En Vacances
All posting will be at Woolgatherer for the next ten months. You’ll see why.
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The Demon Brew
Recently, I made an awful decision. With the inexorable creep of winter boredom going unalleviated even now in mid-April, I decided in an flighty haste to quit caffeine. Like most urbanites, my morning begins with a ringing alarm, an unceremonious tumble onto the floor, and a desperate crawl to the coffee machine. This sequence has played out thousands of times in succession, the life of a working man, every day starting in this predictable, fated pattern. The rare times I found myself in circumstances that kept me apart from my morning cup, within hours a splitting headache would arrive, along with the familiar, rueful laments of an addict. Never again. Next time will be different.
Coffee is not a demon; it’s barely even a vice. But it is an addiction. I have lately been in the company of a few Buddhists, and have taken a particular liking to the free yourself from attachments thing. While caffeine is far from a drag on my life (in fact, I owe it a great debt), my body still lurches a little too eagerly towards a steaming cup in a way beyond my control. I am not ready or interested to quit my Self or renounce the Ego, but it would be great if I could survive a morning unmedicated. I love coffee, but I don’t want to need coffee. So I set out, mistakenly and in great error, to break the cycle.
My first try at quitting caffeine was cold turkey—a terrible mistake, second only to the decision to quit in the first place. Within hours, the familiar headache appeared, with no intention to leave. For two days I braved these miserable conditions: a lowered mood, a paralytic body, a near-total absence of brain activity. At the same time, work started getting hairy and making me so sullen that I began to allow a strange and baseless paranoia—nearly a dementia—about my job security to creep in. Realizing where this was headed, I gave in to the urge and made myself a double espresso.
The second try was more successful, but ultimately a failure. I tried to switch slowly from coffee to less-potent Earl Grey tea, then to green tea, and finally to herbal tea. The guiding principle of this strategy was gentle separation: reduce the morning pot of coffee to a single cup, and change subsequent mid-morning, late-morning, early-afternoon, and late-afternoon cups from coffee to tea. This was easy enough, but it didn’t work. The morning cup provided a sufficient jolt of caffeine for me to ride a sort of caffeine-wave throughout the day, topping it up every few hours with cups of watery tea. Moving to caffeine-free herbal tea was trivial as long as I kept the morning cup.
(The most important lesson I learned here is that herbal tea sucks. Does it ever taste like anything but slightly tart water? Where’s the flavour? The flavour is in the caffeine, isn’t it???)
Clearly, the evil Morning Cup was the linchpin of my addiction. The link for me had become psychological, reinforced with years of Pavlovian conditioning. Alarm bell go off, drink coffee. I attempted a third strategy: instead of quitting the M.C. outright, I placed a delay between waking up and drinking the coffee. I resolved to drink M.C.s only at the office, never at home. To get my M.C. I had to put on my boots and walk down to the office and then elbow my way past the morning zombies who coagulate near the espresso machine. And on the weekends? I’d buy my coffee at Tim Horton’s.
The trick worked. Within days, the M.C. was a thing of the past. I knew it worked when I shambled into the office one morning and forgot to have coffee. Like never even noticed. It was a busy morning, and I was wrapped up in some menial task and by the time I noticed it was three in the afternoon. With no headache.
Since then, I’ve gone caffeine-free. I still feel sluggish, weary, and braindead, and not seeing the benefits at all. The snow falling outside doesn’t help. But if you’re considering quitting caffeine, please learn from my mistakes. All of us deserve an addiction or two, especially when they taste so good first thing in the morning.
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Return of the Meme
Glorious memes, growing in strength and in number! For what was once five is now ten! Besides, I do whatever Vila tells me to, a month later or not. So without further ado… yet another Five Things About Me:
- I taught myself to read at age three, according to my parents. My mom claims to have been startled by my reading aloud the cover of a magazine at the grocery store checkout. My skills later atrophied, and from the ages of 4 to 19 I probably read fewer than fifteen books. I still have trouble keeping my eyes on the page and if there were pills that allowed me to read a book and remember anything about it a week later, I’d pay good money.
- I like to play games, and the way I play a game is this: I learn the rules of the game and the basic strategy. Then, I immediately set out to find a way to mangle, skew, mix up, undermine, or otherwise debase the way that game is played. I do not so much play games as attempt to find their limits; my style of play tends to rub up against the game’s most obscure rules and special cases. After settling on a pattern of debasement, I try to generalize it into a strategy that works against my opponents, who have since given up and moved on. This is why I play games at home, until the sun comes up, against no one in particular.
- My immune system is made out of galvanized steel, flanked with missile turrets and encircled by a hideous, alligator-filled moat. I have not had the flu in almost ten years, and aside from a few minor sniffles, I never, ever get sick. I chalk it up to a disgusting lifestyle that tests my body’s fortifications regularly.
- Language is probably my chief pleasure in life, as well as my chief pain. It is a rare moment indeed that I do not have some word swirling around my head which is either a) utterly appalling, or b) fantastically hilarious. I grieve over haphazard lingo-gunk like “empowerment” and “skill set”, and giggle over endlessly pliable profanity like “pussification” and “fuckery” (n.). The other day I was proffered a portmanteau for “blog carnival”: blarnival, and I nearly keeled over, but now I can’t stop saying it. Out loud, even. I obsess over the latest linguistic irritatants (current nemesis: “either you’re [adjective], or you’re not” and all variations thereof) and keep such close watch over my usage that I never get anything done. The downside of this obsession is that I am a horrible grammar and spelling snob, and judge everyone accordingly. Call it a coping mechanism.
- Most days I spend more hours on a computer than sleeping. This pattern of living has made me demonstrably dumber. In fact, I’m sure the two variables can be correlated. Computers are the leading cause of gawky, clumsy teenagers, and old habits die hard. We keyboard-jockeys sit still, making only negligible motions with the hand or wrist, conversing almost telepathically with the computer screen. This has been my habitat for many years, and I am of mixed mind about it. Gainful employment is a blessing, and my general state of inactivity has made me physically awkward, and yet more self-knowledgable than anyone could ever be. However, much self-knowledge is without essence; it is merely more information. So I still harbour serious dreams of taking a job filled with nothing but manual labour where my days are spent upright, pulling up quarry stones or pushing trees over, so that I might rediscover movement. Know anyone?
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Boxes
I shoved everything into boxes as best I could. My dad made the “fake strangle” hand gesture to my landlord, aimed at me, and then we lifted some more things downstairs. It was a hurried day, pure labour, impossible to remember fondly or even at all. We moved boxes from one place to another, and sometime during the day we ate club sandwiches. We remembered to breathe and nobody sliced their hands on anything. For all my admiration of asceticism, my ceaseless railing against waste and calls for renouncing material objects, it took hours to clean out the closets, and my new closets are stuffed to their breaking points. Days will pass, I’ll move more bags to the curb and breathe again. I’ve changed my address in a thousand places, learned how the heater works and when to water the plants. Soon, maybe I’ll meet the downstairs neighbour who practices the piano at night.
Writing feels forced. I’ve been busy: there was the move, some travelling for work, lots of decisions, and a new routine in a new place. It’s a new year and my life is changing. I’m spending more time in front of a computer than ever, and seeing less of people. Computers can be tools of communication, instead of isolation, but my relationship to them has become businesslike and transactional. Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not worth much anyway. I’m trying to read more attentively, take care of myself better, feel emotions as strongly as before. My world has shrunk and so has my awareness. A local event comes and goes, my opinion rises and falls with it. Rants seem perfunctory and the news follows the same patterns. Of course it’s foolish that they’re renaming Avenue du Parc, and everyone but the mayor can see it. Castro is dying, Bush has ceased being a cowboy, and everyone has forgotten about bird flu. The world is just as scary and troubling and fascinating as ever, but I’m content to let it pass by for now. Friendships haven’t ended. I miss the conversations and gulping down the last beer we shouldn’t have ordered, or the grandiose plans that we know will never be. In the meantime, I’ll unpack boxes and string cables into sockets and eat take-out, and wonder how everybody is doing.
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Not Fewer Than Three Walls, And A Roof
I am awfully tired of apartment hunting. Every day begins the same. Scour the usual sites—Craigslist, Louer, Voir, Toutmontreal, Hour—dig up items that fall within the desired price range, click, note contact information or send an email. After work, phone, talk for a minute or two and set up a visit. Take the Metro over (I’m not so desperate as to look for places outside the reach of the Metro yet), shake hands, exchange pleasantries, struggle with simple French sometimes, see the apartment, leave for the next place, or to go home and search for a few more.
Over the months this has become ritual. My standards seem reasonable. I’ll live in any apartment within fifteen minutes walk of a Metro stop, with nearly any configuration of roommates, straight, gay, French, English, whatever you’ve got. Or no roommates. Or with a crazy old Japanese lady who hangs stringy beige undergarments over the shower rod. I ask for basic appliances, access to laundry, a kitchen with at least one working stove element, no imposed lifestyle constraints (there seem to be many vegetarian-only places out there, to say nothing of all the “female roommates only” stuff), and that some form of heating exist. Also, I want it to be cheap. No need for clawfoot baths and kitchen islands, swimming pools and tennis courts, proximity to nightclubs and restaurants. A modest place, modestly priced, without any serious deformities, in a building without crack hookers, that’s all I ask.
Other people have done it, so why can’t I? Every Montrealer has stories of stately 6 1/2s shared by three students for a total of $500 plus hydro, or loony landlords who haven’t raised the rent in forty years. The number of people who’ve “lucked in” to a great place here seem to outnumber those who haven’t. Times seem not to have changed much. Craigslist reveals apartments big and small, for much cheaper than in other cities, new ones appearing every day. I’ve visited friends’ places that look twice as good as mine for the same rent. Telling people what I pay for my spartan 3 1/2 inspires gasps only when it doesn’t inspire guffaws. In Montreal? they ask. You can do much better than that.
Entering a new apartment my eyes are drawn immediately to the weaknesses, as apartments in my price range are seldom sold on their strengths. Often three or four glaring problems leap out; water damage, lack of a thermostat, questionable people hanging around the building, smells of any kind. I’ve stood and feigned interest in sales pitches, some obligation to politeness holding me in place. Most of the apartments have been poor or mediocre. I found one excellent place, beautiful, cozy, almost perfect, that ended up being rented to the brother of the tenant. Others I found too late. And every day, there are a few more to look at.
Discouragement hasn’t set in yet, but mental fatigue has. I still see at least three apartments a week, confident that the right match is out there. Finding a good apartment does not seem to be a skill. There are no techniques, no great mysteries, no mastery of arcana to put you above the competition except for knowing the right web sites. It is more a test of the will, requiring perseverance, a tireless and undiscouraged resolve to drag yourself to the Metro, to each new building and unknown street, each new landlord and neighbourhood, checklist in hand, calling people and leaving messages, saying no thanks.
If there is a skill it lies in not saying yes to the wrong place. I’ve said that feeble yes before, to desperate or pushy landlords, to help out friends, to commit, to get it over with. My current apartment is one such yes, hardly a bad place but chosen hastily on my arrival in Montreal, pressed for time, unaware that I could get more for less with a bit of effort. A hasty yes is a mistake you live inside, seldom with horrible consequences but with the lesson decidedly learned for next time. I’ve learned that lesson well, and I’m determined to prove I’ve learned it. If my standards are high it is because in this city they can be.
UPDATE: No later than a day after posting this did I hap upon a sumptuous flat, Plateau-ish, with every amenity and for a fantastic price, in a neighbourhood next to a good one–albeit with a robust supply of nearby homeless, or as the present tenant calls them, “the local fauna”. But lovely, and I took it. If you were preparing a missive of pity for the comments, you can save it for when I start complaining about the cold winter in a week or so.
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Never Been Scammed, Never Gave a Damn
Lately, I’ve been reading travelogues online—blogs, diaries, FAQs from bearded guidebook authors, travel advisory warnings—both for amusement and for working up the courage to try something like that myself. My mother pointed me to this one, Tripping on Words, a trip journal of two Stanford grads, Lara and Claire, who decided to “quit life” and make a run for it. They’ve been through Spain, Italy, Greece, India, Thailand, Nepal, and probably others. I haven’t read all the entries yet.
They’ve posted to the blog pretty much every single day so far (as well as regular posting to a second blog, the thrust of which is unclear to me ). It’s a difficult thing to do, to not only have the energy to write (many of the entries being of not-insignificant substance, and some bordering on being Real Writing, the kind you might do over the course of an evening, seated at a mahogany desk with all they day’s cares behind you, a dim light illuminating your quill and the crackle of a Thelonious Monk record in the background), but to have a dependable Internet connection everywhere you go. Who knew the broadband in Laos was so widespread? They also run a mailing list and answer all kinds of reader mail and manage to run marathons here and there, and they seem to have an odd interest in the BALCO/Barry Bonds steroid case.
These two girls have landed themselves in a nice little arrangement. They work on the side, remotely, and won’t come back home until they have to. They keep their travel funds replenished by writing on the side and doing editing work, so I suppose straying too far from a computer w/ net connection isn’t an option.
I’m having problems with all this. Having never been anywhere particularly adventurous, my concept of travel in Second and Third World countries involves a lot more purse-slashing, pickpocketing, roadside robbery, and being very careful not to show signs of wealth. I imagine sleeping in flea-infested hostels, hosing your arms and neck down with DEET before stepping outside, boiling and filtering your water, and being accosted from all sides by scamsters and fraudulent taxi drivers. Not a travel guidebook in the world exists without warnings like these. And these two are carting around laptops? And digital cameras? And in general looking impeccable in every photo, right down to the jewelry, watches, and summer dresses?
I just want to know how this is possible. Even with a budget that affords four-star hotels, you’d have to be very careful in a lot of the places they’re visiting. However likely my overestimation of the dangers, I like to think that the government of Canada isn’t completely full of shit when they say that in Nepal…:
Maoist armed militia forces remain present in nearly all districts. Prior to the ceasefire, armed clashes between the Maoists and the Royal Nepal Army occurred frequently throughout the countryside, including popular trekking areas. The danger of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is always present. The situation could deteriorate rapidly without notice.
And here are two cute American tourists toting expensive electronics around and getting their pictures taken in front of certain Nepalese mountains and generally having a grand ol’ time in the midst of a Maoist insurgency. My hat is off to them.
It could be an obsolete Western habit to think of far-flung places as dangerous and chaotic. The guidebooks and web forums I’ve been reading certainly do nothing to dispel these fears (telltale quote from one I’m currently reading: “…anyone who is tempted to go to Cambodia should know that field research by Physicians for Human Rights estimates that ‘in Cambodia…one out of every 236 people has lost at least one limb to an exploding land mine.’ Do you really want to risk being next?”). But the general level of travel aptitude given off by these two bonne vivantes are filling me with something that could either be hope or despair. Hope in that they are backpacking worldwide, as I would one day like to, but they don’t appear to be staying in ratty hostels and showering on a monthly schedule, and, despair in that they make it look so easy, stoking my self-doubt even more. A few years ago I took a trip to France, a lovely but wholly unadventurous place, and I still wound up with a bag full of smelly, wrinkled clothes, a terrible rash, dirty shoes, and probably some French strain of pubic lice. Hell, even heading down to Toronto for a weekend manages to keep me away from my email account.
Their log is making me feel like this globetrotting thing isn’t so bad. But I wish they would post more details. How much is it costing them to stay in what appear to be very nice hotels for extended periods of time? They seem to be enjoying a pretty high quality of life over there; how is this possible when you’re living out of a backpack? Have they been robbed yet? Has there been any danger whatsoever? Inquiring minds, inquiring minds.
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Saloon of the Despairado
I want to belong to a private club and spend my days lolling around in a big old chair. A man of the world belongs to things. He subscribes to magazines and sits on advisory boards and attends pot-luck functions, and he certainly pops in at the club a couple times a week for a drink. My club would have ugly carpeting and little upkeep. It would require a few utilitarian chairs and barstools, and one nice armchair that looks in worse shape than it is so nobody sits there. Other accoutrements: thick beer mugs, the requisite jar of pickled foodstuff, microwaveable pub grub, a bookshelf full of used dime-store social studies textbooks, roaring fireplace tended to by no one in particular. Over in the corner, an old man would push faded snooker balls around a table covered with ripped felt and water stains. The club would play no music, or at least nothing more than subtle cocktail-club fare, a piano tinkling a discreet medley all day. The white noise of chatter would prevail.
Members would share a single bond: the belief that civilization is doomed. There’s no political or business affiliation and no heredity. You show up because they know the world as you do, as a fiery ball of spiralling death waiting for someone to light the wick. Members share this trait and bond by it. What of it? Religious sects can form to discuss Rapture, can’t they? And so can I gain membership in a club to discuss our (humanity’s) silly world-changing hubris, how funny “ideas” are and how they really believe what’s coming out of their own mouths! The fireside chats have no trace of depression or hopelessness, no sour faces, just entropy and erudition and laughter and slaps on the back and a general understanding that it’s all for shit, and what are we doing here, anyway.
It could be called “Misanthropia”. How about “The Low Ebb”? “Downfall Lounge”? “Second Coming Café”? No. No. “Club Despair”. Yes.
The members are Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, Libertarians, Paleoconservatives, sexual deviants, doctrinaires, nihilists, professors, armchair intellectuals, Zoroastrians, and malcontents with senses of humour. As a shield against possible optimism, the owners guard memberships as if they were gold bars. Instead of a fee or cover charge, Club Despair asks for a critique of a random topic, with the expectation that you run it into the ground.
At the door, the entrance examination would go something like:
“Can art exist within the confines, forms, and constraints imposed by mass industry? Is the ensuing adulation of modern mass-art heroes an expression of our shared values, a complex manifestation of class forces, or a contrived feedback loop assembled by those who profit most from culture?”
“I reject the question!”
“On what grounds?”
“You have posed the question under the assumption that ‘art’ has any value to civilization at all, or even any demonstratable presence in it. Have you looked at this building we’re in? These cold slabs of concrete carved into a block and hollowed out with all the craftsmanship of a calculator performing square roots, into which citizens are shoved and told to experience “art”? You can paint the hallway burnt sienna and mitre-saw the wainscotting and hang goofy photographs of blood oranges all you like, but you’re living in a husk of a dwelling, designed and situated to suit the powers that be. Art has no way of oozing into the public sphere without being coated in the indelible slime of society’s values. Television, radio, print, film, music, and the Internet, all of these have trailing behind them the stink of opportunism, of managerial sophistry, of design by committee, with the audience’s approval and ensuing riches held in the locus of the creator’s mind. How’s the crowd in there tonight?”
“Good, good. Quiet night but it’s picking up. Is art, then, worthless? Or does it exist at all?”
“As soon as it is observed and sent into the churn of mass critical opinion it cannot properly be called ‘art’, though I believe most art is asphyxiated long before it reaches the public. As for your ‘questions’, once art is sold or converted into an item of extrinsic worth (viz. money) it begins to drift from the realm of intrinsic beauty. We assign it lots of sociological signifiers to make people feel they’re missing out, and the real art exists in the intricacy of the deception. The real basis for our society. Every American home should have a Norman Rockwell, right? Nothing but more product, another pile of chopped hamburger for you. It’s all for shit. Any drink specials tonight?”
“Jack Daniels is $2.50 in a mix or $2 for the shot. Oscar Wilde said, ‘all art is useless’, but he did not mean worthless. Surely art can coexist with money?”
“True, but what the public craves and pays for can scarcely be called ‘art’, since they are only interested in seeing reflections of themselves in it, or a statement of one’s place in the social order. All artlike things created en masse have worth only in relation to other artlike things, as a social currency in a society that is going straight—not with a detour through Limbo and then down, but absolutely dart-like straight—to Hell. I’m surprised the flames haven’t already begun licking at our heels.”
“You can check your coat at the counter on the left.”
“Thank you and good evening.”
Clearly this club makes good economic sense. While one contemplates the fate of humanity, what’s $4 for a drink? The club could send out a quarterly newsletter, The Modern Eschatologist, in which we are kept abreast of the latest world events clubbing humanity on its knee. Nobody takes it too seriously because one’s own mortality is hardly a parlour topic, like other people’s mortality. It’ll go slow at first but with these changing times let’s just say the horizon looks to be blazing-hot for Club Despair.
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Things Privately Done #54
This is a topic I’ve hinted at before but never expressed its true magnitude. I listen to really bad hip-hop music. The worst, awful, abominable. A trip through my “Hip Hop” playlist is an odyssey of poor taste. It starts at your standard gangsta rap canon, your NWAs and Wu-Tangs[1], drifts then like a plume of ponnie-weed into the higher spheres occupied by the Tribe, De La, and Hiero, and then without warning goes right off the rails, into songs—or sections—of my collection, whereupon you might feel compelled to ask where I went wrong in life.
Nobody’s talking Vanilla or Hammer. We’re talking second-album Onyx here. Third-album House of Pain. Boogiemonsters and Craig Mack. Mad Lion and DJ Yella, Bas Blasta and Originoo Gun Clappaz. There was a series of one-hit wonder rappers in the early 1990s, and I felt it necessary to own not only the hit album but all the followups. The kind of rap flocked to by teenage males of any age. Hell, I own the Flatlinerz album, and if they had made a second record I’d own that too. I play these ridiculous records for my friends, and while the songs start I explain a little backstory.
“Check out this intro. It says in the liner notes that the guy is screaming into a microphone stuffed inside a tennis ball can, to give it that real Splatterhouse Rock authenticity. The song should be placed in the context of the record’s leitmotif, which is the drift of a poor inner city male into a slovenly adulthood while never quite becoming a man, and the manifestation of that anxiety through a series of elaborate killings of, I quote, ‘chickenheads’, that purport to express his mature mind to the only ones with a window unto his grisly world: the local police, and the Korean shopkeeper on the corner.”
“Cool.”
“Track three is a paean to street defecation, but only the kind you do to get by. The bassline is a slowed-down sample from a Warren Zevon instrumental. The grunts at around 2:15 are real. We can fast-forward to them if you like.”
“Oh, uh, cool.”
“Splatterhouse Rock were fucking luminaries, man. These guys were highly influential on other acts like Deformity D, Cankerous Crew, Wormface, The Coagulators, and Scrunt. They’re all from the same area. Same shopkeeper and everything. His name’s Jaewa. He’ll sell them all firecrackers because their moms shop there too.”
These are times when I understand keenly that no two adolescences are alike. This music, as well as many of the genre conventions, could subjectively be called bad, and objectively as well. With every spin of the disc it becomes more apparent that bad music isn’t very good unless you’re alone, away from the critical ear. Away from objectivity, and the need to impress or self-justify. Some music is just good because you thought it was good before you knew anything. So I wait until everyone leaves and then open the laptop back up and blast that noise, because damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
[1](including the solo efforts of all original members[2], as well as spinoffs including, but not limited to, Allah Mathematics, Killah Priest, Dreddy Kreuger, La the Darkman, and if I’m honest with myself, Shyheim the Rugged Child)
[2] this does not include Cappadonna, by any name
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Boredom
Boredom lives inside spare time. The phrase “spare time” itself suggests time set aside for boredom. They are bedfellows. In theory, time with no set purpose is precisely the best time not to be bored, since one has absolute freedom over how to spend it. But, it never works that way. Boredom will fill every crevice, like water. The best vaccine against boredom is to be busy, to constrain time in a rigid way so as to not allow boredom the vessel in which to inject itself. This vaccine carries the stipulation that one has to remember to take this “medicine” every day, which is hardly easy.
Boredom should not exist in a world of infinite choices. Given the means to choose, one can cure boredom by choosing something unknown, and given easy access to the means to choose, one is theoretically never more than five minutes away from a boredom cure. Yet it not only exists: it permeates. We are bored so often that we scarcely know another way to exist, and it seems almost as though we enjoy our boredom. Nobody would ever choose boredom, but wherever you look, there it is.
Boredom begins with a foot brushing against a loose flap of cardboard under the desk, or with a phone call, or by opening the fridge, closing it, and opening it again to get the pickles. Any gust of air. A phone call or an email, or a loud noise from a neighbour. Anything abrupt, shaking you loose from your moorings, sending you drifting into the sea of ennui. With persistence and a little luck, a mad scramble back to the shore is possible. It is easier, though, to drift.
Boredom is not laziness, because laziness is pursued, chosen, and even reveled in. Laziness can and should be active. There is a sublime purpose to laziness, and it can be treated as a high pleasure, even an art. It may seem that conscious intent or even consciousness is antithetical to laziness, but one must not mistake laziness for boredom. The purpose of laziness is to feel good, while to be bored is to cling desperately to life. One typically chooses laziness after a prolonged period of a draining activity. When exams are over, one makes the executive decision to veg out, sometimes even making a show of it. After a busy week at the office we take to parks, beaches, and thick sofas, to pursue the craft of laziness. Boredom is not expressly chosen. It is channel surfing, or letting some yappy mouth have your ear for an hour, or thumbing through a magazine looking at the pictures waiting for one of them to leap out of the page, bringing you out of your haze for an instant. Boredom need not be idleness, but it must always be passive (one can “laze”, but one cannot “bore” unless the object of the verb is someone else). Done properly, laziness is the worship of the principle of minimal exertion. If boredom is a desperate search for stimuli, then laziness is a (perhaps romanticized) respect and fondness for the stimuli one already has.
Boredom is a depreciating contentment with the known. Creation can never be boring. It is impossible. The unknown is the uncreated, and the unknown is never boring. Not all contrivances are “creative”. Perpetually creating the known does not cure boredom, though it may serve other purposes. It could even mutate into a form of laziness, like comfort food.
Boredom is a habit. Depression is merely practiced boredom. It is a skill, arrived at with serious engrossment, and stored chemically in the brain along neural pathways, as you might store recipes or the directions to the office. The ways depression is introduced to the brain vary greatly, but all forms of persistent depression involve cognitive reinforcement. The skilled practitioner rehearses daily with allegations at himself, weaving a narrative of futility inside which he can bind his life. Depression strengthens through repetition, entirely of one’s own doing; it is the depressive’s imposed duty to not only enslave himself but deepen his enslavement. That is not to say the depressive is at fault for setting off this chain of events. One often learns undesirable skills without trying, and some are deemed neuroses. There are some things about which it is possible to know too much.
The depressive can hone his craft night and day, whenever the muse strikes. Unchecked, he will learn to place his fundamental energies there. Any stimulus can be passed through the muddy lens of defeat, and this becomes second nature. Just as the computer programmer effortlessly lays his fingers on the keyboard in perfect home-row position, so too does the depressive slide effortlessly into melancholy, his practiced trade. He is, after all, on his way to becoming an expert.
Before long the he sits in a thicket of his own skilful making, and lives within reach of his primary expertise. To him, boredom suffices. It is comfortable. The depressive says “this is good enough for me”, and may even refuse to abide society’s pressures to drink deeply of life, to be carrying on like those people who go to the gym daily, or write novels to show off, or act out roles of meaningless ambition. He likens his condition to a worn armchair under a favourite lamp, and he lives from a sitting position. Staring at a tree in his front yard, or the lit apartment across the street, he says “there is more than this, but reaching it would involve getting up.” Eventually he discovers he can’t.
When life obligates him not to be bored but alert and responsible, his boredom may gnaw at him, haunt him, and grow slowly over his world like an invasive species. Left to grow, depression is a weed that permeates the cortex and melts over the eyes. Lights seem dimmer, and a stultifying grayness permeates everything. The cure involves the breaking of habits. Expertise cannot be purged from the brain; one must simply choose to learn new ways and hope to forget about the old ones. To the man sitting in the armchair covered in constricting vines, summoning the energy to shake off his bonds is easier said than done. He decides to try one day, and each vine is hacked back slowly. Casting off a few small branches gives him the confidence to try bigger ones. He may not get them all. Nobody ever does. But he can move his elbow now, and start stripping the leaves off. With every crack and snap, the plant dies. He gets an arm through, and then a leg, and before long he sees a light peeking through the vines, not from his favourite lamp, but from the moon outside.
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Goodnight, Friend
When I am feeling restless and jittery I do the following breathing exercise. Push all the air out of your lungs, every last bit. Inhale deeply for four seconds, diaphragmally, in such a way that your stomach (not your chest) rises with the breath. Hold it for seven seconds. Count while you do this: one, two, three… build a rhythm. Then exhale for eight seconds, staying on beat. When you hit “eight” you should have no air left in your lungs, as when you started the exercise. Then repeat for as long as you want, but no less than five times. No gaps between each stage of the exercise; keep a steady beat. Imagine you are an aspiring urban music professional in the inner city, and someone is rapping over your breath for their demo tape. This technique allowed me to sit down and write instead of rummaging through my cupboards for snack food even though I am not hungry, drinking a bottle of beer even though I am not thirsty, sleeping though wide awake, jerking off though as far from horny as I get.
My mind is preoccupied with the big questions. Will I ever find love? What will it look like when I am utterly, transcendently fulfilled? Is there room in my life for hockey games or beers after work? Will there be a “work” or will days blend into evenings in a continuum of bliss?
A sequence of rhetorical questions is a sign of poor writing, one of my professors once said. Writers answer their own questions, and anything else is either speculation or sensationalism. I don’t believe this but I agree the technique is tired.
A tough week and weekend. The creaks of styrofoam take-out boxes rip through my apartment at night as I bathe in the computer screen’s glow. Silly Flash games and jazz music and the old bottle of cheap whiskey [sic], like every other middle-class lonesome spirit who ever had a bad week. Each noise, rustle, and cough is meant as a communication with people on the other side of these walls, calling out for some empathy from the dwellers of this shitbox building. A dishwasher moans upstairs. An Indian man next door strode through his front door to find a box of his belongings at the entrance with a note from his girlfriend saying to please move out. I heard raised voices in the hall, not quite screaming. There were accusations that trailed off into dead ends, the voices smooth and restrained as if the conclusion were inevitable and mutual. Two days later she moved out instead. A schoolmarmish woman who looks older than she probably is. Margaret, a schoolmarmish name. She asked for help with a few boxes. In one of them was an old Macintosh computer, a Quadra, resting on some floppy disks. Margaret gave me a lamp she couldn’t take with her. “It’s his,” she joked.
The other day as I locked my door, the superintendent emerged from that apartment with a pair of wirecutters in his hand, and I saw the place was empty.
Asian students, single moms with three kids living in a 3 1/2-bedroom unit, teenagers reeking of marijuana on their way to Battlenet 24 to play networked Counter Strike until their eyes bleed…. I am in here with them all in blissful cohabitation. The air is thick enough to be worn as a blanket. Urgency is everywhere but it’s all outside, in the street.
There are times when I long to be the sort of person who keeps a menagerie in his home, a thousand pets and plants and treasures. None of it should have meaning or express a sentiment. Not an ecosystem; a curated thing. It would light up anyone’s eyes. Dogs and koalas and an old, wise owl. Serpentine leaves dangling from strange ledges. Dusty sunbeams touching branches that sway perpetually under tiny gusts, seeming to make a noise as you watched them. The snakes would crawl into my lap and around my thigh, their motivations only to strangle me and eat the body. “Oh, Lancaster,” I’d laugh as the boa curved around the back of my neck. “That’s enough, now!” I’d do kissyfaces with a tapir named Mosey. A parrot would land on my arm and say a few curse words, and I’d give her a piece of green apple. At night I’d hit a single light switch that would dim everything, signalling to the animals that it was bedtime. I’d go around to each one and say “goodnight, friend” and each would sleep without a worry.
Or a plain barn with a hundred geese and guinea fowl following me around as I sift handfuls of cracked corn into little piles in the mud. Close the barn door and hear the squawks. The birds could sit and eat quietly because there’s enough food for all of them, but they don’t, because feeding time carries rituals of territoriality, of pecking-order iteration. It is a form of play. I want to enjoy meals as they do, with glee and primal primality. As a human being I’ve never fought over a single crumb, and thus do not know what fear is, choosing instead to fill the fear-urge with dirty, invalid spectres of economic uncertainty, of losing my job or never finding a soul mate, the standard spooks and bugbears of the big cities. At least nobody punches me in the jaw while I eat a cheese sandwich.
Have you ever been around a hungry dog and made a motion towards the biscuits? Even the insinuation of biscuitry opens a stopper in the dog’s brain, and in flow the reagents of joy. The sight of that biscuit imbues a grave danger, a fight-or-flight reaction. Perhaps I’ll cultivate territoriality in my feeding habits, shoving my coworkers out of the way as they reach for my Tupperware containers in the microwave. I will eat boiled corn kernels and claw at the bottoms of jars with gnarled fingers. Then I will steal theirs and run off to a corner with it.
Tonight I ate leftover stir-fried chicken doused in hot sauce and did not taste it. It was a bad week and from now on I’m going to eat all my food aggressively, naked and noisy, in good hungry company.
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Yulblog Voucher
I am one who writes a weblog and who lives in the city called Montreal and I’ve not met anyone similar. Do you know how long this sad charade has gone on? Tomorrow there is reason for us to meet. I will wear my usual glasses and sleeved shirt and perhaps even buy you a drink. I will not touch you unless you ask, or offer your hand. Let me sweeten the pot: I will definitely buy you a drink, if you attend the Yulblog meeting tomorrow, Wednesday 8 PM at La Quincaillerie, selon le courriel. “La Quincaillerie” might mean Hardware or Hardware Store. Have we met? Do you read this site regularly? Have I seen yours? I don’t care. RSVP in the comments and you get one (1) drink from me tomorrow night. IOU. I will show up at 9 PM or 10 PM and will wear basic colours. Stay until the end or else I hate you. See you tomorrow!
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Smell This Law
I have been reading with great interest the posts over at The Smoking Section concerning Bill 112, the ban on smoking in public restaurants, bars, pubs, and what have you. Its formal enforcement began May 31 midnight, marking the first concentrated effort in the history of mankind to get the Frenchman to butt out his cigarette (oh, those wannabe bans in France don’t count). My interest in this law goes back a few of years when cities and towns across my home province of Ontario began tabling similar legislation to curb the unruly smokers’ behaviour. Smokers are a dangerous bunch—looking at their filth-encrusted hair (w/ snakes) and gnarled teeth you get the disquieting sense that they could snap at any moment, even in the times when they get their fix on schedule. The cumulative effects of these smoking bans might not be known for another thirty years, but the damage to the smoker’s psyche is done. They are filth, scum, flaneurs, reprobates who probably have long hair and who partake in extramarital coitus. But now we’ve made them angry, and while we’re all fussing over our health and spending our days at the gym and our nights marinating in our post-industrial existential torment, smokers are sitting on fire escapes and plotting our bourgeois demise.
My defining moment on this issue took place on a cool evening in Ottawa; my home town, The Town That Fun Forgot, and perhaps the world’s Capital for hamhanded nanny-statism (they banned street hockey, e.g.). My persistent, delusional good thoughts about Ottawa were shattered once and for all, as if struck by a hammerblow, on this one incident. A friend, Matt, and I were on a windy patio in the Byward Market, the kind that is partially roofed under a white tarpaulin with little slits for the windows. It was otherwise a nice evening, cool and dry, but the wind shook the plastic hard all night, the little beer-logo flags flapping helplessly. That wind kept most of the crowd inside at the bar or the fireplace. The effect was such that an occasional good gust would catch the tarp at an angle that would cause a concentrated blast of air to hit the patio with a great reverberation, sending coasters flying and loose shirt fabric sticking to sides of faces. We didn’t like it, but Matt wanted a smoke so out we went, backs turned to the open air. Matt is a no-nonsense guy, and he is perhaps the most popular of all my friends. He carries himself with a certain swagger, a persistent sureness of foot in which you see glimpses of yourself during your finest moments, and with it an instinctual perception of the sheer rightness of his manner. He has the right jokes, the great politesse, and the endearing loutishness. You feel like you are always in his hand, and that you love being there. He had his back turned to the wind and was talking to people I didn’t know. Entertaining them, probably. It was a short blonde woman and her boyfriend. An unlit cigarette dangled from his hand; a break in the conversation allowed him the idea to light it. He turned his back to the wind and, not having had a lighter handy since he’d left his white Zippo on the table in a pool hall, he lit a match, and before he could lift it the flame caught a gust of wind and extinguished. He excused himself and took a step back towards the door, opening it and wedging his foot in. He leaned inside to light his smoke, got it lit, and without any warning a small white hand yanked the cigarette from his lips. Matt looked to his left; there stood a member of Ontario’s finest, an OPP officer who saw it all happen. She promptly presented Matt with a $200+ fine and a stern lecture about the nature of “zero-tolerance”. We wandered back inside to soak ourselves in ale, our evening ruined. Justice yet again served within the borders of Ontario. Great to be home.
Police will snatch many more cigarettes out of mouths in the months to come. The law has told them that is what they must do, and enforcment is all they know. The legislative bodies-that-be will continue to impose standards of private, consensual behaviour under the banner of “zero-tolerance”, and will give the rank-and-file their orders. These standards will not only serve a combination of pragmatic, bureaucratic, partisan, ‘classist’, and political aims, but will represent a successful experiment in shaping the public illusion of consensus. For not only have the parameters of the debate been set by the elites, the public has filled its role perfectly as willing agents of mass hysteria. Smokers are just backlog inventory in the great socio-political warehouse, being clandestinely dumped into the sea, to uproarious cheers.
You can get a sense of the one-sidedness of the debates by how often you hear the words: morality, civil liberties, rights, law of the land, ethics, government intrusion, consensus, private property. Not very often. You are more likely to hear stories of people who hate coming home smelling like smoke, cries of smoking being one of the major killers and a burden on the health-care system, citing of lung cancer rates, heart disease rates, excoriations of smoking as a “useless habit“, and the loaded phrase “passive smoking”. When did this tireless vitriol towards smoking suddenly jump into the front seat of the public consciousness? Did people feel this way about smoking thirty years ago? Cigarettes haven’t changed much since then, but the opinions of the non-smoker certainly have.
(To blatantly stoke fears: if you’ll accept the assumption that smoking bans were unthinkable thirty years ago, what will they propose thirty years from now? A return to Prohibition [only not called that, obvs.]? A tax levied on flu carriers? Mandatory blood donation? Your liver to the State? However slippery the slope may be, the possibilities cannot be dismissed out of hand. Thirty years ago you could smoke at your seat in an airplane. Today, they’re banning peanut butter in elementary schools.)
In any case, one must understand the stakes of this ban. It is more than a formality, or something that was bound to happen anyway. And it is more than a simple outlawing of a dangerous behaviour. It is nothing short of a governmental revocation of a right. That right is for people to engage in a specific, consensual activity on private property, which happens to be harmful, and harmful to a degree that is unknown. That is the nut of it. Imagine the government held a snap referendum on that question, using that exact terminology, without telling you they were talking about smoking. Which way would you be more likely to vote?
Look. I won’t pretend like the anti-smokers don’t have valid points about smoking. It is harmful, it costs money, and it can make bars and restaurant decidedly unpleasant. Who could question the facts? Whatever the controversy over second-hand smoke, the best the smokers can hope for is a draw. Inhaling smoke can’t be any better for your lungs. And the best part of the trick is… it’s so easy! Just ban it! Few, if anybody, will protest, and the savings—of life and budget—will be vast and shared by all. Even better, the smoking ban has the auspicious trait of being easily enforceable. Laws aren’t worth a thing if they can’t be enforced, right? Well, this is no such law. Threaten huge fines and plant a few rat finks in casual clothes to keep ‘em scared, and bar owners will snuff patrons’ cigarettes out on their own tongues if they have to.
The laity has already spoken: they don’t like being smoked upon. Fine. Most people don’t. The first question becomes, then, under what circumstances must you permit yourself to be smoked upon? Where twenty, thirty years ago the answer might have ranged from “not in my home” to “nowhere” to “anywhere”, the answer nowadays is a definitive “nowhere.” Not a single cloud of smoke should climb into another’s lungs without consent, is the pervading popular view. The liberal counter-argument is simple: if one doesn’t ever want this outcome, he can stay home, or hang out in a place that doesn’t allow smoking. And those who are willing to be smoked upon can go to a place that allows the smoking-on of people. By showing up in a smoke-friendly place, you grant consent to be smoked upon. Too simple?
In a sense, yes. See any smoke-free bars around? There aren’t any. I don’t know about Montreal, but Toronto has tried a few times in the distant past to open non-smoking bars, and failed. One might say the demand for non-smoking bars cannot support a market in these places. This is clearly not an issue people are particularly militant about if they pack the bars every weekend. At most the ban represents an expression of a preference on the part of non-smokers, and even some smokers. A large group of people would rather not be smoked upon, if they had the choice between “smoke on me” and “don’t smoke on me”. This is a perfectly legitimate preference, and I don’t doubt it represents a majority of the popular opinion, incl. among smokers. They have another choice, though, which is “go to bar” or “don’t go to bar”. Theoretically, they could have a third choice too: “go to non-smoking bar”. If they existed. That is, if people were willing to go to them. Those last two don’t involve the government stepping in and passing laws. That is the liberal argument. It makes a lot of sense to me, but it’s true that the “invisible hand” isn’t everything. We allow regulation of industry where there is a clear responsibility for the government to do so. How often do these regulations interfere with the rights of the common citizen? There are also questions of shared values, of protection from “tyranny of the majority”, and of morality. These are questions that are not only unanswered, but unconsidered.
The anti-smokers’ ace-in-the-hole, the trump card, the bomb, is workers rights. They slam it on the table like the winning domino. The real reason for this ban, you see, is not about their own preferences, but rather that they are deeply concerned about the health of Juan the Line Cook who has to toil all day in that awful smoke. This is the slam-dunk sales pitch, and this is how the law was packaged and sold. It is cotton candy, to get you in the door. Melts in your mouth.
If I could quote Vila, from a Metroblog comment:
“As for the health and safety of bar staff, I feel compelled to point out that service industry workers, as non-unionized employees, make less than the minimum wage; receive no pension benefits or health insurance; and deal with the threat of alcohol-induced violence every time they go to work. Although I have no doubt that some would prefer to work in a smoke-free environment, you’ll forgive me for being somewhat skeptical about ‘pro-worker’ arguments.”
Hear, hear. And while I’m at it, raise your hand if you’re pro-smoking-ban because you think provincial health care spending is just gettin’ crraaaaaaazy these days? Anybody?
Perhaps the saddest spectacle of our times is the image of a dozen or so smokers huddled exactly five metres away from the entrance of a building, behind a few signposts or a cordoned-off “safe zone” strung up with cheap yellow rope. My office building has legislated this bit of segregation as a rule of their property. We are willing to live in the worst conditions of air quality brought on by a century of industrial pollution, but we cannot abide a three-second traipse through a thin haze of tobacco smoke. We inhale car exhaust and sulphur dioxide and all kinds of nasty particles all day. Can we hold our breath for a second? No, that won’t work. Someone will come up with a reason for why they can’t do this. It causes them an allergic reaction, perhaps, or it blinds them temporarily, or they feel a deep revulsion that starts in their soul and draws life from every cell in their body, causing them to shrivel into a dessicated husk which is only alleviated by the the sweet, life-giving fresh air they gasp for on the other side. And that means the government needs to step in. All around us we see the spectres of infection, and we want them to be legislated away. I can only assume that the citizens of my country have gone crazy.
Footnote: To be fair, I have no special love for smoking or smokers. Stepping into the shower and smelling the smoke being steamed out of my hair is not a preferred morning ritual. Furthermore, the habit is romanticized a little too much as some kind of neo-bohemian tonic of the spirit, a philosopher’s stone and aprhodesiac all in one. It feels unnecessary. I’m reminded of the cannabis activists who steep their arguments in a kind of nature-based pseudo-philosophy, extolling the cannabis plant as a great giver of life and industry, invoking George Washington and the early agrarians, and barely stopping short of drawing a bold line between Man and Gaea herself. Is it disingenuous to argue that you like smoking a bowl every now and again, because it makes you fly? Nothing against vice, but call it what it is. It feels good and it calms your nerves, and gives you a pleasure to look forward to, sometimes, and that’s why you smoke and that’s all the reason you need.
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The Sound of Warring Dogs Shall Never Cease
In light of recent events pertaining to the neighbourhood dog-owning gangsta menace I spoke about in the entry Two Dogs Go To War, it is time for an update on this most pugnacious of neighbours.
I witnessed the following scene. It was a Saturday afternoon, and our hero was in the park behind my apartment, yelling. This time he was calling his biggest dog, Naya, a “bitch”—technically a not-incorrect exclamation, but lacking in rhetorical oomph when said by a human to a dog, maybe? Also, he was telling her to “shit, now!” He said the word “now” as an affected “nah!”, the way a true Southern baller would say it. Our man is a player, yes indeed.
An old guy in a bright blue golf shirt stumbled outside and began yelling at gangsta-boy to pick up his dogs’ crap. Gangsta, in riposte, instructed him to apply suction to his engorged genitalia. And with that, it began. You know how in baseball the manager doesn’t agree with the call and storms out of the dugout after the umpire, and they both stand there yelling at each other at the same time, as in actually speaking concurrently and not listening each other at all? It was that sort of an argument. The old man had sort of a frail, rickety voice, and the gangsta was in full-bore thuggishness, waving his arms in all kinds of configurations of feigned menace. The old man hadn’t a chance. He gave up and went inside, but gangsta-boy kept vocally keeping it real. Finally, he turned around towards his dogs, and with a low, laggardly limp forward, he said, I swear to you he said to ab-so-lutely no-one:
“Crazier than Slim Shady his-self, bitch!”
There are no longer two dogs warring, either. There are three, and possibly four dogs now. But more importantly, there is now more than gangsta! One day, the yells sounded different. At first I didn’t notice, but when I caught on that the thuggish growl had been replaced by a bassy, more boisterous shouting, and then joined by a second shouter, I took notice. Out the window were two different gentlemen, a bit taller, a bit more scary-looking, playing with the dogs in the yard. They yell louder than our original hero, but they lack the swagger. Apart from that these are friends of his, I have no idea who they are or why they like to yell as much and as loudly as the OG does. Would the real Slim Shady please stand up?
So, with summer coming on, I was worried. Last summer was not only uncomfortably humid, but was marked by a distinct Slim Shady presence at three in the morning. There was simply never any other way for Slim to be. He was going to walk his dogs in the park and yell at them, and that’s the reality of this neighbourhood. There aren’t options when you’re dealing with a real gangsta. He wants to go out and decorate the air with recycled lines from The Eminem Show, and I want to sleep between the hours of approx. 12 AM to 7 AM, and one of us is going to lose. I expected it to be me.
But Fate, perhaps not such a fan of the yelling herself, had other plans for Slim Shady.
I spent this particular day in my apartment, cooking. As I stood over the kitchen counter chopping root vegetables, noises were beginning to emerge from outside. The noises were unfamiliar. They were voices, yes, but not the usual ones. I wasn’t near the window; nothing was clear. Before long, loud screams began to overpower the chops of my kitchen knife. Outside were two guys sitting in the corner of the park on lawn chairs. They had enormous beards and rather shabby dress, both of them. I assumed homeless. Also they were drinking out of paper bags, unironically. The screams were at each other, the screams of cheap drink.
Nothing to worry about, I thought. The screams subsided for a time, until the sound of a radio emerged. They were having a Sunday afternoon beer picnic in the 10m x 10m dog-doodoo-filled park behind my place. Good for them. I kept cooking, and an hour later I looked outside and they were still there, slumped in their lawn chairs moaning drunkenly to each other and listening to something Steppenwolf-y.
But then… a familiar voice Crip-walked its way through the din. Oh dip, son! It’s Slim! And where his dogs is at? Right with him of course. And he got right into the task at hand, which was as always, the task of yelling at great volume for absolutely no reason.
With a few things going on the stove, I paid them no mind. The voices rose and fell to the rhythm of strong drink, none of them louder than my bubbling Dutch oven and cranked-up stereo. Things progressed as usual until I heard a very loud scream. Not a scream of fear or distress, but of anger. A battle wail. After that was lots of loud cursing. Then: all four dogs barking. Not a playful bark. A violent, territorial bark, in a way they’d never barked before. I ran over to the window.
The two homeless guys were standing and waving pointed fingers. Slim was on the prowl. He was storming around the park in feigned indignation, not going anywhere in particular but simply walking in an errant circle with his trademark thug-swagger, thrusting his arms every which way. And of course, yelling. One of the homeless guys had either thrown something at him or hit him, I couldn’t tell. But Slim had a bee in his FUBU hoodie, for sure. He continued to pace and flail his arms wildly.
Then Slim disappeared and took the dogs with him.
I went back to cooking. A few minutes later, I heard “I’m gonna kill you! I’m coming back here to kill you, asshole! You hear me?” It wasn’t Slim’s voice, though.
I looked out the window again. Two cops were taking the homeless guys away.
They disappeared out of sight for a bit, and then the cops came back for Slim. They stood on the front steps of Slim’s building and questioned him. I listened. He was too far away for me to hear every word, but I definitely heard Slim say that he “minds his business” and “doesn’t start shit” when he’s outside with the dogs, and that these guys threatened him. Oh ho ho. Believe me, it took every ounce of energy in my body not to lean out the window and yell “buuuuull-shiiiit!” like the fans do when the ref makes a bad call. Slim leaned forward and the cops started searching in his hair (?). They talked some more and suddenly Slim stormed off in anger (??!). One of the cops must have said something he didn’t like. Neither of the cops followed him; instead, they walked away, laughing. Yes, Slim told off a couple of cops and they didn’t do a thing about it. I stood at my window in a stupor. The scene had unfolded before me in a kind of dream sequence, rendered in an impressionistic haze. I was unsure of what I’d seen, unsure of anything. Interpretations were impossible. It was like choosing ten words at random from the dictionary and trying to mash them together into a sentence.
But days and then weeks went by, and I noticed Slim wasn’t around so much. The yelling decreased, as did the barking and the general kerfuffle outside my window. Then it stopped outright. I started to forget about Slim, and even miss him. One day, I looked out into the park where a mysterious sign had emerged. It was not attached to the fence but stuck on a post right smack in the center of the park where you couldn’t miss it. And what did that sign say?
“Terrain privé — pas de chiens!” (”Private property — no dogs!”)
It’s gonna be a great summer.
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The Textheavy Days
Mere words cannot express how much I miss Fireland. I don’t even miss Josh. Screw that guy. He shares a birthday with me but what’s that amount to in beers? Five. What I miss is myself enjoying Fireland and watching the designs change every week. I miss what Fireland means, not only in the sociopolitical context in which we find ourselves, but in the ways we web-folk once strove to achieve that Firelandic holism, that feeling of sinking into a body of text set in a periwinkle colour scheme and never wanting to come up for air. The me who could not comprehend the brilliance of the mind behind the Fireland FAQ is not the same me, though the brilliance remains unsolved. Those were heady times. Blogs weren’t all that interesting back then, but they were new. Today, blogs are still that, but Fireland is beyond trends, for that would imply Fireland is subject to the circumscriptions of time. Fireland is the best website ever made by a Josh, and the Josh in question is marriedsville now so he’ll probably write about gas grills and universal remotes and joint custody instead of people choking the shit out of each other with their words while Jesus watches. Please consider this my message to Josh, wherever he is. These are Desperate Hours, and they don’t taste so good anymore.
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De Retour
Boiled potatoes, apartments to let, black iron gates and brick smokestacks, steak and kidney pie, tap water, Anglicans, Methodists, heathens, buzz, unrelenting expense, sweet corn, chavs, Camden t-shirt vendors, chicken tikka masala and Cobra Beer, bog-standards, hefty coinage, Industrial tenement hangover, the spindly disembodied “Mind The Gap!” at Paddington, soot, rugger, 3 PM drunkenness, oak, foodcake-shaped cars, unkempt trainyards, ledges, streams, punts, shires, swains with hair spiked in the front, kebab for take-away, footie, Borough Market, grammatical whispers, bodies, sidelong glances, and 800-year-old everything—that’s what my trip to England was like.
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More Than Two Non-Blowhards
2 Blowhards is one of the liveliest web sites around, and maybe the least aptly titled. For one thing, there are actually five Blowhards. And none of them sound like blowhards to me. They are a lot of things: thoughtful, erudite, charmingly grown-up. But not blowhards. Each has his own milieu: Donald, the car design buff, Michael the autodidactic culture fiend and B-movie afficionado, Friedrich the art historian, Fenster the college administrator, Francis the architect. Michael and Donald do most of the posting, between all five there is always plenty of fresh material on the front page. Post range from three-liners to multi-volume treatises. Even the smallest posts can take your afternoons away. All the Blowhards seem to be of the type who’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know, and they carry a “kids-these-days” sensibility to their writing that I often agree with, despite being one of said kids-these-days.
Michael Blowhard seems like the dirigeant of the site. He is certainly the most candid, and there is a great personal narrative woven throughout his posts. He tells the story of his victory over cancer in between inspired musings on teenage culture, or hard facts on illegal immigration in the United States. Some of Michael’s links even flirt with dirty-old-man territory at times, though he never manages to debase himself: he appreciates naked females, and who doesn’t?
What amazes me most is the sheer volume these guys pump out. They make posts twice as long as anything on my site, nearly every day, all of it of high quality. And they’re twice my age. About me, this says more than I’d like it to. Furthermore, they curate the comment sections meticulously, jumping back in with lengthy follow-ups and debates. Each post lives well beyond its timestamp. It’s an exemplar of the blog medium at its highest functioning peak; a vital, bustling place, well tended-to by its owners, engaging on every imaginable topic, and in constant change.
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Me, I Like a Web Site
Over the next little while I’ll post some sites that I like to read and that deserve more attention.
Thank God for Le blog de Polyscopique. I love everything about this blog. It covers one of my very favourite topics, Quebec politics. It’s thought-provoking, readable, researched well, updated regularly. Laurent sticks it to the separatists regularly, and has plenty else to say besides, but without a heavy heap of editorial cheddar on top. Just the facts. And best of all? It’s bilingual! Even better than that, the two languages are presented side-by-side, so I can read the articles in French (for practice) and wander to the left to get the English translation when I struggle with a word. How great is that? Are there any other blogs like this one? No.
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And Another Thing
Why can’t I write less than 500 words an entry? No wonder I never update anymore. Has anyone seen the gentleman on St. Catherine who dresses like Spider-Man and dances to a hip-hop beat? What a guy. How about the local sports team? Boy that coach and/or player sure messed up. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, if any of you solve Hapland 3 before I do, we’re not friends anymore. Good night.
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Man Diego
Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been travelling. Okay, not really, but business travel is kind of like real travel, except for the strict scheduling and the limited opportunity for fun, and then again, the expense accounts. California was the destination, specifically the two Sans: Diego and Francisco. I’ve spent plenty of time in SF, so the San Diego part of the trip carried a little more intrigue. I hadn’t been since I was young, and my only memories are of snake room at the Zoo and the row of red Ferarris we found parked on a hill near the Old Town.
The San Diego suburb of La Jolla is your typical office industrial park area, appearing perfectly groomed from any angle of observation. The meticulous grooming serves to obscure that nothing much happens there but the passage of cars. Even still, I found a particular sort of organic Californianess to the whole place. Half the streets have “La Jolla” in the name, so instead of taking the “La Jolla Village Drive” exit from the highway, I took the “La Jolla Colony” exit, and ended up driving up and down the hills of a rich SoCal suburb. Normally I would turn around and get back on highway but I kept driving. The sight of the houses on the steep hills, held there as if by supernatural forces, appealed to me in the way any mountain does. You just want to look even if you’ve seen it before. This suburb was so different from the usual. So pretty, the design so authentic and earnest in what I’m sure is considered a flatly ridiculous postmodern Meso-American style. But it drew me in, and around and around and around I drove, until I’d seen every side street at least three times and decided it was getting dark, and then fought my way back through the maze of La Jolla-named streets.
Without exception, I pronounced La Jolla wrong when reading it (“La Joe-la” instead of the correct “La Hoya”).
After grabbing a snack at a Carl’s Jr (an experience in American fast food I won’t repeat) I found the hotel and checked in. The receptionist in the enormous lobby was a tall, smiling blonde of stunning stature. As she asked me questions, I became unnerved by her perfectly scripted manner. She didn’t even seem human, instead resembling one of those mechanical European robo-blondes from Bond movies. I suspected a speech module instead of a larynx. It’s possible she was plugged in to a wall socket, somehow.
She kept calling me “Mr. Taylor”. Our conversation lasted no longer than two minutes, and when I came back hours later she still remembered that I was “Mr. Taylor”.
The La Jolla Hyatt hotel crawls with businessmen in pressed suits. There is a mood of deal-making in the air. Breakfast conversations are about work and business and the matters of the day, sometimes with people taking their morning eggs with their day planners clutched in the other hand. The restaurant at breakfast is livelier than the hotel bar, even. I sit and eat my waffles, trying to place each overheard American accent to its corresponding region. I’ve got the California regional dialects down pat. New York is easy, as is New England and the Midwest. The South still throws me off—was that Texas or not?
The weather in San Diego in March could be considered equal to a late afternoon in August anywhere else. It’s alternately sunny, windy, cool, and rainy, sometimes on the same day. No matter the weather, it is pleasant. The town can’t be called “lively” but the mood is always up, and the streets teem with possibility. The weather provides an odd contrast to the sensory buffet that is the American business travel experience. The aura of this postmodern colony of simulated hospitality pervades, of each weary traveller laying his head in one of a thousand tiny palaces carved out of a giant piece of stone, each the exact same. But it’s sunny. In that sense, it felt like a permanent Friday. In this picture it is not sunny:
In the absence of the patience to weave this into some kind of narrative, some snapshots from my time in California, two weeks worth:
- It’s been so long since I’ve heard someone say “We would like to take this opportunity…” Going to America always delivers. Fits like a glove.
- Lying on the bed with my eyes closed and thinking about visiting Tijuana. Tourist trap, yes. But Mexico! I’ve never been. Don’t I want to do new things? I’m overcome with fear about poor Mexican orphans with beady eyes, shaking jars containing their own teeth and holding out dirty hands. What’s wrong with beggars and corrupt police? But also: it’s a tourist trap! Nothing but souvenir shops and Tijuana-branded apparel, and who needs that? I deliberated over this for a few days, and my decision against Tijuana came when my instructor (I was there on training), a young Latina, shook her head sternly and said: “Don’t go. Don’t go.”
- For such a hot, peaceful, fun city, with paradisial climate and beaches forever, San Diego is suprisingly asexual. What I mean to say is that it’s not sleazy, like Montreal. It’s happier. Vice feels like virtue in San Diego, whereas here it feels like vice. Everyone radiates the sort of peaceful inner life, that Californian spirit that comes with having never endured the isolation of snow, rain, or economic hardship. You would think in such a place people would be fulfilling their base desires in the streets, but no! It’s quite tame. The bartender at the hotel bar tells me they call it “Man Diego” because of the gender ratios, and that it is not so much of a destination as far as metropolitan entertainments go (the big act in town that week was Dream Theater, I think) but more of a place where gaggles of attractive muppets congregate to have hug parties atop surfboards, bikes, and weird rollerskates that go sideways. (Halcyon is my picture of the Archetypal San Diegan. Except he’s a porn star now, so, I dunno. He must be operating out of LA these days.)
- I have yet to visit a hotel in this world that doesn’t have a Gideons-proffered Bible in the drawer, which is kind of amazing.
- The co-branded bathroom items in my hotel room. My, what names they are given. Some examples: “Renewing Body Lotion”, “Protective Shower Cap”, “Shoe Shine” (n., to describe a microfiber cloth), “Clarifying Shampoo”, “Massage Bar” (soap). The function of the item is explicitly stated, for some reason, even when the function is incorrect. Does shampoo “clarify”, body lotion “renew”? OK I’ll confess the massage bar was pretty great. It had little round extrusions, like Lego.
- Business travel in a place like La Jolla seemed to me not about sleep or accomodation, but more of a theme-park type experience, by design. Each time I’ve stayed in a hotel I’ve wondered the same things. Do I need someone to hold the door open for me? And valet parking. How is there this persistent myth that parking my own car is so inconvenient that I’d need to pay someone to do it for me? Could it be that valet parking is merely one of the enduring falsehoods of the good life, and that valet parking is actually not convenient at all? Why is everyone calling me “Mr. Taylor” and in general walking on eggshells around me, when it is clear that I don’t want that, and nobody wants that? And they make it seem so natural! But how many massage bars and rejuvenating lotions and morning papers and types of melon in the continental breakfast do you need, exactly? Weary travellers could not be demanding this level of servility and tiresome benevolence that is so total, so all-knowing, and so inescapable that all traces of humanity are wiped out, could they?
The answer is yes, according to the executive from Indiana I’m chatting with at the bar, who now lives in Hong Kong and is staying at the Hyatt for a month. To her, there is a clear gradient of quality to the hotel experience, and insisted that these things mattered greatly even though an inexperienced traveller such as myself might not realize it. My instinct was to write her off as a case of terminal bourgeoisie, posessing standards both unattainable and of fractal-like infinity and complexity (”This shampoo doesn’t say ‘clarifying’ on the label! Room service!”), but she had a point. She was staying there for a month, and halfway across the world at that. It’s not the European backpack trip or the crash-on-a-couch visit, which is the only kind of travel I’ve done. It’s a month of hell. You’re away from all your comforts, your habits, and your friends, and you want only to be given exactly what you think you want, and then left alone, but not all the way alone in case you want something else.
- And yet: pulling up to the parking lot attendant in the hotel lot, a Mexican guy with an American accent asks my room number and my name. When my results come up in the computer, he turns to me with a goofy grin and says in an exaggerated Canadian accent, “get out der for some sunshine, eh?”
- Driving back to the hotel from the training centre, the freeways are clogged for miles. The lumpy landscape of San Diego offers stunningly great views, with the proviso that each view lasts only for the single second it takes to crest each hill and begin descending the other side. The “Zen view”: a view that catches your eye for a second before it is lost. Rising into a nice vantage point over the highway, I watched the cars on the road, swelling and pulsing in rhythmic gasps. Set against the backdrop of the empty sky and the San Diegan horizon that never ends, I began having rather conventional ruminations about the Size Of It All, of these millions of little cars scurrying around and how small they were. It brought back a memory. When Kevin and I had gone hiking in the mountains of Balestrand, Norway, and at the end of a long day we noticed a spot on the trail where thousands of ants were crossing our path in a neat line. They were moving in both directions, and were not startled when we got close. Looking to the left, we saw an enormous anthill. It was the size of a beanbag chair, and shaped like a volcano. The ants were crawling across the trail by the thousands, into the thick brush, and up the side of this giant twig-and-dirt structure they’d built, and finally into the tennis ball-sized hole in the top to join their brothers in the colony. I’d never seen so many sentient beings in one place. It throbbed and hummed with life. An anthill that large must have taken them years to build, and it occured to me that I could destroy it in about thirty seconds with a rock, a tree branch, a bucket of water, whatever. My human body and mind could come up with thousands of ways of demolishing that anthill and they wouldn’t stand a chance. I stood for a minute watching the ants cross the path in a neverending stream, this immensely complex hive mind moving in perfect sync, and thinking about how probably some jerkoff tourist would come along and destroy that anthill, some college kid wanting to show off to his friends, or a park ranger wanting to make the trail more attractive. Or maybe it would rain for a few days and it would be washed away. And it didn’t matter, because the ants would just build another one, as big as the first. We kept hiking, we saw a few more anthills, smaller ones, but not much different. Giant ant metropolises. And back in San Diego, the endless procession of cars on the highways, stretching out for miles and miles on their way to the anthills, our cities, made me wonder whether there’s a hotshot tourist out there somewhere, watching us right now with a rock in his hand knowing he could destroy everything we’ve built with a single throw.
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The Fives Game
My Obligation to the Meme calls, this time by Hugh who can now safely be called “of LibriVox fame“, so without further ado, five things about me that could be interpreted as “odd”, should you want to interpret them that way, but maybe interpreting them that way would say more about you than me, so stick that in your corncob pipe and allume-le.
- Living in a big city has tremendous benefits, like: money and booze and music everywhere, even if a lot of that music is Sheryl fucking Crow. But a lot of the obligations of urban living tire me out. Structuring all your time around the 9-to-5, having friends beholden to same, the general feeling of placelessness, the reliance on services instead of people, the having to wear the right shoes, and of course, lots of Other People, with their own sets of conventions and rules, their own schedules, and their own sordid histories. Often I dream about packing up everything I own, dropping most of it in storage, and moving somewhere both isolated and far, far away. A log cabin in the woods maybe. Or a small town somewhere with a reasonable climate. My Bella Coola, BC (thanks Dick) still awaits me. Knowing myself, I’d never go all the way to Walden Pond living, but a place an hour away from a city would suit me fine.
- I’m in an office fantasy hockey league, and I am beyond obsessed with it. The other players in the league share in the fanatical obsession, which adds to the fun of it all. There we are, tracking player movement like Bay Street day traders, Excel spreadsheets and elaborate market timing and the whole thing. We even have moratoriums on talking about strategy between rivals, for fear they might emulate it and thus nullify the gains of your clever tactical move. Then chat windows are open, trash is talked, and we all reload the boxscores every night until the whole thing is over. It’s fucking sad, is what it is, but I’m in second place and you can’t take that from me.
- It’s now entirely possible for me to surf the web without even realizing it. Surfing has become an idle pleasure like doodling or pen-spinning, taken up for its own sake while doing something else. All I need to see is that Firefox icon somewhere on my screen, and I’m liable to get sucked right in. I will sometimes open a few sites in tabs, one after the other with a rote movement, and my habit has gotten so bad that I’ll open the same site twice on occasion, without having even looked at it the first time. On bad days I’ll do it twice in a row. Metafilter in this tab, and Metafilter in this tab too! I’m like the smoker who lights up a butt when there’s already one fuming away in the ashtray. I never felt my hand move, but suddenly I’m checking box scores (see item #2), or what Layton said about Harper this week. It’s not hard for me to do this for several minutes without noticing. Be honest: have you ever found yourself absent-mindedly typing random letters into the Address bar, and visiting the sites that pop down in the menu? Try it, if you haven’t. Put the cursor up there and start typing letters, and see what you’ve looked at recently (try ‘x’, especially if it isn’t your computer). I’ve done the alphabet during times of extreme duress. A to Z. Surfed every one of them. The Web is a dirty succubus, and I am a lonely travelling salesman wandering the Red Light District with a pocket full one one-dollar bills.
- Politically, if you removed all the shades of gray and pinned everything onto a board labelled “conservative” and “liberal”, I would probably come out on the “conservative” side. The margin would be small and maybe uncountable. These labels are meaningless, as we all know, and it’s important to remember that both terms have been hopelessly perverted by the media, turned into daggers, rendered into lumpen categories with which to dismiss an opponent. People who hold political opinions of any kind are bound to have undetermined or inchoate areas of opinion, and even hypocrisies within their beliefs. Nobody has a self-consistent system. So at best I can categorize my views in vagaries. I like smaller government, except when I don’t. We should help the poor, except not by paying them in cash. Education should be perhaps the highest priority of government, both in providing it and exuding it. The government is best used when the private sector cannot provide the service, and by “cannot provide” I mean the service does exist for the purpose of financial gain. It is something bordering on a crime to me that I can’t find a doctor in Montreal who doesn’t have a two-year waiting list for new patients, or that I have to sit at the passport office for six hours before I can even hand in my forms, but politicians sit in their war rooms dreaming up the next expensive social program for getting themselves elected. My indignation is mostly towards the political class as a whole, and at the stunning lack of qualifications and moral authority these people have to rule the country.
So I hate waste and politicians. That’s not a political philosophy. Conservatism is, though, and I am going to state here that I am theoretically a conservative, and that includes, get ready…a vague allegiance to evil social conservatism. But a secular kind. I won’t go into everything here but I do believe that nationhood depends on a modicum of tradition to its affairs, respected by both the citizenry and its elected officials, and a clear delineation of the rules by an authority which is seen as legitimate (I might even go so far as to say the A-word…aristocracy). A society of no rules has no identity. If public institutions and laws are going to work they need to be treated as keepers of nationhood and pillars of civilization, not only in a legal and structural sense but what I will call a reverential sense. Resistance and fracturing creeps in when those institutions lose meaning to the citizenry, when they grow into nothing but means to economic ends. This is what I see as the true bedrock of Conservatism, not about making sure those dirty gays can never visit each other in the hospital, or handing tax breaks out to those who deserve them least, or divvying up the oil profits. Real Conservatism also has very little to do with any political party currently existing in North America, but then again, I’m talking theoretically here. Tommy Paine said it best: “That government is best which governs least.”
So I won’t vote for any contemporary conservative (read: business-class) party, which are the creation of politicians, but in theory, I wish a real one existed. (It won’t. I’m resigned to this.)
(FWIW, the sections of my political file which could be called “liberal-leaning” tend to fall into protection from the views of politically significant religious groups, tyranny of the majority, and of protecting society at large from the extremely wealthy and the massive bureaucratic structures they use to vacuum up the nation’s wealth. I believe this latter area to be the most underrepresented in all of political discourse today, probably because the media is beholden to this system and thus serves to harness uproar and direct it towards the insignificant. How big should corporations be allowed to get? What happens when corporations reach the size when they can easily put governments out of business, or clog up the system by dragging their feet on legal matters to the point where government agencies cannot function as they are intended? What happened historically when the private sector was allowed to assume control over a nation’s military for its own purposes?) - I really, really love the Wu-Tang Clan.
I am not one to tell other people what to write, but the Obligation to the Meme is strong, so I’ll have to pass this on to two people. If they feel like it: Moose Morel and Vila H, I summon thee.
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