Getting away from it

At a Tim Horton’s, we ordered coffee, I ordered a doughnut. Denise wouldn’t have doughnuts. She seemed a little upset. I later found it was because she had visited her mother and became victim of her latest insensitive remarks.
“Why do you bother visiting your mom if all she does is hurt your feelings,” I [...]

Read Full Post »

Quote (Nelson Mandela)

Our deepest fear is not that we’re inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking [...]

Read Full Post »

How To Be a Self-made-man with no choice

There are the Horatio Algers of this world, who have built for themselves a high degree of success by hard work. Such examples are rare. There are others, however, who have no choice, and have to build their lives up from scratch. They just come from negativity and have nowhere to go but in the [...]

Read Full Post »

Debt freedom is a lot of work

A while ago, I posted that I finally saw, for the first time in 5 years, $0 owing on both my credit card and my line of credit. The battle is never over, however. Unless I want to completely free myself of the luxury of a credit card and line of credit, there will always [...]

Read Full Post »

The eternal sunshine of a spotless debt record

A few minutes ago, I finally, after about 5 years of trying, paid off my debts with the bank, including my line of credit and my credit card. There were times the debt climbed to a nearly unmanageable $10,000 dollars, but after working like a bugger to pay it down, it finally got paid down, [...]

Read Full Post »

Murder at the hot dog carts

Well, I was making a bit of money selling hot dogs at one of those portable vending units near some night clubs. One night, Daryl and Morton, two regulars I knew came outside and stood in line up for a hot dog, then decided to fight over this girl they met while inside. Neither guy [...]

Read Full Post »

How the war on terror was won

The whole thing began in 2001, when the largest nuclear power the world has ever known was brought to its knees by a bunch of guys weilding box cutters and exacto knives. Yes, in the post-nuclear era, countries with the power to evaporate entire populations will have the back of their power broken by a [...]

Read Full Post »

Learning in its purest form

Once I romanticised learning in its purest form as being a learning done for the pure love of it. I would like to think of my childhood as being like that. But I know that the reality of my childhood was characterized by being one of intellectual vapidity outside of my pursuits, so that my [...]

Read Full Post »

Some of what I do here

Some of what I do is to fictionalise my past and make it less boring and more spicy and readable. I find this blog to be a vehicle for practising this craft of writing fiction.
I am 45 years old, so a lot of my past have faded into a dull memory. Even reading diary entries [...]

Read Full Post »

Completely believing people’s wildest stories

I’m into totally believing every story people tell me about themselves. Sometimes, when people tell me their problems, it’s complete horse-crap, with only the flimsiest relation to reality. But I sit in wide-eyed fascination of these artistic bullshitters. I’m just along for the ride, and sitting and listening to these tall tales aren’t really going [...]

Read Full Post »

Friends and friend-oids

I have a lot of “friend-oids” and few friends. I think that is like most of us. If we are honest, we may have a friend — two or three if we are very lucky — I think I have two if I count my wife.
Others live on the periphery, and they are people that [...]

Read Full Post »

A not-so-strange strange stranger

We were sitting quietly in the waiting area, waiting for legal aid. At first, I didn’t recogsnise her. She was tall, her long legs made to look even longer in her high-heel patent leather boots. She also wore tight black jean slacks, an old fur waistcoat, and way too much makeup. That, along with the [...]

Read Full Post »

Tammy and I had a couple of things in common

We both wrote — she wrote poetry, and I tended to write prose like this. I found her interesting in a way. But there was something dull about Tammy; something wishy-washy. It infected her poetry and her music. Yes, she also played guitar better than I could, and sang quite well. But her emotions were [...]

Read Full Post »

These are the good old days

Worked myself nearly into delirium today, and decided to go home and do other things rather than being driven to distraction by work.
These are the good old days. Other people have them in the past, but I have them now. I see it
in the smiles and hugs I get;
in the smiles and hugs I return;
in [...]

Read Full Post »

King Lear

Lear knew he was getting on in his years and asked his daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia for their proclamations of love so that they may deserve an inheritance. Cordelia takes the moral high ground by being sincere and in her sincerity she had nothing really to say, since it would not come from the [...]

Read Full Post »

On Cheesburgers, love and loving cheeseburgers

Hmm… I am not sure that I would agree that every relationship can be healthy. Just like knowing cheeseburgers are unhealthy doesn’t make them healthy. Similarly, if a person reacts to me in a negative way too often, I don’t think the secret would be to anticipate their negativity and to “socially engineer” only positive [...]

Read Full Post »

With love, without love

We are all different. Some people have certain properties about themselves that arise from an interplay between genes and environment which confers upon them certain strengths but gives them some vulnerabilities.
This gives us each a unique set of needs arising from our environment, and from its interplay between that and our physical being. Indeed, we [...]

Read Full Post »

Renewal

Today in Church we heard about the tale of Lazarus and of how Jesus brought him back to life. The homily given was how this illustrated the possibility of hope and renewal in all of us. Not only can we be brought out of our sins, but we can also be brought back ouf of [...]

Read Full Post »

Forgiveness made manifest

I have a tape of John Vanier giving a lecture on CBC Ideas regarding the concept of Forgiveness. I have played it to death, and still I find what he has to share with us humbling, and very deep.
I listen to it and imagine an ideal world where the guilt of rejection for either real [...]

Read Full Post »

Forgiveness

As I understand it, forgiveness is something that is given after the other party has admitted wrongdoing. If they had not, then forgiveness is futile, except maybe in one’s mind. In other words, if I had wronged you, and I don’t say I am sorry — in fact, I refuse to even acknowledge that wrong [...]

Read Full Post »