Week 3: Everything is better when there are lobsters involved

Driving to Prince Edward Island and back in an old Corolla was a unique experience.  Why PEI?  I was actually repeating a 2001 trek to the island for a national scout camp.  My dad, brother and I delivered the Edmonton Journal through the coldest months of winter every day at 4AM to pay for the trip.  Two memories stand out when I think about PEI the first time, and they’re both painful:

1) Former potato fields are a stupid place to play tag.  There are holes and ridges in the dirt that are difficult to see and likely to cause injuries.  I haven’t been able to rotate my right foot since that afternoon ten years ago.  All I wanted was to avoid being tagged, and I got a torn ligament in my ankle instead.

2) I called the girl I had a crush on long distance from a payphone to tell her about it, and she wasn’t interested.

Despite these traumas to my ankle tendons and adolescent ego, I wanted to go back.  I can’t quite explain it.  Must have been something about being heartbroken and on crutches at the same time.  It created a lasting impression on my mind that beckoned me to those rust-hued shores.

I didn’t really understand at the time (nor do I now, I just have a bigger vocabulary than I did then), but I suppose that the little taste of laid back island life appealed even to my wild teenage self.  If you’ve never lived on an island, I’d like to describe it to you as relativity in action.  There’s something that you don’t hear about until you arrive called “Island Time,” which is the time zone, or continuum if you prefer, that allows an additional several minutes/hours/days to do anything depending on the nature of the task.  The pace is vastly more relaxed.  I found it very easy to adjust to the Charlottetown rhythms.

In August of ‘06, I packed a few belongings in the back of my car and drove across the country.  I had registered at the University of Prince Edward Island to study philosophy, and I was mighty excited about all of the Kerouac-tinged wisdom I was going to magically acquire by driving the Trans-Canada for 12 hours a day.  The trip felt like a sort of rite of passage.  Some of my friends back in Edmonton called it my “mission” on account of my Mormon upbringing, which at the time made me bristle with indignation.  Honestly, though, they weren’t far off.  I had been told since my early youth that when I came of age I would be expected to set off to some unexpected corner of the world, scriptures in hand, and preach the word to the unsaved.  I left off the preaching part, but that kind of conditioning is hard to escape.

I kept a daily log of my drive across Canada.  It consisted of my start and end times, total mileage, and a few notes on the activities and scenery of the day.  I still have it sitting in a box somewhere, but in summary, it went something like this:

Day 1: Flat.
Day 2: Still flat.
Day 3: Flat-ish, some trees.
Day 4: Rocks and trees on the left, lake on the right.
Day 5: Montreal drivers scare me.
Day 6: Quebec City is awesome.
Day 7: That’s one seriously long bridge.

If I had made the trip in a van, I might have elected to stay in it and make a proper go of hobo living.  Alas, my vehicle was inadequate for such a project.  My first apartment in Charlottetown was in a historic house on Upper Prince street.  Rent was $200 plus 25% of the utilities.  I survived on a weekly grocery budget of $25.  Only in the maritimes, folks.  It was small and smelled like cats, but it was only 20 minutes on foot to the UPEI campus and less than 10 minutes to downtown and the inner harbour walkway.  I spent a lot of time wandering down by the ocean.

While I was working on this blog entry, I went back to some notes and journal entries that I made during my year in Charlottetown.  When I talk to people about my time there, I tend to romanticize the experience because I loved the whole environment out there so much.  I was lonely, though.  Natalie was back in Edmonton and we were engaged.  Ultimately, it was much easier for me to head back to Edmonton than it was for her to uproot and move out to the east coast with me.

Before I drove back to Alberta, Natalie came to visit for a few days.  I not-so-secretly hoped that she would be enchanted with the place and decided to stay or come back after we got married.  We’re on Vancouver Island now; it’s closer to family in Alberta, and it’s a great place to be, but I’d love to go back east some day.

When I think about PEI now, the most vivid memory is a painful one again.  Damn these emotional experiences!  After my first school semester, I moved to a basement suite just a couple of blocks from my apartment on Upper Prince.  I shared the kitchen and living space with my awesome landlady, Jenn.  I remember giving her a big hug before throwing my backpack into the car and driving off towards the mainland.  I’ll never forget leaving the city behind and wondering if I’d ever see my friends there again.

My life in PEI taught me about humility.  I could never afford to party or eat out, but my small monthly income was enough to keep me warm, dry and fed.  I loved the east coast and its friendly, relaxed people and way of life.  Now that I’m back on Island Time, my project is to apply the template to my life once again, and to be humble, relaxed, peaceful and frugal.

Word count: 1,000. Whoo! Precision!

My apartment on Upper Prince street near downtown Charlottetown. Mine is the window on the second floor above the door.

The house on Orlebar street, also near downtown and a really cool African art and music boutique that I'll write about one of these days.

Week 2: Getting a move on

I’m the type of person who might occasionally be overheard delivering such cliches as: “I don’t regret anything I’ve done in life, regret is pointless!”  It’s the type of platitude you might expect from some bar stool philosopher who puts his arm around you and wisely intones that life is, like, all about moving forward, bro.  There’s something to old cliches, though... I think that admitting regret is like admitting that you’ve chosen to worry about, rather than learn from, a choice that you made.  Having said that, there are certain situations from my past that think about a great deal more than others.  I wonder how life might be different if I’d picked option B instead of A at some major juncture.  I say this because I don’t necessarily regret the course of events that I’m about to impart, but I’m certainly ready to acknowledge that they sprung from what was probably the worst decision of my life.

Once upon a time, I lived with Natalie in an entirely decent sort of a place.  My folks owned it and gave us a break on rent.  The kitchen was too small, but it came with a fitness room downstairs and in-suite laundry.  We really shouldn’t have complained one bit.  As is so often the case though, our capacity to spend increased and desire for more spacious housing soon followed.  I decided that the parent-owned condo that we lived in, despite our subsidized tenancy, was too small, in the wrong neighbourhood, and lacking in privacy and quiet.  Thus we set out to rent a house of our very own.  We dreamt of a cute, cozy little place where our little baby, to be born in the new home, could grow up in the sort of whimsical, carefree environment that parents must all envision.

Preparations for a move are an exercise in stress cultivation.  I’m going through it right now, and it never gets more pleasant.  The best laid plans of people with boxes often go awry.  We make lists, we budget time and money, we write dates on the calendar and declare that this will be the last move for at least  some indeterminate number of years.  We plan to settle, to save money, to enjoy life.  Moving has taught me a lot about chaos.  There are too many factors and possibilities in every situation, and no matter how well you’ve thought something through, there’s always something you didn’t consider.  The unforseen consequences of activities like signing year-long leases on short notice are the sort that teach you a lot about chaos.

When we found the character home (a term that has since become vulgar in our private lexicon), we were sold on its charm almost immediately.  We hastily signed a lease.  It was the last weekend of the month, and the landlord was particularly anxious to secure tenants before returning to his job in another city.  We trusted him to look after the deficiencies that were pointed out in our pre-move in inspection at a later date, since he seemed by all measures to be a decent and trustworthy human being.  Oops.

And then comes the learning.  We were victims of our own naivete, and of the arrogance that often accompanies a steady income and a seemingly reasonable set of life plans.  We should have checked it out better; we should have been less trusting; we shouldn’t have been so hasty to move when we weren’t even prepared to leave our other place.  But leave we did, and we paid for it the entire time that we lived in that god-forsaken house.

A chronicle of the problems that we endured while we lived there would be lengthy and tedious.  Suffice to say that the eventual flaw that broke the lease’s back was the discovery, by a telephone installer, that the electrical system in the house was extremely unsafe.  The sense of home and of security that never quite took root was crushed.  We realized that the person who had rented us this house did not have our safety or best interests at heart, and our rocky relationship with him was likewise ruined.  I’d never met somebody before who was two-faced like that.  It was this experience that taught me about people who are genuinely dishonest (how’s that for an oxymoron?)  But I can’t blame him for everything.  Again, our own naivete was a precursor to the problems long before they cascaded into a giant mess.  Well, now we know.

I wonder how much we can trust people.  I’ve become more cautious and more savvy about getting in to business and housing relationships since our catastrophic and painful experience back in Edmonton.  I almost feel that the loss of innocence from that experience isn’t a boon, though.  There’s something unpleasant about being suspicious of everyone else’s motives.  Honesty is absolutely the most important thing to me, and the idea that other people aren’t willing to deal with me on the same terms and with the same mutual respect and honesty is disheartening.  There’s still a lingering doubt in my mind every time I shake hands or put pen to paper, and I wish it wasn’t there.  We’re about to move for the third time since leaving that house, and we’re still dealing with unresolved legal conflicts related to the exodus.

But here we are in Victoria, getting on with our lives.  We’ve done the due diligence on the new place, and this time around, I feel that we can be confident about our decision to settle there.  It has the space and the location we need, and a dishwasher.  It’s owned by people who cared enough to point out the recent upgrades that they’ve made to the unit’s safety, environmental quality and structural integrity.  They have kids of their own, and seem to be the sort of people with a lot of empathy towards a young, inexperienced family.  We’re working on building a life here, and I sincerely hope that our housing situation will be a help rather than a hinderance moving forward.

Regret is a tricky thing.  Maybe I’m not even defining it correctly.  Maybe I do regret my mistakes... but how could I when they’ve led me to this amazing place?  Does that mean that they weren’t actually bad decisions, just ones with unintended outcomes?  But I still find myself wondering, what if?  What if I’d taken the path of least resistance?  How many times in the years to come will I find myself looking back on the decisions that seemed sensible to me now and thinking to myself, what if?


Word count: 1,102

Week 1: Like Glenn Miller, I'm getting into the swing of things

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about creativity.  Why do I feel compelled to do this?  Am I writing for myself?  For others?  Why bother sharing it with everybody on the internet?  It’s not as though I have anything particularly insightful or revolutionary to say.  I suppose that the whole rationale is to explore the question of creativity; the answer may not be forthcoming.

Writing is an interesting art form and this is a meaningless sentence.  Music comes in a myriad of genres, played by thousands of instruments.  Visual art is limited only by the availability of media, and can involve everything from charcoal to bodily fluids.  Maybe I’m looking at writing the wrong way, but it seems that it’s defined by a much more narrow scope.  A reductionist might suggest that a blog is, in its essence, no different than scratching lines into a clay tablet.  We’ve all agreed on an alphabet and some rules about spelling, grammar and sentence structure (except for the post-structuralists, but let’s face it, nobody wants to read that mess).  Unlike music, it’s not something that can be universally understood.  Yet here we are, producing and consuming written language, because we’ve all felt at some point that we can extract meaning and relevance and beauty and all sorts of other nonsense from it, despite the limitations of language.

I was once an English major at the U of A.  Writing was my entire life.  I was completely entangled in a paradigm of analysis, sentence structure, argument, persuasion.  I spent hours agonizing over sentences and paragraphs, reading and re-reading, revising and editing.  It was the most painful thing ever, but here I am working through it again.  Why?  Things did not go as planned the first time around.  Perhaps I’m doing this because I feel that with the benefit of hindsight and a bit more maturity and life experience, I’ll have more relevant things to say this time.  I will also have the benefit of greater freedom of expression, having no real constrains outside of my self-imposed one week timeline.

The point of this blog is to start writing again, and to make a commitment to creativity and catharsis - not just this occasional journal entry cop-out bullshit.  Once upon a time, I produced some writing that I was proud of.  It felt good to be creative.  Every time I put pen to paper, I discovered new ways of looking at life and new angles and elements of ideas that were already floating around in my brain.  Writing led me to fascinating places.  Sometimes hours would feel like minutes when I was deep into a writing session.  I would wake up from a trance, and find that I had somehow managed a dozen pages of text.  I miss that.

I’ve been working a job that I do not enjoy.  It’s mundane, repetitive, and the pay is low.  There is a payoff, though - I am not obligated to deal with customers at all, nor is it necessary to converse at length with any of my co-workers.  This leaves me ample time each day to listen to my iPod.  After numerous repeats of my favourite albums began to grow tiresome, I finally wised up to podcasts and it has changed my life.  No exaggeration.  I’ve been able to listen to fascinating lectures and interesting talk shows about science, philosophy, religious studies, comedy, and all sorts of other interesting topics.  The Joe Rogan Experience is a particular favourite, as I am a huge fan of his comedy.  The discussion is humourous, insightful, and always interesting, and it has encouraged me to think about life in ways that I had never considered before.


Which brings me to this new endeavor.  One thousands words per week, every week, no excuses.  Sometimes it’ll be essays.  Sometimes comedy or rants or poetry.  I’m working on putting together a stand-up comedy act, so I’m quite certain that writing diligently every week and probing for interesting topics will provide me with ample material for the stage.  I’m leaving it pretty open, just to see what happens as it rolls along.  My writing is nowhere near the level that I once attained, but I’d love to get back to that place and have the freedom with words that I once experienced.  I am writing because I intend to return to a different realm of possibility with words - a place where I can craft my thoughts into interesting, well-organized and aesthetically pleasing forms.

The first batch of writings is going to suck.  Sorry.  It’ll get better.  I don’t know if anybody has the patience to read 1000 words on the internet anymore, but here it is.  Maybe if this goes well, I’ll revise each week into a 3 minute YouTube clip for easier digestion.  I’ve been driven to do this because of a lack of creative output.  I feel like I’ve been taking in all kinds of sensory information, art, ideas... but I haven’t had a decent outlet for them in a long time.  It’s largely because I haven’t had the discipline to make it happen, but I’m working hard to change that.  The goal is 1000 words per week.  I’m going to keep doing it through school, holidays, the works.  There’s a million ideas floating around in my brain and there’s no lack of things to write about.  The consistency won’t be great.  Sometimes the topics will be interesting, other times they won’t.  Sometimes I’ll rant and rave and cuss (sorry, Mom) and other times, I’ll express my utter joy and delight and love for everything.  Sometimes I might even cast off the yoke of post-secondary English training and forgo proper punctuation, just for a gag (gag!).  Feel free, by the way, to point out the irony of the preceding sentence as you pick apart my inappropriate uses of commas, dashes and semi-colons throughout this document.

I’m a big believer in the payoff of work and dedication.  When I was younger, a lot of people told me that I was smart.  It wasn’t the best thing for me, though, because I got into the habit of thinking that because I was smart, I didn’t really need to apply myself in order to be successful.  It worked to a point, but now when I think about my accomplishments, all I can think of is how much better I could have done if I had really put in some hours.  I could have excelled.  I know now that having discipline and work ethic is many orders of magnitude higher on the importance scale when it comes to success and getting what you want  I guess that this blog is a way of getting in to the habit of being disciplined, rather than just being smart.  Maybe I’ll be able to successfully integrate the two from time to time and come up with something really stellar.  Stay tuned; when it happens, I’ll be as surprised as you are.

Word count:  1,167.