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 positive direction. Their achievements are modest, but those who look back on their lives probably feel no small degree of success.

They seek the foundation to build a life on, because the previous castles in the sand were a fool’s kingdom that quickly washed away with the shellfish and lobsters.

Seeking counsel for people that have no stake in your life really leads to a castle in the sand mentality. Ultimately, they go home at the end of the day, and they think of their own lives, not yours. If they did, think about you beyond the bounds of their work, then there is something wrong with them, and you shouldn’t seek counsel from such unstable people.

If you can’t find good counsel, then you are a self-made man with no choice. Welcome to the club. You did not make it as Bill Gates, but you have none of his complications. You may have needed to work hard to build your life skills, your literacy, numeracy and other life skills; worked hard again to get a university education; worked hard again to build your skills up to standard for work; and then worked hard for modest gains and an even more modest promotion.

It sounds futile, but in my case, I never really did want to be in any enterprise for the money. I wanted to enjoy my work, and get totally involved with what I am into. Otherwise, there are no real rewards. Money is not a real reward, and it never has been for me. The real rewards also come from the thank-yous from the people I serve and aim to please with my skills and talents.

USENET: Death of the Alt.* Hierarchy

The Usenet has been, and continues to be, a great source of information, where technologies that push product can easily be pushed aside using filters. There are more than 10,000 newsgroups on nearly every topic that delienates our human existence, all hierarchically arranged. The major hierarchies are known as “The Big 8″: comp.*, humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.*.

The one hierarchy which has been the bastard child of the usenet has been the alt.* hierarchy. Like all technologies, they start off with good intentions. According to one follower of the Big 8:

The alt.* hierarchy was begun, in part, as a reaction against the management principles of what came to be known as the Big-8. It is an “alternative” approach to creating newsgroups

This meant that, in reaction to certain sites placing a “veto” on certain newsgroups and due to the political influence certain site maintainers had, why not make it possible for anyone to make any newsgroup they want, without the need for a vote? That was the idea behind “alt.*”

Most people who maintain USENET sites will freely admit that much of the alt.* hierarchy has become a moral and technological toilet. It carries nearly every nutty newsgroup bounded only by imagination, including groups no one has ever seriously posted to, as well as long-dead newsgroups that also have no posts (unless you count spam). Examples are

• alt.swedish-chef.bork.bork.bork
• alt.n (where “n” = monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday, sunday)
• alt.sex.extraterrestrial
• alt.food.pez

… you get the idea. This led the folks carrying these newsgroups to decide that: OK, maybe we’ll make the carrying of the alt.* hierarchy optional. Thus, the carrying of the alt.* hierarchy has been considered optional since its inception. I don’t know of any universities that carry it.

There is another problem with the alt.* hierarchy. It has been used as a vehicle for carrying child porn. If we censor ONLY these newsgroups, that would only mean that people can create others within alt.* that do the same thing. This is also the same for newsgroups that carry ISOs of complete software suites, mp3s of complete albums, and DVDs of movies. None of these activities are what I would call “legal”, and is easy justification for axing the whole hierarchy for reasons of freedom from liability for the ISP. That still leaves the “big 8″, which are mostly safe from illegal activity (unless it’s spam).

Verizon will be cutting alt.* from its offerings, and Time-Warner will no longer offer USENET at all later this month. It must be stated that alt.* carries a lot of worthwhile groups that are active, with their own FAQ maintainers. In light of this, many ISPs have taken the middle ground of not carrying the alt.* binary groups, leaving the text groups intact. What Verizon has done would be considered extreme by the standards of most ISPs.

There are hierarchies that are not part of the “Big 8″, having to do with gaining inexpensive (free) tech support, such as microsoft.*, corel.*, borland.*, linux.*, and so on. These are even more worthwhile, and I hope they are keeping them. They typically are relatively free of spam and have more wothwhile posts. There are knowledgeable people there who can answer your queries in a relatively short time.

Freedom of speech has historically been limited by the understanding that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” For the Internet, the argument is specious, since it was taxpayer’s money that built it in the first place.

That means that even the attempt to privatize it to various companies (Time, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, Bell, and so on) constitutes a form of corporate welfare. The questions seem to come down to: who really has the right to decide what newsgroups I can and can’t read? I suppose someone has to manage alt.*, but who gets to do this, and in who’s interest? These are really the questions that need to be explored.

A NatLamp article at a White Supremacist site

I have been a fan of the National Lampoon since I was a teen in the 1970s. One of the most shocking articles for me to read in the mid 70s was P J O’Rourke’s “Foreigners From Around The World”, which appeared in the National Lampoon in May, 1976. The article is really a heap of ethnic jokes strung together, formulated to piss off all minorities equally. Maybe some more equally than others.

Even in my teens I realised that the humour is meant to be taken in irony. Problem is, O’Rourke dropped few hints that he was actually joking, outside of the fact that the entire article was totally outrageous. It is an orgy of stereotypes said without much apology. I felt at least a little disturbed by the article for that reason.

The reason I am bringing it up now, is because for the first time since I disposed of my NatLamp collection, I found the article using Google. Problem was, it was found at a White Supremacist site. Like most racist sites, you never actually know for sure you are at a racist site until you do some poking around. Then you begin to stumble on actual hate literature. For reasons of my own sense of ethics, I won’t post the link, but anyone can still easily Google to that site and find it easily enough if they really want to.

Now I am wondering if my willingness to be entertained by the article was actually an acceptance of hate literature, and was O’Rourke an earlier version of talk show hosts such as Ron Imus or Rush Limbaugh? O’Rourke does rescue himself, however, by lampooning his own ethnicity, which by his surname appears to be Irish. The illustration for the Irish is one of a nasty-looking lerperchaun, describing the Irish as “Pie-faced, neckless, bandy-legged sots who almost never fuck.” Maybe that gets him off the hook. For my part, I didn’t keep a scorecard.

But in addition, there is a larger idea that he appears to lampoon that is easy to miss among all of the sniping about individual ethnic groups. The United States is composed almost entirely of the ethnic groups he is making fun of. Ultimately, if we follow the logic to the end, it is America itself, his own country of residence, which he lampoons.

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 be the slow creep of regular payments, and short-term borrowing ($100 here, $200 there), which in my situation are unavoidable occurrences.

So, I will always have to pay down between $200 and $300 on any given 2-week period to maintain the zero balance. This is in stark contrast to the prospect of running up all of my credit in all of my cards (credit, store cards, etc), where I know I could be easily $25000 in debt in a week, should I be silly enough to do such a thing.

But there are other issues with money. In my opinion, credit is too damn easy to get. I really shouldn’t have access to $25000, because I know that paying back would be nearly hopeless. I would have to work past my retirement to do that.

In addition, we have grown too accustomed to people pushing product in our face. I have been working for weeks trying to cancel my cell phone contract. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to shake a salesperson off my leg from Bell, trying to push cell phones on us, both on the phone and in person. I have been alive for 45 years without the need of the ball-and-chain of a cell phone, I will live another 45 damn years without it. It is cheaper to use a pay phone. Way cheaper. Even at 50 cents a call.

The pushing of product in the form of a pressure sales job is a rising trend that I find alarming. I think we are at a point where we are buying so much stuff that we can’t pay for, that I find it hard to believe that it will be easy to come out of the recession. Pressure sales, to me, applies to any attempt to sell to you anything you were not considering buying before the sales pitch.

We all like to prioritize our spending to suit our purposes. Pressure sales is a disruption to that purpose. It throws you off-focus. The only possible answer must be “no” to these people. You have to have a steely resolve that they are wasting their time and effort on you. And so what if they think you are a jerk? To them, the only people who are not jerks are people who buy their stuff, so who needs the high regard of people with such shallow values? On the other hand, if your purchasing decisions are deliberate, then you can walk into the store, and give the salesperson the easiest payday they ever had. You get exactly what you want, and the salesman still makes money.

We live in a society utterly awash in the sales pitch, so it is easy to miss the fact that you are not anything but a wise spender if you just say “no”. Make every purchase decision a planned, deliberate one. It takes a great deal of mental discipline to do this. You need to separate yourself from the competitiveness and the materialism of society to be such a person.

Story fragment #1

Philo was working late again. But the payoff was that he could have the next day all for himself. He wanted to beat his next-day deadline and have his sales forecast all ready by the this evening. He put the finishing touches on his spreadsheets, and imported the tables to word preocessor.  Then, after emailing it to head office, it was all done, by 8:30 in the evening.

Philo sat in his office chair for a bit and enjoyed the quiet of his office, with just a fan blowing a few feet behind him. The city lay 20 floors below, with street lights beginning to turn on, and the lights of nearby office buildings becoming more noticeable. There was a different quality to the office, when no-one was around. It was peaceful; almost liveable. He was tempted to indulge in some net surfing or some Solitaire to wind down for about 15 minutes or so, but it was almost time for security to close up the buildng, so he had to leave before they set the alarm.

On his way to the subway station, he stopped at a newsstand to pick up a newspaper, and he met Wendy Marlowe, an old high school friend to whom he used to tutor math when they were both younger. He remembered that she had a love for animals, and used to care for a pet ferret, which she got when she visited her grandmother’s farm, Philo remembered.

I laughed till I choked

This was originally discovered at Patti’s Random Noise. A Google search shows that this one is all over the ‘net, with a complete history behind the sign and everything. I laughed so hard, I could barely breathe; I was even in pain. And, yes, I suppose that particular clinic doesn’t see many clients, having already gained useful advice before they even enter the parking lot. I wonder what the Pope would think of this kind of family planning advice?

The sign was for a family planning office in Northampton, England. The “NHS” logo stands for Britain’s National Health Service.

I Can’t Get Behind “I Can’t Get Behind That”

I Can’t Get Behind That — William Shatner and Henry Rollins
Never charted anywhere

From the album “Has Been” (2004)

See/Hear it here, if you dare. You hear it, but you only can view muppets lip-syncing to the song. You can also get the mp3 and the rest of the album from EMusic. My understanding is that no muppets were hurt in the making of the video or the song. I don’t believe it, though.

What do you get when you place the former Captain of the Starship Enterprise in the same studio with a former frontman for the punk rock group Black Flag?

I don’t know, but whatever it is, I can’t get behind that!

We expect an embarrassing level of tackiness from the likes of Bill Shatner (anyone remember “Transformed Man”?), but no matter how much Henry Rollins and producer Ben Folds try to make this sound cool with manic music arrangements, the result is, well, a tax write-off for them both, because I am not sure of any other uses for it. Adrian Belew is on Guitar, Henry Rollins says in an interview. If anyone recalls, Belew made his name touring with Frank Zappa, then David Bowie, and afterward became a band member in the 1980s re-formation of King Crimson with Robert Fripp at the helm. But mostly you hear the manic percussion instruments, not much guitar. The percussion is something along the style of the Hawaii 5-0 theme.

I heartily agree with certain observations. For example, I believe also that there truly is no modern invention more futile than a leaf blower. And “futile” is an excellent word to describe leaf blowers.

As for some kind of overall rating, Shatner’s work must be rated with stars of a different galaxy, for I have none to offer.

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, and for the first time in about 5 or 6 years, a balance of $0 was seen on my ledger.

I can now finally save my money. Keep the dollars I earn. It once seemed unimaginable, but the day has finally arrived.

My years of debt have taught me to believe in saving my way to the things I want and need. That seems repulsive to some people, but it is way cheaper than borrowing. That ought to increase my buying power.

The politician most likely to be assassinated

Before I say “Barack Obama”, I would like to say that: from time to time, whenever the stiflingly narrow range of political discourse becomes too obvious in its narrowness, I often look for a politician whose views tend to question those in power. That is, I look for those politicians who still seek the truth, and whose views resonate with the electorate a little better.

Those are the people most likely to be assassinated. Hilary isn’t likely to be assassinated, since she has unstoppingly supported the war; so has Bush, McCain; …. none of these people are likely to be assassinated. Their votes and their rhetoric have been friendly to big oil and other big-money interests.

Time will tell if Obama ends up being the same kind of politician, but his fundraising was from the grass roots and proved to dwarf Clinton’s fundraising (she only courted rich people and organisations); and his message was equally of the “rootsy” kind. That inspired people. He is proving to be the leader people want to follow. The kind of leader not seen since the early 1960s (John F. Kennedy) (or in Canada since the early 80s (I am thinking of Pierre Trudeau)).

A political admirer wanting to name his/her boy after Barack Obama is not out of the range of possibilities. That would be unthinkable for our current president (Bush) or prime minister (Harper), neither of which have achieved anything Earth-shattering for their grass-roots supporters. Now, Bush and Harper are both conservatives, and why pick on them? Would you name your kid after Bill Clinton? Or Paul Martin? Jean Chretien? Stephane Dion? I don’t think that public admiration for them is so sky-high that that would be on the top of people’s list of priorities.

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 was really brawny; both had average builds and heights, and were clean-cut. Both were heavily intoxicated. But Daryl threw a punch at Morton and really connected him.

And some punches “connect” a little too well. It was a lucky punch. But not lucky for Morton. Morton falls backwards without bending his knees or his back (probably already unconscious), and hits the pavement. You hear a distinct crack as he hits the pavement. I later learned that it was the sound of Morton’s skull breaking as it hit the cobblestones, according to later forensics. I see him bleeding from one ear. The police and the ambulance seemed to take forever to arrive.

But when they came, that’s when me and the hot dog vendor next to me got real popular. With the cops. Of course, that was expected. We were right there and saw the whole thing, after all. They didn’t buy any hot dogs.

We were both subpoenaed, and back in residence, I have had a number of police looking for me over the next few days for more questioning.

The legend had grown taller in the telling with people in town. Because it happened near our machines, and it involved people who were drunk, I have heard people say that Morton got murdered over a one-dollar hot dog. Now that’s death with dignity, for you.

You know that fights seem petty and things you said and did seem embarrassing after you sober up, the morning after the night before. Problem is, there will be no more “morning after” for Morton.

Also, does Daryl, who has since been convicted for manslaughter, finally get the girl he was after? If I were the girl, would I really be turned on by the fact that I was potentially dating a person capable of murder? I’m not sure I would feel too safe.

New ways of going insane

“Excessive text messaging and email” is now proposed to be included as new mental illnesses in an update to the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV). These are not the only silly classifications they have.

One proposed mental illness that I have heard from that seminal magazine, the Journal of Polymorphic Perversity, is “Consensual Validation Disorder”. That is, if someone doesn’t like you, then you’re one card short of a full deck. The rest of what I have here sound just as silly, except that they are for real.

Suck at math? Well, not only is math “not for you”, but you’re 8 pawns short of a gambit. You may have “Mathematics Disorder”, or dyscalculia (315.1). This includes the inability to copy things down as you see them, forgetting to carry, forgetting signs, and so on.

Like the taste of coffee? You could win a trip to the funny farm. You could fall into one of the classifications for the “Caffeine-Related Disorders“. They had to give it its own classification, because the disorder they have in mind does not constitute substance abuse. But you’re still one drop short of an empty bladder.

Can’t sleep after too much coffee? It’s not a natural outcome of drinking too much coffee. According to DSM, you are a crouton short of a salad. You have caffeine intoxication disorder (305.90).

Like to have a cigarette after a good dinner? Then you are a few fries short of a happy meal. Nicotine dependance (305.1) is a mental illness.

Trying to quit smoking? Then you’re one sultana short of a fruitcake. Nicotine withdrawal is also a mental illness (292.0).

Can’t write legibly or can’t express yourself in writing? It’s not that you have lost your muse. You’re one weenie short of a roast. You have a disorder of written expression (315.2).

Do you snore when you sleep? It’s not just a minor irritation spouses have to put up with anymore. If you saw logs, then you may be a chocolate chip short of a cookie. You probably have Breathing-Related Sleep Disorder (780.57).

If your son or daughter is rebellious, then it is not because the world is unfair to them and most certainly not because they are expressing their independence from their parents. Your teenage son or daughter is actually a doughnut short of a cop. He or she has Oppositional Defiant Disorder (313.81).

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 bunch of nutcases weilding very sharp office stationery. Next it’ll be paper shredders. That’s gotta hurt.

The war on terror, clearly, has been won hands-down by the oil companies. The military on both sides have taken a shit-knocking, infrastructure has been decimated, the US economy has been seriously weakened and the Iraq economy is entering hyperinflation. But just pass by any gas station, or look into any business magazine for who is making record profits, and it is obvious who is winning.

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 energies continually dissapated into a vacuum. What was really needed was to move away from that environment and into one where my energies were less dissapated and more directed. That way, I could amount to something.

One can romanticise about learning for the love of learning, but it has limited practical use. Yes, we all need to enjoy what we are learning, but we also need to ensure that the bulk of our efforts actually get us someplace.

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 from when I was 18 or 19 is challenging. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since. It looks like it was someone else’s life. But I just want to make a few remarks about it.

I do remember some things about it. I remember a mood. A terribly anxious mood. I was trying to be somebody I wanted to be, but I was trying too hard. I probably had to push that hard to become “somebody” given the hostile environment I was raised in, but it now looks vaguely repulsive in retrospect. Very little to fictionalise here.

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 to hurt me. So I believe it. All of it. With all my heart. It has nothing to do with me, so who cares? I even offer to help out with their “predicament” (which they fabricated of course). And it never amounts to anything anyway.

Here’s how you play: you completely, without holding back, believe everything a bullshitter tells you. If they falter, help them out in order to get their story right. In order to win the game, you have to “land on your feet”, and neither player gets hurt. Those are the rules.

OK? Ready to rumble?

I saw Karen again, and this time it was in the Student Building on campus. She asked me if I remember bumping into her a month ago near the Harbour Front with her mother. I vaguely remembered, and said so.

She said if I could clearly remember this, that she wanted me to testify that in court, because she thought the police were giving her trouble. I was not able to find out what kind of trouble. She was evasive. I didn’t want to pry, but my naturally supportive self wanted to jump in and help her out. I told her so. But, funny thing, none of it amounted to anything. The conversation about court just evaporated. Living in fear of the police didn’t seem all that important, all of a sudden, and I never heard about it again.

It was just like the day later on when she spoke about the fact that her parents were Nazis. She was in her 30s when she spoke to me on this (and that would make her parents, what, oh 50 or 60 years old when they gave birth to her)? She went on about how they used to operate the torture chambers in some part of Poland. She lived in mortal fear of her parents, apparently, because they ruined the livelihood of her brother and set his house on fire. She was now living in fear of them coming for her.

Now did I react and say “Come off it, Karen”? Nooooo. I was the proud picture of gullability itself. I listened to her for hours, in fascination of her and this incredible story. The next day I ran to the university library and took out an atlas of Nazi prison camps. There were hundreds of small camps dotting Poland. I laid it out for her to jog her memory. She pointed at one called Treblinka, but she was no longer going into the same level of fine detail that she was regaling to me earlier with.

The subject was dropped, and never pursued again. For some odd reason, the topic of her parents about to kill her any day now did not seem to inspire as much fear and was no longer important, and she never brought it up again.

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 I don’t think I connect well with. I could tell them my problems, but they project their own lives and problems on to them and don’t really listen. In the end there is not much communication. One friend-oid is actually a doctor with quite a successful career behind him, as a head of a specialty in medical school. But he has been given to dropping hints such as saying “you wouldn’t begin to identify with the kind of problems I have”. I guess he is right. But it is a statement designed to alienate.

There are others who give a listen to one’s state of affairs, and I suppose they try to give some perfunctory concern, but have problems of their own that overwhelm them. These are friend-oids that need a friend, but have trouble being one to others.

Then there are friends that would never seem too busy and are with you to the end. And they know you would do the same. Those are the kinds of friends I like.

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 black eyeliner and the shock of bottle-blond hair emanating from her head made her look overdone; pimped-up.

I sensed a hardened character; one who is somewhat desperate. I felt uncomfortable around her, as though I ought to have been better off being someplace else.

We made eye contact. Slowly she smiled at me. I wasn’t sure about this. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, except to the legal aid lawyer about my car accident. That I perceived that she was one that had seen the ceilings of too many seedy motels didn’t help. Get me out of here — I thought.

“Uh, excuse me”, said the bottle blonde. “Do I remember you from somewhere?”

What kind of an icebreaker was that? “No, I’m sorry,” I responded.

“Did you go to university in Nova Scotia?”

“Never seen Nova Scotia.”

“I’m sure I remember you” — why is she keeping this up? Maybe she is bored like me.

“I only ever attended U of T.” That narrows it down for her. To over forty thousand people.

“I went there too!” she exclaimed. “I think you were a DJ at CIUT radio in the early nineties, weren’t you?”

Hm. Lucky, I thought, and said “Yup,” throwing her a bone. Mothers tell us never to lie. This is often bad advice, though.

“Your name is Howard, isn’t it? — Howard Brandon!” she said with a sudden cry of discovery.

Well, she got me. But I couldn’t return the favour. This disheveled person does not resemble anyone I remember. “So, what’s your name?” I asked sheepishly, bracing myself.

“Concietta. Concietta Lozano.” Holy shit. Has she ever changed. She used to sing in the night clubs back in the early 90s, and looked sexy in a tasteful sort of way. I guess the makeup thing with her is an attempt to hide her age. But this wasn’t Concietta. This was just the shell of her.

My past memories of Concietta were lukewarm. I remembered she gave herself away too readily. I wasn’t used to the idea of our going to bed after our first night out, and her casual attitude toward sex. But that’s what we did. We had safe sex. We stayed up all night, chatting for much of it. For a few minutes, she got out of bed in only her panties, and sat in a beanbag chair across the room and played her guitar; her long, bare legs stretched out underneath her instrument as she sang softly. I felt as if I were transported to some strangely beautiful place. I lay in bed watching and listening, hypnotized.

But even with this spell cast over me, I knew we didn’t really know each other. For all of her soft kisses, caresses of her skin, and then her voice, there was little else. Was she somebody I could get along with? I couldn’t tell, because she was so busy trying to dazzle me, that I couldn’t tell what she was like underneath. Also, we had little in common. To put a further barrier in the way, she was as casual about university as she was about sex. What interests did we have in common that we could we talk about over the long term? This pleasure cruise was going to be one night only, I thought. And after that night, I never heard from her again and she was impossible to reach by telephone.

And now, in legal aid 15 years later, here she is, smiling as if we were long lost pals. She first mistakes me for someone in Nova Scotia, then by trial-and-error figures out who I am. She continues, “I never forget a face”. She explains that the reason she is waiting here, is because her boyfriend of 3 years is about to kick her out of the house, and she was wondering if there was anything she could do about it legally.

I am called into the lawyer’s office, ask my questions, and it turns out there is not much that can be done about my accident, that it was a no-fault accident and that I should just pay my own damages.

As I leave the office, she asks “How did it go?”

I said “It looks like I have to take responsibility for my problems. I can’t sue the city for not clearing the snow off of the roads, so I will hope the insurance will cover it.”

Concietta follows me out of the legal aid office and continues her conversation with me, explaining also that she can’t wait for the lawyer any longer and had to make some purchases downtown, and a friend was waiting for her over on the west end of town. Since I had to go east, we had to part company then and there, which seemed to be more of a blessing.

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 too forced, as if she was forcing something from inside that was never there to begin with. Always on-key though.

She admitted to me she was a little mixed up. Okay, maybe she was really mixed up. Maybe it was that shrink she was visiting. Maybe it was the parents she still lived with. Maybe it was something to do with those emotions that didn’t seem to belong when she sang. Maybe it was all of that.

I couldn’t tell if either she was making her first baby steps in discovering herself through her poetry and she was probably going through an awkward phase, or was she like this all along? All I have of her is a dull vignette; a brief passage through my life. I know her musical choices were often grating to me: How much Dan Hill can a person take, after all (to you youngsters, he is an 80s version of Michael Bolton — she was still a fan of Hill in the early 90s)? I sensed that Mr. Hill wrote of perfect love which resonated with her, and gave her an overblown standard to which she held all other men. I know I didn’t fit with that standard, and I wasn’t going to try. I refuse to relate to the opposite sex under expectations that are so sky-high. I just want to be myself, and let that be that. We only lasted a couple of days before she left town, and moved to places unknown.

Nobody votes NDP because nobody votes NDP

I just wanted to briefly comment that it kind of amazes me to have heard over the years journalists and pundits alike rationalise that the reason nobody votes NDP is because no-one votes for them. And they would rejoin that with something like “and anyway, they won’t form the next government.” This argument is offered, often without rebuttal or criticism, to journalists who are obviously getting paid to be lousy at their job.

While we can argue all night about the “truth” of these comments, isn’t it voters that should be allowed to decide these things? Since no-one votes NDP, if we all voted for them we might as well spoil our ballots, I guess is the reasoning. On the face of it, it just defies logic. But we just take it in. Amazing.

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 the cool sunny breeze through my office window;
in the casual chats I have with colleagues, janitors and secretaries;
in the respect I am given when I answer questions or help others in need;
in the independance I have in deciding what I need to do with my life;
in the freedom to love;
in the freedom from fear;
in the freedom from want;
when having it, rejoicing that I have it;
when I lose it, rejoicing that I once had to have it to lose it;
in surrounding myself with kind people;
in being supportive;
in enjoying the support of others;
in cooperation;
in seeing others cooperate;
in not having over-blown expectations put on myself;
in watching children play;
in cycling through quiet parks;
in jogging a “personal best”;
in writing a robust computer program;
in successfully doing a complicated math proof;
in imagining and hoping;
and in being alive to see, think, feel and love.