Lost Poem.

I thought this was lost but I found it today. I think it's one of the best things I ever wrote. It's from my Flatland Blues collection.

Sometimes it's so good that afterwards it's revelatory
Synapses firing at random, little sunbursting neurons flashing in the liquid darkness of the post coital mind
and there we were
and it was winter
and outside there was snow from a blizzard only the day before
and while the sky was dark the snow lit the night
casting a blue light over everything
that blue light that feels like loneliness and home and peace
that sub-arctic light that feels like an aurora passing through bone
and you lay there afterwards
lit all snow blue and smooth as a matisse
just form and light
warm with the blankets cast off,
and I just lay there
one of your legs over my cheek
one under my neck
and it was ghostly blue in the bedroom
and the neurons were firing at random
little snowbursts
bio-luminous ethereal snow flakes glinting momentarily under flashes of cosmic eternal
and your skin was blue like you were frozen,
and I looked at my own skin and I was blue like I was frozen
and we were still and warm in the snow blue glow of prairie bedroom
and the snowflakes of my mind flashed and dimmed and fell like magnesium flares
into this poem for you
laying beautiful and blue and drifting
after the blizzard.

Editor's Note.

I posted a speech of Heinrich Himmler's on Remembrance Day, under the heading "Why They Fought and Died." Most of my entries are written fairly late in the evening, with the result that I often need to go back and correct. Upon revisiting the Remembrance Day post, I realized that I'd failed to provide any context to the speech other than the title. It occurred to me that one could view it as pro Nazi without given some background info first. I've gone back and re-edited it with a small introduction and a title change. For the record, I AM NOT A NAZI!

25th Street Bridge Song

Yesterday was the first big snowstorm of the season. 10 cm fell like a mofo. Plflplflt! and there it was.
It came fast and it came hard and the city crews couldn't keep up and it was just warm enough for the first layer to come down as sleet, which quickly froze and turned the streets to ice. I had the pleasure of finishing work at 4:30 pm, the midpoint of rush hour. My route demanded that I pass through to downtown and across the Broadway Bridge, a daunting task on good roads.
It was made all the more horrible by the fact that my roaring behemoth 1981 Chevy Van (aka Black Thunder), turns into Elizabeth Manley on ice. Needless to say it was with a sense of dread and foreboding that I fought through the howling wind and driving snow to scrape the ice and snow off the windshield before what I imagined would be a harrowing journey. So I headed off into the crawling stream of traffic, moving like a Youtube progress bar on dial-up.
Soon the heat off of the big V8 kicked in however and Black Thunder warmed up and I realized that I had an hour and a half to make it to my destination. It occurred to me then that I was in my favorite place (my van) with all of my favorite music, and for the first time in a very long time it looked like I was going to have an hour completely to myself. Suddenly the drive home was looking really good.
So the traffic eased forward in the tiniest of increments, and occasionally I'd be in the faster of the lanes, occasionally the slower, and from my perch on high I got to people-watch everybody that went by. A lot of them were really pissed off, I mean REALLY pissed off, and when I'm in a good mood, there is nothing funnier than someone in a futile rage.
There were also a lot of them like myself. Eyes wide with wonder at beauty of the havoc, relaxed and meditative and given over pleasantly to circumstance and chaos.
At the 45 minute mark I'd reached downtown. Whenever I saw someone signalling helplessly for a lane change in the 10km/hr stream of trickling road rage I'd let them in and they'd give me a wave. But as I turned on to 4th ave, headed for the Broadway Bridge, I began to panic a little. From 25th street on it was a stationary line of brake lights blinking and fading like Christmas lights into the white blur of the snowstorm. After spending 15 minutes moving across the first block I began to realize there was no way I'd make it to my son's daycare on time on this route. A quick shoulder check and an icy fishtailing u-turn sent me back to 24th, where I turned towards Spadina. I'd have 2 choices there; roll along spadina to the Renaissance, and come out at the base of the Broadway Bridge ahead of the traffic, or hang a left and hit the University Bridge. At Spadina it became clear that the University Bridge was the best option, so to the left I went.
Now here's the thing and I've taken a long time getting to it but I just came off a really hard day and I'm beat like Tina Turner in the old Ike days so I may have rambled a bit, but thanks for sticking it out.
The thing is this: There is a feature of Saskatoon that for me is the ultimate expression of what makes those of us that live here different from anyone else in the world.
At the base of the University Bridge there are 2 intersections. One from the Spadina underpass on to Spadina Crescent, and one from Spadina on to the bridge itself. Both of these intersections are uncontrolled because there is an implicit understanding in this city of nearly 1/4 million that if we just take turns it works just fine.
So imagine, in the middle of a snowstorm that crippled a modern city, with 10 minute commutes suddenly lengthened to 1 and 2 hours, traffic lined up for miles in places, imagine how well this hokey and simplistic backwater system of taking turns would work. It worked beautifully! People who were jockeying for position all through rush hour, fighting for lane changes, swearing at tailgaters, suddenly paused when they were supposed to and let their neighbour go first, because it's the polite thing to do at these particular intersections. Maybe it's just me, but there is something to be said for human potential, for good will and selflessness and for the intrinsic communal nature of the human animal at the bottom of the 25th Street Bridge. Walt Whitman once said that "Life is not so short that there isn't time to be polite." Saskatoon demonstrates it.

What They Fought and Died to Fight Against

The following is an excerpt from one of Heinrich Himmler's speeches to SS officers in 1943. It captures in a nutshell the pure evil that the Nazis perpetrated, and their view that non-German lives were valueless. I've posted it on Remembrance Day in honor of my grandfather, who was killed fighting the Nazis at the Battle of El Alamein.

Heinrich Himmler's speech to Schutzstaffel (SS) officers at Poznan (4th October, 1943)



In the months that have gone by since we met in June 1942 many of our comrades were killed, giving their lives for Germany and the Fuhrer. In the first rank - and I ask you to rise in his honor and in honor of all our dead SS men, soldiers, men, and women - in the first rank our old comrade and friend from our ranks, SS Lieutenant General Eicke. [The SS Gruppenfiihrers have risen from their seats.] Please be seated.

One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men - we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian or to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be rough and heartless when it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude toward animals, will also assume a decent attitude toward these human animals.

I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on 30 June 1934 to do the duty we were bidden and stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it. It was that tact which is a matter of course and which I am glad to say, inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, nor speak of it. It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary.

I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things it is easy to talk about, "The Jewish race is being exterminated," says one party member, "that's quite clear, it's in our program-elimination of the Jews and we're doing it, exterminating them" And then they come to me, eighty million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has watched it, not one of them has gone through it. Most of you must know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or one thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptions caused by human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if with the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and troublemakers. We would now probably have reached the 1916-1917 stage when the Jews were still in the German national body.

I've got a Yuan for Some US cheddar.

The US/China currency war explained in a catchy animated rap video, click here

A Study in Gray

I went to pick up my son at daycare and the hallway was filled with boys from 4-12 all suiting up in snowpants and mittens and toques and there was a chaos and an energy that could only be described as jubilant and they were all going out to play.
"C'mon son, time to go!" I said to him and his shoulders dropped and his arms dropped and he threw his head back hopelessly and gave me a "But Daaaaaad! and I said "We have to go buddy." and he said "Can't I just play outside for a little while?"
I had been outside, first at 4:30 a.m. scraping my windshield, and now at 4pm after spending half an hour in a vehicle that just wasn't getting warm enough. It was cold outside, crisp and clear see your breath and hear things clearer cold. Outside was not on my radar, but then it occurred to me that I could get a hot coffee in a warm coffee shop and let the day seep out of me and the heat seep in to me so I said "Okay, I'll be back in half an hour." and he said "Yay!" and I zipped my jacket up all the way and crossed my arms across my chest, tucked hands in under my arms and turtled my head into my trapezoids. I hunched quick steps in a quick-stepped hunch to a new place that had just opened, just up the block.
Il Secondo is new and it's a hip urban coffee shop pizzeria and bakery all in one. I walked in and ordered 'a coffee to go but I'm going to have most of it in' and I got my coffee and loaded with a head turning amount of sugar and headed to a corner seat. I sat quiet, which is something I don't do or can't do depending on who you ask. They had slow jazz playing, old Billie Holliday or young Ella Fitzgerald and it put me in a peaceful space, a romantic space even and I sat with my wrists around the coffee cup to warm my blood and as had been my intent, let the warm seep into me.
Above me the ceiling was open-concept and black, lined with fat round heating ducts all painted black to match in that style popularized by the 'premium casual' dining industry. In the far corner, a wood fired pizza oven glowed orange and flickering and the walls were painted milky coffee colored and the chairs and tables were painted dark coffee color. It felt urban and felt metropolitan until I noticed the blue and yellow and flowery country crockery placed at intervals on high corner shelves. Imagine Grandma Lee circa 1974 stumbling drunk into a Starbucks in the West End of Vancouver circa 1994 and puking in the corners. That would about describe it.
Granny china or not I was in a drifting and dreaming state of mind and I was happier than I usually am at the onset of winter when I can't get warm and happily I soaked in my surroundings. At a counter along the window one of those 21st century hippie girls (siwash sweater, spandex pants and a tie-dyed shirt) sat studying, and her book was flat on the table and she had her head resting on her hand parallel to the pages. She had clean, free, product free hair and it fell fine and flowing and flipped over her shoulder and she wrote at the page from a position off to the side. Her neck was bent at a nearly 90 degree angle and it looked like an uncomfortable position, but it looked like it was her favorite and her most comfortable position and she was young and pretty and had a look in her eye like she was writing poetry or songs or something romantic and firelit, a look that was soft and filtered like old silent movies or 70s sunshine pics. The heating ducts put out a quiet hushing gray noise and the music kept padding and purring away like something you'd been thinking about and forgot and the pretty girl's aurora (no I didn't mean aura) had me feeling romantic and poetic too and I fell in love with the moment and I was looking around at everything with my groove on, which you either get or you don't.
Looking out the window I saw the street and cars and the brick building across the road and parking meters and power poles and power lines and leafless skeletal trees and an overcast sky that must have been open cast somewhere out of eyeshot because there was sunlight there too and in cast long shadows on the ground. I was grooving on the crazy angles all the straight lines of the man made things made against the unstraight lines of the unmade things and it was then that I noticed everything was gray. I mean EVERYTHING man! Now gray usually makes me want to fucking hang myself, honest to God. It's always been the thing I hate most about Saskatchewan winters, the whole monochrome 2 dimensionality of everything. Yet here I was managing to get lost in just how many shades of gray there were in front of me, and finding one of those rare transcendent moments where you realize that there is nothing on this planet that is not beautiful! The old mottled gray pot-holed street, a decade or so from it's last resurfacing, oil-stained almost black here, darker gray with the wet silhouette of an old puddle there, and shadows falling at crazy crisscrossing intervals contained an entire pallet of gray in the space of an empty parking space. Stretch it up, onto the clean, bright concrete of the cool crisp crumbling sidewalk and spill up into the fluid form of an old parking meter and there were a dozen more grays. The skeletal tree-a gray as white as sun bleached bone, it's furrows and fissures shaded charcoal and deep, it's immaculate imperfection humbling the perfect gray power pole beside it. Give me a pencil and a millenia and I'd struggle to sketch it for you, a little less pressure where the shadows fade, a smudge where the ice just melted. A thousand shades of gray, contrasts as deep as moon and sky and so freaking gorgeous and complex and simple at the same time and it just screams illusion at you. I knew in an instant that like the song says it's all too beautiful, and whatever it is; love, hate, birth, death, water and ice, blood and feces, war and peace- it's all exactly the way it's supposed to be and all any of it takes is just a moment of peace and the right vantage point and there's beauty in all of it.
Look. I've been up too long already. This is one of those posts that I'll regret making public because it's a little too visceral, and by that I mean that I've given you my viscera in this one, for you to do with as you please. Generally that's an open license to kill or maim, at the very least cripple, so I'm hesitant to put it out there. But at the same time, it's one of those things that only a few of us with more senses than just eyes and ears and orifices will get, and I think that if you know I'm resonating on that same wavelength, that I've got it too, well the world is a little bit bigger and better for us, isn't it?

Peace, Harmony, the Indomitable Beauty of the Human Spirit and Advertising.

Struck by how well advertisers have tapped into the most wonderful traits of the human animal; joy, spontaneity, creativity and wonder. This is brilliant and moving. Wish it could be for something more than a mobile network. Or maybe I wish networks could be more.

New directions.

There are days when plflflflft!, I just don't feel like writing anything. Today is one of those days. I'd rather just surf and google drift until I get tired enough to sleep. I was doing just that when it occurred to me that I could increase the appeal of my dusty old blog, if I were to post the occassional link or two that I find interesting in my travels. So while searching around for mustache pics to help me with styling my own Movember 'stache for prostate cancer awareness I came across this pic of Hitler without the mustache. He looks strangely British to me. A bit like Alec Guinness.

zen and the art of cooking.

I've lost more than a few cooks to the heavily structured environment of my corporate kitchen. Most of the truly passionate ones are in the game as an outlet for their creativity. They turn every mound of mashed potatoes into a rosemary masted galleon, no protein is complete without some overthought (and usually over-reduced) reduction and if the vegetables in house somehow survived beyond baby years to childhood they're too old. Most of these guys haven't mastered the basics, and few can see beyond their aspirations to the skill level required to do what we do well on a daily basis. It took a long time for me to notice it as well, because most of it had become unconscious for me. I started noticing when I took on more of a coaching role.
It starts with the way a cook holds a knife. Invariably they all cut wrong, every slice taking them one blood gushing heartbeat closer to a severed digit. So I'll gently correct them, show them the grip that for me has become so comfortable and watch them struggle with the awkwardness of it. I'll watch them tear into a pepper or an onion like a TV chef, then pass by their waste buckets and show them that they're throwing away half the usable product. I'll show them that the best parts of most vegetables are what they're habitually discarding, show them that in some cases one quarter of an item's size can amount to three quarters of it's mass and most of our usage. It moves on to everything; cooking temps, the color of a protein as it moves through different stages, the sound it makes in a pan when it's ready to turn or finish.
Then, on the days when I'm finally able to step back from coaching, step back from the paperwork and the cooler checks and the inventory counting and the hiring and firing, on days when I'm able to cook again I get my zen on.
The back of the knife blade slips easily into the the calloused path between thumb and forefinger, you can feel the life still resonating in a pepper or a mushroom, turning it and considering how best to maximize the potential for it. Gas flames burn a soft blue, occassionally flickering orange and the heat is no different than the heat off the first fires of the first men gathered around a fire for survival and fellowship. Soon the knife is chopping, and other knives are chopping and there's a stillness and a calmness that settles over me, and it's all stuff that I've done so many times that I slide into an almost meditative state, concentrating on improving knife skills on every stroke.
There were days working in the sewer when I'd daydream wistfully about being back in the kitchen. Freezing cold, rain/sleet coming down, 12 hours into your day with another 12 to go and never seeing the horizon until the end of the day, and all I could think of was how nice it would be to have those gas fires at my back, a knife in hand, chopping away quietly and quickly, my only purpose to make each slice as perfect as the stillness. Stayed up too late again...

endless ramblings

That's the visual that's been keeping me up at night. I don't have a lot of energy left to explain it right now, but here are my notes so far.

Between 1 and -1 there are infinite decimal points on each side, therefore, 0 is actually an expression of infinity as opposed to a value of nothing. Nothing doesn't exist.
Rather than counting up to infinity as on a number line, in this model, we count points away from infinity. At the standard starting point of 0, 1 is represented as 0+1. In this case infinity plus one. Conversely on the negative side, we have 0-1, or infinity -1. At the upper end of the standard positive number line, rather than some astronomically high number, what we have is Infinity -1. On the negative side instead of some astronomical negative number, we have infinity +1. It becomes painfully obvious that the sum of all numbers creates an endless, ever expanding singularity, and a perfect model of the universe.
Here are some more notes. It becomes possible to divide by 0 when it's equal to infinity. Whole numbers are simply fractions of infinity. 1/0 =1, 2/0 =2, etc.
50+infinity=infinity. -50+infinity=infinity. 50+(-50)=infinity. I can't find a problem with this concept, and this is why I can't sleep at night, because it's not supposed to be this simple.

Que Onda

Can't sleep. Here's why. I read this article tonight about a new gravity wave detector. This passage in particular got me wound up.
"In general relativity, changes in mass at a location cause space and time to stretch and compress. Rather like sound waves, compressing space-time causes stretching in neighboring regions and vise versa. In this way, a moving distortion in space-time is created. We can detect these by measuring the response of a mass to the distortions in space-time."
The mention of changes in mass and location causing stretches in space time got me thinking of the wave particle duality of light.
So for those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, here's some oversimplified layman's terms for you.
The Wave Particle Duality of Light


and here's a little primer on gravitational waves;


So you fire some electrons at the speed of light, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle states that you can know one of 2 things. You can know how fast they're going, or where they are, but not both.
You'll notice when they did the Wave Particle Duality of light experiments they were able to 'see' only one electron at the slits, but when they watched from afar they found the interference patterns.
I'm proposing that what's causing the wave phenomenon is a gravitational wave caused by electrons moving at near light speed. It doesn't appear in a single slit experiment because the electrons are caught in a gravitational 'slipstream' of sorts. It occurs in the dual slit experiment because the gravitational slipstream is split by the slits and collides with and upsets the time-space the electrons are passing through. This creates the interference patterns that are so recognizable as gravitational waves on a macro-cosmic scale, but so mysterious in the lab. That is all.
Watch the videos again, read everything you can on it, and you'll see it makes perfect sense. Unfortunately I don't have the math to back it up, but I guarantee you that somebody will 'discover' this in the next decade. Then you'll be able to tell them your crazy insomniac Rev. Dr. Andy knew this 10 years ago :)

Goodbye summer, hello blog.

Yep.
Outside is quickly becoming inhospitable, and the computer is looking better.
I learned a new concept today. Narcotization, and while this is an umbrella term for many concepts, the context I'm using it in is the psychological context. In psychological terms, narcotization refers to a condition where due to stimuli you feel you have no chance of avoiding a particular fate, for example, if you are faced with a problem that appears too large or complex to deal with. I was introduced to the term in Chuck Palahniuk's book "Non-fiction". He cited a study on gum disease. Patients were shown pictures of gums in various stages, and the effect this had on oral hygiene throughout the various groups was then correlated accordingly. He discovered that while both groups shown the early stages of gum disease improved their hygiene, the group shown the worst case scenario resigned themselves to the inevitable and gave up altogether. It seemed insurmountable, and futile to make any effort.
It's a concept that's been floating in the back of my mind all day.
I work as a Chef, and there are facets of my operation that fill me with defeat when I consider them. Today I stepped back a bit and looked at the components of these problems, rather than at the insurmountable problem itself. It was easier to fathom. This seems like common sense, and in many ways it is, but the concept has been picking at me.
How much of the world is narcotized into inaction? When we look at racism, culture clashes, poverty, climate change, what solutions can one possibly see? Is it not reasonable that the daily onslaught of doom and gloom from the media has narcotized us into inaction? We get the news on the half hour from the radio stations, all day on some tv stations and every time we sit at the computer. We're bombarded with an overload of how big the problems of the world are more than any other culture or generation in history. We need to realize that this narcotizes us into a state of dull resignation to the 'inevitable'. Maybe this is what lies at the root of the apparent apathy epidemic in the west.
On a personal level, and at the risk of sounding like an infomercial, I'm going to take a good look at the things I consider barriers to my development as a human being, and a father and a husband and I'm going to make a point of looking at the little picture from now on. Maybe I'll find a little more power there.
And for lack of a better graphic, on the theme of dental hygiene;

Undefined my ass!

Okay, this one has kept me up too many nights. Not because I can't figure it out, but because it is so unbelievably simple that it simply has to be true. I would invite you to invite all of your math friends to check this out for me.
0*0=0 right?
Infinity*infinity=infinity right?
X * infinity=infinity
X * 0 =0

Okay, that's the background. Now here's the deal. When you get into dividing numbers by zero, or dividing numbers by infinity, they say that the answer is 'undefined'.
Here's a quick (not really)explanation of why that is. (If you like you can skip the explanation and move to the next paragraph following the explanation)
THE EXPLANATION FOR WHY YOU CAN'T DIVIDE BY ZERO OR INFINITY
Because there's just no sensible way to define it.

For example, we could say that 1/0 = 5. But there's a rule in arithmetic that a(b/a) = b, and if 1/0 = 5, 0(1/0) = 0*5 = 0 doesn't work, so you could never use the rule. If you changed every rule to specifically say that it doesn't work for zero in the denominator, what's the point of making 1/0 = 5 in the first place? You can't use any rules on it.
But maybe you're thinking of saying that 1/0 = infinity. Well then, what's "infinity"? How does it work in all the other equations?
Does infinity - infinity = 0?
Does 1 + infinity = infinity?
If so, the associative rule doesn't work, since (a+b)+c = a+(b+c) will not always work:
1 + (infinity - infinity) = 1 + 0 = 1, but
(1 + infinity) - infinity = infinity - infinity = 0.
You can try to make up a good set of rules, but it always leads to nonsense, so to avoid all the trouble we just say that it doesn't make sense to divide by zero.
What happens if you add apples to oranges? It just doesn't make sense, so the easiest thing is just to say that it doesn't make sense, or, as a mathematician would say, "it is undefined."
Maybe that's the best way to look at it. When, in mathematics, you see a statement like "operation XYZ is undefined", you should translate it in your head to "operation XYZ doesn't make sense."

UNDEFINED MY ASS
This reminds me of the commercials where they try to pass off baffling legalese to children to rob them of their toys. The commercials end with "Even a child knows etc" I think even a child would realize that the above undefinition is a cop out.
I think my explanation, as follows, makes a lot more sense. My theory mathematically proves that nothing is everything, and everything is nothing. It proves that the universe is one giant singularity. Are you ready, it's not that complicated.
Imagine if you will, a number line. The negatives go off to the left to negative infinity, the numbers go off to the right to positive infinity. This is the same line we all learned in the 4th or 5th grade.
On the number line zero sits between 1 and -1. Infinity sits at either end of the number line.
What I'm going to ask you to imagine next is this: We don't count out to infinity in each direction. We count down to 0 from infinity in each direction. 0 isn't the start or beginning, it's the midpoint. It's the sum of all points. (-infinity)+(positive infinity)= 0. In this instance, because the range of points from 0 to infinity = infinity, and the range of points from 0 to -infinity is infinity, we can see that 0, being the exact halfway point could be expressed as infinity/2=0. Consequently, 0*2=infinity. These equations work IF 0=Infinity.
Do you get it? Yeah, that just happened to your head. So what can I do with this now?

I'm All Out of Love.

Maybe it's the rain. Maybe it's the time of year. Maybe it's because I'm here and my wife and kids are home and school's starting and my boy is sick and I'm 1000 miles away. Whatever it is the magic isn't here this time. I passed on the urge to slip into old ghost mode and haunt the halls of my old West End memories this time. I hit the skytrain and it was a pain in the ass to be honest. The shopping downtown is just downtown shopping.
Cursing my way through the wet coast rain I didn't hear the refrains of Miles Davis drifting in the seedy alleys of my boarded up nostalgia that I used to. That slightly bad ass feeling of being down and out and cold and wet was noticeably absent. More than anything I was just cold and wet.
Somewhere there were vague memories of enjoying the rain and the cold and the dark because there was always dry and warm and neon light to be had in my favorite rainy day go-to places. But the memories were too vague...more an intangible wisp like a sensation you think you might remember from a dream.
What I found today was that I miss my home, as lacking in glamor as it is. I miss my family. I miss my friendly cat curling up with me the moment I lay down and my mean cat hissing at me with a swat the moment I walk by. I miss my ridiculous vehicles and my longboard.
There was something that did make me smile today. You can still get a giant slice of pizza for 1.50 all over the place. They're even billing it as 'Vancouver Style' now. I think that means 6 hours of old with toppings more implied than employed :)

Paradigm Slide

This year I bought my wife a longboard for her birthday. Admittedly it was a bit of a chipmunk gift. I wanted a smaller board that I could do a few more tricks on, but she really wanted a longboard too, so it all worked out.
The great news is that she took right to it. I'm really happy about it, because it means that in future I'll have someone I actually enjoy spending time with to come out with me. But there's a neat byproduct of this.
We went to one of the more upscale areas to do some boarding the other day. On the way back Janet laughed to herself a bit and I asked her what it was about. She said that in the past anytime we've driven down that particular stretch of road she's always looked at houses, but this time she was looking at the trails and paths and roads for nice board runs. It's not quite enough to call a paradigm shift. But it's a start. What makes me so happy about it is that she's seeing the world a bit like I do. A fancy house is one thing, but a healthy mind, body and inner balance are a whole lot more important. Hopefully longboarding can be a door of perception for her in that light. Maybe we can both go into our 60s like Cliff Coleman.

Scrambled Egg In a Cup.

This isn't about scrambled egg in a cup. It's about time, impermanence, infinity, eternity and all that jazz. But it starts out with scrambled egg in a cup. Just giving you a heads up in case you think this is going to be some heartwarming nostalgia type thing. It's not.
When I was a kid, my favorite food was scrambled egg in a cup. My mum (Scottish)would soft boil an egg, put it in a cup with some salt and butter, scramble it up and serve it to me with toast soldiers. I know I loved it, I remember loving it, but I don't remember ever eating it and loving it because at 5 years old she must have undercooked the egg a little too much and I came down with a hideous case of food poisoning. I couldn't stand the look, taste smell or texture of scrambled eggs after that.
So at 5 years old I came down with a massive case of food poisoning and I puked and puked and puked and puked until I passed out, then woke up and puked and passed out until I became completely lost as far as time and space were concerned.
Previous to this poisoning, I had a pretty established routine. I got up in the morning, and I went to bed in the evening when my parents threatened me with Wee Willie Winkie, who would take me away to some kind of labor camp for children if I wasn't in bed when he came knocking.
My routine revolved around television for the most part. The news in the morning until Dad left for work, then a few kids shows until lunch time, mum would watch her soaps in the afternoon and then we'd all watch the same shows at night: Gilligan's Island, Barnaby Jones, Ironside, etc.
This might sound bizarre, but I can pinpoint the day I learned about time, and it was this food poisoning day.
I came to after having been passed out for what seemed like forever. I thought that I had gone to bed at night, yet when I woke up it was night time again. Somehow I'd slept through the whole day. I came out of my bedroom which adjoined the living room to see Gilligan's Island on TV, and the confusion it caused me had my parents giggling away. I was horribly disoriented. Gilligan's Island was something that happened after supper. Supper was something that happened when Dad got home from work. Dad got home from work after the soaps, etc. Yet here I was, a whole day gone, and in my experience none of the event triggers leading up to Gilligan's Island had occurred. It was then that somebody told me it was 7:30.
And at 5 years old I became aware in the most acute and disturbing way that time does not stop, even when you're sleeping.
Since then I've had a few more disturbing revelations concerning time.
I've learned that when you're 16 years old, grade 7 is an era, grade 6 is an era, and the summer between grade 6 and 7 is yet another era. But when you're coming up on 40 years old, then it seems your 20s were an era, your 30s were an era. Somehow the cognizant realization of time hits warp factor 9, and 10 years seem to pass as quickly as a year in school or a summer at the lake.
I've found a way to stem this though, to slow it down so that a summer lasts almost forever again. The secret? Relax. Work less. Play more. If you work a lot, and can't change it, then you have to play a lot more.
I push myself to a state of complete and utter exhaustion every day all summer, every summer. Just because I'm stuck in a little cup of time-space doesn't mean that I can't alter it. I'm going to scramble things up a bit. This year I'm starting summer in the spring. I won't finish it until the fall. And I will play people, and I will play hard.

39 Winters Rant.

The build up to this rant really began about 2 weeks ago. Nevertheless it's been an omnipresent irritation for a long time now.
Here's the deal.
Chronologically I'm pushing 40. Now whether it's arrested adolescence, Peter Pan syndrome or simply a deep seated joie de vivre, I do not behave like a 40 year old.
Most of the people that I work with are in their 20s and I relate to them quite well. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that most of them are more mature than I am. They all work with me day in and day out and I think they know me well enough to realize that I'm not going through some midlife crisis. I think they know that I genuinely have never had my enthusiasm for silliness dampened or lost. Other 40ish acquaintances of mine like to rib me about my leisure activities. They seem to think that biking and skateboarding are ridiculous notions and attempts to gain back some kind of youth. I have nothing to gain back however. I never gave up these kind of pursuits at any point. I never made the attempt to grow up and be responsible that they did.
The people that know me best know that I'm a big kid, with a big kid's enthusiasm for pretty much anything fun, and a big kid's disdain for anything not fun.
So on to the past couple of weeks. I'm in Vancouver, looking for a new MP3 player for Janet, and absolutely refusing to buy into another Apple device. In a glass case behind the counter they had an MP3 player by Sony called a Wearable Walkman. I asked the clerk if I could see 'that walkman thingy' and some jerk next to me laughed and said 'you're showing your age'. Initially I thought he was making fun of me using the term thingy, but then I realized he thought I was calling all MP3 players 'walkmans'. I showed him the package and asked for his thoughts on it and when he saw that it actually was a "Walkman" he got a little sheepish.
Fast forward to one week later (or skip to the next track I should say.) Janet and I are in the store and I see a Wii game out of the corner of my eye that I thought the kids would like, called Sega Superstars Tennis. I asked Janet to hand me the Sega game, and she laughed at me and said "It's a WII game, not a Sega game,we don't have a Sega!" and then she made a comment about me getting old and mixing up my decades. I pointed out that Sega still produces software, although they don't produce consoles anymore and asked her again to pass me the Sega game.
Now to wrap up this little rant. I don't feel old. I have more energy than I had when I was 18, I'm in better shape than I was when I was 18, I don't feel that I gave up any of my youth to become an adult. In fact trying to fit into the adult world of responsibilities and commitments is and always has been a monumental struggle for me. The only time that I do feel even close to 40, is when somebody comments on my behaviour, interests etc as being for someone younger. Screw that.

Speed Wobble

There's a parable here, or at least I hope there will be a parable here by the time I'm done, so bear with me.
I've fallen in love with longboarding. As it was with poker it's the meditative, zen quality of longboarding that really does it for me. The moves required to maintain any sort of fluid and experience enhancing flow are extraordinarily simple, yet any variation from the norm and you are eating shit in a manner most painful and quick.
Speed wobble is a phenomenon that occurs in most wheeled vehicles when they hit higher speeds. It is just what it sounds like. A terrifying incongruency between the oscillation of the wheels, resulting in a destabilizing wobble, also known as 'death wobbles' at very high speeds.
This is what I find absolutely beautiful and zen and jedi about speed wobbles on a longboard. When you're flying down a hill and the board begins to shake, the first instinct you have is to somehow correct your balance to fight the wobble. Generally this is a bad idea, and the parable should become evident here pretty quick.
Like the universe, a longboard's natural state is one of balance. The design of the trucks (the things that the wheels are on) is such that they are self correcting. If you apply force to turn them in one direction, the simple removal of that force will return them to center. If, while experiencing speed wobble, you attempt to steer your way out of it, you're keeping your wheels from correcting themselves. The best action to take, is nearly impossible to explain until you experience it. The best action to take, is to just relax. When it begins to feel that the board is going to lose all contact with the road and throw you down at 40 or 50 kms per hour, your best course of action is just to go loose and have faith that everything is going to be okay. The moment you do this, your calm translates immediately to the board and the wobbles cease. I used to get speed wobbles at around 15 miles per hour, then 20...now I'm up to about 40 without a problem.
As with so many things in life; fear, stress, anger, frustration, anxiety, they all seem to vanish into a smooth state-of-grace kind of calmness when you realize that trying to control it all is sometimes 90% of the problem. And in case you missed it, that was the parable.

The Strange Alluring Opiate of Freedom and The Nature of Elephants

Last night I fell asleep watching videos of longboarding in warm climes. My hope was that I would then have beautiful dreams of carving down sunlit streets with a warm breeze barely sufficient to vaporize the sweat on my skin. That didn't happen. All I remember about my dreams is that a taxi company was opening a new dispatch on Idylwyld. Hardly the escapist alternate reality I was going for.

Today I woke up to a sick boy, and girls that needed to be at school for 8:30.
I stepped outside to start the car and my breath came in crystalline incandescent blue clouds, and ice cracked like a whip cracking as I opened the door to my vehicle in the crisp quiet of cold winter morning. I spent my first hour of the day shivering, much as I have done for the last 4 months.

5 days a week, sometimes more, I go to work. As far as work goes, I've got it pretty good. Decent pay, a high degree of personal autonomy. Yet I am dissatisfied. Discontent. I have no higher ambition in life than to longboard MOST of the time. It's getting to be an obsession. I'm considering a flight to Vancouver or Vegas or Phoenix or Albuquerque maybe even Juarez just to get it out of my system.

It's a sickness right now people. I can feel it 24/7. I KNOW that living in the snow and ice and darkness is not normal. I've been to places where winter consists of 1 or 2 snowfalls a year and a little rain now and again. I've been to places where it never snows, where it rains for half an hour at night, and half an hour in the morning, and within half an hour more the tropic sun has dried the streets. I know that there are beaches, where in the words of a good friend, all you need to survive is a guitar and a sad song.

I've worked at home before. Less money, but no schedule.
I read a thing lately, a metaphor for the bondage we all find ourselves in as we're consumed by work and responsibilities and 'life' in the 'real world'. The jist of it was this:
A traveller in South East Asia noticed that the massive elephants people used for work, elephants that transported entire forests with their trunks, capable of destroying homes and bridges,were secured against any attempts at escape by a frail little rope tied around one foot. Any one of them could easily have snapped said ropes in an instant.
The traveller asked a trainer why they didn't break the ropes.
"We tie them with that size of rope when they are babies. The nature of an elephant is to roam free. Throughout their childhood they are too weak to break the ties. They try and they fail, they try and they fail until eventually they give up. When they become adults, they have come to accept that they're bound, and they don't bother trying to free themselves."
The problem with me, is that I know this whole way of life is a fabrication, and it chafes at me more than any rope ever could.

Wormholes on Broadway

I finished work last night, called home for the usual "Do I need to pick anything up?" call and received instructions to get milk.
20 minutes later I pulled into the parking lot of the OK Economy on Broadway and headed inside.
There's a certain headspace that arises when you've had a long day and a quiet drive and the night is dark and snow is falling quiet and slow like it does in Christmas movies. I came out of the sparkling deep blue night into the blinding flourescents of a grocery store that hasn't changed in 25 years. A muddy trail across the tile started thick at the door where people had knocked the snow off of their shoes and melted away to gradually disappear deeper inside the store.
Something about that triggered a memory somewhere. Not a deja vu, but an actual image locked in some neuron. OK Economy, circa 1984, going to pick up powdered donuts with Ryan Townsend so that he could try to chat up the check out girl that was in her 20s. I got to thinking about places and time, and places in time and it occurred to me that somewhere in this universe there is a vantage point from which I could see 1984 me and 2009 me walking around OK Economy simultaneously. It occurred to me that just because that moment has slipped into the past doesn't mean it's not here anymore. Walking around the store I had the distinct feeling of walking through an ethereal wake of time, that all the events and moments those walls had seen were still there, rippling in tiny waves, collecting in corners in extra-dimensional eddies and swirls.
Anyway, it was one of those weird, surreal little moments I wanted to write down.

Repo Man

So I'm sitting up at the bar with Dan, and Dan is ebullient and jovial and glad to be alive because it's his day off and he came into $200 he wasn't expecting or needing and was exercising his option to be frivolous with it.
It was a slow night for me so I checked out early and sat with him for a bit, swapping work woes and future hopes and what-not, in a generally jovial mood myself. Somehow we got on to the topic of career choices and the options we had if we were to wish a change.
"My buddy is a repo man." Dan said.
"I'd love to be a repo man!" I said. "It's up in the top 5 of jobs I'd like to try."
"Really?" Dan was taken aback. "I wouldn't think you'd enjoy dispensing misery to people."
"I'm pretty good at staying detached and reasoning my conscience away." I answered. "As a Repo guy, you aren't God taking things away from people with your power, you're simply the hand of God. I just think it wouldn't be dull."
Dan shrugged then raised a thoughtful eyebrow. "Well, my friend has a lot of stories about it, that's for sure."
"Like what?" I asked.
So Dan told me a story.
"One day he got this call from one of these rent to own furniture places. He had to go out to a reserve and pick up a big screen tv, a sound system, and some video game stuff. So off he goes, in the middle of winter, and he gets to the house, where this disshevelled woman in her 40s answers. Behind her, there are at LEAST ten kids, all ages, from 2 to 12, and not one of them has even a stitch of clothing on. After some initial arguing and debate the woman finally realizes that resistance is futile and lets him in, directing him through the house to a room at the back. There's nothing in the house. An old couch and chair and that's about it. Finally he gets to the room, and there's a big hole in the wall filled with snow, and snow pouring into the house. In that room is this altar of electronics from the rent to own place. Once the kids start to understand that he's there to take it all away from them and leave them with nothing but the snow for entertainment they start crying and yelling and arguing and begging him. He just dismantles it all, a component at a time, taking it out of the house piece by piece while they all cry and sob. And that was one day on the job for him."
"Wow." I said.
"Can you believe some people live like that?"
"Well if the pay is good and he likes it..." I said.

Social Networking, Neuro-linguistic Programming, Molecular Gastronomy.

Quitting Facebook has been tough. So tough that as of yet I'm unsuccessful. I've been checking it daily still, just not posting. Every time I do check it I try to do a little neuro-linguistic programming with myself, build some negative associations with the site etc. But I'm still interested. It's tough for me not to post info about everything. For example.
One of my cooks at work has taken an interest in molecular gastronomy. It's debatably a new form of cuisine that relies on chemical profiles of food to blend tastes, textures etc. It uses techniques, ingredients and equipment that are more at home in a laboratory than a kitchen; liquid nitrogen, syringes, calcium chloride, sodium alginate. The results are curious, beautiful, often tasty. It's nouvelle cuisine on LSD. My cook's facebook feed shows that he's joined a Facebook group for Molecular Gastronomy. A quick perusal of their wall shows comments from young aspiring chefs, many claiming to be great and talented professing an interest in this new cuisine. Most of them look too young to have even begun to understand classical cuisine, a grounding that is crucial to success especially in this path. There were a lot of arrogant statements on their site and it was damn tempting to break my facebook vows and berate them. Fortunately I have some self discipline, so I'll just air my thoughts here.
A lot of classical chefs don't think too highly of molecular gastronomy. They feel it's pretentious, serves a chef's ego more than the cuisine, is about showboating technique over the dish. I find to my surprise, that after an initial interest in molecular gastronomy, I subscribe to this school of thought. In my opinion, food should be simple, regional and magnificent, emphasis on the simple. I think on this, even Ferran Adria would agree.
To me simplicity is the corner stone of great cuisine. Fresh ingredients complementing one another in taste, color and texture, prepared with passion. I don't have any desire to see the word 'chloride' anywhere in my food. Molecular gastronomy is a neat novelty idea, a high end cousin to deep-fried cola or cotton candy, but it's little else other than a passing fancy. Students of molecular gastronomy would do well to pay attention to Adria's words in this video Ultimately, his work is first and foremost about the cuisine of Catalan, and it came about after 10 years of studying nouvelle cuisine, followed by another 10 years specializing in Mediterranean cuisine. Before you can make a lobster gazpacho, you need to be able to make a gazpacho.