

Music is about tension and release. With nearly every "hot" single released I hear of un-dynamic music without release because the sensory assault simply doesn't let-up. The people I see out and about wearing walkmans or MP3 players seldom seem to tap, or nod, or hum along at all; instead their gazes seem fixed with a steely resolve, their bodies tense and their minds seemingly tenser. To me that isn't the body language of someone enjoying music.

People are forgetting how to listen to nearly everything and who can blame them? Compression is addictive. This weekend when I visit the city you can count me out as a passenger aboard the BS train because I will be pacing back and forth to the sound of my music.

good news despite a broken jaw

2006-07-06T21:27:00.000-04:00

Nothing like a holiday to bring out the crazies... I too am crazy. Then again, 'crazy' is just a word used to describe someones state of mind. Which, in this case, most would rather dismiss this as wrong than consider as an alternative perspective. The denial of it is mental self-defense. Sanity preserved by slides of pleasant nature effectively made to block the truth. The truth that would shatter the belief system as we know it from the bottom up if it were uncovered.

As incidentally mentioned to me in an argument this past week, there was an individual interested in questioning my merits and was adamant that the United States has every right to return the favour to our friends in the east for 9/11. Hearing this is enough to boil me from the inside as it proves modern propaganda has reached one of it's finest achievements in convincing hot heads in blind truths. It is also precisely why the American and Canadian public routinely fail to address the growth of militarism. America for one, statisitcally speaking, now has far more debt than any third world country or even the world combined.

To deny that there is some serious global manipulation going on, which leads to selected and not elected govt, religon, corporate domination, and fascist states masquerading as free countries (by the way, my happy belated canada day to you) among other things, to me is crazier than a bag of hammers. Maybe this reason for being belongs to the fact that no one wants to question the bubble economy we live in, because to most of us we are only familiar with the weather and what lies in front of our own feet, and I say fine… Let the good times roll on forever - with the power of positive thinking... and all that shit.

The really funny thing about is that we all need “mental help” to get out of this sheep pen of reality we’ve been conditioned to accept. If we all realized that peace and love come from within, and learned to live to our full cosmic potentiel, we wouldn’t be in a world that lets wars, famine and full scale genocide go on unchallenged, while politicians try to convince you that it is important not to let a person marry another person. The universe is only how you percieve it, which means that you can control your destiny and your point of view...

If you want to.

So the mental help part I agree with, that our reality is caged but the door is and always was open. Only were our fondest of remembrances, memories if you will, were not of violence, nor legacy intertwined with the sweet perfection of destruction, we oursleves and our society itself would not be so self-aggrandized. If we change the way we think, I believe we would find ourselves somewhere in the not too distant future induced with more positivism rather than a blended shake of camouflage. Until then, we are crazy. I too am crazy because I have a love affair with futility.

If you're interested in having read so far already, I'll let you in on my past long weekend. It just so happened that I did not participate in the festivities held in downtown Ottawa this Canada Day, nor did I happen to relieve myself by visiting a friend in NYC (mostly due to a limited budget, no source of secured lodgings or accompaniment, et al). Speaking about relieving oneself, I’m am quite sick of the media’s play on a retired veteran snapping a few digital pictures of several people going to the bathroom on the National War Memorial, as thousands poured into the streets following the fireworks.

Apparently, most cheered and laughed when they were photographed using the memorial as a toilet and the government is again calling for a guard to be stationed at the memorial to prevent such occurrences. I think that shouldn't be necessary. There was a time when a public assault on the memory of war dead would have been quickly addressed by witnesses taking the offender into the street for a discussion with closed fists. Today they take digital photos. Mark up another victory for the been there done that jealously guarding war hero.

As a final note. Curiosity kicks boredoms ass... but seriously speaking, after a month of having my digital camera in hiatus, I finally had the problem fixed. You may have a look at the few additional photos on my flickr web gallery. At last, all I have left to say is stay tuned, somedays are more than others.

low thick grey clouds

2006-06-30T13:01:00.000-04:00

In the middle of the night a thunderstorm had hit home and I awoke to the pouring rain and thunder rumbling across the sky. In almost a strangely continuous, loud, and somewhat alarming volume, the low thick grey clouds without lightning penetrated to warn of the next crash. I remained starring at my window in sleep paralysis. With the windows open the black clouds felt invited to scatter their minions of heavy rain into the shadows of my room. Tear drops can spill around one way or another onto a menagerie of creatures oblivious to the bluster. Flinched. I felt their cold splashes puddle my senses bathed in a hypnotic sky-dance of light and sound.

If we could imagine, really imagine, what it was like to be soaring above the world, care-free, astonishingly aware, senses alive in a way that we bored, distracted, abstracted, sensually dulled humans can no longer conceive, if we could put ourselves in and surrender to the spell of the sensuous, we could never return to, never again tolerate, the unimaginative poverty, the prison that our culture has captured us in. If we could free ourselves from that, if we could imagine such an utterly different way to live, to really live, what could we do? What would we do? When you can't imagine, you can do anything. You can end the world or remain in some inscrutable occupied space.

when the sky turns colours

2006-06-29T12:43:00.000-04:00

Ooh, Superman had potentially unlimited entertainment value, don't you think? A slapfest between the moderate wingnuts and the serious wingnuts? If only I had a cold one to crack open to make myself comfortable with such endless possibilites. Then again, I recommend seeing it for your own take and you can't go wrong with the popcorn. Popcorn is always a good idea, too.

I'm looking up when the sky turns colours, at the newly arrived things that fall in my space that don't seem quite at home here yet. I should be wading through purgatory to defend the honour of some of undignified handling but I'm just bone tired. I dread the willing up period and I'll only write until one day I stop and then I'll call it quits from here withal. There, I’ll have a plan.

I suppose aging is a simple function as death seems to make you his guest more often. Even with extra practice, loss is never easy. I am not easy. Hindsight might be off but who can do a damn thing about what they’re looking at anyway? So it is with people. Perhaps the greatest value in losing, are the questions we then ask of ourselves while losing in itself. While the feet are on the surface of the grass there are the moments you'll change your stance, the things you say or not bother too, followed by the string of what if and how else scenes those lead to. If I cared more or less...what then? I might have been easier. I might have been different. I might have traded up for more refined flaws. Still, it's never too late to effect change. As a wise man once said, "you am what you is", but that ain't a fixed quantity when your surroundings dictate yourself.

Right now I’m bone tired and since I’m still planetary topside, I’d like to take care of a few things with the dysfunctional mob we are so we're okay. Nobody like me descended into weirdness by pro-choice it just happened that way and we've each been through a lot and emerged relatively human.

My sweet neglected friends and family. The demands I place on your patience are unreasonable. I know that you are there and I rely on your beauty, wisdom and filthy sense of humour. Just in return for you putting up with me.

big leap into oblivion

2006-06-27T12:52:00.000-04:00

The real world spells trouble for everyone in my vicinity that happens to be looking for it. But as often as this is the case, I join my fellows in congratulating them when they finish their studies and put them into practise so their forced distribution in functional activities are rewarded with a few menial appraisals that will score them one big leap into oblivion. The following article I found quite funny because from personal experience I know it's speaks the truth. It will go a long way in eliminating some of the negative aspects of the system before you lose yourself in your internship. I only wish I had read it sooner...

Internships are becoming more important as an entry point to the working world. Here are the top mistakes interns make, and how to avoid them. When companies come recruiting they can put on quite a show for starry-eyed undergrads, as Andrew Dill, a student attest. After potential interns are wined and dined with fancy meals and frequent follow-up phone calls, they start out thinking it'll be a 10-week carpet ride. But when the wooing ends and the work begins, interns may find the ride to be a bit bumpier than expected, especially for college students who are first-timers in the corporate world. -- read more

In training, they’ll mention the 'new-existing' system yet you’ll find it has been running the same way for years with little deviation beyond re-phrasing the manual. Being an intern myself working for the government we just love to hate most of the time, I find that it requires a lot more attention to setting commitments and better employee-interaction, especially if you want to extend your contract. All in all, it's a very, very good thing not to be deficient in your work if you’re looking for further moments of again... menial appraisal. What is very evident to me is that I need a cultural if not social change at any possible level because I honestly think that for the remainder of my time at justice I will be one those "sacred" things that will never change or be touched upon.

progressive conscience

2006-06-26T23:24:00.000-04:00

Whoever said politics was about making corrections? I acknowledge that most power worldwide is firmly in the hands of an elite who are happy to control most of the world's wealth and power and use it to acquire even more. Some of those wielding that power masquerade as progressive. Talking a moderate progressive line just before elections, but their actions, most of them quiet and done in back rooms or written into legislation no one reads or understands, are designed to retrench, to prevent substantive change. Even more of the world's political power is in the hands of those who are not elected at all -- corporate leaders who simply buy politicians from either party but all two sides of the same coin, and buy mainstream media, and with them, acquire far more political power than is represented by the ballot box.

So progressives need to acknowledge that, unless they devote most of their time and energy to activities other than electing and lobbying politicians, they will continue to accomplish nothing. Indeed, they will accomplish less than nothing, since in the meantime the corporate and political elite will be busy dismantling, rolling back, bribing their way out of, and circumventing laws and regulations, a much easier process than getting them passed, and enforced, in the first place.

As much as I admire what activists are doing I too also feel it is largely futile. I would guess that the money leveraged for neo-conservative and neo-liberal causes of all kinds, when you add in those of right-wing religions, big corporations looking for concessions and favours, and anti-regulation ideologues, would have to be at least a thousand times greater than what the handful of altruistic progressives could muster.

I noticed the blogosphere is utterly preoccupied with parties getting people who represent their values and interests, which, even if they were wildly successful, which is doubtful given the agnostic political realities of the day, and even if most of those politicians didn't turn out to have a very different and more status quo-preserving agenda from what they campaigned on, would not begin to offset the political power of the unelected.

In order to be progressive we need to find another way to bring about change. The effect of exploring alternative means of expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo has been reduced to the point of impotence by anti-democratic laws, anti-democratic enforcement authorities, and media propaganda.

What we need to do instead is starve the status quo. Starve our own sense of normal. Starve what we are used to and maybe not even liking. That existing black hole -- we all have an insatiable and ever-growing need for consumption and to keep it growing. But it will stop growing and it will die and we too along with it. Why must we be terrified of anything that threatens growth, even at a personal level?

After all this I must say there is nothing new under the sun, and yet this obscurity has never been so pronounced as now. This past weekend was spent in fevered huts and baking sun, it seemed as kingdom come unto this life. Stolen away with friends into the midst of smiles and youthful hopes. This following weekend again I'm thinking I may escape. Escape at any cost to make a difference, if not for anything more than my own conscience. Maybe New York. Yeah, nice. Even just for a little while.

cantankerous graphics

2006-06-22T22:16:00.000-04:00

Unusual as it may be with what little I've shared with you on the occurences in life that scare me, I must say that If at any time I come accross as sad, depressed, maybe even miserable I would have to say that you have me mistaken... Being that I'm not afraid to say, taking into account the discovery of my own identify may be a mystery even to me and because of that I'm a very reluctant person... I still manage to be an all around good kind of guy...

As far as I'm aware, my only confidence lies as an artist. Since I can remember - I've found that I could truly be my one and only more intuitive and skilled judge of raw talent. When I was confronted with an idea proposed long ago I started writing for myself and for the entertainment of others. At that time I spent every waking hour writing and producing works. There were days when I felt I was my very own inhabitant on devil's island with the occasional head trauma and the thought with having to prioritize my school work beyond my own personal endeavours seemed but a crime yet not only a distraction. On the outset of leaving 'the' school... I originally, at first, felt I was pursuing my first real passion in life. I made my own decisions, agreed to go through with them and did. What followed I'm sure was no longer for my senses to linger upon as I had basked in reflection for the years to follow as little more than a peon in someone elses great plan.

Life gets harder. Like bread. What that idea produced was roughly five years of unreality that I would initially best describe as banishment. I would ignore phone calls, people at my door, even the fact that I hadn’t showered in days. At a time I smoked, and would sometimes consume almost a pack of cigarettes in a single day while bouncing back and forth between my tiny bedroom and the impossibly small closet in which I slept. In taking the position that it has, I had made an enemy of myself...so to lived and made personal realizations I was one of the most cantankerous demographics in the world - a youth. A youth who had love affair with rebellion as old as time itself. And by doing so, it has caused irreparable damage to myself just as there is no question that it took a considerable toll on me. But I can say from exploring my alternative possibilities I've gained a weight in which to measure myself, I've theatened myself to post it today but you know... I can't remember.

To stir the occasion elsewhere for the fun at heart, you'll be glad to know the outdoor summer festivities have begun and they're doling out skin cancer for free. I cannot carefully say I happen to be monitoring them closely enough to have any relative means of informing you, but what you can expect is the jazz music festival, the 15th annual farm house execution on Sparks street, and a Italian Festival a personal friend of mine has recommended. While deciding which one may be more ideal to visit, I encourage you to start licking the meat balls you know where.

cloud of imagination

2006-06-20T23:07:00.000-04:00

I attended a church ceremony earlier this afternoon. There was a death in the family and I felt obligated to compromise my projects at work with the intention of paying my respects to our lost one in the family. The community followed the experience and the participants included my co-workers from justice who shared history with our dearly departed. The respect flowed in her memory, of all the generous, dignified, and kindness that she expressed to her family, friends, and strangers alike. With further clarification, the personal experience for me reinforced my concept of healing through understanding.

To begin, aside from a of passing near-talent less wit, remarking Johnny Cash look-alikes. I found there was one difficult joke to grasp during the speech, it was about a insider illustration shared between lawyers about determining balance. The word balance not only the exists in justice as a word between peace and harmony but to me, the control and drive that lies within our ability to balance becoming stimulated and nourished from inside and outside of our whole experiences. If I were going to have more emphasis put into practice, kindness for one (although I'm not implying I'm entirely deficient in said action) can be difficult to practice in everyday life. With honesty you have to allow yourself to be at first... honest with yourself, and in the case of some, we often hide from the truth.

Often, while overlooking my past, I've most often been with myself, when with others on the save few occasions, I often begin to watch how I communicate. It's often difficult, physically, emotionally, spiritually and psychologically to be in that balance. Positive and effective practices like acts of kindness are but one of many techniques that essentially develop in our daily function, but how can it be when such properties are not nourished or even returned?

I remember my experience in therapy last year was to help me realize that balance only dealt with two parts, what I needed to deal with was all parts to bring things into balance. Checking today.... I just have to jump on the scale or look in the mirror to find out that I am not taking care of my physical self. Spiritually is very personal but I've found that to some, connecting with kindness and honesty connects one with the creator so you know.

The other two pieces are family and community. I'm determined enough to say that it would be my practice in art that brings me closer to connecting with myself and family. Art to me is very basic and concrete, although to some it can be even the most complex of matter. Through my art and over time I can see how I am changing and how my community is changing and the world around me. When I look at this world in a physical sense I see alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, apathy, sexual abuse, all those things et al.

After the reception I was overwhelmed in a sense. It cannot be addressed in parts, but I know, for I, the question remained -- what do you want to do with the rest of your life? That is when I remembered this new book I stumbled upon entitled.... Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

Without putting myself into sham for advertising, I've been seeing this as a essential for everyone looking for a new perception and attitude towards a new lease on life. It's about why the future we imagine, plan for and work towards ends up so often being both very different from and less satisfying than we expected. This is due in part to not knowing ourselves, and how we are changing, and not knowing what makes us happy and will make us happy:

Some people... tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice...We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy...Why (then) do they (our future selves) experience regret and relief when they think about us, rather than pride and appreciation...when we gave them the best years of our lives?... Shouldn't we know the tastes, preferences, needs and desires of the people we will be next year?

Most of the book is devoted to describing these illusions which fall into different categories. It examines and discards several alternatives, including practicing imagining (just retrenches the illusions) and asking others for opinion or coaching (they just reinforce the same myths that cloud our own imaginations). Instead, it advocates finding 'surrogates' -- people who are now in a situation similar to the one you think you might be in in the future, and asking yourself if you would be happy if you'd done what they did and were doing what they're doing. Less imagination, and more research. This entails learning more about what the future will probably be like when you get there, so that you have a richer context for understanding what your life might be like, and then searching for people who have already made a similar journey -- people whose present is as much as possible like what your future, as objectively as you can imagine, will be like. Then study them, and learn about your future self. In other words, get real.

Wrapped with plenty of dark humour the book does an interesting job dissecting the argument that we're all unique, and that no one could possibly teach us about our future or how happy we will be in it. So I suggest this book just for the fun of reading this 'anti-self-help book'.

moving from program to process

2006-06-19T22:55:00.000-04:00

In response to the various amount of hits I've been receiving while away this past week, I take it that most people are distraught that my continuum of care had been severed. While observing from a minimum safe distance, I find that my whole society of mental patients are in a frenzy. I think it's accurate to say that most of these people don't care enough. The enough is critical. People don't care enough about coffee, or gas mileage or ski bindings or Darfur. The challenge is to get people to care enough... because deep down, most people care. Just not high enough on their priority list of life problems.

In essense, this webpage and the words within it are free in that they don't cost anything. The approach is as always to provide a alternative view and a preference to emote. This is not free, though, because it keeps users like myself from what we really need, and to be quite frank, I do not know what the hell that is. So I've said to myself, If you're not sure what to say, say nothing. So kick back, have a look around, and stay awhile. I'll be back for breakfast

down on everything

2006-06-13T21:51:00.000-04:00

There will always be something sort of curious about the sub-text of entries miles logged. In real life, I'm just this murky yet enigmatic crazy loner guy arranging papers as if it mattered. After hundreds upon hundreds of earned to tell goofy stories and quality output, sometimes I think myself perhaps it's best to put it away for awhile and take a load off to guess at the number and the nature of demons I'm holding.

It's so impossible to be down on everything with such countours and sweep. To decipher in spending about half an hour to rather proportionate amount of time per day living ‘in the moment’ - focussed, getting outside my head. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't take me away from the PC and learning to pay attention. Some of this time should be spent in what I may as well call, meditation.

I’ve been a permanent inhabitant of the bedroom for sometime now. As I'm spent, sitting on my seat looking out my window at night. I'm with myself, just listening and sniffing the dark. I look forward to feeding the ducks sometime soon, but other than that, taking my camera out can be just as interesting.

I took photographs these past few days and looked carefully and closely for what or whom to capture and I've had some great photogenic subject matter I cannot wait to unveil. I must say, this no dumb blogger unusually took a bold step and now if only he had a good sense of humour...

I'm reluctant to inform you that my photos displayed on flickr will be without similar updates along with this blog for the next little while in my attempt to get back to the ordanariness -- the stuff that makes me human and not the stuff that makes me superhuman. Maybe I've yet to have seen my compassion for responsiblity. Who knows. Who knows.

morning fuzziness of a mind

2006-06-09T12:56:00.000-04:00

Recently I ran across a quote I thought was interesting. "Only a mediocre person is always at his best." Considering the quote, I pondered as to whether or not I could have overestimated the word mediocre, as I understood it.

According to the dictionary mediocre means: of only ordinary or moderate quality – also barely adequate. Casting a glance at the thesaurus for words that meant mostly the same thing, I found words that agreed with my basic mental meaning. It revealed: run-of-the-mill, commonplace, pedestrian (did not know this word meant that), passable, so-so, fair-to-middling, average, medium and normal – and these did not surprise me.

Then the words after that had much poorer meanings that went downhill in a hurry with: insignificant, slight, trifling, paltry, meager, inferior, rather poor and second-rate. A word can be known by the company it keeps and these latter snippets of language were not a good crowd to hang around with. This was a disappointment to me since I had considered mediocre more normal and average than that.

The word is what it is and I must admit I have seen many mediocre things and products that were proclaimed to be much better than what they actually turned out to be. Then a thought stumbled across the early morning fuzziness of a mind that one hopes would be a little sharper after the brilliance of later thought burns off the haze. The thought brought to me was in the form of a question – can plants be mediocre?

The harvests of some garden plants in my past have been mediocre but I do not lay the fault to the plant. All plants will grow and produce according to the way they were designed unless they have a lack of moisture, nutrients, proper temperature, or are interfered with by disease or natural disaster. If plants are healthy they always do all they can with what they receive to do with. Considering this, maybe people are more like plants, at least in their productivity. Of course some folks would take this to mean that they're rooted to one spot and never move.

Mediocrity is rampant in humankind – and the in things they produce – because we are the only creature given the choice as to whether or not we want to be mediocre. We all may have worked with folks that considered mediocrity their highest goal – sometimes they reach it and sometimes not. Ultimately, this strive for mediocrity lends itself to a very mad world not in love with itself until fair gain. Have a nice weekend. It's a good time to enjoy photosynthesis.

the hell with it all

2006-06-07T22:19:00.000-04:00

If you're one of those folks that's into Jesus - and I mean really into him - I hope you had a Happy 6/6/6. Triple six symbolizes the Mark of the Beast, and the probable beginning of the End. I think we all now what that means, don't we? It’s time to start praying and stop mistaking the strip club for a church, y'know what I’m saying.

Yesterday, a Netherlands-based Evangelical organisation had called on Christians in 21 countries to hold a 24-hour prayer vigil against Satanic forces to mark so-called Devil's Day. Some feared the date 06/06/06, which signifies 666, the Biblical number of the Devil, will usher in calamities and even the end of the world.

Prayer, according to those who are believers of good faith, they say it's kryptonite to The Devil. Sure, he's the eternal embodiment of pestilence, suffering and all things unpleasant, but he just can't cope with the one thing every three year old learns to do just before dinner. We all have our weaknesses, and prayer happens to be his. The only thing that has saved us through 4,000 years of human civilization has been three year-olds saying grace at dinner.

But that was 4,000 years of ordinary days. Yesterday was anything but ordinary. It had three sixes in it, after all. Regular old prayer doesn’t cut it. No sir. It had to require a full 24 hours of "violent prayer." But then again, I'm not a authority on these things nor do I take part in such religious affairs other than plugging my head into a electronic processor. I'm given to believe that prayer for some is a lot like sex, in search for that explosive drop off point through the rougher and the better. You can throw away the power of your prayer by reciting it meekly, but I think we all know that you've only had a good prayer if it leaves a mark. And after having witnessed yesterday, I found there was nothing less than hair-pulling, ass-smacking, and literally people throwing people in front of moving taxi cabs. After all, this is the apocalypse we're talking about. Somebody hand me the ‘I survived June 6th, 2006 certificate.’

Don’t get me wrong, I'm not a atheist. But I've always been just a little suspicious of the monotheists among us. It appears that they aren't much for hedging their bets. Don't they know that if they bet the farm on the wrong god? Pragmatism dictates that we do whatever we can to prevent the Beast from making us have the Mother of All Bad Days. You and I both know we've had those before.

For that reason, I think we should all find something different to pray about. Since it was my idea, I call dibs on the God for making warm cookies, the voyeuristic thrill of cyberspace and anal sex. I've been praying to explore the rapture of my curiosity all along, but yesterday really wasn't all that different. The Voices didn’t tell me to burn anything so I sat back and nurtured the brain cancer in front of radiant glow from the comfort of my own home.

I don't want any of you to think that I'm less than wholly serious about these most dire days, because I am. I know that Satan is Real because we've dated. I've tasted that brimstone in more ways than one. Because the Devil is my bitch lover and likes to play rough. So you're going to have to pray rough if you know what I mean. Our survival depends on it.

If you're anything like me, you're going to huddle in a dark room for the next while; play a music record backwards as look back at yourself to see where life has got you and where you want to belong in this coming of age. These are trying times for us all. But if you know anything at all about me, it is that I am the eternal optimist, otherwise I would have been already dead a long long time ago. I think we can make it through this if only we engage in some extra-kinky, bruising prayer. Our mortal lives and eternal souls depend on it.

sentient companion

2006-06-05T23:49:00.000-04:00

The ultimate cause of the gravitational force remains an open question and gravity remains an important topic of scientific research. I'm sitting in my room and the world is going to end five minutes and without much to do I place my keyboard on my lap as my eyes boil down to my floor. These are all consequences of gravity, the liquid water remains in the rivers and oceans rather than flying in the air. As I gaze at the moon, I notice it is not stuck to the Earth. It's far far away. Yet still it seems to want to stay near. It's a force that is completely unexplainable to those who do not experience the particular pull that causes the attraction. Apparently, Robots for instance... Robots will never understand love. A robot will never feel any affection for it's owner, and would be just as happy serving one owner for 50 years as the next. If a Robot, a Man, and the Moon all set off together on an interstellar voyage, the moon wouldn't get far before it was captured by the gravitational field of the first planet or star that it came across. The human would continue to travel with the Robot, but would eventually get lonely and seek out sentient life forms. Whether she was green, had antennae, or what have you, the Man's need for female sentient companionship would increase until one day he willingly accepts the alien from Planet X as a mate. Then he would make a home with her and his journey would be over. Man need Woman. The Robot-well... does The Robot. Which is cool enough to say the least.

reckless abandonment

2006-06-02T20:50:00.000-04:00

Sometimes this perverse notion of your sustainability gets to you. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up here. Sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own life. Right now I'm dealing with the sort of anxiety and mental exhaustion that leads either to rash action or a rash forehead.

On matters beyond, what is most shocking about all of this is the narrow view of the world and the assertion that it should subject human rights and living standards to unknown vulgar forces of the global market. Imbedded in these middle and upper-class statements is that motive to take lead in the global race no matter how much human suffering it will entail.

"Former US vice president Al Gore issued a sharp wake-up call over global warming at the Cannes Film Festival, warning the earth was facing "a planetary emergency."

Last year's spate of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans in August were proof that global warming was beginning to wreak havoc due to global climate change, he said.

"Mother Nature has joined this debate with a very powerful and persuasive voice," Gore told a press conference after a screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," which documents his one-man crusade to raise awareness about the issue. - read more

I had attended the Bytown theater this past week to view the documentary film and witnessed Former Prime Minister Paul Martin lending a supportive appearance. Despite his gallow term, his presence was the limelight of this presentation and without being overly presumptuous, we all found ourselves with the same need to be meaningfully addressed about our environment in the midst of devastation.

After the film, when you come to think of it, you wonder if they ever taught ethics in political science. The government is taking a gamble on everyones future as a means for providing more "social services" aimed at meeting the needs of those corporate citizens, giving them a free ride until we're beyond a shadow of doubt, already rendered by the governments uselessness. The destruction of other people, be it for purposes of conquest or defence, remains the foremost goal of all militaries yet why not climate change? Trying to convolute that reality by attempting to paint it in any other light than that cast by the reality of what is, perhaps, the reason why mankind refuses to wake up to the fact that no matter the feeble justifications for wholesale death, in the end it always results in having been a bad idea - even if only on a personal level. History, be it even our own, often renders itself just and, even at times, honourable. But the present, nor the future, adheres to such reckless abandon.

This weekend, do yourself a favor...

Visit http://www.climatecrisis.net/

life as a miner

2006-05-30T22:07:00.000-04:00

It's hot, damned hot. I knew from the beginning of this week I would be in a foul mood. In turn I blame the weather, but as we all know, we ourselves are the predicators of our own demise. This evening I peered out of an opening in one of my crumbling walls. Out past the mounds of debris and carcasses stretched in folds, I looked at the place reserved for the birds. In contrast to the bleak interiors of my room, a loom from my mind that beckons, my tongue hanged freely out of the sides of my mouth, slobber having slipped off into the wind to take the rest of my voice that remains away.

I've been particularly stressful and done my best to engage the principle dealer of dread for so many years now that I believe it's beginning to taunt me by reminding myself of the reality of the situation I'm in. The rules are simple. You live once and you die trying to play by them but somewhere along the lines I came to thinking that the balance of life lies within the imbalance. One day I will be replaced or I will be killed because I knew too much and was therefore a form of contingent liability. So I live my life in fear. Strange for a creature that is I, that had dealt in terror for most of it. Every day an excuse with another exercise in my own hypocrisy. I will terrorize others in an attempt to abate my own.

Despite the stress of this position, I admit that there are others far worse off. For all those that arrive to life, only one of a hundred would get a posting. The rest get death. In my posting, I imagine I have others working under me. Plenty of them younger, stronger people that all covet my position relentlessly. The only thing that will keep me safe is the legendary cruelty that came with me. For no other creature in this world has taken more life than I. Not one. It has taken most of my life to come to terms with this. And in doing so realize that I will be killed.

Lingering in front of the opening, the uncanny ability of being able to solve those around, simply by watching and listening. There is nothing I fear more. Long silences. Sudden bursts. Bizarre conversation. The only thing. Such behaviors have resulted in long years of murder. That unpredictability that all maniacs possess. And it haunts me ceaselessly. Sliding away from the view through my crumbing walls, my eye shadows in it's known irony in the form of paradox. The paradox of what is good and bad at the same time.

bold territory

2006-05-29T22:17:00.000-04:00

I contributed my $10.00 to the cause. How about you? As it turns out, a few other people have went out to see the movie, especially during the bold territory of weather we've been experiencing these past couple of days.

The opening, the biggest so far this year, also has surpassed those of the first two movies in the X-Men series. The first, X-Men had $54.5 million in sales when it opened in July 2000, and X2: X-Men United grossed $85.6 million in its opening weekend in May 2003.

How come? I’ve got no idea. After a lousy year of mainstream cinema, maybe people were desperate for a half-decent blockbuster? In what can only be related news, Fox announced that there will indeed be a fourth and possibly more X-Men movies. And why not? Franchise is a license to print money. And, in truth, the comic book has a rich and lengthy history from which to draw more of a premise for each character and of course, plot lines.

As for an article I'm in concurrence. I think you may like to read it. You may also find there are a few points to disagree with, but they’re well argued and it’s full of excellent advice:

If you don’t really care, don’t write. If you are a student and everybody is talking about exams and papers and you simply don’t care, let it be. If your job bores you, it will bore us. (If you despise your job with a rich, enduring passion, that’s another thing entirely!) Write for yourself; you are, in the end, your most important reader.

The only mistake made is an awkward and crass plug for his company’s product late in the piece. I also noticed he makes references of these tools like everybody’s heard of them and I’m guessing that nine out of ten readers haven’t. He presses readers to "write honestly", but hasn’t been honest enough himself. Despite the missteps, it’s a readable piece, and I’d recommend it to anybody who writes for the web.

grind my gears

2006-05-27T19:59:00.000-04:00

Ye have little faith over his shortcomings due to circumstances involving a abnormal embolism. An embolism far greater than that of any reasoning between the extremely redundant motions and lines challenged by expressing myself monosyllabically enough for you to understand them all. I vouch for what’s worse; therefore losing myself or another in a figuratively based conflict based on falsehoods for the final thought of; is there peace after all?

Here’s my two cents. These days’ freedom is bullshit. As if the Night Of The Living Dead, an entire continent of zombies wander this strip mall landscape in search of brains. We shop at mega-stores that aren’t fond of full time employees because it means giving them proper benefits. These same retailers flood television screens with commercials depicting themselves as community saviors aligned with the needs of the thinly budgeted, while selling pants purchased for 15 cents for $15 dollars. And, to add insult to injury, we are also often made to adhere to the morality foisted on us by such retailers. Walmart, for example, represents a percentage of the gross national product of the United States, which means that it has the ability to set standards based on the beliefs of its owners with regards to things like music, film, and literature. Entertainment companies, who can’t afford not to do business with them, are forced to either play ball or lose the cooperation of America’s largest retailer.

But that’s what’s to be expected in a world in which people wholly removed from conflict, famine, and a whole host of other insecurities, can talk loosely about such subjects without batting an eye. Our entire economy is possible because of the exploitation of those less fortunate.

Pity poor George W. Bush - the much-maligned president is at an all-time low in the polls. And if Canada's new prime minister wants to stick around, he should learn from Mr. Bush's presidency and avoid making the same mistakes.

Little mistakes - like flouting important international agreements. Mr. Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for example, in spite of scientific consensus that the problem is urgent and a public that sees global warming as a serious problem. -- read more.

A few words of interest to follow on from a weekly column produced by David Suzuki, the renowned environmental activist. He was in town the other night to promote his latest book and I attended the hearing with interest. It was a heartened glimpse into a brilliant life with a impetus of drawing attention to the importance of protecting our besieged planet from increasing degradation. For the less veraciously susceptible intellects, a world where we buy and sell ourselves bags of our own shit filled with excuses, such as the belief that globalization will catapult us into ‘the now’,so that those who are already swimming in pools of cash can have better access to cheap markets where entire families will work for 3 cents an hour making shoes that some whiner of a kid will spend 30 minutes throwing a temper tantrum over until his mother spends the $200 dollars to shut him up. Meanwhile, his counterpart arrives home to the news that his 14 year old sister, forced to prostitute herself in an attempt to help bolster family income, has been found floating in the river.

We are forgetting the fact that we are all in over our heads and going to douse our drawers over the edge that is far more devastating than any terrorist organization or a weapon of mass destruction. I implore all of my readers to visit his website to gain what it is worth.

Even this blog isn’t immune. I’m a Yahoo/Flickr member. Yahoo enthusiastically collaborates with the Chinese government with regards to censorship, not to mention that it has also aided in the arrest and imprisonment of a Chinese journalist. Yahoo’s Jerry Yang claims that the company is merely abiding by Chinese law. What he obviously isn’t willing to do is refrain from doing business in China because of the position in which it places Yahoo. Money, at the end of the day, motivates otherwise intelligent people to avert their eyes from those aspects of their business that are anything but ethical. I believe in the power of the social networking capabilities and applications created to bring people together and allow them to share information. It’s a shame, a real shame, that they have been sullied by a company that finds it acceptable to aid in the restriction of such things in other countries.

But let’s face it - hypocrisy is in. Be it me, you, us, or them – everyone’s in on it. Even the vast majority of Suzuki's environmentally friendly followers are habitual oil guzzlers, all to head home in by the end of said event.

As for the democratically elected leaders, they lie to their citizens and it’s forgotten within a matter of weeks. Wars are waged based on lies, and yet those responsible are never held properly accountable. Human rights violations are ignored in favour of fostering stronger economic relationships with those who perpetrate them. The rule of law is mentioned when convenient and discarded when it isn’t, as are human rights. Syria is bad, Saudi Arabia isn’t. The passive genocide in Sudan continually slips under the radar while Iran remains in the crosshairs (though I will admit that Ahmadinejad seems an idiot. Thankfully, the Iranian people can take heart in the fact that they’re not alone when it comes to suffering idiotic Presidents/Prime Ministers). The United Nations isn’t allowed to inspect American nuclear facilities, but when it’s denied access by other countries then it’s grounds for sanctions and possible military action. Of course, that shouldn’t stop us from examining the justification for the acquisition of the bomb, be it by the United States, Russia, or anyone else. The second that Hiroshima was erased from the face of the earth, the world’s powers knew that their securities would require the immediate acquisition on a nuclear deterrent. Of course it’s madness, but that didn’t stop the US and the USSR from engaging in the most dangerous and disastrous arms race in human history, did it.

Speaking of madness... Politcal left v.s. right and the Sponsorship Scandal has polarized Canadian politics, taking the onus off of what needs to be publicly accomplished and placing it on the ambitions of those that would use whatever opportunity possible to further their agendas and careers. And, as far as I’m concerned, there isn’t one in the entire lot that doesn’t seem a mannequin.

There are shootings in the streets, people lock their doors when once not long ago it was rarely done, school teachers are being nabbed with hard drives stuffed with child pornography, our military is being used to further one of the most reckless military agendas in recent history and there’s rarely mention of it (and when there is, people usually refuse to believe it, often defending the practice by offering up trite justifications), and to top it all off - next door neighbours are ever more strangers than friends.

But look on the bright side – you’ve got your paycheck.

Thus, beer and lap dances for all and everyone a good night.

And that’s what grinds my gears - Dianne.

motivational seminars

2006-05-21T22:28:00.000-04:00

I'm a not particularly attrative man. I'm not particularly the most wowee good time kind of guy either. Find me in most case scenerios and I'd rather cover my face with both my hands in hopes of you or I disappearing regardless of being for better or worse. What I mean to say in this gabble of mine is yes, as you're certainly as, er, comely as you are you are not for a demisecond the person to insist on rushing into these words inside of a consciousness made of a profound wretchedness. Some idiot part of this brain insists on rushing the words out through any transferred means neccesary in order to either slide you into this similar state of despair or substitute your state of thinking from that of a woman wearing the skimpiest of tops, the tiniest of pants. Possessing a pair of enormous, magically anti-gravitational breasts; endowments that not so much depended as suspended before her like helium-filled spheres, swaying and moving as she moves from side to side along with that tight... Well, assuming you've got the hang of the basic premise here, I imagine you're still a long means away from that one event-packed long weekend much like myself.

I succumbed to watching one of those news television episodes that attempted to clarify on post 9/11 traumatic syndromes, high-tensions, anxieties and alike. Ultimately, I believe, the goal was to provide moments of hilarity where one is invited into asking themselves the questions about their very own common fundamental principles. Such as: try your best not to kill yourself or other people, and love is a good thing so try using it in a sentence today, and there's hope after all--and my personal favourite--hey! You're forgiven. All I have to say is if guilt and fear were currencies I would have started my own religion to capitalize on it by now.

With a lifetime of experience and largely thanks to the reality of the United States, I have understood something quite different. In the last post I described people as indoctrinated with ideas such as patriotism, and for only one reason: because it serves the interests of the wealthy upper class: the plutocrats, who are not concerned at all about their country, nor any country in particular, since they belong to NO country... they are not only above the law, they are above borders. The only God they serve and honor is wealth. Their greed and selfishness are their virtues while they cultivate indifference and passivity among their slaves, in particular their herd of 300 million American sheep sitting in front of their televisions so extremely effective at capturing their curiosity like tiny bathroom products and miniature toothpaste tubes.

In the 30s, Hitler connived with, and was assisted by, the upper class of the US and the UK who were only too happy to help Hitler in his great plan to conquer and enslave the USSR. The US was also in favour of France becoming a part of Germany. But as usual, the Americans greatly miscalculated and thanks to the glorious Red Army and the heroic Resistance ("terrorists" in White House jargon), Hitler failed miserably in his conquest, so that when the war was almost over, the Americans found it more expedient to land in Normandie and destroy part of France as well as a large part of Germany. They even "suicided" their pet, Adolf.

The ordinary American does not know any of this, nor is he allowed to know as otherwise a revolution would be a sure thing. Therefore, the government-controlled press and TV have for mission to brainwash the people from crib to grave. They do such a great job of it that even now, when a small part of the truth is seeping out, many if not most Americans don't believe any of it but prefer to stick to the fables and illusions they have been accustomed to believe during a lifetime of indoctrination.

In other words the severe mental conditions of Americans explains how so many Americans have supported and still support the crimes committed by America in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. To be honest, one has to say that the plutocrats are spending large sums of money to carry out their brainwashing. They know that the foundation of the plutocracy rests on this mental manipulation of the masses... masses of fools who believe what they see and what they hear: yes, a winning combination!

Now, let's see. Since patriotism means the defence of one's country against foreign aggression, it necessarily follows that the Iraqi "terrorists" are not terrorists at all but heroic patriots who defend their motherland against the barbaric aggression of American semi-human gangster-terrorists who came all the way from the other side of the world to liberate the oil fields.

This was to be just the start since the Americans were planning to liberate the oil of Iran, Russia and other places. True, they already succeeded in liberating the oil of the ex-Soviet republics by paying, subverting and enslaving the local governments there, as well also as in carrying on miscellaneous acts of terrorism in that entire area. But I just heard that in Uzbekistan, they have now been unceremoniously kicked out of there. Well another defeat for Nazism. Anyway, they had no business being there in the first place.

But here is where some misunderstanding arises. For instance, the American whorish media keeps calling the heroic Iraqi patriots... "terrorists", while they refer to the American Nazi terrorists as "patriots".

Seems to be some confusion here but that should not be any surprise. During the Second World War, the German Nazi terrorists also called us Resistance guys: "terrorists", while they called "patriots" the traitors who were working for them. Doesn't this show the truth of the statement: "One learns from history that one doesn't learn from history". In any case, if peace should come back some day, some people are now proposing that, through a Nuremberg-type tribunal, all American "patriots" be condemned to death for complicity in crimes against Humanity, while the so-called Iraqi "terrorists" be celebrated as heroes who will live for ever in the heart of all men of good will.

This however, will probably not happen for the simple reason that the main force governing the world... including the USA, is the plutocracy... the terrorists! (which some may wish to call Illuminati).

But we must not stop at this point. Consider that in America today, there are between 20 and 40% of "patriots". This is the so-called "majority" in rigged elections, and this "majority" supports the president and the country, right or wrong. As you can see, this "patriotism" presents the gravest threat to Humanity's survival. Why? Because there is no need to be an Einstein to notice that the US government - as in fact most other governments - is controlled by the Military-Industrial Complex... the plutocrats! Therefore, the "patriots" are nothing more or less but the brainwashed tools of the plutocrats and it follows that their supposed "patriotism" is in fact Slavery to the plutocracy.

Had these "patriots" one little bit of a brain, they would see that their first duty is not at all to the plutocrats but to humanity and it follows that their human duty is to help the poor Iraqi victims fight this American plutocracy as well as help in the slaughter of all existing American troops.

Thus instead of the devilish slogan "Support our troops", they should follow the human slogan "Destroy our troops", since indeed when they support those gangsterish animals they become accomplices of their terrorist government while otherwise, they would be heroes.

It is easy to say all this but it is unlikely to happen if we reflect that for generation after generation, the Americans have been subjected to a plutocratic brainwashing transforming them into servile slaves of the plutocracy, with artificially implanted tendencies towards greed and selfishness, accompanied by indifference and passivity regarding government affairs. Moreover, just to make sure their interest does not deviate in the direction of social problems, they are discreetly encouraged to take refuge in SEX, DRUGS and CRIME. It is no coincidence nor accident that the United States has become the world centre for criminal and deviate behaviour: just check world statistics! See, America is FIRST in something!

At this point, one could ask the logical question: What is to be done? However this is a question I need not and must not answer. You know the answer and the rest is up to you.

voice of innuendo clamours

2006-05-19T12:50:00.000-04:00

“Patriotism, better said is the love for your country above the love for humanity.” - J.D.

Nearly everything normally associated with patriotism – wars, rituals of nationalistic loyalty, sentimentalized (or invented) traditions, parades, flags, etc. – is quite dreadful and full of appalling claims of superiority and pre-eminence. Can you still remember those days when one believed there was nothing more important than to serve our country, even die for our country, defend it against invaders and we heard or were rather told "don't ask what your country can do for you but what can you do for your country" At that time of hearing it, it all sounded quite correct and logical, like many other tunes from the day, like....the Spice Girls.

After a trip to the dentist my jaw feels broken. Especially when hearing about Captain Nichola Goddard of the 1st Royal Canadian Horse Artillery who was killed in firefight near Kandahar yesterday. She’s apparently the first Canadian woman to die in combat since 1945

"Capt. Goddard was killed while Canadian troops were supporting Afghan security forces in an operation against the Taliban, who had massed in the district. Hundreds of Canadian troops are involved in the clash, which was one of the biggest firefights since the arrival of the 2,300 Canadian troops in Afghanistan."

I have very mixed feelings about Canada’s role in Afghanistan. Primarily, I believe we have no buisness being there. As the events unfolded while debate raged in Parliament about our Afghanistan mission. The Conservatives extended the mission by two years to 2009 (notably, the year President Bush leaves office and apparently the earliest possible exit from Iraq). Harper called a vote on the issue yesterday afternoon, and won it by 4 votes.

How, exactly, does one reach the conclusion that by wanting to end a war, those fighting it aren’t being supported? It seems to me that the best way to support a soldier is to promote peace, and thus their removal from a situation that could very well claim their life and the lives of others including the innocent.

Over the last few days I’ve received numerous response about my website, people condemning me for not focusing on the positive aspects of tragedy or in fact... myself... and I have sat here in silence, blankly staring at this screen, stunned by them.

Have we been so submerged in denial as to not be able to look at this plainly? Have we become so accustomed to living each day in a state of constant self affirmation and arrogance that we must intrinsically find some fantastic aspect to all of this to better demonstrate that even in the face of mass incompetence, tarnishing our fantastic exterior is inconceivable?

If positivism or thoughtful insight on flights of fancy is what you’re after, besides going to the club to have it away, or on the other side, donating money to help the victims of any disaster, start asking yourself some tough questions about government, about how we view the loss of life in other parts of the world, about the realities of poverty and inequality in our society, and how we have grown distant from each other despite the fact that there are more of us now than ever before. Perhaps, when all is said and done, tears should encompass more of our days. Maybe then more might be done about the state of this world rather than very little, with a smile. As my mentioned, cold and sterile self in a voice of innuendo clamours and your neighbourhood blinds shut, the half dazed answer to your curiosity of my long weekend will not be as if it were rehearsed, or nothing, but wherever it may be I will be split like lightning. Gone.

my satan sense tingling

2006-05-17T12:53:00.000-04:00

I’ve been dwelling on new ways to increase the productivity of my life as of late. I haven’t done a lot with it as I’m more than a few screws loose from a pretty solid approach towards what I expect to be a not so wide embrace. My Satan sense tingling far be it from me to question our dumb civilization or stupid customs. Believe it or not, on a weekday Tuesday I decided to head into the public and smoke the kipper back for breakfast with the old pal J-Rod. We had a couple drinks and talked about the carnival of our realities. Soon enough we conspired for the upcoming long weekend in an attempt to find intrigue. I think he’s on the right track, but I also think any attempts he makes in appealing to regulators of the opposite-sex will be somewhat on deaf ears. Then again, now that he’s bigger and badder... the folks may heed this air of present tension. I dunno.

Afterwards, for the main event, J-Rod and I went out to see the film Art School Confidential which started out honest and funny and seemed promising but ended pretty lame as we had found. It didn't suck outright, but the cop-out ending certainly brought it close. The moral of the story? You'll never make it as an artist unless you lie, cheat, and scheme your way to the top... or you're a no-talent hack that gets mistaken for genius. Though it contains some modicum of truth, I found it entirely too discouraging and cynical to be entertaining all together entertaining.

I am not positive, but I think Art School Confidential will end up being one of those films that most people hate, but a few, prominent, loud people really feel passionate about whether they really liked it or not. I sat down not wanting to write this review because I was always told that if you cannot say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Then I decided I could say a few nice things, but not nearly enough to adhere to the sentiment of that declaration. I thought about just leaving the space blank with a few words like, "Make up your own mind on this one." Part of the problem is that there is so much technically right and wrong with this film by the reunited Ghost World team of Terry Zwigoff (director) and Daniel Clowes (writer) that settling into either camp automatically puts you dangerously close to the fence—a rickety fench, at that, which might just fall over and crush you with the weight of the opposition. Boiling it down, though, if a film is technically flawed in many spots, it almost doesn’t matter that there were some good parts, they are quite simply negated.

So, the technically good parts: It is about time somebody skewered pretentious fine arts students with a little of their own medicine—face it, most of the really great skewer films were probably made by pretentious fine arts students. So, I say let the skewerers be skewerees for a change. This makes for some good humor, especially if you are, know or have known some fine arts students from a real fine arts school and the professors. From my perspective, gathered by my history in art, there is a lot of truth in these characters and situations minus the campus strangler, of course.

Technically, there wasn’t that much in the area of filming, lighting, costuming, and set design to criticize. The main cast includes Max Minghella as Jerome the main character and Picasso-wannabe, Sophia Myles as nude model and daughter of a famous artist Audrey, Matt Keeslar as Jonah the mysterious new student and Jerome’s rival, John Malkovich in very rare form as the archetypal visual arts instructor Professor Sandiford, Jim Broadbent as the alcoholic former art-student-has-been turned sage Jimmy, Joel Moore as Bardo Jerome’s college mentor, Ethan Suplee as Jerome’s filmmaking roommate Vince, Steve Buscemi in an uncredited role of Broadway Bob restraunteur and art gallery owner, and more of a cameo that a real role, Anjelica Huston as Art History Professor Sophie.

The casting director did an exceptionally good job with the possible exception of Jerome. Max Minghella comes across as a nice boy, but he doesn’t come across as a really great artist or even a kid who will go on to become one. More on this later in the flawed section to come. Mr. Malkovich was stupendous—he nailed Professor Sandiford to a tee from his holier than thou attitude, to his my advice comes with a price professing, to his "I’m always there for you as long as you aren’t better than I am" teaching philosophy, he was perfect. Joel Moore also did a brilliant job with Bardo—I’ve met this character 10 or 12 times in my life, and as his character states, he is just a cliché of a cliché. The story concept, I believe, started out a good as a good one. And, to be fair, it was an interesting, interlocking mystery that takes advantage of the twists and turns that cropped up. Unfortunately, the final twist just about completely ruined the film.

Now for the exposing the flaws… My first inclination was to go after the script / plot. With more thought, however, it occurred to me that it is the director’s job to reject a poor script and ask for re-writes. In fact, when all is said and done, the lack of success of this film has to come down on the shoulders of the director in this case. Here are a few of the most glaring wrong turns made. First, casting Max Minghella in the lead was a poor choice. Mr. Minghella is a talented young actor. But, he was not ready for this role, nor maybe even to carry a picture of this complexity. For the film really to work, we had to be able to believe that he has/had the capacity to become a brilliant artist. Unfortunately, all we believe he can be is a lovesick puppy who confuses politeness and courtesy for real artistic sensitivity, hard work for creativity, and outspokenness for genius. Were I his mentor as an actor, I would have sent him to enroll in fine arts school for a month and get to know the kid he was playing. The role he turned in, the kid he played just doesn’t exist in a real fine arts school, he would never have gotten in. Art schools require portfolios and talent. They don’t care what you look like, if you have any social graces, they certainly don’t care if you are a doey-eyed, polite young man full of chivalry and happy thoughts. And, when he went through the class critiques, if he were whom he aspired to be, he would have been able to back up his crass comments about other students’ works, not just have a minor temper tantrum about how the other kid’s work wasn’t any good. As I say, I don’t fault Mr. Minghella. I think he was just in over his head in a very pivotal role that required someone with a temperament more along the lines of a younger Leonardo DiCaprio in say Basketball Diaries (1995) to carry it off. After this casting flaw, however, the blatant script flaw should have been even more obvious instead of less to the director who should have asked for a re-write.

I don’t want to ruin the story, so I’ll just say this…late in the film, to try to win the heart of Audrey, Jerome makes a decision that, in the visual arts world, would be considered nearly the highest possible crime (just below murder). This decision is so desperate, so pathetic, as to force a nearly total reassessment of how you have felt about him as a character all along. Worse, the decision is entirely incongruous with all that you thought you knew about him. It is the worst decision since Sophie’s Choice, and orders of magnitude more grim. In the end, it was this that really sabotaged the film. So, for all that’s right with the film, the fatal flaw is just too big for the rest to overcome. The film has its small merits—it's just not worth seeing at this time for the usual price.

But the reaction of Jerome—and the viewer—is derision towards the arrogance and phoniness of an art world that rewards high-concept or no-talent work while dismissing deserving efforts. Minghella switches his soft brown eyes into burning embers, as his character grows increasingly disillusioned and becomes as willing as the rest of them to sell his soul for 15 minutes of Warholian fame, money and the adoration of his muse.

If you’re an aspiring artist, prepare to sell-out or slit your wrists. In the meatime, keep smiling. Always remember to keep smiling. Whatever will be, will be. There is nothing more pathetic than a sore loser freak of an artist. So keep smiling. Everything will take care of itself. As in that same night I had taken a photo of roadkill while walking my way home. Thank goodness for art on the sly.

if i had a lightsaber

2006-05-14T13:18:00.000-04:00

“If I had a ligthsaber, which I don't, yet. I would kick your ass. Or at least scare you a little bit and force you to watch all the Star Wars movies until you were mentally empty inside. Trust me, I did that with my ex and she dumped me seventeen hours later.” – SW forum.

For shame to say I’m with few choice words to explain how I am a shipwreck of a son who cannot happen to help save Mother’s Day. Some people just make it so easy to put it off (for example, as in you not visiting this site to dawdle here for awhile, getting a better understanding of this person writing or a sense of intimacy as it were). The same is true for most things. I think this is all a symptom of the stress of modern society. Too much information and too little time to deal with it.

As a society we have become increasingly stressed as individuals. The causes are multitudinous: economic, population levels, pollution are just a few. Individuals growing up today are under a constant assault of information. As I’ve mentioned before the sum of all human knowledge is on a logarithmic progression doubling under. As a species we have not evolved to handle this type of stress. This is constant, unending, ever increasing stress. We are only designed to handle sudden jolts of fight/flight stress. We have been born into a world that is continuously increasing the stresses on individuals. Is it any wonder that we’re living in a world of walls, be it visual, olfactory or aural, and that our art will reflect that wall of stress?

The perfect example of all fine art or ability falling apart under stress is Star Wars. This subject is tricky so I'm going to have to start at the beginning and go through it for everyone at home.

Star Wars: (1977) The greatest space movie of all time, hands down, no question. There willnever be another space movie better than the original. (Blade Runner doesn't count because it's in Los Angeles, which is kind of like outer space and yet not). A funny thought just occurred to me. A good name for a porno. Star Wars (A Nude Hope).

Empire: (1980) Empire is the darkest of the three and thus my favourite. Even though common sense, and economics, dictated that there would be a third film it was nice to see the good guys lose for a change. I must bring up one thing though. YODA. Though passable in places, the arrival of this character signalled the beginning of the end as far as I was concerned. The cheese factor (or CF) could only grow in leaps and bounds from there. The Hoth stuff was cool, as was Bespin.

Jedi: (1983) Like child abuse, I've tried to block out Jedi's existence for some time. The arrival of the Ewoks was just too much to bare. Was it just me or were there far too many burping noises in this film? And what's with all the fucking musical numbers? The cantina scene in A New Hope was one thing, but that bullshit at Jaba's Palace was embarrassing. The little Ewok "yub nub... jub jub... nub nub jubbity joo" song in it’s full glory at the end just made things worse, like being thrown into a dark pit only to discover that it's filled with 200 Bushmasters that haven't eaten in a month. But the crowning moment of cheese was when Chewie did that whole Tarzan swing onto that Imperial Walker with his hair dressing Ewok buddies. That moment ruined the whole picture for me. Not even the special edition could save that film (and I own all the known editions in the world). Now don't get me wrong. It's a Star Wars film so I love it by default. But as far as epic conclusions go I could have done without the fat fucking lizard, 2500 teddy bears, and a guy who played the Emperor who was about as evil as some jaded, bitter fuck sitting around at The Railway Club bitching about how they became a has-been without actually being anything at all. It could have been done so much better. I don't want to talk about it anymore. It makes my insides hurt.

So, we come to the new movies. In 1999, before having seen the release of the first of three care given prequels, I really didn’t care what it was going to be like as long as it didn't play to childish sensibilities. I wasn’t eager to rob the younger generation of anything but as we all know these were our movies, not theirs. I gave my hopes up and because of that have come to learn; we will always be disappointed when the saga ends and the circle is complete.

Yes, it’s weird. Perhaps all I’m trying to say is…Sometimes love hurts. Kicked my ass and made a mess out of me.

Anyways. Tell your mother I said thanks.

She is so sweat.

hand in my pocket

2006-05-12T16:42:00.000-04:00

To pass the time.

part of the problem

2006-05-12T12:58:00.000-04:00

A person who assesses my merits writes: Should I be part of the problem or part of the solution?

Be part of the problem. Being part of the solution takes too much energy and there's no comprehensive dental and medical. The problem has been evaluated and dispensed to the very heart of me saying I know where I stand and you a part of it. The problem pays and I will spare you from the whole happy and everything is open all day and all night anyway foray by saying every individual is special and unique, and as such, more important than everyone else. Blah blah *cough* bullshit.

In case you're out of the loop, the very nature of the problem is that of existence being competitive. You can see that hole in everyone and you can't escape it. The innate but carefully concealed hostility that is the most constant modality of our daily functioning. Surely you must have had your self-esteem challenged per se, external accomplishments, acquisitions, and the accolades of one’s own and in turn developed you own sense in defence with similarities to counter act.

With contempt there’s thinly veiled hostility, they come as the preferred emotional response to every separate entity to aggrandize itself in any way possible. If anything for an example, a interplay of egos comparing oneself to others, a cock fight, showing off if you will, seeking to one’s advantage wherever possible.

Me me me is the ultimate goal. I happen to hate social arenas with a passion for this very reason.

Maybe we just need to be thrown away a few times to notice we’re truly full of ourselves. I don’t know.

Thanks for sharing your rationally intuitive insight, no matter how numb, no matter how off, it’s illuminating. May your new day not be as ferocious as the last. You ought to rest your pretty head.

Be seeing you.

remember to forget

2006-05-11T12:51:00.001-04:00

I will not eat today. I will not eat today not beause I am in protest. I not eat today because I am broke, plain and simple... like a joke. Times like these, when I visit downtown I often encounter the homeless people. Usually one may have the gut instinct of doing their own personal good deed for the day everytime they happen to give them something. A pat on your own back, right? Even though I am constantly hearing the same homeless-hostile stories: That they're actually well-off, just begging because it's easier than working; That they'll blow it all on alcohol or drugs; That I'm encouraging them to stay on the streets instead of forcing them into shelters and treatment facilities where they'll be better off. Many of the homeless I see appear to be in a state of stupor, whether from intoxication, mental confusion or just numbness I do not know. But more often when I see them I think...

The homeless and addicted are a perfect metaphor for all of us living in modern civilization.

We're not so different. We, the civilized masses, are lost, adrift, imprisoned. We do not know where we belong. We sense somehow that this life we are living is alien, wrong, not the way it should be. We are disconnected, confused, struggling. And we are addicted to consumption and debt and unable, even unwilling, to break these addictions. It is the only life we know. We cannot imagine living in a place that we know in our bones is home. We cannot imagine living a life where we have everything we need, take nothing more than what we need, and owe nothing to anyone. We are homeless and addicted, desperate to find a home that makes sense to us and to overcome our addictions and yet at the same time defiant, unwilling to accept the 'home' that others try to impose on us 'for our own good' or to break the addictions that give us such comfort, our only moments of joy and freedom.

Ricky's been kicking the gong, lickety split didn't take too long
A junkie's sick, a monkey's strong, that's what's wrong.
Well, I guess he's been messing around downtown
So sad to see the man losing ground
Winding down behind closed doors, on all fours.

Mama, don't you call him by name, he can't hear you anymore,
Even if he seems the same to you, that's a stranger to your door.
Go on, ask him what's he come here for.

Oh my God a monkey can move a man,
Send him to hell and home again
Empty hand in the afternoon, shooting for the moon.

It's halfway sick and it's halfway stoned
He'd sure like to kick but he's too far gone
Winding down with the methadone, he's all on his own.

Baby, don't you throw your love away, I hate to seem unkind.
It's only that I understand the man that the monkey can leave
behind.
I used to think he was a friend of mine.

- James Taylor, Junkie's Lament

Civilization is our pusher. It's The Man who keeps us hooked on consumption and debt, The Man who holds the key to our prison and gives us our illusory rush of elation when we buy and use his addictive product. The Man who seduces us back even when we have decided that life in his prison is insane, self-abusive, worse than death. The monkey is our addiction, without which we cannot live. And we wander the streets of civilization's artificial world in a daze, never really home, wondering what is missing, why we feel so lost. Civilization is our ghetto, a whole world of six billion homeless people, setting fires on every corner for warmth, ganging up and stealing everything we can get our hands on to pawn for our fixes, breeding babies already drug-addicted at birth.

So the next time you see a homeless person, or an addict, don't be frightened, angry, or filled with pathos. You are looking in the mirror. It is we who are homeless, and addicted. What will it take before we break the habit, walk away from The Man, and find our way home?

How can we break the habit when all of us are addicts, even The Man? When we have all forgotten what it's like to live without the monkey? When we have all become the hollow, empty, desperate shadows of men that the monkey leaves behind?

When I become too theoretical, when I ask with too much vehemence why people work jobs they hate, why so many earn their living by deforesting, or mining, or working other destructive jobs, my friend reminds me: "Sixty days", he says. "That’s how long it takes before people in the civilized world begin to die of starvation. Dave can’t quit his job because in sixty days his children will die. That's the primary reason most of us do not rebel. We have too much to lose". Ours is a politics, economics and religion of occupation, not of inhabitation, and as such the methods by which we are formed and governed have no legitimacy save that sprouting from the end of a cannon, from a can of pepper spray, from the rapist's penis, from the travesty of modern education, from the instilled dread of a distant hell and the false promise of a future techtopia, from the chains that bind children to beds and looms and from the everyday fear of starvation -- as well as an internalized notion of what constitutes social success or failure -- that binds us to wage slavery. The responsibility for holding destructive institutions, systems and culture accountable falls on each of us. We are the governors of this prison as well as the governed...

- Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

There's no methadone for the stuff we're hooked on. And no one left to administer it even if there were.

end of the line

2006-05-10T12:57:00.000-04:00

Life's too short to bother with the fanciness to explain how I do not happen to like staying in line to get my head done, you’ll see what I mean. The question, no matter how you spin it; as in how are you? How have you been? Is as always: have you been staying in step, in other words, in line? People are afraid of those who are not in sequence to the step. It makes them look foolish for being in step. It might even cross their minds that they themselves are in the wrong step. Do not run nor cross the red line they say. If you go too far out in any direction, they will lose sight of you. They will feel threatened. Thinking that they are withdrawn in other words, not in part with something that they saw move away from them, they'll feel something's going on up in there that they don't know about.

Are you still here?

Then the revenge will set in. They will start thinking of how to get rid of you. Act mannerly towards them. If you don't, and you like being the asshole you are, they will take it personal. As you come directly in contact, do not make it a secret of how much you happen to require them. If they sense that you have no need for them, the first thing they will do is try to have you need them. If this doesn't work, they will tell you of how much they don't need you. If you do not show any sadness at a remark such as this, they will immediately tell other people of how much they don't need you. Your name will begin to come up in circles where people gather to talk about all the people they don't need or don't happen to desire. Whether you know it or not, you will become famous this way. Although you will only get the people who you don't need all the more angry, you will at the end of the day become a whole topic of conversation. Needless to say, these people who don't need you will start hating themselves for having to talk about you. Then you yourself will start hating yourself for causing so much hate. As you can see, it will all end in one great gunburst.

Don't you just hate gossip?

For my true believers, my new photo section from flickr is now up and running; I truly hope that the return of this section will shut you up. To be quite honest with you, I’d forgotten how much fun it is. As the visual stimuli happens to please to the observer you are, (never to be mirrored here) when it comes to commenting, I am not quite sure what you mean by ‘restrained’ when I ask you to tell me what you think. It worries me. All the stuff worth seeing anyway is migrated over there, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here all too soon, following a long stretch of business, procrastination, and a bunch of other crap not worth explaining. Corresponding posts on the new site. Get it? Got it? Good.

journey to dementia

2006-05-07T23:51:00.000-04:00

Some movies cannot abide without explosions. Recent example; Mission Impossible 3. Just no fun at all, man. They should have thought about adding a scene where secondary character Maggie Q is having sex and gets blown up in the middle of it. So you’ve got your nudity, sex, an explosion, and unnecessary violence all rolled into one three-minute scene. Shit, that could very well be the entire movie. Start to Finish. As far as I’m concerned, the basic groundwork for Monster’s Ball was the sex scene with Halle Berry. As expected, self-execution deserves Oscar recognition. And that gives the impression of being.

I happen to be keen on movies in case you didn’t know. It’s actually one of my most dominate leisure pursuits and out of the volume and complexity of films available today, it devastates me that this trend of basically… shit, remains and will, for the foreseeable future remain… shit. At root, the problem appears to be a plurality of views. Doctrine, tactics in marketing, all this naturally leads to the question- Is there a better way around all this? Sometimes I really do happen to think so and I firmly believe in an alternative position for myself in writing/directing so I could show the emerging need for content driven material set for a world that is without a sense closure (relation, what have you) between the gaps of life chances and experiences. Ideally, no matter what or how hysterical your dream may be, with precision and detail, who knows how far you can go in achieving your vision. Just whisper the question to yourself once in awhile, tell yourself the reasons, and tell yourself the reply. Positive developments are far more complacent when answered by you than anyone else’s argument or concurrence.

Have you been doing your garbage picking lately? All of this conjecture, plain and simple as in waves. The form straightens as it hitch-hikes through the air to finally bounce back a surface and ripple, therefore dissipate into a chaos of misinformation. Therein lays the beauty of fiction. Fiction allows one to say and believe whatever they want and there's nothing you can do about it, cabbage heads. Hell, the Christian Coalition does it to you guys every ten minutes.

I envision making a truck load of money in one night at the MGM Grand having thought of the idea of World Scientists v.s. The Christian Coalition. Now that would be fight to the death worth watching. Knowing my luck they'd just stand on either side of the ring yelling at each other. You never know. Some Chaos Math genius might try to bite an ear off to prove a point. That point being 'an ear for an ear', I would suspect.

The point of all this is that you never can tell what's out there in all that darkness. Some extremely unromantic figure in a dark alley way that represents all the badness of the world. 'For the love of god, don't go down there!' they say. So everyone does. It's just the way the game is played. Stupidity's been running a boot camp outside of town for quite sometime now. There's an army of mall-rats with their shit eating grins turned upside-down. Way, way upside-down. It should come as no surprise to you that you yourself might be a graduate of that rotten academy.

Maybe it is the perfect time to break the news. With the Da Vinci Code film hitting theatres on May 19, Christians are organizing violent protest marches, firebombing theatres, demanding that the UN introduce and enforce anti-blasphemy laws and have forced Ron Howard and Dan Brown into hiding. But seriously folks, Area churches are preparing to counter unorthodox claims about Jesus Christ in the movie "The Da Vinci Code," which opens in theaters later this month.

"The Da Vinci Code' kind of gave a focus that there's a lot [of misinformation] about Jesus Christ and Christianity out there, and perhaps it's time to rebut it," said Monsignor Francis J. Maniscalco, a spokesman for the District-based U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "If people see [the movie], they should go prepared." -- read more

Over the next few weeks, keep an eye out for many of the same people who made excuses for the Muslim anti-Danish demonstrators to sneer about American Christians' "intolerance" and attempts at "censorship".

affinity for destruction

2006-05-06T23:50:00.000-04:00

Personally speaking, I have been unflattering as of late; in the interest of science of course, and as a matter of historical record. How much of an asshole can you be?

Do you know? Or don’t you?

I say, “Where are the bitches at?” How is that for attraction and making sugar of a scene? So I figure it’s time I got back. For my first step I’m making a minor dramatic revision in prose, I'll excise weak or superfluous passages as such when sure that excision would improve bolstering this text in spite of everything futile enough as blowing away fumes of poisonous gas.

Obviously I’ve gotten ahead of myself; virtual animosity allows you to get away with a lot of things, so one may think. With references to bitches, I must apologize, in actuality I’m trying to say something else yet ultimately what I really meant came and without conduct. As noticed post-modern narrative is not my “bag”. My slang may not be current and English may not be my strong suit. If you ever happen to encounter my native tongue, you’ll come across Gibberish. Regardless of how crazy and/or stupid I am, I’ll waste my breath along with your IQ.

my head in dirty oil

2006-05-04T12:58:00.000-04:00

A thoughtful and provocative quote from George Orwell – “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

First of all, I don’t usually do this but I would like to take this opportunity to talk about a personal pet peeve of mine - email abuse. Email abuse or dare I call it spam comes more from people I know than outside sources or at least it seems that way. I'm sure you know what I mean if you are shaking your head in agreement at this point. If you aren't shaking your head in concurrence then you are probably one of the guilty ones.

Do you ever get odd emails and wonder how they got your email address? Never been to the porn site and yet get porn emails? Do you get the viagra emails? Or any medication emails? Home mortgage emails? If so, follow some of my guidelines below and it may help...

Don't forward an email and leave all the email addresses it has been sent to showing. Why you might ask? There are programs out there that real spammers use to grab email addresses. When you forward (or even reply) with all the addresses showing you just gave spammers the opportunity to get all those email addresses. Imagine if the email went out to 10 people who sent it on to another 10 people, before you know it, there's my personal email address and yours vulnerable again and again.

Another thing; don’t send every joke to everybody. I, for one am hard on humour and something you’ve just pulled out from a box of cracker jacks just doesn’t cut it these days. Some people seem compelled to send every joke they get to every person in their address book. Don't waste my time only sending me what you think I might be interested in. If I miss out on a joke I'm sure I will live to see another day.

How about this; don't forward emails and consider that keeping in touch. A lot of people happen to think that keeping in touch is forwarding an email. No, it's not. Once in a while send that person a note and see how they are doing. And stop forwarding the "too good to be true" emails. Disney World and Pepsi will give you money to forward this to all your friends, Microsoft and AOL will send you money or little doodads, send this to everybody in your address book and you will have good luck,...you get the idea. Spammers love this because these things make their way around the Internet quickly.

I received the following in the mail today, aside from nameless deciding to roll out my e-mail address and I having to acknowledge there should be more security offered guards against spam adverts and possible viruses while mitigating the dangers of these zero-day exploits, the ludicrous title had me up the wall. GAS WAR - an idea that WILL work. The first thing I remember saying to myself was, you have got to be kidding me.

GAS WAR -- Join the resistance!!!! I hear we are going to hit close to $1.50 per litre by next summer and it might go higher!! Want gasoline prices to come down? We need to take some intelligent, united action. Phillip Hollsworth offered this good idea.
This makes much more sense than the "don't buy gas on a certain day" campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn't continue to "hurt" ourselves by refusing to buy gas. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them.
BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work. Please read on and join with us! By now you're probably thinking gasoline priced at about $.80 is super cheap. Me too! It is currently $1.08 for regular unleaded in my town. Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a liter of gas is CHEAP at $.90 - $1.00, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace..... not sellers. With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. How? Since we all rely on our cars, we can't just stop buying gas. But we CAN have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war.
HERE'S THE IDEA:
For the rest of this year, DON'T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies , PETRO CANADA and ESSO. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Exxon and Mobil gas buyers. It's really simple to do! Now, don't wimp out at this point....
Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all. (If you don't understand how we can reach 300 million,all you have to do is send this to 10 people.... I'm a mathematician, so trust me on this one.)
How long would all that take? If each of us sends this e-mail out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!!
I'll bet you didn't think you and I had that much potential, did you? Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on. I suggest that we not buy from Petro Canada/Esso until they lower their prices to the $0.60 range and keep the man down!

Do I sense fantastic logic? If this even happens to work, it will only prove there are a lot of veracious intellectually challenged people out there that make up this worlds key demographic.

If you're not a fan of spam, I suggest seeking further information on ways to fight back by visiting the following website, titled Death to Spam. Why visit? Because spam related activites are highly more questionable than you may happen to think.

I’m not sure if you have come across this, but there was this group of kind, cheerful characters who once lived in harmony with nature. Then one day and from there on their idyllic surroundings were threatened by these garbage-strewing characters anchored offshore from their home. That's right! The Smoggies! And without becoming too comparable, the three shit disturbers, in reality are the the most bellicose of foreign policy initiatives in history that pursue intimately with the petroleum industry. So what have these Saturday morning cartoons taught me? There is a horrific cost to our hypocrisy.

Beneath it all, our land is all in private hands, much of it foreign-owned, and has already been destroyed. Canada's near to being one of the #1 sources of air pollution, this problem among plenty others basically makes Canada’s Kyoto commitments unreachable.

Canada is second only to Saudi Arabia in global oil wealth. Granted, the majority of it is Bitumen, not oil. This leads most to wonder why it costs $75 dollars to fill a car up with gas today. Reliant as we are, if this is our strategy for helping it is working brilliantly. Unfortunately, I’m not in the oil business like the Bush family so much like anyone else, one way or the other we’re all pretty much screwed by these rising fuel prices. Better yet, why aren’t the majority of next year’s domestic automobile releases hybrid? Why are there only a handful of alternatives out there when gas is over a dollar a litre at the pump?

Using your computer? It needs oil, believe it or not. So doe’s agriculture, major industry, recycling, medicine - the list is endless. So is it just an automobile problem as said in this outrageous spam mail? Or is it an oil problem?

And how should the world view those who claim to have a seemingly endless supply of oil, when they rig their own oil fields and refineries with high explosives in the event that the Monarchy is threatened? As possibly prophetic? If the estimates produced massively contradict the claims of vast reserve left, then perhaps we’re a lot closer to Mad Max than you think.

Take into consideration that oil is a tightly controlled and regulated resource that is primarily traded at two world exchanges, both of which are steeped in the US dollar. You must also realize that we are so utterly dependant on oil that the loss of automobile use is actually the least of our concerns. That the production of food, and its dependence on oil, is a far greater problem that could lead to very real and terrible occurrences in the not so distant future.

I suppose then we might have another laugh at the idea of waging against our leaders in the oil industry. Being able to control the world’s water supply may just be a lot easier for a country that practices pre-emptive and unilateralist military policies, and god knows if we drink it or use it for other purposes we’ll all be hypocrites by then.

after all you are only human

2006-05-03T19:57:00.000-04:00

In case you didn't know, I happen to think best when in the rain. Plenty of times erosion has got the better half of me.

As I’m really glad to see you’re sharing your intuitive sense. You and I both realize, everything is not the same as on the big screen. So remember that.

As you may know, there is a war going on and I’m not talking about the war on Iraq, I’m talking about a war that is being fought amongst men and women about something that no one can rightly recall. Like these people you sometimes happen to share the convenience of your time, they’re prone to squabbling, it doesn’t come as that big of a surprise. Doesn’t it?

The way I tell it, it’s as if humans have been looking to do away with themselves for a long time because to be quite frank… we’re tired… of everything… if not mostly (pardon my French) the bullshit.

We’re too disenfranchised with ourselves to do away with anything but. So we blow ourselves and each other up. Sometimes literally. We set upon the world, year after year, a terrible shaking. A shaking of the land and the trees and the oceans. And, after years of drawing lines and daring ourselves and each other to cross them, we finally set about doing something…

…inventing clouds that could choke the air out of our lungs.

One day there will be a choking so great that none of us, not one, will survive. In the future, the mole people, them or the bug men will tell it best being that we humans were, at one point, the best of friends. How the clouds did not kill them would be anyone’s guess.

As for me, I understand where you’re coming from. Pardon my mentioning, I was born in the year of the rat, but it comes as no coincidence that I figure I am in fact much like a rat itself. Reviled as little more than a bottom-dwelling disease carrier to the most ignorant of creatures. I remember running away from them to my place of abode beneath the shade of a tree. ‘When pigs grow wings’, I said to myself. I the rat will one day spin a cocoon like the butterflies, I imagined. That I will sleep in it and emerge transformed.

In my far younger days, I would watch the caterpillars climb high atop the trees into their very own cocoon in the spring and then wait until they came back with better names. I would marvel at the perfection of their lives, being that they were all given second chances. That they were born again with wings enough to carry them far off into the possibilities of a greater world. But I’m only a rat. A rat that lived with a great many other rats. ‘When pigs grow wings I will fly away’, I told myself. Because if pigs could fly then surely they'd allow I, the rat.

To think up something to say today I’m surprised enough to say as it were in the very least. I’m glad you find this even something worth your time if you have happened to have read up until here. There’s a lot of fodder in the world. It rarely comes up with anything beyond grunts of yes and no and excitability. But once in a while one might think up something to say.

As demonstrated by many, a hive mind within itself. The world is drowning in courageous inner monologues of those that march to their own drummers and all that. But generally things in this world are quiet. Mistakes are made all round, leaving the majority of us bitter and unsafe except within the bosoms of our own discontent. For a rat such as myself, I sometimes figure it’s best and most adhering to see the world as the mistake of those who took a good idea and made it bad. The fact that it’s hard to realize that the idea itself was bad to begin with isn’t my fault. It’s nobody’s fault when it comes right down to it. It’s just one of those things that you find yourself unable to remember with any clarity. The end of the world? It just happens.

where there is no vision

2006-05-01T22:42:00.000-04:00

Can’t sleep. I must have residues on my brain. Last night I had the wild shrieking of nightmares yet again. The nightmares seem near-infinite in detail that it must be what makes my world-weary. Not so much to do from the dead cold of the night and the scorching weather in the day but rather the tiredness and numbness.

I happen to miss the unrelieved grey days.

I could barely move when my eyes had blemished. “Use them” I told myself while attempting to polish the unrequited rattle of chain undertakings. Struggling mercilessly against a drain of vision this unshaven face turned into a relic in dead-lock. Subsequent incoherent intermissions are not uncommon when you find yourself in a tense, hurried, and hostile environment. Much like rapport of carnal commerce this day and age. In guilty silence without my two eyes, I penetrated deeper into my sub-conscious. The place you're told to stay clear of, the place of intimate affairs.

I've been quite sick over the past few days. In a state of utter disarray, in my exploring of this pattern, unbroken, and continuing, I’m sorry to say I’m a bit lost as of late. Life it seems is a whole lot of unmotivated steps. I call them unmotivated steps because they lead no where but to my own sort of quarantine. It’s a motto that tends to violate me while I’m rushing to meditate in my ardent journal. Without trying to thoroughly disintegrate rightly in the given situation; If I were to imagine myself as a building I would certainly be condemned. Perhaps with a doddering hypochondriac inside.

everyday nomad souls

2006-04-26T19:46:00.000-04:00

Sell me the blue sky and paint me with clouds of blasphemy. Apparently the Vatican’s are reconsidering their ban on the use of condoms. The spin in this case is that it’s for the prevention of AIDS among married couples, choosing the lesser of two evils; there’s the spilling of ones seed, subverting “God’s will” in reproduction vs. being culpable in the infection of innocent party. So literally, if you screw your wife you may as well consider yourself screwed too. Unless algorithmic procedures are in your philosophy of life, take the time to mull over the possible alimony. Hell, America alone may be rich off infidelity.

Like I said, that’s the spin. The nitty gritty is that approx 7.5% of the sub-Saharan African population is infected with AIDS and that percentage continues to grow each year along with some 2.2 million deaths so far and the likely worst yet to come. The biggest source of growth for the Catholics has long been 3rd world countries; poverty and desperation are great indicators for religious growth potential. What the church sees is it’s believers dying off faster than they are being replaced. What they see is children dying because fathers infected mothers because of this other women insist on condom use despite the church’s pronouncements, a situation that will always lead to a lessening of the church’s authority. Loss of authority over the sheep combined with a declining believer base due to AIDS has left them little choice.

Cloak it however you like the use of contraceptives has never really been about theology, it has always at its root been about power, authority and the need for the church’s followers to breed with great fecundity in order to produce many more of the brainwashed and often sexually abused by the clergy into believing their hogwash.

Amusing the inner nerd to a video game based on the Star Wars films, I thought to myself about life on the Skywalker Ranch, contrary to what you might imagine, it’s no sprawling shrine to the Lucas empire (or “Empire”). You’d be hard-pressed to find so much as an Ewok spear, in the way of props, laying around campus - unless you hit the archives building, where everything from a life-sized “Jedi” speeder-bike to the Ark of the Covenant from “Raiders” go to die.

But what rocks about this place is how quiet it is. Nestled in the hills of Marin County, Lucas used his “Empire Strikes Back” bankroll to purchase 5000 acres that would make up the ranch, home to the best sound-mixing facilities on the planet. But if you didn’t know what went on inside most of the architecture that dots the landscape, you’d never imagine it was in any way tech-oriented: the buildings resemble large bed-and-breakfast Colonials, vineyard houses, and barns.

I picture myself roaming hills and fields in all manner of livestock, looking for turkeys to steer. Every once in awhile a ranch-hand vehicle would roll through, but other than that life as I imagine would be still, ever present, and beautiful. So peaceful you can hear bees buzzing from ten feet away. The kind of place you don’t want to pass wind in, for fear that everyone will know it was you; not even the one-cheek-sneak would be safe. Things like that now are hard to find. The kind of pastoral beauty so quiet yet so moving, the avowed Atheist would remark “This is God’s country.”

Yeah, may I offer to say that I too am oblivious as to where this is going.

Excuse me if I’m not too current on world news. Maybe you can answer a couple questions for me? So what is up with the Pope? So what, is Sasquatch doing the Atkins diet? It’s amazing how much you miss just by spending a few nights in the seclusion of darkness. What’s that you say? The voices tell me we’re still fighting in the middle east? Well, point as you may, the issue as I see it is that we’re too busy pointing fingers at each other rather than taking a moment to realize that we are all part of a problem.

I use my computer on a daily basis and enjoy what privileges that come along with my minuscule secular life. At times when I’m reminded of simplicities, I think of this one particular person from my art school days, someone who would say if we’re all so advanced and smart and innovative, how about a day without relying on technology? How about a week? Bathe in a river. Plant some trees and be happy discussing life and its mysteries with your friends.

And if your answer is “But that’s unrealistic! I need to go crunch numbers and write reports in hopes of receiving at least twice the minimum wage at my office job otherwise those who judge me won’t be impressed by my fancy shoes and knowledge." then you are the problem.

There are different attitudes out there. For one, stop using your television and computer to check up on how poorly the world is doing and go make some change. And don’t expect anybody to thank you or offer gratitude because true giving is selfless. Perceptibly I am a problem as well. Point fingers at all my hypocrisies all you want, that won’t change the fact that you’re still sitting here clicking ‘refresh’ while you could be off to planting vegetables.

In the next few hours, I’ll be attending a congregation in honour of the old buddy of mine that I speak of. We will celebrate being swept into a sea of motion. In his case, en route for New York after spending more than his fair share of time in a one-road town filled with an odd variety of mindless shapes.

Life comes down to these small moments, and in these moments, all the big decisions are made. In this particular moment, I can see deflection into perspective in all the practical arguments trying to pull together a short notice, or opt out, already emotional and simply given in to this night.

traditional concerns

2006-04-24T23:30:00.000-04:00

What has felt like my first full retreat in over days, I’ve reached into the sloppiness that is my life and decided to take a load off. I am admittedly unaware of the comings and goings of today’s fast-paced pseudo society and acknowledge that I like many others am only misunderstood to a point exaggerated with problems beyond periodicity to concentrate on something much deeper.

I’ve noticed time has managed to produce lots of big news and for some, couldn’t wait to hear what thoughts I have to share. Well, my site design and a lot of ideas for new features and types of content are still in the works, but I will leak to you what I can now, and continue updating you as new items become more certain and concrete.

While many of you may think I have been operating this website since September of last year I have been writing blog entries since spring of 2004. I have since and always thought of new ways of writing without diminishing the strengths that have brought to where I am now, including the consistent stream of original content along with what most can come to expect as a reflection of nonpartisan skepticism and hopeful belief that news media, politics and social change all have vast – what’s the term I’m looking for? – potential for improvement.

My gears are still turning, although rather slower on the selection of things to write as I’m persuaded by the beginning of a hybrid series of summer movie releases and lavish computer animations.

While lacking response or valuable input from readers I have given a sense of less urgency in priority blogging. But I am always open to various proposals via e-mail; some, to my delight, so concerned they’ve even submitted suggestions to me for penis enhancement.

I thank you for your patience and understanding as we all happen to be wrapping up something in our own personal ways this month. All in all, I imagine we all have a lot of challenging work and exciting prospects on our collective plate at the moment, thanks to the supporters who come through for me. I can’t wait to show you the enhanced results.

how to manufacture news

2006-04-19T12:52:00.000-04:00

Got Spam? How about this, got something intelligent to say about one of my posts? Maybe you just find me so damned attractive you need to get to know me better? Well relief is at hand, incase you didn’t notice, I happen to have had the same damned e-mail address for the past two years now. Can you spell e-mail?

Here’s what is on my mind right now. One being that it is already just plain scary that there is a moron in the White House and why he and his cabal can get away with whatever they want, especially nuclear strikes against Iran if as they say diplomacy fails to curb the Islamic Republic's atomic ambitions. And two, why is the local news and abroad so bad?

I remember speaking with Taz Boga from the local Broadcast news station, and besides I having failed miserably on a number of occasions to ask her if we could share a future together we adamantly agreed that outlets today are becoming no longer a real resource for information. They tend to take the, "if it bleeds it leads", theory to a whole new level. Stories are rarely covered in any depth. Rather, sound bites and quick overviews of a topic, followed by the ever annoying, "let’s ask the people on the street" what they think about this issue, are the general reporting style. More and more radio and television news stations, especially at the local level, have fewer and fewer actual reporters. Instead, they have plenty of microphone toting pretty faces asking us all "how we feel" about issues or the weather in the Byward Market. National newscasts and programs are not immune to this either. They tend to have seasoned reporters actually reporting, but all too often the news agenda is driven by producers who are looking to provide stories that will drive the largest audience. That policy of sensationalism can lead to excesses.

Case in point: although not locally, Dateline NBC recently, publicly and unapologetically sought out Muslims to be filmed attending a NASCAR race for a segment on racism in America. Various segments of the US population may very well be racist against Muslims given the decidedly paranoid environment their President has fostered in relation to the War on Terror. But that is really beside the point here. Dateline is trying to manufacture a news story. They are not actually reporting on a case of racism, but instead, are trying to put a scenario together whereby an act, or acts of it, will occur. They would then presumably show the segment in their program declaring that their little hypothesis and experiment was correct. Curiously, they weren’t looking to try this stunt at a baseball or basketball game, speaking volumes about the intent of the piece. When did manufacturing news become an acceptable tactic in news gathering? ‘

This post will probably put me in company with some of the more shrill elements of conservative bloggers, who themselves pounce on examples like this as a left wing media conspiracy against them. So be it. Not only dateline but many and more gathering news resources are not reporting news; they are trying to make it up. In doing so, they are fueling cynicism everywhere which should be a concern to all of us.

conflicted with the outside world

2006-04-17T23:45:00.000-04:00

The freedom to inform and the right to know are not, by all appearances, equitably shared in the world. After centuries of dominance by monolithic political structures and dictatorships, we’re realizing that the Leaders of the Revolution, the helmsmen and fathers of the nation, are predatory vampires whose insatiable appetites have assisted us into a cesspool of human misery. To retain their power, these predators reign in disguise as Bunnies with tools of terror: an efficient system of physical and psychological torture.

Despite the appearance… a guy in a Bunny suit was beating a woman on a busy street corner, witnesses to the assault called police and some guys even boldly took pictures on their phones. Most in all probability just turned up the volume on their spanking new iPods to drown out the screams and kept walking to the mall. Not exactly knights in shining armour. In the face of the doubts and the uncertainties of this shameful scenario, you wonder about the challenges before it.

…You know, come to think of it, I never even thought Bunnies would be important enough to have their own day. I think this weekend used to be about Jesus or something, but like all things, everyone goes out of style sometime, man. Bunnies however are in. Their cute and cuddlesome appearance has therefore usurped Jesus and made this day their own. Along the same lines as how the fat-man and his army of elves and reindeer smuggled Christmas. All I have to say is good job to the identity who had it in on us, oh yes, of course, the Bunny. I love pointless trivial holidays, wait, my mistake, sorry their not holidays, their special days.

Easter to some is about a man who many years ago gave up his life to show us how we were living ours unjustly. Religious or not, Jesus existed and although his miracle performing skills are questionable, he was a great man who did a great many things for many people in need. In case you didn’t know, you can help people without having magic powers. Magic powers make it look only a little more decorative while doing it for the history books. On such days we should remember to realize how we should be at the very least celebrating good will towards our fellow being and we should be sacrificing certain things to help others. So I hope you had a Happy Bunny Day and your chocolate made with slave-gotten beans were consumed merrily as you danced the night away.

In case you have been pondering where I may have been, I’m turning whatever creative energy I have these days into learning Portuguese…

Nah. Not really.

Actually, I have learned a very clever trick so that I don’t embarrass myself while out in public—at least this works in certain situations. There is no possible way that I can keep from embarrassing myself on a fairly regular basis. I have come to accept that an embarrassment-free existence isn’t going to be possible so I just try to keep my personal public humiliations to a minimum by avoiding the public altogether.

I came to this realization just after I had arrived from my brief visit to Montreal. I visited many new locations and enjoyed even more fascinating sceneries. I also found that in Montreal, it’s not that a man happens to carry a purse that makes him a sissy but what's inside that probably does.

I myself have tried to be a real man and although I haven’t completely given up, you wonder how far off could that be before there are too many controls to manipulate, for one, my video game system. I still happen to drink regular coffee from a pot, if you happen to remember that, but more and more often it’s becoming a requirement to have more instructions than a kitchen remodelling job to have just a plain cup. I used to go to the barber shop for a haircut, now only the salons happen to exist.

The professed men’s magazines have articles about how to blow dry your hair and exercises that will make your derriere look more masculine. No wonder Hemingway blew his brains out. Guys who run with the bulls in this day and age probably carry purses and use their free hand to read text messages about hair growth products. Maybe now it’s called “Sauntering” or “sashaying” with the bulls. Maybe the bulls aren’t as tough as they used to be. I hope not because the old bulls would have eaten tall lanky wimps like me for breakfast.

This whole thing along with the very evident appearance and decorative arguments one hears everywhere, the media muzzle. It is all relegated to reflect – with more or less accuracy – the interests of prevailing economic, cultural, political, and social powers. Media manipulation and structured disinformation have become an organizing force, as demonstrated here or to more recent extremes, 9/11, and the extent to which world opinion has had its fill of that media phenomenon. It is all giving me a headache.

Personal opinion is literally submerged by the weight of information which has been culled, wrought and aimed at a public which is considered to be a rabble of cultural morons, incapable of personal judgement and unable to think otherwise than in accordance with the cannons of some source.

I’m not sure where this long inexorable slide into for example, metro sexuality—or whatever you want to call it—began, but taking it from one who's been there I happen to have a pretty good idea of where it will end. I see the Village People adopting a new character in their act that dresses in Kenneth Cole and has a fresh manicure. He can keep everyone’s schedules straight on his palm pilot. Considering this, I’d rather walk around with a tomahawk any day. America’s new male archetype will be the sissy in the Village People.

What’s next? Exposed midriffs or thongs hanging out of our pants? Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t equate homosexuality with being a sissy. I’m addressing the mindless pursuit of personal grooming that has gripped our culture. Both men and women I think are becoming more and more fatuous, boring, and indirectly heightened towards converging into one archetype: unintellectual twits with nice hair. I find it curious that in a culture where everyone is obsessed with health, no one seems the least concerned about the precipitous drop in our ability to carry on an intelligent conversation about anything other than working out or clothes.

If you happen to roughly know my history, I realize the inherent contradiction; this is my arbitrary shutdown into the realization of this principle strewn with obstacles in the shape of archaic, obscure, restrictions. Over the course of my life I have picked up bits of wisdom that I am now ready to begin sharing with the rest of the world. Much of this insight has been acquired through tremendous personal effort, trial and error, cliff notes, forged notes, cheat sheets, purloined answer keys, cassettes tapes, diligent study, over-the-shoulder peaks, night school, imitation, invention, improvisation, correspondence courses, group therapy, psycho therapy, private tutors, and home schooling. I offer this knowledge to you free of charge. That people are working out their bodies for an hour while they pollute their brains the next with People Magazine. It is the replacement of thought with higher grooming standards. That’s a shitty trade-off in my book.

So are we going to give up our weekends in favour of shopping vacations? I may have been had since I mentioned the consumer cultured Montreal in the first, but actually I was trying to figure out what to do with the dead hooker in my motel while worrying about paying for excess baggage on my return trip. Just shoot me now and put me out of my misery, but not in the face. I just put on an exfoliation mask.

garbage storing loyalties

2006-04-12T22:10:00.000-04:00

How do you ruin a perfectly good pagan holiday? Simple. Invite the Christians. Works every time. With such a guilt ridden lot I’m sure we can all get along very well. Just can’t let anyone else have any fun can we? Because we’re too afraid of fun ourselves.

These past few days I’ve scuttled around to say the least. And when your working a government day job near downtown parliament you haphazardly notice where more and more people tend to congregate. They are the very pleasant and the very familiar in a world overwhelmed with distraction. They are the consumerists collaborate with their thoughts being invaded.

Riding up the escalator for a higher vantage point, a hill for your own safety above all else, you may find yourself reluctant to concentrate on a very familiar stranger travelling down your opposite direction. Maybe someone you had seen before. You awkwardly exchange silent stares, neither of you propelled or hurried. Not in wary, mutual sizing-up; in bewilderment one points out to say “So you’re still dealing with… high school trauma?”

“Maybe.”

And despite your means for escape, the maze continues without exit. You come full circle. As you notice how many reflective surfaces there are in your surroundings. The elevator mirror will have you staring at your reflection in its closed doors. The structural columns are also covered in mirrored glass. Certain stores employ reflective trim around their plate glass windows. Everywhere you go, you get to see what terrible decisions you've made visiting this migraine.

This last Monday, I decided to devour a form of General Tso's chicken—probably the third-lowest tier of the food pyramid. The lowest rung is the fried onion loaf. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the Tao. General Tso must have been the most reviled military leader in the history of China, because if ever there was a "f-you" entrée created by a disgruntled personal chef, it would definitely be General Tso's Chicken. Napoleon lucked out. And General Custer's custard, although not a reliable meal for dinner.

But General Tso's chicken is like a culinary dare disguised as comfort food. Like most things fast food, it's made of all the wrong parts of chicken, each blindly hacked off with a cleaver, and then cleverly concealed inside some kind of glazed doughnut. The worst part is that its deep-frying only creates a perfect outer seal, protecting the bacteria crawling throughout the bizarre interior of poultry and tendon clinging desperately to each other.

What may have summoned that thirst for Fast food, Fast sex, Fast times, Fast anything, is abandoned once you’ve found maggots tale grinding inside and out of your appetite that is literally on the go. You’ll come to understand how flesh-chafed this reality is when it comes to experiencing life on the fast lane. I don’t know about you, but I think we should slow it down a morsel because I’m spent with having my head in a toilet.

On my way back from purchasing my General Tso's Chicken, again I found myself passing about fifteen mirrors and I remembered when I realized that the proliferation of mirrors in shopping malls might have been a secret act of consumer advocacy on the part of mall architects. All of those mirrors primed as mines under pressure to explode, repeating over and over again for emphasis, telling you, "Will you look at yourself? Is this what you really want?” If you’re not in the category of wholly mesmerized narcissists or desensitized to compassionate teachings you may find mirrors saying a lot of these things, then again...well.

As an ex-retail employee, I did the window dressing and engaged clients with “freedom… only for how much you've got?” while notably dressed in a suit with my tie worn around my cranium. My way of saying don’t think I’m any less fortunate than yourself to enjoy this perpetuate hypocritical philosophy specially branded as freedom.

Our ancestors built our land with their calloused hands. They fought off invasions—and it makes you think, for this?! I say drop that fried chicken and just start running. Run for miles from any advertisements or free samples until you hit an undeveloped parcel of land. Enjoy the scenery, maybe even talk yourself out of the flavoured mocha-frappe-chino coffee cravings.

But I guess even that is hard to absorb.

tired but cannot sleep

2006-04-09T15:34:00.000-04:00

Sometimes overnight I get worried. In the mornings I seem forever on the verge of trying to recall my dreams, when I get the faintest of glimpses before the whole thing evaporates like my childhood. Last night after this call I started to panic. Laying down for an hour or two with my mind feeling like cake batter, looking down every slight hint of grey and dry wall my window omitted into my dwelling area that I share with the bug men.

During the late hours, I had received a phone call from a probable mental patient with a british accent who asked me to suck his genitalia then admittably place a plastic bag over my head while I’m attempting to rest. The night before, my mind had spent sometime in a Nuthouse for the psychiatric disabled. I was dressed in a black suit as I travelled through decending elevators and into corridors of blood red rust stains with black mold and mildew walls of concrete. I had been conscious of the fact that I was sent here by the board to report an issue indicated in dealing with a patients difficulty in dealing with his experiences and suffered ‘severe depression and recurrent nightmares’.

The shock gets you through as your senses get taken away from you. Overstimulation, too much noise, too much movement, too much to do. So much that the specialties of any one sensing are lost or ignored. You can almost call it a sickness of the human condition.

I can hear you but I cannot listen to your plea. Much like yourself, I do not have wings but have such a strange and strong urge to fly.

Santos-Dumont, the diminutive dapper aeronaut from South America came to Paris, crashed his flying contraptions, and opened a restaurant with chairs and tables 15 feet high, requiring customers to climb up ladders. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't it psychotic? Mr. Laas on the otherhand has a burrowing tendency. He has an aversion to stairs and multiple-storied housing. In the endless Nebraska prairie a four-foot tall wispy-haired Freddy boy standing in a wheat field was the only landmark for miles and miles. The hawks could swoop down and carry him away, or lightning would be attracted to him.

He devoted a month to digging a hole in his backyard, made it eight feet deep and needed a ladder to get out. (Correction: He says it was 12 feet deep.)

Where do you escape?

The ducks like to show you where things are. You can always trust a duck . You can always trust a duck to be loud and foolish and helpful. Ducks should hold more signs more often. Especially pedestrian cross walks. Ducks command a lot of slap happy attention. Today, I’m going to feed them on my bench by the river.

prime time deliverance

2006-04-06T22:32:00.000-04:00

Darkness had been interrupted by a shy artificial glow as Canadian Rock Artist Matt Good had granted a somewhat romantic aura of intimacy to the loneliness of the Alumni Theatre, in the Ottawa Carleton University yesterday night. Having reached the mid-way point of his solo acoustic tour and still as fiery as ever, for the entirety of the night he glided through hidden passages between lights of numerous shape shifts as they streamed and poured onto him playing his guitar in the greatness of our shared lodgings.

I had included myself amongst the audience of fans. In what was one of plenty of his concerts I’ve attended during his tenure. Again, I wasn’t surprised I found that state of awe-inspire to the indiscernible edifice that stood at first silent in the fog of atmospheric deliverance. Between melodic escapades Matt shared his frame of mind intermittently with his defined occasional restlessness. A pale shadow erratically ventured through his quite disturbing although magnetic sight, his limbs at times stretched out as if to capture essence in his shared tales of tragic to the sanity of rock and roll after The Muppet Show disruption. With or without props that included a discovery guide to many things Paris Hilton or confessions of a Barbie doll for our democracy, it was all animated for amusement without, as he’d say, the bull-shit.

The stage in his presence was a perfect circumference dotted by pale lamps shining dimly as if speaking in sinuous language to each and everyone without being afraid of the towering obelisk, rising brave from the ground in the pivot of that immense space, surrounded by the endless sounds of ambience. In personal dedication, his song ‘Fated’ had his voice breathlessly stimulated, lunged for refuge behind an aged tree of adopted method, there upon at times he timidly peeked to discover a rare sight: in a bright but soothing light reverberated from the sheer ivory marble of his eyes; we overlooked our surfaces.

His shadow agilely skimped through, craving that mythical scenery: the dawning air was defining shapes and colors, pale reds, ashen grays, and those unmemorable whites, the brick of culture from the imperial time, through his renaissance, the modern and contemporary era, ages revealed by such a well assorted variety of urban drama entwined in emerald greens surfacing from historical ground. That night we indulged in perfection craving its embrace, oblivious to the rising sun; inexorably it disappeared in a breathless gaze.

What makes Matt Good a crazy good artist is not that special capacity for being creative, thinking outside the box, spending too much time alone (although all strong traits of his), etc. It's none of that romantic lore that has us believing that craziness is a prerequisite of artistic talent. What makes a person in pursuit of the truth in an art form crazy is the relentless noise of the necessary unreality that encloses our humanity.

Every time a singer has to stop singing the way he has been singing, every time a musician has to stop playing the way he has been playing, and makes a journey back into what we call "real life", some element in the psyche suffers a jolt. A shock if you will. And what is felt is the returning to what matters most. Whatever it may be. The sounds of today that are not music are not worth listening to. In the world of telephones, cars, high-pitched whininess of the person next to you, computers, people arguing and preaching, people asking for money or things--these sounds are considered a part of reality, when in fact, they are not. They are a rouse; the only sounds you can trust to be honest expressions of reality are made with the intent of listening. That was what made this a good night to remember.

one or the other

2006-04-04T23:01:00.000-04:00

"There is no greater sin than desire No greater curse than discontent, No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself. Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough." — Lao Tsu: Tao te ching

I am hypnotized and lost in the haze of retirement. This is the fifth year since my father was vanished across the planet to spend the rest of his days in the desert instead of our front yard lawn or backyard garden, maybe followed by watching Westerns on the television. I'm in my early twenties and am still considered far too young and excitable to take it easy. My mother who’s still around will call me religiously at 7 o'clock in the morning and spit and curse and damn the idiot North American bandwagon lackeys that think them so brilliant.

My closest ones will talk to me about politics and we'll agree and disagree and I'll lose my cool and I'll shake my head and we will yell. And when the phone rings sometimes I'll pick up the television remote and try to answer it. Sometimes I get it right and pick up the phone. Then again.

I have found it hard to sleep as of late, lots of counting seconds and minutes and hours. The sheep have unionized making it impossible for me to count to fifty without them demanding a half hour. So I am left with a magnificent collection of gin and ice cubes. Oblivion is something grand once in awhile. So let it be undertaken in a like manner.

It is questioned that Internet may be reducing our literacy skills. Noticeably reducing young people’s proficiency in thinking critically and writing cogently.

“Talk of decline was old news in academia even in 1898, when traditionalists blasted Harvard for ending its Greek entrance requirement. But today there's a new twist in the story: Are search engines making today's students dumber? In December, the National Center for Education Statistics published a report on adult literacy revealing that the number of college graduates able to interpret complex texts proficiently had dropped since 1992 from 40 percent to 31 percent.” - read more

I sit at my desk in my office, the sky grey and the windows sealed. I yearn for the time of day for music to play and ascend my spirit if but only slightly. Aside from the trivials of day to day life...we all have to blame the weather, right? For too long, and I’m not sure why, it has been easy to blame the weather—particularly the winds, which have seemed so often to come from the wrong quarter—but perhaps it’s simpler than that. Perhaps I’ve been away from the outside world far too much. In the evenings, I’m watching films (Thumbsucker was a great film by the way. I recommend it) exploring ideas, and blogging. Maybe I simply haven’t been where I should be for many of the good evenings when I could have sat out there, doing nothing in particular and so much that matters. I’ve been elsewhere a good quarter of my life. I’ve said, I regret none of it.

Now spring is here; yet with winter beginning to stretch its shadow across the land towards winter again. It’s likely I’ll have few of these evenings left to enjoy. I’d like to share sometime with my old friends; here, squinting across into the sun after another day floating and spiralling and scanning, falling and rising.

It’s hard during these few weeks for most; for those I know personally, we’re faced with the prospect of work the next day, and a relaxed session has to compete with a decent nights sleep and it’s easy to say, “let’s leave it for the weekend” usually meaning Saturday. One day of seven. It seems wrong. A life is so precious and so ephemeral that to waste any of it seems an unbearable tragedy. No...to think of it, it is an unbearable tragedy. Yet so many of us do bear that tragedy; most days getting up reluctantly and heading off to a job we often dislike; a job where we find ourselves most often stressed; most importantly, a job that seems largely trivial and sometimes unimportant, without real meaning emphasized.

What can be done? Well, you can either change your circumstances or change the way you think. Occasionally, changing your circumstances—for example, switching jobs, going elsewhere—can work. Often it doesn’t. Conversely, changing how you think can always work—the catch is that it’s far harder. All I can say, from my own experience, is that it gets easier with practice.

Returning to that sad thought about how so much life gets wasted, I think about the recent sale of this one online auction and the response to that. A small company developed on the internet sold for millions and the news was full of the story of cofounder named Sam, who, only a few years ago, was a trying to keep warm in a shared flat. Now he’s banked something between $200–300 million and is fielding numerous offers of marriage. Good luck to him. I have no complaints about Sam—what disturbs me is the sort of thinking (if that’s not too generous a word) the story has encouraged. Suddenly it seems everyone wants to know how he did it so they can do it too. That, or something equally successful. The tragedy is that, yet again, success is measured as money.

Sam’s either hailed as a hero to emulate or he’s envied because, well, he got rich quick. That is what is considered significant; that is what we should strive for. What seems to have been ignored or downplayed, even when Sam pointed it out himself, is that he enjoys what he does.

To me, that’s his real success.

I wonder: what if we all found a way to make $200 million within a few years? Would we be happier? Would our society be better?

If I were rich I would be on a terrace on the far side of the river where a stag roars: a deep, drawn-out groan full of lust and aggression. I would be at it up in the hills too, wandering about, setting up territories, herding hinds, challenging interlopers. In that state I want to be. It would be easier to hunt the more vulnerable teens who have sex in my woods seasoned in mists and mellow fruitfulness.

But today, my ass hurts. I sit back in my chair with the sun-rotted. Realizing how hormones and testosterone poison our soul of understanding. The ability to understand fractured into the assumption of it and the reality of it. Exactly how convoluted has it become? For all the advances made in the last 100 years, consider the complications and stresses amplified in the pursuit of conveniently and expeditiously understanding. It is, in a way, the accumulation of confusion that distances you from yourself. Would you say that in ages past people knew themselves better or worse than we do? That unspotted by the white noise and the low hum of a million emancipators they knew the peace of their internal selves better or worse? Was there once a greater respect for that inward honesty that we judge ourselves with in private, or does it remain unchanged within us? And how does misinformation and the bombardment of our minds with useless information about useless things effect that inward state and the truthful notions of ourselves?

In a world in love with live broadcasted casualty free wars, television stations devoted entirely to celebrities-their whereabouts-their wardrobe-who they're fucking, and the outcomes of 'reality based' television shows, can we even honestly answer those questions?

Probably not.

blew up in the bathroom

2006-04-03T12:53:00.001-04:00

What is going on? I hear from someone at my office that an explosion went off at a Tim Hortins in Toronto. From the news acquired thus far, a man went into a Tim Hortins strapped with explosives and blew up in the bathroom. Only one person confirmed dead and all the stores continued business as usual. No real panic, just curiosity. And very strange.

"Investigators have ruled out terrorism as a cause for a "very intense, very hot flash fire" in a downtown Tim Hortons Sunday that brought the intersection of Yonge and Bloor Sts. to a halt. The incident, shortly after 1 p.m., sent dozens of patrons scrambling out of the coffee shop after a "wall of flames" erupted from the men's washroom. Police found the burned body of a man in one of the washroom cubicles and, according to one report, a gas can nearby. Attempts to revive the man were not successful. Coroner Dr. Jim Edwards ruled out terrorism." -read more

I’m a little late on this but I thought I would follow up with my weekend for those interested. Dirty jokes and one-liners were on tap at Yuk Yuk’s this last Saturday. Everyone gathered to enjoy a lineup of comedians that included host Sabrina Jalees, opening act Matt Billon, and headliner Terry McGurrin.

A comedian I find of interest is Matt Billon, a mid-twenties Vancouver native. He got the crowd in the mood with draws of humour from his own life, no matter how embarrassing or incriminating. After being in the business for nearly four years he got his big break with a solid performance at last year’s annual Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal. He wasn’t afraid of bringing his own shortcomings into his act, revealing he was born two months premature and doctors had so much trouble discerning his sex that his parents originally named him Tracy. He included a story of him and his brother taking turns shooting each other in the backside with a pellet gun given to them by their uncle.

His calm appearance and deadpan delivery had the place in hysterics for the duration of his set until there was this one moment where he established his unrelenting opinion about the war on the Middle-East and how self-deprecating we Americans are with draws to 9/11 being an entire sham. It’s particularly galling when a voice (whether or not coming from a comedian or anyone else with any other occupation for that matter) has to strip oneself of their own full-time thought mechanics and are towered over by a scowl, in this case a majority of government employed audience members. I made sure to sincerely thank him in person after the show. It certainly felt good to laugh and to know some people aren't afraid to be absolute with themselves and their beliefs.

Of the thousands of North Americans in Iraq, half of them are members of the National Guard and Reserves. Of course, compared to US casualties, the number of Iraqi dead and injured is extreme. If, by way of grizzly math, one were to compare civilian losses endured during the US led war on terror, Iraqi civilian deaths dwarf those of the US, who lost just under 3,000 people on September 11th of 2001; the crucial aspect of the comparison being that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. If the most extreme calculations are to be heeded, that being the figures produced, Iraqi civilians have been violently affected by the policies adopted to fight the war on terror more than any other civilian population on earth, despite the fact that no direct link existed between Iraq and the impetus for the unilateralist and preemptive doctrine adopted by the United States after 9/11.

particulars of a dream

2006-03-31T20:51:00.000-05:00

I never happen to know exactly what to talk about. I belong to a certain class of people who never seem to accomplish anything, and simple as that. Who try to make beautiful things, or beautiful discoveries, but can't. Every line I write conjures up other lines, better lines, from other writers. Every image I paint, conjures up better images from better painters. Every scientific discovery I make already discovered. So again I come to think about the end, death if you will, and how I should stop beating at doors I’ll never enter or anyone will ever ring. So I’m a bit agitated if you will.

Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and scramble to write down the particulars of a dream or whatever. I awoke at 2 in the morning. As always, brewing something cataclysmic. As I sat on my desk looking at something scrawled on my monitor. There were two words written on dust. Help me. A message from days ago, speaking to me. I looked out the window, and wondered as I wrote this.

Uncle John died while in his sleep. He was my late grandmothers’ brother and the last of a generation. Uncle John had came from the reserve to visit us on several occasions; the last time we were in the same room had been during the family funerals nearly 5 years ago for his beloved sister followed by his niece. It’s heart-rending to think that the final moments we had shared together were in such circumstances but through our tendencies of brood emotional history and tears of general confusion he found a place in each of our hearts and brought us hope. I would like to take this opportunity to extend my most heartfelt sympathies to his immediate family and those closest to him. He will be missed. For so long, and good-bye.

I drank a small glass of lemonade, and went back to bed.

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel like the end of an era. A life without a cause. And while I have said repeatedly that this representation of myself and my work might not be seen again, the last couple of years have left a warm impression on me.

For a lot of years I did not particularly like or have anything in common with anybody. It was an awkward situation, one in which the tension never abated and rarely produced the sort of friendly moments that one expects between people who spend a considerable amount of time together. Looking back, though, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t change it given the chance. The mistakes I made during those years, the trials endured and pains succumbed to, taught me far too valuable a lesson and helped open my eyes to a much larger world. Outsiders often equate such things in terms of their own, but to me that is dwarfed by the quiet, solitary, contentment that I now enjoy in comparison to those years lost in a haze of negativity. Let it be damned. While I am grateful that I have few readers established here, I’m no longer in the sort of place where I’m willing to trade my emotional well being for your mind-sighted product.

That said, things as I imagine can never be for everyone’s absolute pleasure. I acknowledge those of you who I may not have chance of speaking with in person again, to those of you who are diversely talented and utterly professional in your own ways, whom, at some time supported whatever endeavours I saw most fit for myself to experience prior. For that I thank you.

So what now? That’s the big question. I do have to make some tremendously personal changes this year, as I do happen to owe myself. I find myself in a new and strangely exciting position from time to time, so I’m somewhat unfamiliar with the proceedings. Sitting here I know that I cannot waste opportunity, that I must take the sort of chances that I once did, staring into the night’s sky in search of stars while laying undone on a parking lot. I sigh on how once engaging in unknown territory was routine. Hopefully I will do just that, and to the utmost of my ability. To each of you I wish the same, we owe it to ourselves and no less.

wrapping your borrowed head around

2006-03-30T20:11:00.000-05:00

As these things often go, the creative impetus goes through a cycle of waxing and waning. Currently it is in a state of wane. It's a time of alacrity dawdling tendencies. Affirmation of how oxymoronic life is.

This site offers a window into only so much I can or may feel the need to tell you. It seems maybe that as the seasons teeter on the brink of change, by many, life itself is questioned for some kind of direction to be established. Don't get us wrong - there is definitely activity. The dilution of democratic freedoms and civil liberties under the auspices of national and economic security. The new fiscal year. Altogether it offers many office groups gossip and speculation as to what the hell resolution necessarily means. Does it really mean management of a new infrastructure? Does it really mean better facilitation? Does it really involve meeting socio-economic needs? Does it really set new challenges with more fluency? Does it really mean policy reform in conjunction with new strategy? Plenty of discombobulated words with axis, charts, and graphs to go around. It may all as well mean a cosmetic change. But of course, I imagine for most public servants, all of it most importantly begs the question, does it mean better accommodations for you know who, if you know what I mean? The unfortunate thing is that all of this falls outside of the mandated subject matter, and as such, my discussion is completely verboten.

During a speech the day before, President Bush said “First of all, the globe is warming. The fundamental debate — is it manmade or natural?” Actually, that’s no longer a debate, at least among the overwhelming majority of scientists.

Natural variation in the Earth’s climate, or changes in solar activity or volcanic eruptions, which have been suggested as alternative explanations for rising temperatures, could not explain the data collected in the real world. In a report to the United Nations, the Environmental Protection Agency says that man-made greenhouse gases in the US will increase 43 percent between 2000 and 2020. And while acknowledging some scientific uncertainties, the EPA says that the recent warming trend “…is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years … due mostly to human activities.”

How much longer will Bush keep his head in the sand? For Sean O'Grady, he wrote recently in the ad-filled motoring supplement of The Independent: "...in answer to the many letters we get criticising some of our coverage, we don't make cars. We just write about them. [...] We try to concentrate on telling our readers about the many ways you can enjoy motoring without costing the earth (in any sense)." (O'Grady, 'Sport Utility Vehicles: Don't shoot the messenger. The people who buy SUVs are the problem, not the industry that makes them, or even the motoring press', The Independent, March 7, 2006)

O'Grady went on:

"Why so defensive? Because so much of the criticism dangerously misses the point. Almost every one of us wants to help to save the planet and almost every one of us wants personal transport.

So who, according to the Independent motoring journalist, is to blame?

"The enemies of the planet, the hypocrites if you will, are not the oil companies that refine the petrol or the car companies that make the vehicles, or the journalists who write about them or the advertising industry that markets them or the bankers who lend us money to buy them. The people to blame are the people who buy cars in the first place, without whom none of the vast industry would exist. Now you know who to write letters to."

This is a facile argument on many levels. For instance, consider that corporations spend billions annually to promote their products and to create new markets around the globe. As a philosopher one notes:

"From the point of view of the corporation, the ideal citizen is a kind of insanely rapacious consumer [driven by a] kind of psychopathic version of self-interest." (Quoted in Joel Bakan, 'The Corporation', Constable, London, 2004, p. 135)

Corporations also 'externalise' the environmental and other costs of their products, minimising or avoiding regulation with government connivance - so that society as a whole, and the planet itself, bears the burden. However, O'Grady's article is quite a significant piece of journalism in that, until very recently, any discussion linking advertising, the media, corporations and environmental collapse was simply off the media's agenda. It is a promising sign that the public recognises that those issues are linked and that the media had better take note.

"But we don't talk about that. And, of course, they're very often the people [i.e. the corporations] advertising in the press and in the newspapers in the first place. It's very interesting, the kind of lack of debate at a time, for instance, about the car industry and the future of the car industry. Then you look at the number of car adverts and you begin to wonder, is there a connection? …I shouldn't say that, probably." ('Start The Week', BBC Radio 4, January 16, 2006)

Indeed, you are to be well-rewarded in a media career. If you’re interested in pursuing such a prestigious stint, best to learn not to dwell on such topics or else the sparks of sanity will quickly snuff you out. Referring to the argument that rejecting advertising would almost certainly drive you out of business.

People are readily eased for the dismissal of certain uncomfortable facts, especially those who have not escaped the attention heavy reliance to the crème de la media - indeed all the 'quality' press – advertising let alone produces revenue around 75%. Such dependence only produces one of a series of news filters protecting the public from unpalatable truths about state-corporate power in society. The propaganda model of mainstream media is rarely been mentioned, far less discussed seriously. So why not? From a moral perspective, some would see it as indefensible to be propping up pensions by polluting the planet.

The continued curiosity of utopian thinking hasn't yet grasped that of what the market provides for the best possible hope of eventually achieving ends. More money is already being thrown at renewable energy efficient technologies than the system can possibly cope with or is ever likely to produce a return, a state of affairs that will only be accentuated by President George Bush's State of the Union commitment to end America's addiction to oil [i.e. that of when every lost drop runs out].

Taking the statements of political leaders at face value is a defining characteristic of the corporate media. So too are the bizarre notions that corporations and 'free' markets, heavily skewed to serve the corporate interest, will 'save humanity'.

Law professor Joel Bakan interjects a note of rationality:

"The 'best interests of the corporation' principle, now a fixture in the corporate laws of most countries [compels] corporate decision makers always to act in the best interests of the corporation, and hence its owners. The law forbids any other motivation for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers save money." (Bakan, op. cit., p.37)

The last despairing hope of blinkered media is that shifting a few chairs around at the top of the establishment will save the planet. Market 'sovereignty', an unhealthy fixation on economic 'growth', and the benign intent of corporate and political leaders are unshakeable articles of faith for profit-led media editors and journalists. It is little wonder that such media professionals will forever dispel any critical discussion of present policies, and possible sane alternatives, to the realm of utopian thinking. Utopian worlds as far as some acknowledge, will not and cannot exist but only in ones mind... of course. So continues the warming glow of commerce.

confessions of a dangerous mind

2006-03-28T12:57:00.000-05:00

"Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui helped himself get one huge step closer toward getting the death penalty Monday when he testified that not only did he know about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks ahead of time but that he and shoe-bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane and fly it into the White House." - Fox News

Now, on to the larger question - just how long before these people thicken the plot and uncover evidence that Moussaoui is in reality, George W. Bush's secret half-brother.

How many times do I need a post relating pains? While bored of the week already in progress, I went back to reading correspondence entries involving a former website of mine dated 2001. The website was host to a whole slew of incoherent high school angst and fervour (mostly profanities). Some of the behaviours vaguely shared between those I've known have happened to linger in my mind on occasion. Looking it over again I began applying a myriad amount of compressions to my sore head. Nothing more than a huge amount of undesired anxiety about my future forecast. After years of refusing to live under that threat, today I find is no more welcoming. At any time a infinite amount of complacency from me happens to conspire. Considering the anxiety, the depression, military atrocities, secrecy, anomalies, isolated life... Most of this may not compute... Please excuse my haphazard thoughts. The thing is worst case scenarios consistently trump everything for reasons being: complete mental preparation.

Suppose I’ve been carrying heavy thoughts with me on what has to be a lackadaisical slope. I’ve been consumed with thoughts over other matters, not even considering that things are different and have changed since then. I was a completely different person from what I know today. Hell, I suppose, revealing this information to myself even has some shock value.

influence for a change

2006-03-27T00:45:00.000-05:00

The blogosphere is host to a number of public opinions that are critical to the coming-of-age narrative because they provide the framework for building cultural knowledge. But of course this matter of opinion, open-endedness, or entity is challenged with consequence it seems. As the dark corners of my physical and virtual reality are assaulted in a negative sense, I’ve removed my commentary for good. It’s most unfortunate, but it was necessary.

In the past month, I’ve been sent a number of messages by fanatical reader(s) who seemingly want plenty more of my attention. They’ve admonished me for what they’ve viewed as my lack of understanding about the realities of writing online up to and including my human rights having been inflicted due harm on a number of occasions. Rather than respond privately, which is impossible because the reader(s) are unidentified, I thought I would do it here, I imagine the author(s) will read this and, if they have any counter arguments to make, will make them or respect my rights and put this to rest.

It feels as though a lot of changes are happening, or are on the verge of happening, for me and those closest to me. Some are happy and excited. Some are sad and painful. Some are a result of emotional impulse, and some, if you subscribe to logic, have been foolishly long overdue.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." - Benjamin Franklin.

I'm not quite convinced of the spectrum of that quote, but I guess we’ll find out, won't we? I've been stubborn and at the very least ‘optimistic’ enough to be questioning my sanity in the process. Somebody else, I don't know who once said to me, "Some people, they don't even know what they don't know. That's just the way they are. So let it go…" From time to time it seems to resonate within me. Nothing. Will. Be. Done.

Humanity is not willing to take responsibility for itself. Not for it's wars. Not for it's appalling poverty. Not for it’s hunger levels. Not for it’s appalling addictions. Not for it’s dead laziness. Not for the well being of others. And not for it's home planet. I sometimes begin to believe we are at an evolutionary dead end. And we are about to be extinct.

As you must excuse my ill mannered exploration of humanity, I’m only brave enough to say that I’m literally frightened to even dare to dream about the ramifications of this blog onto the livelihoods of those closest to me.

Let me say that I agree that Western countries should work to influence change in the Middle East with regards to human rights standards. But it is precisely our support for those government that deny their citizens proper rights that fuels anti-Western sentiment and protects the status quo of so-called normality. Given the inseparability of culture and religion in the region, including political culture, it is to be expected that, at some point, spirituality will be radicalized and co-opted by those that would use violent means to counteract what they view as the diminishment of their rights, culture, and religion by both foreign influences and those that are supported by foreign powers. If the region’s history did not paint such a blatant picture of Western exploitation, perhaps that wouldn’t be the case.

If the majority of those that visit this blog lived in a country in which they were denied a wide variety of rights, rights that most of us take for granted, how would they view those foreign powers that supported the very government that denied them those rights? Even more, when those foreign interests claim liberty and justice among their most precious virtues? Because that is precisely what numerous Western governments are guilty of, Canada included. The reason? Because oil is more important to the industrialized world than human rights.

Be it Western support for Saudi Arabia’s corrupt regime, or turning a blind eye to the criminality of governments with control over potentially exploitable resources (such as Sudan), when it comes down to the choice between the economics of oil and human rights, human rights lose. And that reality has been made possible by the very nations that claim human rights paramount.

So how should the majority in the Middle East react to the hypocrisy of foreign powers that claim to stand for equality, liberty, and the rule of law, yet support the very governments that deny their citizens proper rights? How would you? It’s not enough to say that things will change but that right now the fuel needs of soccer moms in North America are worth supporting regimes that willfully deny their citizens rights. While the United States condemns Syria, it supports Saudi Arabia. While it condemns Iran, it trades nuclear technologies with India, a country that hasn’t signed the Non Proliferation Treaty. Business is business, and human rights are bad for business. And until the people of the United States, of Canada and Great Britain, among many others, wake up to that fact, then nothing is going to change, be there military action or not.

This is precisely what Canadians should be thinking about, not lower taxes (mind you: they're exclusively for the middle and higher class), and not the falsehoods of men in power who do nothing to realistically address it. I know Mr. Martin’s government certainly did not, there were Canadian combat troops in Iraq long before any government led by Mr. Harper. But has anything been done about it? We, as a people, must choose how we wish to represent ourselves to those that have lost faith in us, and for good reason. If we choose to continue this love affair with apathic resigntaion then we cannot claim ourselves shocked if, and when, the sky falls.

It falls to us to bridge the gap, to show those half a world away that we, like them, are not willing to put up with such a disastrous double standard. Call me crazy, but I was raised to believe that in a civilized society people treat others as they, themselves, expect to be treated. Thus, given the evidence, I can only proclaim us Neanderthals, and look to the hopeful possibility of evolution to translate the difference.

nocturnal canvas of silence

2006-03-23T22:49:00.000-05:00

What is not broadly understood by almost everyone? The war on Iraq? Climate change? All of it has had no impact on public behaviour what so ever. It's ultimately the product of American hegomony. Respone is met with a strange, distant smile and avert eyes. Mind reels, maybe said with, I wonder what I should eat for dinner tonight? David Bowie...phhhft what kind of man woman is he? Say, sex sure would be nice right about now. Eyes can be read of renewal wrapped in distance, undone, unfurled in a story or a kiss. Eyes speak more honestly than one would ever dare for lack of language. So they enjoy themselves. Who am I to spoil their fun? With this moral dissonance deafening. The battle lines drawn, and the major question all over the country, a coalition of homeowners, anarchists, and internationalists are mustering to fight the future.

Not all these people entirely concerned… merely until their homes are due to be bulldozed for a new road way. More and more of us will never get a good night’s sleep again. But anyone who has joined a broad-based coalition understands the power of this compound of idealism and dogged self-interest.

Not so long ago, we lived in a world that the media regularly told us was being connected in ever more complex ways -- think of all that reporting on globalization in the 1990s. But for the last several years, "just disconnect" might have been the reigning news motto. If you read about the Iraq War, you get Iraq, and generally little else. No Turkey, no Israel, few Syrians, no Saudis, nor Egyptians. Reports on our little Afghan war give you Afghanistan, but certainly nothing about the fighters that, according to Syed Saleesurgent Taliban, based in Pakistani border areas, has been sending to Iraq for training in the new ways of guerrilla warfare. (Think: IEDs and car bombs.) You would never know from stories in the American press that Iran bordered Afghanistan, or that both India and Russia have complex interests and connections to this worldly oil depot. Why exactly this has been so, I leave others to analyze. It has left our major papers strangely demobilized when it comes to offering us a picture of our world and so in an unequal contest with the Bush administration is hard to deny.

Every morning I awake with a start to the chatter of demons, milling in the corridors. I wake to the sight of the restless boy sweating profusely through his thin smile covering the emptiness inside. It peers in from behind masks of the dead in wake. The desperate color that in it's own image... wants to paint the world and render it a endless sea of numbing gray.

With every mile put behind, I feel as though I draw nearer to a destination to which no one should ever aspire. The night is deep. I cross check my watch. I see that the hours have surrendered their slavish attachment to the ghost of the day gone by, and have brought me to the brink.

Words are enough to distract. In company, speaking words is comforting in a reassuring manner. They stand up for a while... perhaps to give some fresh air. But there is an ulterior motive. There always is.

I am a plain and simple man. Everyone is to each their own. In any case, a train is a train, carting people off to various destinations. There will be confusion as to why a person gets off or on. I haven’t the slightest idea of those who have crossed me are, or how they would be identified. After much discussion, it was suggested to the voice fraught with tenderness of fading innocence in tears--the onset of shame--perhaps it is recognized from nightmares.

Neither debated the point, rather, they'd remained speculatively silent.

accelerated voyeuristic age

2006-03-22T22:35:00.000-05:00

Nothing. I haven't been sleeping well I’m afraid. Unrecognized cries. Lonelineless ignored. Love is my pain and my pleasure that I will treasure until the day I die. I am watching myself slipping by. I am enduring torture worse than death itself and vanishing. The pain and the sorrow, I ask myself, just one more day at a time. I decline every opportunity to end this self-imposed nightmare. Darkness… taking over…imprisoning me until all I see is absolute horror. A horror. I cannot live. I cannot die. Trapped. I am the master. I am the puppet. I am the type of person who still lives on fantasy island.

Ah, were I to admit to one great mistake besides this blog, or subsequent versions of it, it would be that I have allowed myself to be far too accessible to distraction. Should I feel any better that I live behind closed doors? Over the past, this is something that I, and those closest to me, have addressed and I’ve fought against it by removing a vast majority of content from myself over time, albeit the web, it may not be that of what is altogether.

I know there are those that claim that people in my position should expect incivilities if, and when, I dare to allow others if but a glimpse of myself. I have always found that assertion to be not merely ridiculous, but indicative of an immaturity bizarrely regarded as precious by a great many people. Civility is not something that is abandoned by those that would claim themselves intelligent or decent once they step away from a computer. Being online is, as far as I am concerned, no excuse.

We live in an accelerated, voyeuristic age. That being the case, I believe this blog serves a purpose, which is to allow me a place to comment on current events and share articles that I have found interesting or poignant. I may, on occasion, write about my day to day life of emptiness in muse or the weather but I don’t think that it will be a staple feature. In the days to come I hope time will help amend the page to reflect the focus of the blog so that it’s clearly defined as something other than my sailboat escapist vehicle what have you.

the absurd teachers strike

2006-03-22T12:48:00.000-05:00

It should come as no real surprise to anyone by now that the majority of victims to this teachers strike are students, whether or not it’s the teachers or the government to blame. I would wager that things will become resolute but a number of consequences are considerable.

The suspension of classes affect more than 150,000 college students, who are growing increasingly worried about how this may impact their graduation plans, apartment leases, summer employment opportunities, and the list goes on and on. The teachers insist they're fighting for the future of community college education. Their union is demanding smaller class sizes, reduced faculty workload, and a number of other things.

As I've followed through, there's a media blackout in effect while talks continue at Toronto's Royal York Hotel on this 15th day strike of 24 Ontario community colleges. If you’re at all interested in finding up to the minute and dedicated blog cast of news articles following said event, please visit Ontario Teachers Strike Info. I'm also open to sharing other resources and listening.

I have a few fellow friends who are sadly at the other end of the string as this strike continues. If you are a student, I implore you to discuss or write a letter to your teachers and the OPSEU (Ottawa Public Service Employees Union) regarding the damages of this teachers strike (opseu@opseu.org) not only that but I encourage that you take things from different perspectives and to also visit collegestrike.ca where there is a link to have your expressed opinion directed towards the government.