Week XXVI: Finita, la commedia

the winds of love are no false force,
nor fruitily boosted intuition.
remember being led toward a place that made you wild,
and the line that was completed when you arrived.

the winds of love were blowing past your lover,
and past you, and we were all going the same way in some way.

when the winds of love tickle your whiskers,
you should trust your whiskers and be blown.

-Ben Corno

The poem above was written by my friend, Ben. It was in response to my entry for Week XX, in which I doubted myself, my writing, my raison d'être, my corny romantic notions, etc. My whiskers are getting pretty long, and I'm able to detect those breezes with ever greater acuity. And right now, they're saying stop.

I'm done. I'm at at point where I don't write because I want to; I write because I have to. It's how I figure things out. When I don't write, I don't live, I don't resolve questions, I don't get things done. Writing, along with music, is my passion in life. It's what I crave and it's what I need. There's an invisible umbilical cord connecting my notebook to my brain. If I there's an idea floating around in my head, I can't sleep until I get it onto a page. This is what I should be doing with my life. And I am. Just not here anymore.

The writing that I don't publish on this blog each week is often lengthier and sometimes more interesting to me than what does go up. But I don't put it here because it's too something - too personal, too weird, too vulgar, whatever. I'm trying to consider the audience, (my mother reads this every week) and I've been walking a tightrope between alienating people and censoring myself, and it's been unnerving at times. I'm not very good at applying filters to my thoughts and ideas. What ends up online every week typically represents anywhere from 3 to 10 revisions after my first draft, which usually begins as a handwritten piece in my notebook, then evolves into something digital.

This post is my 46th entry in this blog. I have 54 unpublished drafts waiting in the queue. Over two years, I've written nearly 100,000 words for this project and while I have plenty of things left to say, I have nothing left to prove to myself. More than anything else, this blog was an exercise in self-discipline. It's something I've struggled with tremendously throughout my life. I wouldn't say that I've always been proud of the content I've generated, but I feel vindicated for sticking it out and putting something out every week. In the past 26 weeks, I published late twice. I've accomplished my goal, and it's time to move on and do something else.

This is going to be my last entry. In Week IX, I talked about having one good summer - one in which I set goals and meet them, enjoy life, share love, and show gratitude to the people who inspire and illuminate my life. My summer is coming to a close now. School looms large, work is very busy, and I'm tired. I would say that I've overextended myself, but it's been with things that I love to do, and I've not been inclined to give any of them up. In addition to my regular job, I've been volunteering, teaching guitar lessons, speaking at workshops, playing drums in two bands, and doing regular open mic nights both on guitar and spoken word with the poetry I've been writing. I've been growing a garden, going on adventures with my son, visiting friends and family near and abroad, and generally having a whirlwind of experiences. Now it's time to put the brakes on, slow down, unplug, and to consider the seeds I've planted (literally and figuratively) and tend the garden.

I'm feeling the pendulum swinging back. I've lived outwardly and openly, inviting new friends and new relationships, seeking new experiences, and just generally being out and engaged most of the time. Now I can feel a strong pull inwards, a need to take time to myself, to hide away for a while, to be calm and quiet, to meditate on what I've done and what I'd like to do in the coming weeks and months. I feel an ever greater desire to buck the trend of putting my life on the internet, which is ironic given that this entire entry has been all - look at me, I do stuff! Look at all this cool stuff I'm doing! Regardless, I get enough attention for my writing in real life and I don't feel compelled to put it up on this platform anymore. It's all about the words, man.

This feels a little bit like liner notes. Like I should be thanking my friends at the end of an album. Check out this stuff I wrote, couldn't have been made possible without all these people. I'm not going to name-drop anybody. If you've encouraged, commented, criticized, or otherwise engaged with me through this project, thank you. I'm going to leave this here as a digital artifact. It's a little time capsule of my thoughts for all the world to see. I'll look back some day and laugh at my silly ideas, as we all seem to do. I have a lot of ideas about where I want to take my writing and where I'd like to focus my energy, and this blog is no longer it. So let's not make a big thing of it, eh? Bye.


Word count: 925

Final project word count: 47,075

Week XXV: What We ought to do

Note: For the sake of clarity, this rant will make liberal use of "We" with the capital W firmly in place. It upsets me a bit to do this, because it smacks of motivational speaker-ese in which letters are capitalized at random in a cheap attempt to give more weight to the words they describe. See Stephen Pressfield's "The War of Art" for an extreme example of this. That guy might be the most pretentious writer in history. And without further ado...

/begin rant

There are a great many things that We ought to be doing. All of us. People. Humanity. Society as a whole. The collective big double-u We that encompasses a large, nondescript gang of humans. You know, Us. The eminently useful We that's trotted out during every conversation about changing the world. The type of We that miraculously holds everyone and no one accountable simultaneously. We ought to do something about that. We ought to X Y or Z for the sake of the Greater Good (see, there it goes again with the capital letters... feels like they're just implicit sometimes.)

We need to change a lot of things. If only We could stop the big oil companies and end corruption in the government and start sharing more and growing our own food, then move on to equal rights for everybody, education for women in Afghanistan, and a stop to all the wars. We would have a more perfect world. If only We thought the way that I do. I know what We need. See, society's moral compass is broken, people are doing the wrong thing and We need to change. We're going to bring about the downfall of society/earth/culture/economics/the environment/etc if We aren't more careful.

Here's where I would like to interject. We as a group are not representative of anything. The category of Us as presently constituted is not useful. I don't want those who read this to take away the idea that I'm disparaging group actions for the sake of social betterment. I'm entirely in favour of those sorts of things. I'm big on getting people together to address the rights and the wrongs. I go to the meetings. The issue I have is the flippancy and the frequency of We and Us and Our and other totally useless collective nouns being set out as targets for everyone's solution cannons. People just love to go scattershot on Us with their plans and ideas. It's far too common within the context of this discussion. There are plenty of assessments of the problems that We have with no followup in meaningful action or engagement. Look, I've "raised awareness." Well, job done then. We're gonna need to get our awareness a safety harness if it's raised any higher.

Example: We need to stop letting oil companies drill mile-deep wells in ecologically sensitive areas. You're right. Here's the problem - oil companies are extremely well funded, well organized, and We keep buying their products, so they have all the clout and they can hire all of the lobbyists. Those with the greatest financial stake in the outcome are the ones who dictate the policy. That's how government works most of the time. On the other hand, We are not well funded or well organized, and We aren't selling liquid gold, thus Our ability to stop the oil companies from doing their thing is limited. We ought to do something about this, you say. You're right. I still don't see Us dismantling our economic infrastructure for the sake of some dolphins, though. They don't buy cars, fuck 'em. We haven't reached the critical mass necessary to overturn these types of policies from the grassroots, and for as long as most of Us are comfortable enough with the machinations of society and economy as they stand, I don't expect that to change.

Again, I would really like to stress that my intent is not to be terribly cynical. It might read that way, and I might be found arguing in circles about where being cynical and being realistic start to differ. Regardless, I felt pressed (hence this rant, which will serve no greater social good) to address what I see as an often unacknowledged hypocrisy in this sort of thinking. There's no accountability or targeted, specific, purposeful calls to action. When We are all held collectively as the ones who need to do something about a problem, We all nod assent and go on with Our lives as usual. Nothing gets done.

I'm not trying to disparage people from getting together and standing up for what they feel is right. Quite the contrary, in fact. I am saying put down the sign and do something. I know that it's impossible to be completely engaged all the time and being a mouthpiece is necessary sometimes. Keep doing your thing, I'm not saying stop. I'm saying that to me, it's important to get away from thinking and talking about what We all ought to be doing, and start engaging with what You might be doing to further the cause, whatever it might be. I point to the obvious but useful example of sharing or liking something on Facebook. Look, I've shared this picture of a landscape with some nice words on it. My work here is done. Everyone is more enlightened. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Whether or not it's true that We should really be acting on all these suggestions is, to me, beside the point. I haven't heard a lot of success stories come out of the hippie socialist utopia talk that crops up a lot in activist circles. We should buy some land together, farm it, build some sustainable houses, get off the grid, and start getting back to The Way Things Were. But there is no Way Things Were, there's only the way things are now. Stop trying to hold sway with this illusion of enlightened regression. The idea that at some point We were all earth-sharing, peace-loving, getting-back-to-the-land sustainable harvesters in harmony with mother nature is silly. As soon as technology became available to harvest more while working less, even to the point where it turned around and started damaging the environment, that's exactly what We all did. Ronald Wright calls it a "progress trap." We got too good at extraction and too lazy or otherwise engaged to revert to the old ways, and now We all have iPhones. We're not going to go pull a plow 'cause fuck that nonsense. Because Angry Birds and Candy Crush, that's why. We'll get around to installing that bio-diesel conversion in the truck any day now.

I'm troubled by the level of engagement or lack thereof that I've seen partnered with this absurdly wide cast of the social net. When We all have a problem, it stops being up to any individual person to change their behaviour. I can't help it, I'm just one guy. This is Our problem, not mine. Or even worse, it's Their problem. They are wrecking the environment and corrupting our elected officials, whoever They are. Companies like Haliburton or BP or whoever the Great Satan of the Left happens to be that day make easy targets. Their CEOs might be evil offshore bank account-holding baby eaters, but those companies aren't their CEOs. They're full of regular people doing regular jobs to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Maybe We need to stop the evil companies, but maybe We need to change our economic models for the better first so that We aren't all dependent on the sticky, slippery trickle down of oil to lubricate the economic machine, plus We'll need to find something else for all of those HR managers and IT consultants and financial secretaries to do. The problem starts to get a lot bigger very quickly, and thus We become incapable of doing anything about it. Oh, well, We say.

I've heard too many prescriptions for Our social ills of late and I'm frustrated by it. How much time have you spent researching where the minerals came from to build that cell phone or laptop you just used to tweet that Dalai Lama quote? The moral high ground starts to look a little shaky when you realize that it's built on industrial slag heaps. Good thing those kids in the Congo mined all that tantalum for me so that I could serve humanity by liking that Facebook page today. They'll be happy to know that their work went a long way towards elevating the social consciousness by a notch or two. I'll Instagram them a picture and throw a Kony 2012 bumper sticker on for a real show of solidarity. We're all one people, united by technology.

How many times have you heard this phrase: "Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families." Well, a fat lot of good it did them. If thoughts and prayers did an ounce of good, the world's problems would be resolved in an instant. But unless your intended outcome was to "raise awareness," which you may have by this point gathered is something that drives me crazy for its laziness and utter superficiality and meaninglessness, your thoughts and prayers benefit exactly one person: you. They make you feel better about not doing anything. And don't think for a second that I'm counting myself out in that criticism, because I'm well aware that there are plenty of things I could be doing better but don't because I'm too lazy or too busy or I just can't be bothered to care that day. How much good do you think all this rambling is doing? Maybe raising a bit of awareness about how shitty and useless it is to raise awareness? The irony, she burns.

But here's the other point to be made - you and I and all of us individually can be useful and affect change and improve the world. There are a lot of things that We ought to be doing, but until you and I start exemplifying them in our daily behaviour rather than in passing thought or speech, or tweets and Facebook updates, We aren't going to pick up on them. Stop talking and liking and re-tweeting and start doing. Don't concern yourself with Us. Be accountable to yourself and hold yourself to a higher standard. Comfort and complacency are death, don't settle for them. Challenge yourself, educate yourself, ask questions and don't relent until you receive satisfactory answers. Call your friends out on their bullshit. Be an example. Show love by being honest with people. Get rid of the kid gloves and respect people enough to tell things to them straight. A round of doubles of 120 proof honesty for everybody would go a long way. Feel free to give me back a shot of my own. Start off by calling me a cantankerous asshole for even having the gall to write all of this, as though I had the right to tell everyone else what to do with their lives. Tell me I'm a raging hypocrite to get the dialogue going and we'll hash it out while we dig some potatoes. Put your damn phone down, let's go.

/end rant


Word count: 1,863

Week XXIV: Babel, Pt. 4 - Coda

Chaos formed in rings and waves
Darkness fell upon the slaves
Confounded voices dispersed their scattered words

Piercing cries from sharpened tongues
Impaled the letters drawn and hung
Shapeless marks in dust and falling tears

The tower and its stone protrusions
Stood firm against the dissolution
A sepulcher concealing remnant echoes

The sound crept through the cracking mortar
Shaking stones and sand immortal
Whispers lost in motes and darkened swirls

The coming night an inkwell black
A mask upon the bending backs
Of words now incomplete, no consolation

As textures writhing on the ground
Chaotic formless broken sound
Unified in loss and failing throats

Translation by the sweeping hand
Of God whose vicious curse of humans
Left creation trembling beneath

In moonless corners, dark slunk in
To sing a new temptation, sin
That it might mask the echo's older tongues

A serpentine curse from deep below
Soon found the cowering, fearful souls
In desperate leaps, they caught it in their mouths

A new refrain in harshest tones
Sang bitter in the trembling stones
Slanted and grotesque as crooked sculpture

The cursing pinched the tongues of many
A garish cry of enmity
A war of sound beheld in tower heights

The droning chant imbuing evil
Contended with residuals
The clamor shaking all the world's foundations

Harmonics fly, pitch and yaw
Reverberate throughout the halls
And all the ashen vessels hearken to them

Listen
The wailing of the rent and torn
Subsides as though a passing storm
The clouds from blackened chorus bringing rain

Dissonance, denying God
Accursed masses, lost facade
Failing mask of self-divinity

Yet deep within, a recognition
That they might of their own volition
Recapture what they once had held as true

The waves of sound within the tower
Cracked the stones as they grew louder
The greatest art began to buck and sway

The savage voice of blackened speech
Contended out of human reach
With all the harmonies left from their praise

And when it reached the tallest spire
The words made flesh could reach no higher
The stones could never touch the face of God

Blackest night gave way to red
Piercing flares and golden threat
Illuminating wasted words and breath

The contest in the tower fading
The vessels there below in waiting
Seeking shreds of hope amidst the ruin

The sun arose to light the day
Rebirth for words of ash and clay
A recollection of their genesis

Their gaze fell eastward to the light
And images of Eden's flight
Came flooding to the minds and hearts of all

The garden which from memory
Became a cage, illusory
Before the words were granted in deceit

The blinding march towards the sun
Seeking eternity, finding none
Babylon constructed there instead

The apple bleeding from their lips
As falling dew from tendrils drips
They sought to taste its nectar once again

For therein God had not foreseen
The essence of creative beings
Their hubris paid in tears and flesh and blood

That many tongues would tell the tale
The fallen tower to regale
With newer words and greater yarns to spin

A phalanx cut in cuneiform
The phoenix in the ash reborn
The words made flesh beheld their tongues anew

Melodious roots brought singing fruit
New generations followed suit
And harmony became the fireweeds

As God destroys, so it creates
The beauty of the language plays
In jest to One who thought to ruin all

In jealousy, divine in thought
The greatest art was culled for naught
For now their palate grew and multiplied

A thousand songs soon burst from one
With common language come undone
The mother tongue passed down onto the child

The poets came to paint their flourish
Downtrodden souls from which to nourish
Discovering their letters yet again

The word was God, begun again
Beginning brought of violent end
The beauty now of many yet as one

For flesh in ash and dust composed
Though fallen in its verse and prose
May seek the new divine from many paths

Behold the words made manifest
The wrong of pride is soon redressed
In humble speech and laughter for their folly

They cast up to eternal scribes
A reverence from deep inside
And fill the book with many new translations

Though memories begin to dim
Of knowledge bought with carnal sin
The fruit brought forth an orchard in its stead

May all who come to recollect
Behold the spire and genuflect
For all was lost, eternity to gain

Week XXIII: Babel, Pt. 3 - The Tower

Behold and admire the ascendant spiral
Its apses refuse elemental decay
The buffeting winds whistle sweet from the spire
A song of delight in hearts of clay

The ritual held in hubristic design
Its sacred geometry traced in the earth
Beset by the glory of untethered minds
Expanding in measures as merits of worth

The scribes of the book of life noted the plans
That records eternal of human misdeeds
Be weighted against all the mortar and sand
Constituent blocks of heretical creeds

They thought not to sacrifice well to the Gods
Assuming the mantle, denying the source
The slaves of the word ignorant of their bonds
Played masters and fools in proverbial farce

The builders united, their language as one
Their tower still climbing, erect in the sky
Its foundation thought to be never undone
Forgetting the dust and the ashes inside

The God in the word and the word in the flesh
The vessel imperfect, its content divine
The great incongruity, ignorant, blessed
Prescribing the tongue and distorting the mind

A gilded processional purchased the gaze
The letters incarnate, the eyes and the wise
As forbears of Sisyphus carried the stones
And bid the apocryphal prophets arise

And all there were gathered to hear of the word
Creation's custodians circled the square
The carrion majesties screamed to be heard
As the sun became black as a sackcloth of hair

The words fell upon them as arrows and darts
Divine retribution confounded their speech
The wheat and the chaff were torn apart
Their dissonant tongues now beyond common reach

The scribes at the veil slowly lifted the cloth
They gazed on the words and the discord they made
Indignant and jealous as God in his wroth
Despised his creations in flesh and in name

Woe to the vessels who mourn for the loss
The tower, the tongue, the letters confused
Consumed by their misery, bearing the cross
They fell down in Babylon
Useless

Week XXII: Babel, Pt. 2 - Made Flesh

Stepping into rising sun
And burning in the face of God
They held their course and ventured forth
To spread the word upon the earth

Behold the light and plant a seed
A lineage from which to spring
With hands like dust of pages swept
To lift the branches from the dirt

Cast your gaze and see the makers
Bursting forth as blossoms follow fire
The echo of creation's voice
A choir awakened, breathing

The words made flesh with shaking steps

Obeyed the mouths of animates

And rolled about the palates, lips

Suffusing symbols with consonance

Infused with blood and welling up
With tears borne of a fallen soul
The words found characters inside
And wept for ink to please the scribes

The writers of the book of life
Beheld the words beyond the veil
Beyond the reach of muting hands
Their incantations rose aloft

And so above, as below
The book was blackened with their speech
The stain eternal, carnal sin
They carried in their mouths

Accepting stress and accents
Indelible marks upon their flesh
That they might be remarkable
For swallowing their flight from God

As grapes fermented, words were pressed
A nobler nectar to impart
The flavour of its art, its timbre
Their lips caressing every letter

Each one fruit upon their tongues
Succulent resonant lingual bliss
Their voices bringing forth new life
Labial instruments giving birth

Come hearken to the maiden voices
First to carry forth a song
To cast a seal in living wax
And repossess creation's mantle

Tilling blood into the soil

The words bore fruit and multiplied
That though to dust they would return
The reaper would refuse their urn

Behold the words, transcend the flesh
Enmeshed within divinity
And transience, a melody
The chorus swelling from the ground

In generations, pure in thought
And practiced in the art they knew
Began to unify the minds
Of all who sang and praised the word

The time has come to build anew
A beacon to the word within
The power held in chanting voices
Edifice to language blessed

Though mortal vessels, anagrams
Of life and death in human clay
They sought to take upon themselves
The power that the words command

With toiling hands and tongues to guide
The greatest arts they now possessed
The skyward spire began its climb
The cornerstone their words inscribed

Week XXI: Babel, Pt. 1 - The Fall

In the beginning was the word
The word was God the power within
From naught to draw the wind, the seed
To cast upon a fallowed field

The darkness, silent muted strings
Beyond the breath in chaos formed
Unmoved as yet by careful bidding
Without the cast of the word

The night and day were there divided,
Dark retreating in blackened streams
The shadows cast as effigies
For truth to burn in pits of flame

The word was God immutable
The dark defiant to the last
To name creation into being
Then cry for its unmaking

Behold the dusk's collision
The event horizon on the earth
Turning valleys into ink wells
And mountains into clouds

And lo, creation's breath arises
Sculpted clay of dust and ash
The greatest art, the word complete
But knowing not itself

And from the word sprang forth a tree
The fruit as red as a harlot's lips
The provenance of understanding
The mind, the meat, the carnal self

O that ignorance was bliss
The soul kiss of a lover's lips
The song from which, long since forgotten
Would calm the storm in mind

But the lustre of forbidden fruit
A beacon to the words of clay
Held forth as God in memory
And beckoned unto them

And with one bite the word complete
Flowed red like blood now coursing through
The veins like strings, a plucked lament
For Eden and the face of God

A mark in clay, the agony
Of choice laid bare upon their flesh
The knowledge they in trespass gained
Capitulating to the word

Come crashing from a higher plane
Come Raphael, the fruit it seems
To cut away the silver cord
And drive the lovers from the sun

Eastward from the garden then
The cherubim with swords of flame
Came forth to guard the tree within
And point towards the dawn

The bleeding breach of morning sun
Came forth to light the day of death
The fall from grace, the God unmet
The dawn of humankind

Week XX: Roughing it

I've spent the past few days at a place with no internet connection. I didn't bring a laptop, and I avoided the TV until tonight - GO BRUINS! But such is my dedication to this blog that I've poached my brother's computer and a painfully slow connection to bring yet another thousand words into being.

I have nothing in particular to write about this week. Let's call it a stream-of-consciousness piece. Haven't done one of those in a while. It's a rather dressed-up sort of a way to say that I'm about to spew a bunch of bullshit. Get out now while there's still time.

This was another week that I was really tempted to post "on vacation" and leave it at that. I took a picture of my son with his little fishing rod, sitting at the end of the dock. I'd thought that I might post that up and leave it with the caption "sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words." Clever, no? And yet once again, the twinge of my writer conscience compelled me to sit down and write, even though no thought of a topic was extant.

I'm on a roll. With this entry, I'll have matched my first round on this blog with 20 entries. I've done better this time, though. Last time around, I frequently posted late, and I missed a couple of weeks. With this, I'll have published by my deadline every week for 20 weeks. I'm gonna allow myself a bit of self-congratulation, even though I'm coming into my 20th post absent much in the way of style, substance, content... I'm just going through the motions and fulfilling my obligation. Like my friend Scott Cook says about touring with his band - it's a lot like working blue collar, a whole lot of gettin' 'er done.

As I type this, I'm watching the sun set behind the mountains surrounding Shuswap Lake. It's been a wonderful break from reality. I'm staying in a place that I'd hesitate to call a cabin - it's more of a house that's much fancier than any place I've ever lived. I've been out exploring on the beach and along the forest trails with my boy, reading good books, ignoring my phone, and playing guitar on the beach. Couldn't ask for a better place to sit and reflect and be truly grateful for all of the love and good opportunities in my life.

I was thinking a little bit about what I wrote last week - ending off my missive with that bit about my words being carried on the winds of love or something to that effect. I almost deleted it, it seemed too hippie, even for me. I realize that I'm constantly running the risk of pigeonholing myself by my attire, diet, frequent acoustic guitar playing and large beard, and I don't know that I need those sorts of phrases following me around. This was a case of feeling that I need to get out of my own way every once in a while and just let what comes out stand on its own. It's a rather nihilistic project to suppose that people want to read what I have to say anyways, so it's not like I'll have any means of veiling myself from criticism.

This blog began as a promise to a writers group that I joined about 6 months ago. There was threat of physical punishment if I failed to make good on my promise to deliver a thousand words by our next meeting. We've been too scattered to meet the past couple of months, and I miss the encouragement. Sometimes I coast and don't work very hard on my posts. Like this week - just banging out a few words to hit the count and the deadline. Next week we'll be meeting for the first time in a good while, and I'm going to renew my commitment to working harder on my writing and producing better content. 

I'm barging into people's Facebook lives every Sunday with entreaties to read what I've written. Is it arrogant to presume that anybody would actually be interested in taking valuable minutes out of their lives to read something like this? I'm in frequent conflict with myself about this blog. To write and ask of others to read or listen is unquestionably an act of vanity. There are other facets as well, but there is undoubtedly an element of self-aggrandizement. I like to hear that people enjoy reading my work, but I don't respond well to simple compliments. I think that they ought to be commensurate with the work that was put into the piece. I think that I said something similar a few weeks ago when I nearly missed my deadline.

It's a game of statistics. Write a thousand words every week for a whole bunch of weeks and they'll start to bell-curve. There'll be a few outliers, like Week XII, which I think is my best piece of writing to date, then there'll be works like this one that don't amount to much, then a bunch of decent pieces to fill up the middle. But I don't want to write just filler. I want to be an excellent writer. That's what I'm aiming for, and I need to put in more time if I want to make good on that goal. Maybe I just need to add the threat of physical punishment back into the mix - write something awesome, or we'll beat you senseless!


Word count: 914

Week IXX: I am but one man

I don't often sit and read full articles from the world news section. I'll skim the headlines once in a while. I spend a lot less time reading about American politics than I used to because I've more or less figured it out. They're unbelievably corrupt. This tells me much of what I need to know to understand what's happening. Perhaps that's an incredibly ignorant viewpoint. Like missing the forest for the tress, but in reverse.

The news is upsetting. I read about the civil war in Libya today. Apparently Russia is still selling weapons to the Assad regime. As with every war, the real losers are the innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. It's a humanitarian crisis, the tragedy and scale of which is unfathomable to me, to you, and to anyone else who's never lived in a war zone.

War is too big and I'm too small. I can't influence the actions of governments halfway around the world. I can't help those people. I'll continue to make my small donations to a couple of organizations that I believe in each month. It'll never be enough. Enter one of my favourite turns of phrase from the many protests I've attended and the many volunteer organizations I've joined: think globally, act locally. Easy.

Consider an issue in which the Canadian government is presently invested. Education for women and girls in Afghanistan, for instance. Now follow the (simplified) chain: international humanitarian issue - Canadian diplomatic envoy - local governments and public policy navigation - Canadian embassy - Minister of Foreign Affairs (the Honourable John Baird, Conservative) - office of the Minister - underpaid intern staffer charged with Education in Afghanistan portfolio - you get the point. I'm a lot of steps removed from something that I'd like to see changed, but don't have the wherewithal to influence.

Things like women's rights in countries where religious extremists control public policy aren't prone to rapid improvement. Consider, though, that one might still be an influence for good in this complicated arena while acting on a very local scale. Follow the simplified chain in reverse - attend a supper hosted by the International Women's Catering society - eat some delicious curries - listen to a talk about the group who'll fly to Afghanistan with books and school building supplies paid for by the proceeds from dinner - eat more curry.

It's tempting at this point to run off on a tangent about how leaving the government out of it simplifies the hell out of the chain. That's a topic for another time. I'm just rambling here. Perhaps I'm getting my point across that a small local act can indeed have a profound effect on the world. I eat the samosas from the International Women's Catering society most Saturdays at the market. I like to think that I've really made a difference.

Today I participated in Victoria's first annual SlutWalk. It was organized by friends, and I'm grateful and inspired by their dedication in making the event such a tremendous success. I heard some excellent speakers and some truly humbling and heartbreaking stories from men, women, and trans people about their experiences as victims of rape and sexual violence.

Many of the speakers today addressed the issue that I brought up earlier - the rights and lack thereof for women and girls in many other countries around the world. The prevalence of rape and abuse in many parts of the world is sickening and staggering. Over and over it was stressed that we need to stop the violence and I agree wholeheartedly, but unfortunately a crowd of 300 waving signs and chanting slogans will have little effect on the Taliban's decision making process.

Fortunately, our sign-waving and slogan-chanting can have an immediate effect on people here in Victoria. Perhaps as a consequence of our collective efforts, more women will feel confident in coming forward and naming their abusers. Maybe a few men will remember the admonitions from the speakers today and look to how they might behave differently when interacting with women in social or sexual situations.

I have not been a victim of abuse. I grew up in a good home and I was fortunate to be raised by a good man who taught me that respect for women and girls was paramount. I can't undo the poor example that's set for my local brethren by other parents/relatives/friends/media outlets/whoever else. What I can do is speak out about what's right, and try to set the best example that I can for my friends, my relatives, and my son.

My number one goal in life to be a good father. I want to raise a child who makes the world better by his presence in it. I suppose that's a common goal for most parents. My son is not yet four years old, and I can already see my influence on his behaviour beginning to wane as he explores his own mind, his emotions, his ways of interacting with the world. I can't force him to be a good person. I can do my best to set a good example and hope that it sticks. When I think of the world I'd like to leave for him, it most certainly features men who are self-assured, forthcoming, responsible, communicative, and respectful towards the women in their lives.

It's difficult to find good role models as a man in today's world. They're not readily available. A lot of attention to this issue tends to focus on the unfair and damaging portrayal of women in popular culture. While this is unquestionably an important topic and well worth addressing, it's a lot less common to hear about the lack of influential men in pop culture and how that lack might cause some confusion among the ranks of adolescent boys.

I'm not well versed in pop culture, and I would struggle to provide many examples of popular male role models, good or bad. I suppose that I'm assuming things based on my impression of what's taught to be acceptable behaviour. It's especially galling to me that a pervasive and accepted model of interaction between men and women is essentially a game of predator/prey. But men are not predators, and women are not prey. I abhor the notion that sex is a pursuit of capture and conquest, and that gaining consent is like a war of attrition where women are taught to fend off the relentless advance of men who seem to have little respect for stated boundaries. The whole of the characterization needs to be thrown out for the sake of new language and new understanding.

I worry about the messages that my son will be exposed to when he starts to seek out media on his own. I hope that I can equip him with the tools to think about them critically and skeptically. I'm a bit far on to be changing courses towards international diplomacy, but maybe he'll take up a banner and a cause and get to changing the world. Or maybe he'll do what he can to make his neighbourhood and his community better. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm doing my best to raise my child in the company of people who will teach him about respect, justice, honesty, consent, and a genuine and enduring love for the people who he meets.

It feels like hubris to say that I can change the world, but on the other hand, it feels like resignation to say that I can't. I feel like I'd get about equal weight on both sides of that argument. Of course you can change the world, get out there and do it! Or, like David Bowie says, planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do. Maybe my local actions will ripple out internationally some day. I'll probably never know either way. As far as I can tell, that lack of knowledge is perhaps the most important element.

I'll never know how far my actions and words will reach. It's not my privilege in life to know. Their course is their own, and I cannot dictate it. I'll never know how many lives will be touched by the things that I choose to put out into the world. All the more reason to ensure whether for the community association meeting, the protest, the lesson, or just the chat with my neighbours, that my words and actions come from a desire to see them carried on the winds of love, honesty, and good intentions.

Word count: 1,408

Week ƢƥƧ: Relapsing in the 6th world

They swore they'd swear upon throwns and jouls I was barking mad if I ever tolled the tail. That the price would be the gratest pane, that my very life should be forfeit should I brake the silence of their story. That they wood most assuredly remove my head and put it upon a pike. Eye've knot yet scene a fish of sufficient size. Thus I press on as applique hoping the holes in my looming yarn might befit a shuttle. Here proceeds the tail of the Fools who did once command the thrown, but were duelly deposed.

Twas the heaviest year of hour Lourd, and the reign water flooded cobblestone streets, storming the keeps as aye may halve in my younger daze. All the Fools were golled, embossed as promoted men in pyrite. Their florid faces watched us minute by minute from towers and banners, darkening as their dopplegangers slowly dyed, as Patina dusted their visages with soot from the mine which swept them like chimneys each mourning.

We prostrated ourselves beneath their iron gays, cursing allowed and greaving, that their holey legs may be braced against the midnight cadjunkling of shins on low-slung furnishings in their ornately appointed hauls and rheums. Our own ankles brews the more purpling for want of the greaves of our making. Such was the injustice of the Fools.

Then came the day that Shens Blintz the Greaver peed at knight. And upon his return, his tibia made fast the gap between its protuberances and the rude footstool in his hows. And it was in this moment, as his whales were carried fourth upon the wind, that he took up his maul and swore a sacred packed that the sweat of his brow and the lay boar of his hands would never again protect the ossifications of the Fools.

Twas then that Blintz carried out what would come to be gnome as The Grate Greaving. For he left his hows right that moment and betowned the door at the blacksmith where he did greave by day. There did he wheeled his maul and bring it to bare upon the hilt of the anvil! And the spangtingulation caused all who whirr thayer to cassed their ayes upon him. And he gathered a pear of greaves from the bench and equipped his own shins, and all were agape four they had never dared to ware the greaves of the Fools. And with rage in his ayes and pain in his shins, he there stood and cried out, that all who greaved with him day and knight might here his oratorio. And he spoke thusly, in temorious tones:

I shall greave my Lords no moor! Four bye day eye greave for the Fools, and bye knight likewise for the bones of my legs, four yew and eye are swot of pane! Such grate and terrible pane! Our legs are brewsed upon hour footstools and our tables and our beds! No moor shall the iron gays of the Fools in their banners and busts caws me to maul the steal that they might traverse their floors uncandled buy knight! The thyme is nigh for revolt and the season of grate change is upon us! We shall brews the shins of our oppressors!

And the greavers proclaimed him grate and my tea! And they took up their mauls and pax, and upon their own legs did they greave until awl were justly equipped. And they took wrest for cake. Then a caul went up among them and they dawned their hoods and marched upon the Fools. The time for greaving was nigh, the wreck owning close at hand. They marched up the rowed, all begreaven and clanking, and their numbers did swell as they traversed the town square and turned up the hill towards the howses of the Fools.

Twas a quarter passed don, all the Fools still abed, all the Fools still asnooze as the greavers were led by the newly benighted Sir Blintz, who knelt before the blacksmiths at the Fountain of Foolainia and was there brewsed by their mauls upon the head. And when he regained consciousness, they bid him arise! Their words whirr prowed and terce as the hour of prayer - Arise, Sir Blintz! And carry us into an unsplinted future!

The Fools in their beds, their galipot burned lo and smoldering, awoke to the cantankerous clambering commotion of the critical collection of captious, choleric company chips, clanging and crying curdling charges! Change! Commutation! A cabal of churlish citizens champing to complete the coup and correct centuries of corruption!

The Fools did espy awl the smiths in their greaves, and whirr soar afraid. They bolted from their beds, bashing themselves on posts and pots and stools and sots, seeking to flea before Sir Blintz and his greaven hoard. But alas, twas no use, too little and too late, four the Fools had groan fat. The speedy, greaven shins of Blintz and his men made short work of the shorings about the Fools palace, and the doors were kicked down!

Taste our tibias! Suffer of our shins! Such whirr the cries about the palace as the irate, iron-clad chattel burst through the burros of the Fools and booted them from their rheums. And in little thyme a tall, the lassed of the Fools had quailed and the footstools and coffee tables all about them were kicked into kindling. And in their screaming decampment, the Fools could be herred to say that Sir Blintz would besotted and fowned gill tea of hie tree son!

But their cries were awl four naught, and their whirreds as gangue, and they did flea as dusted motes. Sir Blintz was made to rain over the lands and nourish the folk that they might greave in peas until the enned of their daze. And here concludes our tail.


Whirred count:  : ҉҉҉҉

Week XVII: Evisceration plague

This blog is meant to be played LOUD!!

How do I circumscribe order upon chaos? What word, what description can I use to encapsulate madness? The very act of committing it to a page creates organization where there was none, orderliness where entropy reigned. In fact, I think that's what I'll call my forthcoming imaginary tech-death metal album - No Order Where Entropy Reigns. Has a good ring to it. It sounds like a song that Archspire might play...

Best segue ever. This past Tuesday, I saw the Decibel Magazine Tour lay waste to the occupants of the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver. The aforementioned Archspire opened the show with an epileptic fit of jaw-dropping technical death metal. West coast metal, represent! The band recently signed with the auspicious French label Season of Mist, who will release their forthcoming full-length album. They executed their tunes with stunning precision and were such fun to watch. See their guitarist, Dean Lamb, play through "Rapid Elemental Dissolve" below. Sample lyrics: These things planted seeds inside of me nocturnally/Breeding an alliance to defeat the Ghosts of Silent Tongue. Esoteric!

I'd never seen a show at the Commodore, but I had high expectations. Most death metal performances I attend take place in dingy bars with inadequate PA systems and less capable sound engineers. Imagine my delight (expressed through headbanging, roaring, and raised fists) to hear every note, every snare hit, every screaming lead with clarity. A good start to an evening of muscle pain and permanent hearing damage.

Next up was Beyond Creation from Quebec, a band I hadn't been terribly excited about on record but that I was definitely interested in seeing live. They had some guitar feedback issues during their performance, but it was otherwise a visually and technically impressive feat of extremely heavy music. In doing a bit of research prior to the show, I discovered their drummer Philippe Boucher also plays for Quebecois metallists Chthe'ilist. I recommend listening to their demo on a moonless night in the middle of the forest. They walked off the stage to a resounding cheer of appreciation from the crowd.

Then came the heavyweights. The room was filling up - an amazing turnout for a Tuesday night - and the testosterone-fueled energy was spilling across the floor along with the beer and sweat. Long hair and beards and all-black t-shirts with illegible band logos splattered across gory imagery twisted and writhed in front of the stage. Bodies collided and drinks splashed. The mosh pit grew tremendously as Immolation took the stage. This was a night to hail the old guards of metal. Immolation have been playing together for 25 years and have released some all-time classic death metal albums. They still perform with passion and raging zeal for heavy music, and the crowd ate it up. "Do you want something faster?!" Yes, we did. Their 2010 record 'Majesty and Decay' remains high on the list of my favourite straight-ahead death metal albums.

Immolation started the fire, then Napalm Death blew everything up. I saw Napalm Death play Victoria last year, and I knew I was going to love it. But I was unprepared for what was about to happen. By this point the room was at full capacity and the fuse was lit and burning. I direct your attention to my introductory paragraph - here's where it really applies. I'm at a loss for how to convey the insanity that took place when they attacked the stage. Concert reviews are a challenge, and this is an instance where you really just had to be there. The experience was incredible.

Napalm Death are unparalleled. Hailing from Birmingham, England, they're one of the pioneering bands in grindcore, and they've been doing it for as long as I've been alive. By the wealth of their recording and touring experience, they've become absolute masters. Their performance grabs you by the throat with shocking violence and throttles you with unrelenting ferocity before dropping your defeated body on the floor. I had an inkling of what was coming based on my previous concert experience, but it was nothing like this.

The energy in the room could have launched a missile. The band blasted through their back catalogue, playing hit after hit after hit, and the crowd was loving every bone crushing second. I could feel them feeding off the audience response, cranking the intensity, and feeding it right back to us. Screams of NAPALM! NAPALM! NAPALM! shook the hall. I've seen a lot of metal concerts, but this might have been the best live performance I've witnessed in my life. Barney Greenway is without a doubt one of the all-time greatest frontmen in metal. The whole set I felt like I was being blasted in the face with a music cannon. Try to get some sense of what that was like by watching a few minutes of their set from Hellfest last year. Skip to the 10 minute mark for a quick taste. Absolute chaos.

And I barely had time to catch my breath before the splatter and gore started flying from the stage. Here's something I learned this week - human bodies are not designed to take in 5 extreme metal bands in one evening. Somehow, though, I willed my exhausted carcass to the front of the stage to bask in the blood-soaked aural massacre that is Cannibal Corpse.

My ears hurt and my neck and back hurt and my throat hurt, but I wouldn't have missed it for anything. I've seen Archspire and Napalm Death play before. Cannibal Corpse was among the last on my list of great heavy metal bands that I've yet to see live. I've been a massive fan for years. They're my absolute favourite death metal band on earth. And I stood 10 feet from their bassist, Alex Webster, and watched the madness unfold in all its gut-wrenching, eardrum-eviscerating glory.

To cap off the unholy triumvirate of old-school legends, Cannibal Corpse exploded with 25 years' worth of B-horror film inspiring brutality. Their members are pushing 50, but haven't slowed down or turned down. The opening bands were certainly technically impressive, but their songwriting can't hold a candle to Webster, guitarist Pat O'Brien, and drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz. They manage to put mind-boggling precision and technicality into an unrelenting, vicious, headbanging groove. Song after song, the mosh pit sucked people in and spat them across the floor and the front of the stage. Fists pumped, hair flew, drunken masses of unwashed metalheads bellowed in appreciation. This is death metal at its absolute pinnacle.

I couldn't believe the band's stamina. They played for 90 minutes and it being a weeknight, most of the audience didn't stick it out. By about halfway through their set the crowd was noticeably smaller. Especially after the performance that Napalm Death put on, it was difficult to muster the same intensity in the crowd. The energy just wasn't quite at the same level. I barely made it back to the couch I was crashing on for the night. It was sheer force of will and inertia that kept my feet moving. And I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. Or a blast beat.

Word count: 1,187

Week XVI: Benediction

I couldn't resist. It's Week XVI after all. Using Roman numerals to count the weeks was a decision that I made to distinguish this latest round of entries from those that I wrote last year. A blog in two parts, if you will. I wonder if this blog will make it to the point where I have to look up the number. What's 50 in Roman numerals? I don't know offhand. D? I'll have to check. Nope, it's L. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked. I hadn't thought about it when I started writing what became this week's smattering of words, but seeing as how we've recently bid farewell to that creepy, Emperor Palpatine-looking dealer of misery and defender of child molesters, and seeing as how he was a XVI himself, I'd like to spend a few of my 1,000 words to say "see you in hell" to Joseph Ratzinger aka Pope Benedict XVI. He's the first Pope to resign the papacy in 600 years. I guess the cries of all those thousands of abuse victims that he ignored as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the Catholic organization that shielded child rapists from prosecution - must weigh pretty heavily on the conscience. You can't just walk off that type of malignant soul cancer at his age.

Of all the sickening things about Benedict XVI's lofty reign atop a mountain of suffering children, condom-burning bishops, and regressive politics, there is perhaps nothing I find more despicable than the words he and his co-conspirators uttered as they promised to shield abusive priests from justice:

"...and that I will never directly or indirectly, by gesture, word, writing or in any other way, and under any pretext, even that of a greater good or of a highly urgent and serious reason, do anything against this fidelity to secrecy, unless special permission or dispensation is expressly granted to me by the Supreme Pontiff."

I guess that reciting it in Latin makes it okay, though. Tradition. Keep the faith strong and whatnot. As long as it can be shrouded in mystery and chalked up to the will of God protecting his chosen institution on Earth, they can get away with just about anything. Police, politicians, doesn't matter. Can't get through. God's on their side.

The problem of child abuse by priests in the Catholic church is so widespread and the clergy so corrupt that there is now an international Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. The existence of that organization speaks volumes about the sickening corruption in the Catholic church - far more than I could ever express inside of 1,000 words.

Despite knowing about many cases of abuse, both as pope and prefect, Ratzinger and his (I imagine) hooded clan of soul-sucking pedophile mutants hoped to protect the reputation of the church by spiriting child-molesting priests away from the public eye and into new congregations with a stern wag of the finger and an admonishment to stop raping children, which many summarily ignored.

And here he sits upon his velvet cushion of diplomatic immunity, locked away in his waning years, left to consider how best to put a fine point on a career of sickening tragedy and crimes against humanity.

And thus, I dedicate this poem to the man himself for his years of global disservice. The Latin is a parody derived from the oath referenced above that Ratzinger and other Catholic officials took as they promised to keep ongoing sexual abuse of children by priests secret from the public. Summorum pontificum means "of the Supreme Pontiffs." And without further ado,


Benediction

Alas, incongruity wasted the day
And the putrefied paste of their moral decay
Fell like the wheat trodden under their feet
As the bones of contention were lifted away

The last skeleton in the burial ground
Scarcely heard, as the guns and the larks all around
Cursed land and sky with a holy war cry,
The laureate kings of a weaponized sound

The nourishing mother was drained of her milk
For the taste and the succor, intransigent ilk
Idolatrous waste, the venerable caste
Who ravaged her corpse behind spun gold and silk

All glory and honour to christ on the cross
Whose inversions became alabaster embossed
On faces and chains, 'round necks of the cranes
Replace them with nooses, consider the cost

And we but the pendulous, left here to choke
And to absently swing at the end of a rope
Shrug at the pain and recant our refrain
And call down a fire on the head of the pope

Behold as the fat gilded phallus of Rome
With his arms wide outstretched stands and casts the first stone,
A papal bull who leaves gore in the hole,
Then shrinks to his den with a pick and a bone

With censers they clouded the eyes of the mass
All the blind lame and sick, and denied their repast
Woe betide you, lest spirits that guide you
Some day lead you back to the spiritual path

So cinch up your cilice, lay down with the priest
And be filled with the warmth and the love of the beast
Sins need confessing, wrongs need redressing
Come closer, my son, and you'll feel the release

Crimen pessimum, confess as you lie low
Summorum pontificum, motu proprio
Nutu, verbo, aut alio modo
Ego spondeo, voveo, ac iuro

I solemnly swear that the screams I conceal
Will rot in my mouth, grind my jaw into meal
I sin with my tongue and punish the young
And dream that my visions of hell are not real



Word count: 886