Roll the Bones

While digging tunnels in London, workers came across 25 skeletons from the time of the Black Death. I wouldn't say that I'm a 'Doomsday Prepper' type by any means. I don't hoard food, I haven't turned my home into a defacto fortress. That isn't to say that I haven't educated myself for various disaster scenarios. (Bear with me, this will come full circle by the end, you know me). One nugget I found in this article was the mention of the varying conditions of bones in the different layers of burial. The earliest bones showed signs of malnutrition, attributed to the "Great Famine" that preceded the first round of the Black Death (which eventually claimed 75 million lives in Europe). Earlier today I had read an article about a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia in the 12th Century. It's credited with being the cause of a Little Ice Age at the time, as well as being one of the precipitating factors of the dark ages, and the 'Great Famine'. Disease, climate change affecting global economic stability, all created a 'perfect storm' of cirucmstances bringing about the collapse of civillization at the time. Bones found from a later period, after the famine, when the plague had been in full swing testified to this: "The later skeletons, however, show more signs of upper-body injuries, consistent with a period of lawlessness and social breakdown." A study conducted by NASA last week addressed perfect storms such as this, stating that the utter collapse of civilization is likely in our lifetime. It said "The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent." You can read the entire article here. We tend to be quite arrogant about our level of civilization, considering ourselves considerably more evolved than our ancestors 700 years ago. I realized just how untrue this was watching the news this week. One needs look no further than side by side pics of modern riot police and Roman centurions to see just how alike we are. RIOT POLICE IN KIEV 2013

A TYPICAL ROMAN CENTURION FORMATION

Now for the full circle. While some might view this article about some old skeletons uncovered in an excavation as scholarly and thought provoking, I find it to be more of a warning. The NASA article mentions nearly half a dozen advanced and sophisticated civillizations that collapsed under a perfect storm of circumstances. It points out that it is a "recurrent cycle", and just such a perfect storm is brewing now. These tunnel laborers uncovering the bones of their 13th century brethren's short brutal live, may just find themselves the next layer in the dirt.

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?

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.

Almost as good as a double prizer.

I had a moment today. It bordered on spiritual. To say it was euphoric wouldn't be exagerrating. This is just between us okay. Don't let it get out to too many people.
There is a Canadian Tire Store in the city with a defective jelly bean machine.
Here's the thing. I learned back when I was about ten years old that if you put a quarter into a gumball machine, then turn the dial really slowly, you might find the mythical sweet spot, where the prized candy within just keeps on coming. I've never managed to clean out a machine this way, but I've certainly gotten more than my money's worth more times than I can count. It all started with the gumball machine at the old Pinder's Drugs on Broadway and Taylor. By turning slowly to the limit of the dial, then exercising a couple quick twists of the wrist, I was often able to get 2 or 3 gumballs for the price of one.
It seemed that the candy companies caught on to this sometime in the mid 80s. I've haven't cashed out more than I put in for decades.
Then today it happened.
In the exit door of this Canadian Tire they have a row of candy machines. I love jelly beans, and the jelly bean machine did a Svengali number on the last quarter in my pocket. I sunk it into the machine, and gave the dial a slow clicking turn, the same way that I've been doing for the better part of 30 years now. I could hear the jelly bean bay filling up, and I just knew I was getting a little extra. At the end of the turn, when the dial would turn no more, I gave it the patented Pinder's Flick back a touch, and SCORE! I heard another payload of jellybeans tumbling into the bean bay. It all came back to me, all the subtlety, all the English that I used to know so implicitly, instinctively back in the day. I kept flipping the dial, and I found the sweet spot where the tumblers never locked. I filled the bean bay twice before the Canadian Tire flunkies started to notice my surreptitious activities, and making a mental note of the machine's location, I beat a timely, low profile retreat with a FULL pocket of beans!
Life is good people. Life is good.
Almost as good as a double prizer

Flat-terranean Homesick Blues.

I was just searching for the video of Forrest Gump running to add to my last blog entry, which I thought would be kind of fun and whimsical, but instead I found myself getting a little bit melancholy.
I was living in BC when I first saw Forrest Gump. I saw it in the theater, and let me tell you people, Vancouver in Autumn is very far from Saskatoon.
I was feeling lonesome and homesick the way that prairie people often do when they're surrounded and shut in by trees and mountains and clouds. The Pacific Coast can wrap you in, and if you're averse to being wrapped it's not necessarily a good thing.

I'll admit that I'm pretty susceptible to outside influences, particularly when it comes to emotions and such. There's a running scene in Forrest Gump in which he runs across America a few times. One of the shots in this scene is a long sweeping panorama of prairie skyline, as Forrest runs along a flatland highway through shimmering wheat fields.

I was sitting in this dark theater, and that big beautiful blue sky in the scene was even more real to me at that time than any sky I could recall. I felt such an incredible wave of homesickness at that point, of complete and utter displacement that it hit me in the stomach like a lost love.

Here's a confession of some teenage silliness for you, that is somewhat related while we're at it.
When I was a teenager I thought I'd seen Saskatchewan for the last time. It turned out that I hadn't, and the day that I came back from living in Britain was one of the best days of my life. The day that I came back I went to the outskirts of the city where the fields start and they don't stop, and I actually ran out into a wheatfield with my walkman blaring John Cougar and I rocked out until I was exhausted (I'd held on to this image of the video for Pink Houses while I'd been in Britain) and after I rocked out and relived the video I just laid there in the freezing November cold, ecstatic and delirious. Here's another little confession, I was actually trying to grow my hair out to look like the album cover of American Fool back then. I so identified with this video that it determined my entire personality. You'll see at the end...Aviators, long hair, white T-shirt, boots. When I was overseas this video defined home for me, and I think that somehow, by emulating him I was holding on to home.

John Mellencamp - Pink Houses
Uploaded by John-Mellencamp