Lauris nobilis.

Over the last five years, I would awaken on a tourbus about now, rolling smoothly somewhere along the midwest.  I would spend my mornings consumed with hangover management and truck-stop constitutionals.  Wifi signal strength was my preoccupation.  Chicken-wraps, my nightmare.  These tours lasted weeks and weeks. Staring out at a sea of blue-hairs sat comfortably in their Sunday-best, I'd perform the canon of Yuletide chestnuts every holiday season.

That's all over now.

I've done nothing this week.  I have been resting on my laurels.  I admit, watching Christopher Hitchens pick apart inarticulate god-fearers on YouTube will have consumed most of my morning, slipping in to an afternoon filled with indignant self-righteousness.   The TV remote my sceptre, pyjamas and beard my costume, successfully achieving nothing.  Dishwasher half-emptied, laundry half-folded, I rule with a commanding yawn.

Invariably I will gravitate towards a keyboard to shop online and rid my brain of holiday melodies.  Historically, these ditties would have turned the voices in my head into carolling demons from hell.

No more.

Never wishing to fully dampen spirits and to give the impression that I have been an effective team-of-one today, I have decided to spread mirth and cheer, like fertilizer on flowerbeds.

To quote a holiday film favourite: "Follow me down the seven levels of the Candy Cane forest, past the Sea of Twirly Swirly Gumdrops" and into the Lincoln Tunnel.

Enter Santa.

This week, comedian Kitty Flanagan on her last appearance as an Australian infotainment show correspondent told viewers Santa "doesn't even exist" and that they must be drunk to believe it.  Naturally retractions and apologies followed.  Twitter and Facebook displayed their contrition.  The network has since promised to prove the existence of Santa in the North Pole.  If you're kids are watching this tripe at 6:30 pm you probably are drinking and good on ya' mate.  All your neglected children need is more media-therapy.  Not to worry, the government has your back.

Norad's Santa Tracker is 13 short days away from following Father Christmas' high-speed pimped-out toy-shuttle as it makes its way around the globe.   Richard Branson take note:  Invest in magic flying caribou.  On the NORAD website right now there is a little elf building a snowman and another skating along the ice.  Not a security guard in sight.  Anyone could just walk right on in.  If it's discovered that the North American Aerospace Defense Command has dropped the ball we might as well all start learning Russian, yesterday.

St. Nick was a Greek.  He lived and died in Myra, which is now Turkey.  He would never have been caught dead anywhere north of Milan.

Half of him now lies in Bari, Italy, having been moved there in 1169.  The rest of him, thanks to the some grave-robbing sailors during the First Crusades, in Venice.  Not a bad coupla' pied-a-terres for a bearded bishop.

Born, March 15, 270 AD, Nikolaos of Myra died December 6, 343 AD.  That puts him in his early seventies.  He's usually portrayed white-haired and slender, with a receding hairline.  No smile or twinkle in his eye. Nothing like our Canadian type-2 diabetic version.

I was reading (online) some Egyptian census returns, printed on papyri for the first 300AD.  If Nikolaos had indeed become a septuagenarian, he'd probably have been one of the few in all of Myra.  There's no denying Turkish coffee and Greek olive oil have lasting health benefits.  Being a member of Team Jesus probably helped.

Indulge me, fans o' Christmas.

According to Forbes, most Greeks retire around 58.   That's 11 years before the Germans.  I'm just saying there's a reason they're unpopular in the EU.  Clergy in the Greek Orthodox Church of America get a living expense of roughly 120,000 USD a year after 35 years of service to Jesus Inc.

So, if we are to use my well-researched and scientifically peer-reviewed algorithmic model for the employment history (and outcome) of a one Mr. Santorini Clausodopoulous, then by the time of his demise he would have been retired for roughly 15 years.

There was no monetary system in Greece prior to 500BC, but his indexed pension may have afforded him to barter for a few toys for the kiddies.  Legend has it, he kept a trio of sisters from a life of prostitution by giving their impoverished father dowries on the qt.   It's hard to imagine prostitution was far off from a life bridal-servitude seventeen -hundred years ago.

Most retirees in my neighbourhood don't earn half of a greek bishops salary, even after a lifetime as a public servant.   I do sometimes see old nuns driving around in a Buick.   It's a reliable automobile.

They also don't give a toss about any kids but their own grandchildren and rarely leave the house.  I do see them shuffling along their driveways to recycle, a full day before it's collected.  Clockwork, these people.    Most of them certainly don't look anything like a healthy Grecian Bishop.  A rich diet and limited sunlight does thing to a person.  Red noses here are usually the result of rye whiskey induced thread-veins.

I'd like to think of a realistic, modern Santa as simply, Nick the Greek, retired sonofabitch.

I think if kids today believed that "Nick the Greek" knew they were naughty or nice, instead of coal in the stocking there would be much shitting of pants over the potential removal of thumbs at the hands of former alterboy henchmen.

He'd drive an old Caddy.  Smoke cigarettes like they owed him money.  Through thick rimmed coke-bottle glasses, this myopic, irritable old bastard would be more likely to yell at children, hire prostitutes, get caught up in a Nigerian email scam ( if he could get his damn nephew to come over once in a while to help him download "the internet") and probably never be able to lift a sack heavier than the one he's denied himself all his adult life.  His sciatica would keep him from attending church bazaars or taking up golf in the spring.  Flipping through old photographs, he would remember when kids would lovingly call him Papa Nick.  The neighbourhood kids jeer and yell now. They flip him the bird as they walk past his first-storey condo.

This season, when feverish, mucus-oozing hobbits line up to have their picture taken with a pillow-bellied stranger in polyester pyjamas and sit on his lap in a west-Ottawa shopping mall, take comfort.

We have created a far better version than what we could have realistically had.   Live the lie.

Conrad wrote that you should be "faithful to the nightmare of your choice".

Christopher Hitchens believes "Faith is a surrender of the mind".

Once again, I am flummoxed.

I submit to you fat Santa.   I have been a good boy.

I'll finish the laundry, promise.

Sorry, eh?

'Sorry'  is heard above the 49th parallel as frequently as any non-lexical filler.  It's tagged unceremoniously to most interactions with other people.  Undoubtedly handed down from our once colonizers we have refined its use.  Despite appearances its delivery is sharpened to a fine tip. 

Sure, it doesn't share the popularity of "um" or "uh" and other guttural utterances that interrupt the flow of fluid speech, but by the time we've reached school-age, Canadians can wield the apology with reckless and daily abandon.  We joke about our reflexive penitence as a way to avoid conflict, but there is something more duplicitous at work. 

'Sorry' is a four-letter word disguised as five.  

In 2009 the Ontario Government passed a piece of legislation called "The Apology Act".   This piece of brilliance states:  "An apology made by or on behalf of a person in connection with any matter (a) does not, in law, constitute an express or implied admission or fault or liability by the person in connection with that matter. "    

We've even identified this national involuntary nervous tick and took measures to protect ourselves...from ourselves.   This is evolution, no?   If canuck contrition does exist in an apology, it's inconsequential.  We are now free to apologize and use it for evil.  We don't mind conflict.  We are not afraid.  Hell, we've torched White Houses in the past.  

Simply, it is a pretense to avoid you. 

So there, Murica. 

People of planet earth, don't rush out to stitch a Canadian flag on a backpack just yet.   The scope of our deceit is not fully complete until we look at another tool in the hoser-apologists' arsenal. 

The word "eh". 

The American version of 'eh?', is most often in say NYC,  'right?'.  Similar in placement, there are blatant polarities in the usage.  For example, if a New Yorker were to discuss the weather, they might begin:  

"What a beautiful (effn) day, right?"In truth, placement of the f-word is equally fascinating to me, but that's for another day. 

"Right?" does not require an answer because it is not a question.  Furthermore it does not imply negotiation.  It "is" a beautiful day, and you are to agree with me.  "Right?' embodies the everything beautiful about America. Infallible confidence requiring total acquiescence.  To state something as fact and expect complete agreement.  Self-determination.

Further north,  "Jeez, nice day eh?" would not be an uncommon thing to hear from a Canadian.   Naturally, you would hear this only in mid-summer, during the two weeks this country isn't a portrait of a Dostoevsky-esque wintry gulag novel. 

"Eh?" does not require an answer for another reason.  'Eh", simply, is another subtle tool of avoidance.  It is not strong enough to really illicit a response, and carries with it no potential for discourse or debate.  The user himself may not even have an opinion if 'eh?' is employed. 

This national bird-call even sounds harmless and benign.  Eh, eh, eh.  We are lampooned the world-over for it's overuse and oafish sound.  You think it's cute when you talk to us at airports and ask us to say it. 

Under the surface however it's a very effective cultural method to expose the moronic around us. This is not xenophobia.  Sorry, if you think so.  Sorry if you're offended.   Sorry, eh?

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary states that eh is used for "ascertaining the comprehension, continued interest, agreement, etc., of the persons or persons addressed. "

Ascertaining the comprehension?  In short, we are gauging your intelligence.  We're often disappointed. We then incorporate into this disappointment an opportunity to say we're sorry. 

We don't really mean it. 

We're just not that into you, eh?

Postal-saurus Rex.

For 83 cents Canada Post will send a letter almost anywhere over an area of 9,984,670 square kilometres.  It will most likely reach its destination in under a week.  An overwhelmingly fantastic achievement for any business, muling little pieces of paper, stuffed with other little pieces of paper to 15 million different addresses.

Apparently, the average letter is almost an ounce.  If there are sixteen ounces to a pound, Canada Post charges 13.28/pound to ship christmas cards and gas bills anywhere.

Apparently, the average weight of a Canadian adult male is 185 pounds, give-or-take.  'Give' in my case.  So by letter-mail it would cost upwards of $2456.80 to send a man by mail.  He would have to be made of paper.   And split equally into 2960 stuffed envelopes.

Granted, it's not cost-effective, but an alternative to this country's failing airline and train monopolies.  Slap a fistful of stamps on your kid, and she'll get to summer camp in about 4 days.  Grandma getting on your nerves? For two grand she'll be in New Brunswick before Christmas.

Paying to have your stuff delivered hither-thither has been around these parts for 250 years. Curiously, when Canada was still a colony under the rule of Mad King George II, our first postmaster was none other than the freemason, lightning-thief himself, Benjamin Franklin.  It would be another 100 years before Canada would cobble together our own unified system of stuff-delivery.

It would be another 70 years before women could vote.  Priorities, I suppose.

Today as I stare into pixels, getting my monitor-tan on, (pants optional), techno-minions are plotting ways to re-invent new systems of information and goods delivery.  Methods of payment magically programmed into ones-and-zeros.

I was born in the mid-seventies.  I am a sucker for the tactile. If the telephone rang it was pavlovian.  It would always be picked up, each call a mystery before lifting the receiver. A fingers-crossed, bated-breathed anticipation of a high-school sweethearts voice.  Perhaps the familiar "Is your mom or dad at home?" Nanna calling to wish you a Happy Birthday.

Nobody answers their phone anymore.   Similarly, no one writes letters.

Around the same time as my afternoon coffee has become cold and sad, I will usually hear that familiar crush of boots on snow and the distinctive metallic clang of my letterbox. Each time, I spring to the door (pants on) in the hopes some banter with my letter-carrier will improve my chances of a bountiful delivery.  Maybe a cheque.  A postcard.  Something I ordered on Ebay.

"Got something good for me today?", I'll ask, fishing my hand into the cold mailbox.  More often than not, what I remove is worse than finding nothing.

Flyers.  Goddamn flyers.  Cheap pizza offers.  The local rag.  Political mudslinging leaflets. Bank statements.  A small stack of underwhelming uselessness, begins to pile high on my desk. Things I've not solicited, ordered, asked for, or wanted.    There is so much of this advert-stuffage that if you don't sift through it, actual mail can be missed.

Could it be that Canada Post has become the right hand of the marketing industry and the mistress of the recycling plant?

Paperless society, my ass.

Sweetbreads

I gave ten years of my life to vegetarianism.

I had decided to try it on during a rather Caribbean chapter of my musical career. Rastafarian bandmates and their Ital (kosher) dietary restrictions intrigued me.  I was impressionable.  Branching out from mangia-cake cooking were my first tastes of Indian curries.  Arabic flavours.  Somehow this new sense of adventure led me to try meatlessness.

Within a year, I spiralled ignorantly from full-fledged flesh-eater to a grazing, bloated, lethargic, herbivorous idiot. Unmethodical in my diet, I simply removed animal protein from my life and within 12 months (and an eleventh-hour re-introduction of cheese) I was, for reasons unknown to me, a card-carrying veggie.  It was a long dull road. I was pale. I lied to myself about my exciting options when eating out.  During this time I volunteered for Amnesty International and campaigned briefly for Greenpeace. Coincidence?

A decade later I awoke from this tofu-stupor.  I could not remember why I began or how I arrived, but goddammit I was hungry.

The return to my once ominvoral state was not easy.   A trip to The Black Mountains and a daily diet of rare Welsh beef was a good start.  I coupled this beautiful, bloody rebirth with copious amounts of burgundy and beer.  After three weeks of unrelenting heartburn and hangovers, I defibrillated my appetite firmly back into the 15th century.

I now eat anything given to me.  If there is a bone to pick (pun intended), it is only in the naming of food.   

Tell it like it is.  

Give it to me straight. 

If I'm eating testicles, don't call them Rocky Mountain Oysters.  Domestic pets?  No problem, just give it a proper name and use lots of butter.  Budgie in béarnaise.  Lemon ferret.  Scientific names would suffice.  There is a Phodopus Sungorus lovingly wrapped in a shoebox in the backyard.  There was a ceremony.  It bit everyone, shat everywhere and if it hadn't been my daughter's pet it might have been delicious in a mushroom demi-glace.   

The Chilean Sea Bass was once the Patagonian Toothfish.   

'Sea Urchin' or 'Whore's Eggs'?   Both contenders in a sushi bar methinks. 

On a chalkboard menu in Toronto this weekend, tucked unassumingly between liver and bone marrow, I read "Sweetbreads". This collection of pancreatic miscellany and/or thymus succotash came with bread. Fourteen dollars.  Despite a tendency to gravitate towards the deliciously unpopular, hipsters will be hipsters. 

Etymologically speaking, the word sweetbreads is vague at best.  It's history is as ambiguous as a can of Spam.  How organ meats get such a deceiving nom-de-plume is beyond me.  It's possible that 'bread' might refer to old English's reference to meat.  Sure, one can assume without even tasting, that bits of a calf's throat are probably sweeter than its tail.  Still, foodies and hipsters alike embrace this misnomer for cow guts.

Culinary camouflage.  Cow patties, er bullshit, I say.

Offal, a more fitting alias for this collection of colourful innerds, sounds just like it looks.  Not a perfect onomatopoeia I admit, but organ meat has literally fallen 'off' the butchers block.  It just looks awful (earlobe tug) too, in its pale fleshy colour palettes. Whether strewn unceremoniously by road-kill or methodically removed by a French boucherie, it's not pretty.

Speaking of the French, they are painfully honest.

Ris de Veau.  Calf sweetbreads. A little more honest.

Foie De Gras.   Fatty Liver.  No getting around this one.

I'm not knocking organ meat.  Organs are the hardest working bits.  They operate 24-7.  Ask my liver.  Regular meat by comparison, the muscle tissue, nicely cellophaned in the grocery store was, in its previous incarnation, asleep for half of the time.  Right now in Japan's Hyogo prefecture, Kobe cows are being massaged by people into the most expensive, laziest beef on earth.

On the cellular level from barbe-a-queue it's all the same amino acids anyway.

Eat up.

Learn French.

Papaver Rhoeas.

In my mid-twenties I was a desk jockey.

Clerking in libraries, supporting a small family, I wore khaki pants and comfortable shoes. I had a dental plan. I shaved regularly.  I lived for casual Fridays.  The public bus was my faithful steed.

I sat in well-worn, pink leatherette seats, headphones in, eyes-closed, my head-bobbing listlessly during lightless winter mornings, stop after stop. The same coffee, idle conversation, routine ruled. Nine blurry hours later, I'd be enroute home, when November nights began at four. I'd read, have a nap, waking in a panic with just enough time to ring the bell for my stop.  

I was quietly going mad.

Around the same time of this clerical gulag, I watched Romero's "Night of the Living Dead".  There it was.  My new obsession, a distraction from the mundane. To me this film intimated that I wasn't crazy and my zombification was truly taking hold.  Within a year, I watched as many zombie films as possible. My growing collection of bathroom readers would be the source of friendly jabs. There would be a lot of eye-rolling if I made comparisons.

The zombie-genre would not be fully accepted into the mainstream for another decade, and I was all too happy to be in a small fringe circle of fanatics.  When living-dead-love did finally break into pop-culture, it exploded wide open, sinking its teeth firmly into the brains of Joe Public.  I was gutted.  It was as though my favourite indie-band had suddenly become popular overnight, its fans unappreciative to their 'true art'.   The market flooded with tacky swag.  A television series had now become water-cooler worthy.

Now that I had to share, I wondered if people would truly appreciate the genre as I did.  I'm not convinced.   You see, to the true aficionado, the source of the infection is inconsequential.   The comparisons to 9-5ers seemed obvious.  We are the living dead, slow moving moaners, limping in packs, brain-starved, riding on buses, punching time-cards and caffeinating to get through groundhog day.  Simple.

Survivors of the zombie apocalypse face another set of challenges.  Clearly, the first problem is avoiding the infected.  Not only do the survivors have to worry about getting bitten (becoming a zombie), but also being killed outright.  At the time, I aligned myself with them.

The real problem survivors face is each other.  Invariably, someone becomes power hungry and internal problems begin.  Romero in his brilliance and low-frequency captured the human condition.  Packaged in a kitschy film genre, it often goes unnoticed.  Are we a zombie?  If not, what kind of survivor do we want to be?

I'm beating a dead horse, over-stretching analogies.

I drove past a man in his 80's this morning. From the bus stop, and dressed in full military regalia he lifted his cane and gave me a smile.  I gave him a nod.

A nod?  Instantly sheepish, I kept driving, my plastic poppy was to be my only tribute today.

Patting my own back sometimes, this ignorant egoist, believes he's living a life of self-actualization, free from the living dead, the mundane.  As though I'm here on my own steam.

Idiotic.

Sixty years ago, there was a threat of a real zombie apocalypse.  That docile octogenarian in my neighbourhood?  He probably took a bullet for the right to have a clerks job, public transit, and all the other things I once ran from like the plague.   He takes the bus.

Would I have the guts to don the uniform and pick up a rifle today?  It's a moot point.  I'm too old to join so the decision is not mine to make.  How convenient for me. My daughter however is a mere five years away from being able to enlist. Frightening.

I should have got out of my damn car and said thank you properly.

Piggy.

In the 1963 film adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies there is a scene that always turns my stomach.

When I was thin, clean-shaven and in my third-year of uni, I read something about this film that disturbed me deeply.  It's so uncomfortable, that when my thirteen year old daughter agreed to watch it last night, we opted for the colourized 1990 version.  Thankfully the actors in the modern take remain fully clothed and I avoid elephants in rooms.

In the story, the marooned boys, having in a short time devolved into war-painted savages, swarm a wild sow and kill it mercilessly with spears they have fashioned from branches.  At this point in the story, the mob has begun to take hold of the island, its bloodlust growing.

This is not what bothers me.

In the black and white version of this film, while the boys were in a manic and frenzied stabby-krieg, something happened that changed everything.  When director yelled 'cut', the actors, most not more than twelve-years-old, did not stop attacking.  It's rumoured that the crew had to pull the boys off of the pig. 

These were paid actors, under lights. 

On set, life had imitated art.

Golding, whose novel used to be required reading in middle-schools everywhere seems more of a handbook of human behaviour. The mob can react to anything at anytime.  All we needs is to smell a little blood and presto, we're all on-board.


Ghomeshi-gate is in full-swing in Canada. The uncomfortable revelations and disgusting tidbits of his sexual penchants, his pro-feminist deceit of his on-air persona, and the quick and savage dismemberment of this once-popular infotainment host, seems to have obfuscated any discussion of real news. Why I'm aware of his misuse of stuffed-animals is a mystery.  He is a pariah to be sure, having been distanced from anyone to have ever aligned themselves with him. With this distance, his once-friends and associates are speaking loudly, conveniently getting a little press in the process.

A hippie printmaker has made a t-shirt with Ghomeshi's face and has written 'asshole' underneath.  This feckless opportunist claims to be donating the proceeds of these shirts to women's shelters, but his long, pale, myopic face belies the point.  He's in the spotlight, his business may be up a few percent this month and his popularity with the ladies may increase.

Step out of the way fool.  Part of the issue at hand is that a man, who touted women's rights, ultimately did so for the spotlight.

Ironies abound.

It's probably all true.  He's probably a degenerate. For the media to suggest that he's not actually being charged with anything would be highly unpopular.  Yes, it deserved some real estate in the newspaper but there are other things afoot.   Simply, his crucifixion overshadows the real issue of violence against women.  Are we raising boys who perpetuate the problem? Is the government funding shelters properly or should we rely on protein-deficient printmakers?  These questions are b-rolled in print. 

Tax-funded CF-18's are dropping five hundred pound bombs right now. Warmists are prophesying CO2 doomsday.  Russian tanks rolling into the Ukraine.  The 25th anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall, heavens-to-betsy.  There are more important things to discuss than some has-been musician, some self-aggrandized media mouthpiece with no actual star-quality.

Even if we were to focus on eliminating violence against women in this country, there seems to be a delineation between what women deserve the help.   The RCMP released information that over 1200 aboriginal women in Canada are missing and murdered.  What does that say?

Sadly it says, preferring to stick the pig, the herd has spoken.

CBC's most famous deceiver and pervert du-jour, remains at the top of the list if you google "news".

Until the next drop of blood.

Daylight Savings Lies.

I'm annoyed if I miss an episode of Coronation Street.

The show, despite my protests, is a soap-opera of sorts.  I am unashamed.  It airs daily here in Canada, historically at the dinner hour, so really not 'technically' a soap.

I am a fan.  As the woody clarinet leads into the gloriously outdated theme song, everything stops. Phone calls, meal preparations, help with homework, arguments, and general parenting cease to exist for thirty-minutes. Friends and family have come to accept that between the hours of six-thirty and seven the world as I know it takes place on a fictional street in Manchester.

Since its inception, and up until recently, viewers in Canada have been watching the show almost nine months behind the actual storyline broadcast in the UK.  Reasons unknown.  Sure, we could have cheated for decades, phoned British relatives for the scoop, or until recently, gone online and spoiled cliffhangers and plot-twists for ourselves.  Faithful Corrie fans are not like this. They do not shake Christmas presents before opening them. They stand patiently at the bus-stop, in winter coats, with bated, foolish anticipation.

Side note: Two of the show's stars ended up in a pub I was performing at last year in Ottawa.  A media tour presumably.  To the absolute bewilderment of my bandmates, I walked off stage mid-set, gave my instrument to a friend in the crowd and spent the rest of the evening as a spineless, giggling, super-fan.



The autumnal equinox has arrived.  The clocks have fallen back.  I have missed a few episodes now.




Saskatchewan, Canada's most quadrangled and over-looked province has little to boast about. Admittedly, this provincial parking-lot has a handful of famous defectors. Gordie Howe for the meatheads.  For the pinkos and bleeding-hearts, Joni Mitchell.  For the history buffs, Diefenbaker.

John George Diefenbaker was Canada's 13th Prime Minister.  Though born in Ontario,  Saskatchewanians claim him as their own.  In 1959 he built the "Diefenbunker", a secret, cold-war, post-apocalyptic underground man-cave, designed to house him and 534 of his besties in the event of a losing tussle with the Ruskies.  It was built to survive a near-miss nuclear attack.

A near-miss. Isn't that a hit?  Anyway, it's a museum now and a short drive from my house.

Factoids aside, Saskatchewan isn't much of a conversation piece.  If it does come up at a dinner-party, nothing much past the interminable prairie-drives and endless bitter-chill are discussed.

"It's the only place where you can lose your dog and watch it run away for 4 days".   Again, another quotation whose origins are hotly debated amongst the cyber-dorks, so for my own purposes, let's say it was Leslie Nielsen.  Nielsen was born in Canada's murder capital, Regina, SK., and promptly escaped.  If you ask me, Neilsen and the dog in the joke probably had the right idea.

Despite its innumerable short-comings, Saskatchewan lives in a reality not understood by the rest of Canada.  Correction: not 'a reality'.  Simply, reality.  It is under no illusions about its cartography. It's not a rhombus, leaning cooly to one side.  It's not a square (a sideways diamond, as Shreddies, in a stroke of cute advertising genius, attempted).

Nope.  It's a goddamned rectangle.

They accept it.

There's not much in Saskatchewan either.  It's also cold as hell in the winter.

As in space, so in time, Saskatchewan has decided not to live a lie.  Daylight Savings Time does not apply to them.  They have opted out of the farce and chosen to accept realities both spatial and in time.

If I may quote Einstein horribly:

"The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the sole of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength.  They are radical.  Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind union of the two will preserve an independent reality. "

I grant that this is a stretch. Shameful. I've gone too far. I've missed the point. I don't have a goddamned clue what I'm talking about.

What I do know is I live in a place that operates in the Daylight Savings 'Lie' (patent pending) 34 weeks a year.  Reality for most of Canada lives outside of actual Standard Time.   So do we make-believe our year away to get a little extra sunshine, a little extra sleep, stay open for business a little later?

All of this effort for a measly sixty minutes?  That's two episodes of Coronation Street.

Saskatchewan isn't having it.  They've gone unappreciated until today.  Rich in testicular fortitude. Mavericks in accepting the truth.


I have decided to let my iPhone tell me where and when I am.  There are apps.  They are usually a dollar.

Now, if you'll excuse me, Rob has just told his sister Carla that he pushed Tina, for whose death Peter has been framed, off the roof, at the same time his fiancée is having her bachelorette party, where most are getting smashed, and "truths", whether based in reality or not, will be revealed at 6:30pm, Eastern Standard Time.

Cue the clarinet.

Sausage and the Law.

"Those who love sausage and the law should watch neither being made."

Amongst cyber geeks there is some debate as to who coined this.  Twain?  Von Bismarck?  

It doesn't matter.  The nerds have united and are clogging the interweb with info-tedium, foolish discussion about virtually every useless subject that would get you slapped in public.  Undoubtedly, they intersperse their time between blog entries with an unhealthy amount of pornography.

I'm wading through it.  Their discussion about Twain, that is.

I'd like it to be him.  It's an uneducated guess.  His moustachioed, smart-arsery has always appealed to me.   I don't have a memory for jokes or anything past a one-liner, so he's easy to quote.  Perhaps it's because I don't really know much about Otto Von Bismarck.  He's got a moustache too. Will check what the nerds have to say about him later today.

Mark Twain befriended the Serb-American scientist and father of alternating current (AC), Nikola Tesla. The two men spent much time in his lab together.  One could speculate that watching any scientist work, no matter the results would be dreary.  Side note:  The nerds tell me that Tesla had toyed with the idea of a death-ray for military usage.   Surely sausage (or its contents) would be the result of such experimentation, no?  

But I digress.   Back to my ennui.

Often on evening flights home, when wrapped in a cozy blanket of cocktail-confidence, a Suit in the middle-seat will strike up a conversation with me.  Idle chitchat leads to what-do-you-do banter. When I tell him I'm a musician he will invariably say: "Wow, that must be an interesting life..."

"It's not that exciting." I robotically reply.    "Let me quote Twain.", and lifting a finger with a smug grin, I deliver his line, usually without the desired effect on my hapless public-servant.

Sausage and the law reminds me that pretty much everything, whether it be a packet of airplane pretzels, a swimming pool, or a music career, the process by which anything is made is incredibly boring.

I will only think of a swimming pool if I'm floating in it, the august heat, chlorinated red-eyes and all.   No thought given to the dirt, the backhoe, the pouring of concrete or filtration system and its installation.  Even writing that just now feels like a waste of time.

So, while my hooch/soda/ice ratio might be terrible, I'm happy to have it in my hand.  I'll be damned if I care how the plastic cup was made, how the vodka was distilled, "how DO they make ice on the plane?", or where it all goes when I visit the claustrophobic water-closet at thirty-thousand feet.

The television show, "How It's Made" may be the one exception to my argument.  Fast-paced editing, cheesy keyboard music, and narration by a trustworthy, middle-aged woman with perfect diction, somehow makes the process of watching everyday items being assembled seem mildly interesting.

I'm sure she drinks heavily after each taping.  Of course, if you're watching this program it's probably  three in the afternoon on a Tuesday and you're in a hotel in Connecticut. You are in your underwear, slowly becoming unhinged from boredom and an unending diet of chicken wraps and diet coke (because full sugar would be SO irresponsible but bloody satisfying). By the end of each episode I'm thankful that I'm not on a factory line somewhere making this stuff, watching the clock and grinding my teeth just gently enough that a low-grade headache won't push me over the edge to use my Tesla death ray.

I'm reminded that most stuff in my immediate reach will end up as landfill.

I'm reminded that everyone I know will unlikely be around in sixty years.

Bleak?   Maybe.

The fact that things just are, is plenty.

Stop thinking.

Enjoy.

Chineasy. Musings from a musical tour.

October 12, 2014

Fuzhou to Nanchang.

  

The high-speed train system in China is a surprising efficiency in an otherwise bumbling and once-ancient society.  Now they make things cheaper and faster than anyone, they get the last seat at a capitalist game of duck-duck-goose.   Rapid transit with holes for loos. Condo development beside rice patties.  Every man woman and child with a cellphone and a cigarette in each hand. 

Reaching speeds of 300km/hour in a matter of minutes, the train is incredibly quiet, the views spectacular and rural, and the modest amount of air conditioning (that seems to only increase when the train makes its many stops along each route), is keeping us cool. There is a restaurant caboose that send out carts on the half-hour with indistinguishable tv trays with small compartments of unidentifiables, but also serves beer and ice cream.  Everyone seems to have purchased ramen bowls at the station  All the way to China for goddamned pot-noodles.  Want hot water?  There’s a dispensary outside of the toilet on the train.  

Passengers here are not skilled in the art of personal space and quiet.  As we pull out from the station, handfuls of laptops and tablets emerge from designer bags and backpacks, blaring kids-shows, dramas and various other gameshow madness that all seem to commence at the same time.  All of these shows seem to incorporate the slide whistle on a regular basis.  I now believe the slide whistle was forged in hell.  Satanic fife.  

I am still in the throes of jetlag. A woman, a “country woman” I am later told by my Chinese bandmates, spends an hour yelling at the top of her lungs into her mobile. It is the afternoon. I am drunk on time-travel and one light beer.  My seat is being kicked.  

As we pull into Nanchang, the crush of people clamouring to get off comes as no surprise but irritates me all the same.  The queue is for suckers here.  It is the beginning of my public displays of annoyance. 

We are in town now. I get a sim card for my phone, and for a mere 24 dollars, have unlimited data and calling, China-wide.  I pull out my iPhone 6, which is an ironic novelty here in China.  It is both made here (mine delivered to Ottawa from Shanghai) advertised China-wide but is virtually out of reach for most Chinese pocketbooks.  It does give me a thin street cred to these tech junkies. 

Noodles. Beer. Hotel. Sleep. 

October 13

Flight from Nanchang to Nanning, Drive to Liuzhou

The south of China is a new frontier.  Nanning, once the rural playground and vacation spot for Hong Kongers has exploded into a massive place, and like all other cities in China, into smoggy skylines with a hundred cranes in every direction.     We board our own bus for the first time. If you are 5’2 and 100 pounds you will be in pure comfort.  Luckily we are but ten in a bus for fifty.  I slowly fade into the cheap leather. 

I see lights. Blurry lights becoming clearer. We are speeding uncontrollably and about to careen into the back of a transport trailer.  I’m yelling, panicking, “Whoa, whoa, whoa!!”  Noone is listening to me.  The driver looks annoyed in the rear view mirror.  In the backseat of our 20 seater coach bus, whether due to its poor suspension that has jostled me for hours, wrenching my neck, and in my still dreaming state, i am coming to, believing that we are about to crash. My bandmates shake me into reality.  Everyone on board is a little disturbed, me most of all.  This is to be the first of many intense stress dreams from which I wake groggy at four in the morning, sit on the edge of the bed, looking out over the jungle of concrete from my hotel window and begin to miss home. 

Liuzhou is full flash.  The downtown core is postered with billboards, videos, all neatly placed around the high-rise modern condos.   Everything is here.  The streets are heaving with nightlife.  Somehow we end up at our hotel restaurant and eat a meal made with the least amount of love I’ve had thusfar.   Enroute back to my room, a drunken party of people exit the elevator in a thick cloud of tobacco, laugh and stare.  It is only as the doors close do I realize they’ve pushed the button for every floor.  I’m in room 2603.  This will be a long tour. 

October 20 

SHANGHAI

There’s a reason the drains in Chinese hotel rooms are closed everyday. This is a practice I’ve witnessed all over this country.  It annoyed me at first, stepping into two inches of water in a shower,  but one soon begins to appreciate these small eccentricities. Each sad little domicile has it’s own way let the water out (all of which are completely unintuitive), but the closing of the the drain keeps out the bugs.  Bugs that have to survive in China are bugs I don’t want exploring while I mouthbreathe at 3am.  I’m guessing these insects are probably the only things in China that do not end up in cellophane as snack food. Ok, low blow.  But I digress. More than the bugs, the stoppage keeps out the smell.  It should come as no surprise that a walk down the finest Shanghai street will remind you of that close-talking co-worker, his hot sick rot breath buttonholing you at every intersection. This is a primordial smell of sewage that has no rival. 

Our show today started at 11:30.  It was outdoors.  It was a free public city lunch hour concert. I have come to China to perform in a sideshow review, following community centre dance-troupes in shiny silver pants.   We were presented an award made of glass, (overly polite speeches and dry applause) and we placed it at the front of the stage.   George, in a fit of bouzouki Jim Morrison incarnation accidentally kicks it over and it smashes to pieces.  Everyone looks in disbelief and tries to pretend it hasn’t happened. 

After our gig, we take a taxi ride to a microphone factory, (a decision I instantly regret once squeezed into the passenger seat with no seatbelt).  Microphones, while a part of my daily life, are surprisingly less interesting than I could have ever imagined.  I will never get those hours back, but I did get to see twenty-somethings soldering parts they will undoubtedly be seeing daily-  long into their life-expectancy. 

The driving here is, well, too easy to pick apart. Traffic laws are created by the bean-counters and are largely ignored. Here, anything goes and does. Lights, lines, parking spaces are mere suggestions. Tens of thousands of electric scooters (replete with two or three family members and groceries aboard) buzz about in their own dedicated lane, often veering out into the larger hive-lanes of insanity. 

I believe only a few bruised kneecaps and clipped elbows (or worse) would probably educate me quickly. 

Unlike other cities in China there is a big-city attitude in Shanghai and rightly so.  This makes me inwardly cackle at the gumption and bravado of your average New Yorker.  If Shanghai were to be suddenly uprooted and placed in New Jersey…..well then, by comparison, New York City would be a pale, sickly child that was bullied at school and ignored at home. New York is no longer the centre of the world.  Shanghai, much like Beijing and Chong Qin, is so big, that it’s delegated as it’s own state.  The United States should be afraid and not just because the Chinese own their debt.  There are beehives being strategically assembled here, the likes the world has never seen. While the quality of many things might be lacking, the size and volume are incomparable. 

More noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

October 25

Nantong.  Nanchang?  No, Nantong.  We are in Nantong.  It’s all getting a little confusing, as my give-a-shit meter dives past the “bout had it” mark.

Let me tell you a little something about truck-stop washrooms in China.  If ever there was a time to turn your brain and your senses off, it would be here.  If ever there was a place where hepatitis could reign supreme, it would be in these fetid shit-prisons. If there ever was a time for longing, say for some clean white porcelain in an empty house in the mid-afternoon, it would be now.  

The college-try on a road trip is probably my greatest travel tip. The opaque plastic drapes that serve as washroom entrances are undoubtedly catching bacteria like fly-tape. So, you enter as a child might, arms extended in a superman-like pose, holding breath, wincing, only to appear into a room full of urinating men smoking and eyeing you curiously.  Walk up to a urinal with the strut of an out-of-town cowboy.  In this piss-saloon there is only one rule.  Don’t slip. 

Thankfully, there is usually one disabled persons stall where, if you should find yourself in the cold-sweating pangs of intestinal distress you can find a western toilet (seat not a guarantee) and curl penitently to the gods of street-food (at whom the night before you so boldly shook a defiant fist).   Oh, and there aren’t many disabled folk to be seen, especially not at truck stops, so toilet-coup-guilt is assuaged. 

I have only once experienced the unfortunate situation where I was left with no other choice but to attempt the infamous squat. It was today.  I will spare the reader the details of this harrowing occurrence  where, having neither the balance or depth perception for the task at hand, my miserable failure resulted in a copper bracelet slipping off of my wrist onto the floor.  No problem, I thought. I can wash it, bleach it, disinfect by fire.  As I mused about how not to ever mention where my bracelet had been, and sweating from my previous acrobatic debaucle, I accidentally tapped it into the hole. Problem solved. 

Back on the bus, I take a deep breath and healthy dram of rice whiskey.  

Ragweed Bouquets.

A cool November Tuesday.   I can hide the evidence with enough camouflage until winter comes.

I launch five small pumpkins into the air.  One after the other, deformed from a week of late-october frost (ruining their once-fun designs), they take flight to their final resting place; my backyard garden.  Against the backdrop of a rotting maple-leafed lawn, each sad orange holiday gourd is lobbed, touching down amongst the dried marigolds and depressed brown-eyed-susans, crushing some, missing others.  They barely roll once after a very satisfying ground-thud.  The sound of fist-pounding one's chest.

As the third pumpkin takes flight, the glass candleholder inside, weightless, falls away in mid-air never to be seen again in the grass and leaves.  I will try and remember to kick around this area before mowing next spring.

Note to self:  Stop lying to self.

To my left, the Italian family who still hang laundry (in almost freezing weather), are inside.  To my right, lives the bachelor.   He mowed his front lawn yesterday in a toque and mittens, carefully dividing our shared frontage.  By comparison, my lawn looks shameful.  His, manicured.  Manicured.  Manic. Cured.  Yes, fitting word for him.

There is a secret pride I have in my disinterest on the topic of gardening.  A pure, unapologetic, indolent attitude towards greenery.

To this end, I am the pariah of this neighbourhood. The only renter.  Ergo, my interest in tending the foliage of my suburban abode dwindles with each passing year.  I have no "pride of ownership" because there is simply no need.

Let me explain.

Gardening in Canada has always struck me as futile. It is a pleasure only exercised for a brief season and is moreover a glorious waste of money.  The snow will invariably come and carpet millions of man-hours and hard earned cash.

If one is to make Sisyphean comparisons here, it should be noted that poor King Sisyphus had the good-fortune of rolling his boulder up a sunny Greek mountain.  In Hades mind you, but still Greece.  He did not require milkbags in his winter boots, (to avoid Ottawa Valley 'soakers') while shovelling the driveway, risking coronaries, launching hundreds of pounds of snow on his once-coddled, and very expensive lawn.

I will not fall for this zen-approach, building sand-castles for their own sake.  My weak Grecian analogy is about punishment, pointlessness.

Gardeners are racists.  Yes, I said it.  Maybe not 'racists' as it applies to the 'human' race, but most certainly to flora.   Would that make these people florists?   Of course, florists are incredibly selective.  Prejudiced even. Biological bigots.  There are no ragweed bouquets or goldenrod boutonnières.   No one loves the unibrowed middle-child it seems, frumpily pruned out of the family photo, or garden, for that matter.

Ragweed.  Awful name. It was robbed of its Latin handle, ambrosia artemisiifolia when it became a common allergen.  Admittedly, it is my autumnal allergic arch-nemesis.  Attempt that alliteration with 'rose' or 'tulip'!   This 'weed' will take down a full-grown man and put him on the couch in front of the television with a snack for hours.   Believe me.  I say that's a 'win' for ugly plants everywhere.

The dandelion?  Fully edible from stem to floret, requiring no pollination, ph-balance, pruning. Each flower is the exact dna replica of the parent plant.  Instant flower garden, zero effort.

Prickly plants on your lawn?  Bull Thistle.  Cirsium Vulgare.  Sounds pornographic, but keeps the dogs and kids away.

So where does this leave us?    Nowhere, dear reader.

Nowhere.  That's my point.  Winter is here.   We are at a horticultural impasse.

I'm convinced now more than ever Mr. McCartney is referring to landscaping when he so lazily states:

Live and let die.