The Pleasures of Aging

The other day, my doctor said to me, “you aren’t twenty anymore, what do you expect?”.  I didn’t know if she was insinuating something about my soaring blood pressure, my sagging pectorals or my stagnating dreams.  Then it dawned on me, if I can begin an anecdote with ‘the other day my doctor said to me’, I have become another statistic in the plague that goes by the lurid name, aging.

She told me I needed to reduce my fat and salt intake, lose half my body weight, cut out alcohol and caffeine altogether, and eat green vegetables.

“Green vegetables”, I said, “I am way too old to form new habits now”!

Not understanding that a rich sense of humour is the only effectively proven method of attaining immortality, she scowled and said, “If you don’t do these things, you will never see your hundredth birthday”.  My face went ashen: my one true fear is going blind.

Using what I clearly recognized as the patented Bruce Lee Two Fingers of Death, she jabbed me in the side and asked if it hurt.  She just got angrier with me when I whimpered and asked if it was a trick question.  Aging, I am quickly learning, is a condition of fear and vulnerability where people are always angry at you and may abuse you out of some twisted transference of mortality dread.

I tried to placate her with good intentions, but by this time she was hell-bent on my getting comeuppance, and so, ordered a battery of tests.

I found myself with a requisition for an ultrasound, something that up until now I thought was simply part of midwifery witcheries.  I feel pretty certain it was to confirm that I have in fact been the victim of organ theft.  During my half day layover in the waiting room of the clinic, I pictured the jelly lube, the little rubber gadget, and a cute technician and had just about consoled myself that it was going to be pretty much like sexytimes when my number came up.  I was made to put on a paper dress that was obviously stolen from a fashion blind pygmy.  On me, it shredded instantly, and if it weren’t for my nervous sweat gluing the bits on, I would have been the next Chippendale patient.  Dignity, it seems, is just another sacrifice on the altar of aging.

Alas, sexy times were not to manifest.  The technician, whose forearms I envied, employed all the enthusiasm and fervor of a dog digging for a bone and set to work attempting to reach my spine through my abdominal wall.  It was a clever technique really: by systematically tenderizing my organs one by one, she verified their continued presence.

At the x-ray clinic, again denuded and crepe papered, I was ridiculed over my nipple ring.  I was fuming with the injustice that Keith Richards can do what he does, but suddenly I am relegated to the high riding plaid pants section of the store. No urban primitive jewelry for old people! Actually I think she wanted to make sure I didn’t have a tumour shaped like a mystical symbol, fearing that if I had some proven sign of being the antichrist I might wind up a rich tv evangelist.  I am learning that the medical community is a caring community.

The testing gauntlet, worse than those humiliating Canada Fitness Tests they used to break the spirits of children from the seventies, accomplished it’s morbid task:  I am now acutely aware that I am becoming an old fart.

It’s like a wall of denial crumbled and now I notice ringing in my ears, flattened arches, and the end of a pee is becoming an increasingly vague and variable period.  In the ongoing bickering between my bed and my back, I realize it is me, not my bed.  My vision is going, my teeth are hanging on by a thread, and today I used the word ‘piles’ in its euphemistic sense.

Part of the onslaught is I am losing my powers of language.  More and more, in a state of confusion, I find myself consulting my dictionary and thesaurus.  While I find the activity soothing and always have, I feel paranoid that simply owning a dictionary and thesaurus is a sign of aging.  From there, I start to question if being paranoid is a sign of aging.  It’s like going down the rabbit hole.

The language thing is real.  I can’t spell anymore, I forget words and names.  I stumble and stutter and lose my train of thought mid sentence.  I found it really embarrassing until I employed the brilliant strategy of heavy drinking as a scapegoat.  Pounding the potables, or dedicated dipsomania, as the thesaurus might put it.

It’s sad too, the things you lose as you age.  I used to enjoy interjecting ‘get off my lawn’ and ‘when I was your age we had to walk through 3 miles of broken glass and lava to get to school’ as playful ironic banter.  Now, all that playful irony is gone, and people nod and smile while ignoring me.  I used to get angry that I should be expected to give up my seat on the bus just because someone was ninety, even though I actually paid more for my fare.  Aging has robbed me of my righteous anger as now people offer me up their seats.

It’s not all bad.  It’s like the motto for that thing I can’t remember: Membership Has Its Rewards.

When I was young and would flirt with girls, I was laughed at because they all wanted someone more mature.  As I aged, the reaction turned to scorn and occasionally being maced because I was perceived as a skeevy pervert.  Now, I am on the cusp of my golden years, where if I flirt, girls think it’s just adorable.

Aging also brings you to the laurel time, you gain respect and your achievements are acknowledged.  When I was younger, I enjoyed the obsessive vice of cross country running.  That pleasure I was soon denied as I was told I had the knees of an 80 year old.  I laughed—not only is the notion of an 80 year old running pretty unbelievable, but I had my doubts that some skulking octogenarian could pull a switcheroo with me without my even noticing.  Still, I was pretty bummed for the next 25 years until I realized it wasn’t a literal statement, but a reference to a bizarre genetic aging anomaly.  After some quick back of the envelope calculations, my pride was rejuvenated—by my estimation, my knees are now 227 years old.  Most people’s knees are one with the cosmos at that age, while mine continue to demand glucosamine and tremble when my blood sugar is low.  Surely someone could get a grant to study my achievement?  I’m still waiting to hear back from Ripley’s.

Aging is a great equalizer too.  I may have been ugly when I was young, but we all look like dilapidated potatoes as the years go by.  And while I never excelled at sport and suffered the stigma that accompanies, there comes a day when simply maintaining continence puts you ahead of the curve.

So, it’s not all bad.  I find myself at a Starbucks, ordering my decaf, and on a whim complement my barrista and give her a wink. She beams a great smile back at me and says “you’re so adorable” and I realize I am living the dream.

It doesn't matter what colour your parachute is.

In the seventies the addictive boogie man was heroin.  In the early eighties, it was cocaine.  By the end of the eighties it was crack, or super economy cocaine, for the layman.  There was a six week period, when journalists, lacking a new drug, tried to manufacture a new epidemic.  They called it parachute.

No drug user or addict ever called it this.  It consisted of some mad scientist concoction that combined heroin and cocaine.  It was predicated on a tried and true combo that addicts sometimes used, called the “speedball”, when it was called anything at all.  For rough and ready end zone players, it provided the budda-bing of blow, cancelled the crash and instead provided the endless blue simmer of the nod afterward.  It was pretty awesome, but sometimes killed people; like cars, shellfish and football.

But I digress.  All these drugs are paltry compared to the overwhelming success of television.  Maybe The Shield was cocaine, and Six Feet Under was heroin.  Perhaps sitcoms best represent crack.   We deride, we equivocate, and we watch.  We get our fix.  Personal appetite or choice is unimportant, just tuning in.  These are unreported narcotic epidemics.

Recently, I am seeing a formula that must be the elusive parachute that journalists so wanted to be on the forward wave of.  I’m talking about the caustically funny yet dramatic soap opera.  Otherwise known as the jab-jab-deep hook to the solar plexus that really hooks viewers.  Almost everything in primetime now combines the mighty forces of humour and pathos.  It’s brilliant, in a Brave New World way.

There is a really evocative scene in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy.  Our anti-hero and anti-heroine are traipsed languidly across a hotel bed.  Perhaps it was a cigarette toss, I’m not sure, but the whole room lights up in flame.  Foul mouthed Nancy sleeps away, and slack jawed Sid idles his head to the side, takes note of the flames climbing the drapes, and then attempts to drag, unsuccessfully from a cigarette and finally subsides.  This scene may have been confusing to some.  I get it, and I have the skin grafts to prove it.  But more so, I really get a good analogy.

There are nearly one billion people who live the lap of luxury, largely based on colonialism and imperialism.  Today, they do not worry about it, because it is simply efficient neoliberal business.  The mantra is that it creates a rising tide that raises all ships.  Who cares if it is true?  Seinfeld is on.  Both a good show and a celebrity bonfire are passions that drown out anything else.

There is a domino thing beginning in North Africa and the Middle East right now.  It has more to do with food and security than a sudden fed-uppedness with ugly regimes.  And it doesn’t end in far away places.  Less bullety, the “western” world is witnessing every socially progressive thing that has happened in the last three hundred years collapse.  And, newsflash, it isn’t because the republicans are evil and the democrats are lazy stoned leftists.  It is because there are no new continents to exploit, no new ‘niggers’ to enslave, and no magic technologies to fix things.

Hindu farmers are committing suicide.  Union workers are fighting in the streets of Wisconsin.  Panhandlers are murdering in Toronto.  Terrified politicians are fortifying wealth in ways no one alive has ever seen.  Small minded people fear we will move back to a feudal system; they have no imagination about what is coming.

It’s kind of like the colossal fuckstorm that is an addict’s life.  They deny everything, and try and hold the edges together with lies and short term fixes.  Some even whistle innocence when everything goes down.  I hate to say it, but addiction is a perfect analogy to understand a citizen or civilization today.

There are two schools of thought on political power.  One is numbers—say like the Hindu and Chinese(like ants, they can overpower the “evil” elites), and the other is the monetary base. History suggests that the numbers create revolutions that end in crazyhorse regimes, and that a middling monetary base hashes out whatever improvements it feels it needs to, gradually,  and things improve.  I ask where the west is now.

And I come back to Parachute.  Not the cocaine-heroin parachute; keen as it was, it just doesn’t play well with the majority.  But man, tv, tv is gorgeous sexy tits orgasm when it comes to consuming people.  Will the will of a marginally powerful people force civilization to make sensible decisions about the future?  Not in a 500 channel universe.

I explicate the clumsy analogy of drugs because drugs are a billion dollar industry that disengages millions of people, most of them poor (and we all get that picture), while entertainment, with all it’s royalty is a hundreds billions dollar institution that nullifies the senses of an enormous chunk of those western people who are supposedly politically empowered.

There is a famous sound bite from Marx, “religion is the opiate of the people”.  Setting aside that that quote is way out of context, I would say that opium is the opiate of the people, not religion.  In other words, religion is a community institution that binds people together and often encourages them to ‘do good’ for communities far beyond their own back yards, while opium just puts us to sleep, alone in our armchairs.  TV is opium.  Doesn’t matter how clever it gets, how slick production values are, how wicked CGI is, it’s all about being on the nod.  This is far more opiumous than religion.  I’m not making this up, I went through a ‘church’ phase, and every one of them from sensible to wacky, to conservative to transcendental, they were all busy trying to make this supposed temporary earth better.  That is not the sedating activity of a batman movie, or a new forensics crime procedural on tv.

What we consider “the world” is going down right now.  It’s going down with a shortage of phosphorous, nitrogen and peat (if that doesn’t register, the other word is FOOD. and if you don't worry about fertilizer, compare the amount of articles that document a 5% increase in the price of oil versus the 300%-700% price increase in various fertilizer chemicals in the same period).  It’s going down with an end to drunken energy.  It’s going down with the rainforests that regulate oxygen.  It’s going down with ocean life that rules earth’s food chain. It’s going down with the kind of war you can expect after three quarters of a century of wealth built on distributing arms to people who are angry and hungry.  It’s going down to an atmosphere congested with pollutants that will not kill the earth, but will make it a piss poor home for life as we know it.

And on top of all that, now you have to worry about Two and a Half Men being canceled. And the Oscar awards again awarding the wrong nominees, or failing to nominate the right ones at all.  And House jumped the shark too far.  And Sidney Sheldon started writing a different kind of junk book.  And Lady Gaga is too mannish for your late Madonna fantasies.  And goddamn it, I can’t find DVDs of Thundarr.

The journalists who thought up ‘parachute’ were logical in their metaphor.  They were just inaccurate because they weren’t users.  We are all in our parachute addiction.  We are pushing heart failure and lung failure, pushing at every end, and we want every benefit minus every cost.  We want to burn white hot, and then be carried gently down.  I’ve been hooked on everything that has a hook, and I am very impressed with the hook entertainment has.  Imagine, it doesn’t just suppress revolution, but voting and even basic thought processes—and it doesn’t stop you from going to work in the morning--if you still have a job.

The Wayback Wayback Machine

Once, when I was green and golden, young and aspiring, I had a friend who I only held for a few short years.  He was erudite beyond his years.  The funniest thing about him other than the fact that he drank coffee from a mason jar and when he accidentally tipped a cigarette ash into his jar, covered the fact by sipping up and declaring that cigarette ash could enhance the flavor of coffee,  the funniest thing was that in his abstract world of linguistics and philosophy he taught me to love nature.

Most of the time that I knew him, I never saw his nature side.  Only because I am stupid.  He lived in a tiny room and other than a clothing rack and urn sized ashtray, his room was a tropical jungle of plants.  I don’t mean on the window sill and table, I mean there were rack shelves devoted to plants.  The entire room was devoted to plants.  We had to crowd into a dark corner where the chairs were set, outside of the sunlight.  And when I think back, the room he chose in that great old rooming house was the room with the best sunlight.

We used to drink coffee like it was beer and smoke cigarettes like they would get us high.  And talk about Wiggenstein and Chomsky. We’d crash Turgenev up against Kerouac and modify with Feynman.  Mostly I listened, because he always talked over my head.  I was a headstrong, arrogant youth, always drunk on my own smarts, but with him, I always felt ignorant and slow witted.  It would be a cliché elder mentor story, except he was the same age as I.

I can’t even imagine what he got from my own stupid opinionated grunts.  Sometimes I think he craved my insanity.  Who else would jump off a building with him, or make 3am plant stealing runs?  I certainly couldn’t keep up in the cerebral department.

He taught me Hegel and Heidegger.  He taught me to question Alan Watts.  He taught me to love but mistrust Nietzsche.  When I couldn’t understand his monologues on linguistics, he played me the Talking Heads as though that would make it all clear.  To this day, as much as I like their music, I keep thinking there is an encoded message that I cannot hear.  Maybe only he heard it.

His modesty was overwhelming.  He took a year off after highschool, not to “find himself”, but because he didn’t feel sufficiently prepared for university and wanted to “read up”.  I hadn’t attended university, but I presciently told him, “you already know more than most grads”.  He didn’t listen, he just kept misting his plants and reading advanced linguistic texts.

If that was the end of the story, he would still be one of the greatest people I ever knew.

But one spring, he asked me to come on a survival canoe trip he did every year, up past North Bay.  I interpreted the invite as for a camping trip and accepted since I rarely had opportunity to get out of the city.  I paid little attention to the fact that he started training in a gym, other than that his skinny body suddenly popped with lean muscle. (I exercised both envy and laziness in this regard)

I met his father on a stop off before the trip.  He was the sort of man who would either hammer a son into pudding or steel.  Sink or swim.  I suddenly understood my friend better.

We got dropped, with heavy packsacks and canoes into wilds I had never even conceived of.  It was fourteen hour days of paddling and portaging, withstanding swarms of biting insects, making and breaking camp every day, and often enough, sleeping on rock (dead exhausted sleep).  Two things stood out.

I saw a different side of him, hitherto hidden, a scampering, wild-eyed nature born being who was utterly adapted to the unkempt and intraversable, and who you would never think of as a person who read philosophy.  For kicks, he would pirouette the canoe while we were gasping for breath on the rocks.

The other thing, was after a couple of days, I never wanted to return to “the city” or ideas.

He had tried to show me his true world (where he grew up, where his imagination fled to) and demonstrate how it funded him.  The only thing my small mind took from it was, why leave? 

This was an eden beyond civilization, and even beyond the majority of most campers.  The only people who had been here before us were the odd fur traders.  It was sufficiently unpleasant to dissuade most.  We scaled cliffs carrying our canoes.  I had to grip canyon sides, covered in spiders (and I am normally very spiderphobic), or else we would be dashed on rocks in river flow.  As much as my life has been trepiditious, this is as close as i ever got to epic.

It’s all kind of unreal now.  And I still remember not wanting to leave, and him having to explain that we were learning things to bring back.  It was like he had shown me the universe and then said we had to live in a bunker.  Thereafter, his tiny room, clotted with plants and cigarette smoke seemed even more mysterious.  How did this visionary cope?  What did his eyes see?

A year later, I was on the opposite side of the country and phoned him in the middle of the night, addled on drugs and booze, to say I love you, and worried he might think it some homosexual thing that neither of us were.  He replied, so nonchalantly, “Of course *Idle*, I love you too.

Five years later, we ran into each other on a boulevard in Montreal, buying bootleg liquor out of the trunk of a car, and spent the night drinking and talking, sitting on a sidewalk curb.  (ahhh, montreal stories).

Ten years later, we had a beer, then two, then a coffee, while commiserating about the things we hadn’t achieved and the things we missed.

So, that is what time does to the majesty of magical moments.  I am still stuck in a city.  I don’t know where my friend is.  I do court the love of many plants in my little room, and feel good that I have nurtured a tiny bud of a succulent into an overgrown two foot tall monstrosity.  In a good year, I cultivate then eat a good garden.  In a bad year, my plants are kind enough not to die

.

His email name was waybackwayback.  Even back in the day before the internet took off.

This wayback wayback machine operation is dedicated to him.

High School in the Eighties.

I went to a progressive high school.  It had tiered classes, to adapt to student readiness(that was eventually quashed as some kind of Ayn Randiness).  It also had art, drama, philosophy and religion classes to complement the gym and shop classes.  I don’t know why they chose our school; we were a violent gang ridden school.

I was lucky to pass some time there as a youth.  I didn’t manage to graduate from that school, that came seven schools later.

But that isn’t this story.

In my first bout of high school, I drew up a carefully prepared presentation in my religion class using Chicken Shit Conformists, by the Dead Kennedys, as the soundtrack.  We devised an entire primitive religion and acted it out.  The entire scripture was based on the characters dim memories of the last burning light bulb.  It was a world of people trying to make sense of a world they didn’t understand. They prayed to fixtures and outlets.  And they were afraid to venture into the outside world—it was too big and too bright, and so they cowered in the bowels of an abandoned high school and built myths based on shadows and emptiness.  And so generations passed.

The power went out during our "performance" and the PA sounded an ominous deep voice asking "Are you there?  I need you to listen".  We worked it in to great dramatic effect.  Our primitive practitioner dropped everything he was doing and stared skyward at the voice.  The pronouncement ended and our heroic primitive was no more informed.  He eventually braved the outside world and then returned to try and tell his people that they were lost in an empty space, and that they could have freedom in an Eden.  They killed him.

My teacher let us finish up and then shuffled us off to the office and we were failed.  Too bad, we worked hard on it.  We had based it on the Old Testament and Platonic Philosophy (and some old punk know how). Oh well, youth!

This anecdote sums up my feelings about the relevance of high school.  You don’t even need a diploma to get into university.  If I would have known that back then, sheesh.

Bah, The Humbug

I recently shared some email convo with a good friend.  I asked him to come see a theatre showing of It's A Wonderful Life, put on specially for Christmas.  For me, it is a favorite film, loved unconditionally. But I never thought of it from his point of view.  Then he told me how the movie looked to him.    

I now feel sort of embarassed.  This movie is truly about my buddy.  The little guy that keeps working and never took the big dollar or the easier path.  The little guy who makes a difference and gets little recognition.  The little guy who could use an angel to tell him how the shit is.  I watch this every year feeling all goopy inspired and yet I am a shiftless pisspot, while my friend is the hardest working guy I know. 

I'm sure some people might roll their eyes because my bud is vociferous in his complaining about how the world works, but unlike so many other complainers, he actually works in the system and tries to make it better.  So, in my book, he actually has more of a leg to stand on when it comes to being frustrated.

I bawl my eyes every year to It's A Wonderful Life.  I bought my own copy so I wouldn’t have to rely on cable to play it.  I even shed my tears for at least half a dozen other Frank Capra heart grabbers about the enduring little good guy now that dvd makes them available.  Yet, I give little thought to the mythology or other christmas mythologies we get out of our hearth-like light boxes.

I  watched the christmas episode of Warehouse 13, a light actiony sci-fi show.  It was a stand alone Christmas episode independent of it's series run.  It was warm and saccharine and played out a modern myth of the busy wealthy business man who provides for, but isn’t present for his kids.

It’s the opposite of the box-office failure that Wonderful Life was.  This man has a family, but is too busy improving the world(through designing shopping malls) to spend time with them.  In today's mythology, the demands of the evil corporation has robbed the man of his family and values.  He is too busy making money to treasure his family.  Not really a Scrooge, just engulfed in an economic system  Despite his pure motives of earning for his children, they are left behind.  This is the polar opposite of Jimmy Stewart who was focused on making his small town livable, one home at a time, inspired by and shored up by his family. 

Today, I question both myths.  I wonder, thinking of my classic movie and this new tv show, which is suited to reality today?  Are families wealthy beyond reason and lacking their fathers who are slaves to the boardroom?   Are hard working men without recognition out there making the world a better place?  Or are fathers unemployed and sometimes cast out of their homes? Or underpaid humiliated peons to the service industry?  How many dads are still employed in these fantasy jobs envisioned in christmas specials?  How much of the Credit Crisis stems from families stressfully trying to make christmas as bountiful as it looks on tv.

Jimmy Stewart was sweating to bail out poor families back when his company was threatened by a local rich company  The fantasy was that the people actually supported him because of all he had done for them.  Today, big companies reap untold wealth by robbing us of our lives while still we vote for governments that serve them.  They are enriched while our families shatter.  We are left with a sham dream of glitz and wealth and no community to fall back on

I'm always a crank, first to shout foul at the universe.  I've even just curmudgeoned my own holiday favorite.   Ah well, that's me. 

My little Christmas rant goes out warmly to my friend who actually does the work that keeps my world going and always does his best regardless of a mistifyingly indifferent populace.  Hey man, you know who you are, merry tidings!.

I Am Ironing A Kitten: Play For That F*ckin' Money

It’s that most wonderful time of the year, the leaves are turned, the jack-o’-lanterns are rotting, Starbucks has redressed itself in festive Christmas red and school is arching into a murderous crescendo.

While I am too educated to ascribe facetious causal explanations, I do find a correlation between my motivation to post to my blog and the intensity of assignment deadlines. I was faced this morning with the choice to either write something for this space or to catch up on email with an out of town dear friend—the reasoning being I had time for neither so had to choose just one. You get it, don’t you? In the time honoured spirit of self-plagiarism, I realized I could borrow portions from my message to generate a post, thereby maximizing the efficiency of my procrastination!

One of my best methods of procrastination is imagining justifiable procrastinations. I briefly entertained a fantasy that friends would rent a car to go to the Montreal Small Press Fair this weekend and call me to come along and I would be forced to abandon my homework for the greater cause of vital socializing and cosmopolitanism. I stared hard at the phone and willed it to happen, the same way I have applied my will to Carleton University’s union to make their negotiations break down so they would make good their threat to strike. The spineless fuckers just keep sitting at the table while getting whittled at.

I just can’t catch a break.

Seriously though, I’m so frazzled. It’s reaching beyond peak frenzy. I have a paper due on Monday in my population class and it has my colon in a knot.

Background: I got the best mark I have ever received, on the midterm in this class, and have week after week engaged the Prof in debate in class and on the class website. Last week, argument started to become a euphemism, during a vigourous discussion(euphemism) on China’s one child policy (I wasn’t defending it or condemning it; I was defending the notion of seeing it from China’s point of view—i.e. having 1.4 billion people and being a nation whose philosophy favours the collective over the individual).

My Prof stormed up and down the aisle blaring about dead baby girls and an empiricist world that wants to solve its problems by telling Africans(?) they can’t have babies. He was mostly being bombastic and playing agent provocateur—and despite my promise to myself to not keep falling for it, I too was sputtering red faced. I was really out of control. My logic and focus was actually a cut above its normal level(at least in my vaseline-lensed perceptions anyway), but I was hollering and interrupting both the Prof and students. I revved up and started yelling directed questions at the class, nearly Socrates style, minus the stylish cool. Seriously all mental. A very uncivilized ape.

At one point, I thought I had gained an ally, but it turned out that we had awakened a nazi-styled element in the class, who chimed in that international institutions should “get in there” to “stop them from having more babies” so china "wouldn’t wreck the planet”.  So thereafter I had to fight my Prof on the one hand, who professes to believe that everyone should have lotza babies and that growth produced human ingenuity will save us, and on the other hand, fight the pseudo nazi sounding fellow behind me who felt some good old fashioned genocide was in order to make the world safe for North Americans. The only thing more antithetical to university dogma than neomalthusianism is colonialism, so I was saved from being the troll, but just barely.

All that to say I feel like I have to produce a ringer of a term paper for this class. Due on Monday and I haven’t written a real word yet. I shouldn’t be writing this. It is stealing energy from my essay.

And my head is broken. I started out with a theme examining the refugee wave of Somalis in Ottawa in 1993 following the Somalian civil war, and accumulated a wealth of data (it seems every Master’s thesis at Carleton from ’95-’97 was on this topic). I started to drown in data, and couldn’t find the right tone—I was thinking about the nightmare of being forced from a rural, subsistence, oral culture to an urban capitalist bureaucratic culture, and I was thinking of the naked piercing hate that was the response of Ottawa’s citizenry.

From there I trekked over to a more general theme, examining the population composition of Ottawa. I collected a cornucopia of demographic data on Ottawa’s immigrants with the thesis that today’s Ottawa immigrants are more successful than immigrants anywhere, anywhen ever(in contrast to the media’s constant bleet that Multiculturism is failing). And then I started to flounder in lack of focus.

In a completely random mind belch I moved on to global food production and arable land.

From there I caffeinated my way to global population and the apocalyptic nature of growth. I couldn’t find any supportive data there. In scholarly circles there is a perceived crisis in the notion that the global population may start retracting sometime in the next century. Of course this is the same scholarly milieu that feels a reduction in global carbon emissions is also a crisis as it would impact food production (via the C02, not a reduction in petro farm inputs). I calm myself with the Jay Hanson quote that “magical thinking is still taught in universities”.

I saw another scholarly article from an economics journal stating that human populations are proportional to information storage and that to be sustainable and accommodate growth, the world needs to focus on information technology. Aaaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

At this point, I took a break and wandered aimlessly around the internet. I found this captioned photo that I pasted on the inside of my forehead as relief humour to remedy frustration:

Fortified, I dove back into the fray. I started digging into China’s one child policy and the unintended consequences it is beginning to reap—an aging population and a more aggravated than usual imbalance in gender, both very serious issues that a society can wrangle with if it isn’t busy coping with mass famine and the kind of feral warfare that crashes that sort of party. I found lots of articles furiously furrowing brows at these coming Chinese crises, though little analysis of the benefits of a greatly reduced fertility rate.

So, that’s where I am now. The paper is due at 6pm tomorrow and I have 18 papers on the topic that are ideal sources for a paper criticizing China’s efforts to stem population growth.

And I still feel like an atomic ADHD sketchmonkey.

And I don’t want to write this paper. I don’t want to write anything. I want to go to a cottage on a river and watch the leaves floating by. I want to bring a bunch of books and sprawl on a sofa in front of a pot-bellied stove warm with aromatic wood burning inside.

I’m also halfway thru a paper on the Huron Indians of 17th century Ontario for my anthropology class. My thesis is on the historical evidence for settled agricultural egalitarian societies. I chose the anthropologist I am studying, the late Bruce Trigger from McGill University, based on the weediest intuition that his study demonstrated this idea. It turns out that he was a Marxist with global impact on archaeology and anthropology and was furiously concerned with applied anthropology influencing the “real world”. In popular scholasticism civilization is synonymous with hierarchy and class. Accordingly, settlement and agriculture lead inevitably such “progress”, the same way over-consumption, waste and throughput (instead of cycled) economies are part of progress. Trigger spent his career challenging not just this idea but how we formulate ideas(i.e. theoretical work). Incredibly fascinating stuff. I would like to spend a year studying his work and the work he was influenced by. This paper too is a towering overwhelming nightmare of too much curiosity and not enough precision. I don’t want to keep working on it either. The whole thing is moot: soon this paper will be handed in and I will, circuit training fashion, jog on to the next station. Sigh.

I want to watch 70’s era Saturday morning cartoons and ponder the semiotics of my televised upbringing while slurping ice-cream. I want to spend the day rambling Conroy or Bruce Pitt Park and pet dogs. I pretty much would accept going to the dentist or boning up on tax law over my assignments.

I lost 8 days of work(and much more in data) due to the fact that my computer melted down on Halloween. I attribute this entirely to the trickster gods who mind me. I attempted some magick that day, purposed to jar me from a rut. Coyote laughed his ass off and punctually stomped my computer into oblivion(seriously, within an hour of the ritual), which did indeed have the appropriate, if not desired, effect. Never let it be said that I am above tempting the gods.

Through magicks I was able to replace my existential angst surrounding school with frantic panicked measures to actually get the work done. I also had to reach out, ironically enough, to my neglected personal networks in order to re-descend into the digitally connected world. The cherry on top was that I was unable to sit in the narcotic-like fog of the internet (which for me includes all my television and music habits) and instead read many books and worked on fall yard cleanup(screw you Green Man, I hate leaves!).

For 8 days, I didn’t stay on top of weather updates, ugly world news, or hourly micro reports on the movie industry. For 8 days I didn’t trawl chapters.ca for books I can’t afford, didn’t troll comment areas in right wing publications and didn’t truant school for the almighty click. For 8 days, there were no LOL cats, spam or online gaming site pop-ups.

With this sabbatical to the tangible world I felt wholly renewed and experienced a transcendent moment of an angelic Freddy Mercury singing about new times.

The dangers of real world, real space, real time utopia were eventually overcome and I am comfortably sedated back in cyberspace.

I am putting off finishing this post because then it means I have to go back to schoolwork and I just can’t bear it. I can’t find any way to rationalize not working on my essay, but I am trying really hard.

There have been so many assignments that there is never a full day to sit back, breathe easy and say “I am on schedule and today is a day off”. Matters are aggravated by the idea that I will likely not be given the opportunity to use this degree in a professional capacity. More slowly and more troublingly, I am circling around the idea that I don’t think I want to use this degree in the given professions it is intended for. I can imagine being an environmental activist, or working on a farm in a small town, or even working in a bookstore and writing freelance. But I can’t imagine being a planner in a society that thinks of megacities as inevitable and insists on the nihilistic masturbation that is “sustainable growth”. I can’t imagine working for Stats Can when we can only compile reports that support dominant paradigms, or going on to graduate studies for the same reasons. I think working for Natural Resources would be equally maddening-we control 80% of earth’s mining and just quashed a bill that made gentle non-mandatory gestures toward international social and environmental accountability. Canada—a nation of malevolent dwarves.

I’m putting off ending this post because what I really need is to commune, to ‘hang out’, to span some time with people, with friends. The last thing I need is to continue pouring over articles with a highlighter, composing arguments that I don’t believe but that support the data. I noticed, researching, that when an indexed article doesn’t fit a given dominant paradigm it often hasn’t been uploaded to an online database. Makes you wonder what isn’t even indexed? Maybe I am paranoid, but its spookily common.

More and more often I find, if I use the language and frameworks that I am taught in school, and I use the data sources that are sanctioned, I am unable to say what I want and need to say. Often I can only say the polar opposite of what I mean. Eat your fucking heart out George Orwell. When I am trying to write my papers for the marks, and feeling acid burn in my tummy, I think of a line one of the characters in the TV show Treme was always saying: a horn player, scraping by from gig to gig, rarely playing what he wants to play; he always looks over slyly at a bandmate and says “play for that fuckin’ money”. He doesn’t say it bitterly or ironically, it’s just a bemused rally.

I seem to be running low on energy to play for that fuckin’ money. And I don’t get money, I pay for the privilege.