The gunning smoke?

It was an interesting bit of advertising, crammed alongside an article on the possible death of Canada’s Gun Registry.

In fact the story itself, that the ruling Conservative party seems hesitant to bring to public view a 2008 RCMP asessment of the Registry, became secondary as I stared at this:

I used to smoke. For fifteen years on-and-off I barbequed the inside of my lungs. And I’ll admit that I have a certain nostalgia for the days when I was a bulletproof nicotine addict rather than an older, theoretically wiser, asthmatic.

No, smoking didn’t cause the asthma. I grew out of asthma at 18 or so, as many do, and smoked myself right back in, as far as I can tell. Stupid, yes. Just human.

So I was curious about what the “polite way to smoke” meant. Turns out, as far as I can tell, that this is a vaporiser, similar to the ones long familiar in the “dodgy-advertising” section of your local softcore or lad mag.

The difference being that this is meant to substitute for the look and feel of a cigarette. You can even choose whether to smoke nicotine in it, so it seems.

I read the advertisement page with nothing short of admiration.

Amazing, I thought. If they’d had that a decade ago I’d have switched to that instantly.

I clicked to close the window and got the “Are you sure” blurb, including a repetition of the “Free Trial Offer!”

And before the gods and you, O Constance, I seriously considered clicking for a Free Trial Offer!

Because the odd nostalgia never leaves you. I’d imagine ex-heroin-addicts feel a similar rush when they pop into the local blood clinic and see all those shiny needles. It’s about what the paraphenalia means to you.

I sat in my chair, remembering the satisfaction of the first butt over a cup of coffee.

I recalled the night I met the love of my life (okay, several nights and several loves-of-my-life, but I swear I meant it at the time, every time), standing outside the club smoking.

It’s a physical hook, and my gut knots remembering the comfort and company of a glowing Player’s Light on the 2 a.m. fire picket shift on dozens of military exercises.

The smell of my childhood was Dad’s pipe; the atmosphere of the government office where my mother worked a thick blue. My first car reeked of old cigarettes, cheap cologne, and sun-blasted vinyl.

The associations were so poweful that for a moment I hovered the cursor above the “click here” button for my Free Trial Offer!

Yeah, my thoughts continued. And without the hideous side effects from smoking I could have gone on being a nicotine addict until I died.

It took me ten years to get clear of the stuff the first time.  I clicked the “X” instead.

Words I remember, the first

I’ve always known people with great stories, mostly true or embellished only enough to put the final polish on. Dave was one of those guys. He was a “Caper,” one of the Cape Bretoners who, along with Newfies, form the backbone of the Canadian forces.

The man looked like a character from a Dick Tracy strip. His face was seamed and wrinkled like a shar-pei. He had tremendous integrity and character, and I’ll never forget him.

It was Dave who once asked me: “What da hell are you doing in the army?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Well you’re real smart at the book stuff, but I tell ya, bye, some days you ain’t got the common sense God gave a doorknob.”

“Well,” I said, not comfortable with or willing to admit the truth of what he’d said, “What else would I do? The army’s all I know.”

“I dunno, bye. Go to school. Seems like the smart thing.”

“Aw, what’d I go to school for? Hell, I’m twenty-four now. I go four years for a bachelor’s degree and then I’m twenty-eight and trying to start a career …” I shook my head.

Dave stared at me for a moment, and said:

“Well, bye … How old are ya gonna be if you don’t go to school?”

 

Apparently I Lack Ambition

As many people know, I’m a writer. If you hadn’t picked that up on arrival I commend you to the header of this blog.

And like most writers I have a file of unpublished writing (some of it, admittedly, crap). And like a large segment of modern writers I seem to be pathalogically incapable of submitting it for publication. I suppose I’m waiting until it morphs by magic into the Great Canadian Novel. Or at least the Critically Acclaimed First Novel … Well perhaps the Insanely Profitable First Novel …
All right, I’d settle for Published First Novel.

And therein lies my Achilles’ Heel, my classical fault and failure. For clearly I am insufficiently ambitious. Just look at this chap. From the blurb written, I feel it necessary to point out, by the author:

“Like so many fantasy novels inflicted on an undeserving public, this was written by a teenager. [. . .] BE SURPRISED BY the surprise twist which is blatantly obvious 150 pages before it happens!”

There’s more of the same, by the author, at the site. It’s going for $13.50 a copy at lulu.

My hat is off in humility at the sheer chutzpah. Clearly I need to get off my collective and submit. As Lori sometimes, in her role as reviewer, raves at me: “If people are willing to publish this drivel, then you ought to be selling stories as fast as you can pump ‘em out!”

Speaking of pumping ‘em out: It’s NaNoWriMo. If you have a first novel screaming for release within you, now is the time.

Giving thanks for the absence of unlovable ones

Of Thanksgiving I am able

To say ’tisn’t well-begun

When the gent across the table

Mentions he has brought his gun

~Me

I’d been sitting across the table for about five minutes when the stocky, frazzled-thinning-hair-ed gent with the piggish face, busted blood vessels, and tightly-spaced eyes in the multi-pocketed khakis and red T-shirt announced to me and those others present that he’d brought his handgun.

His name was Steph, more or less. I mentally checked him off as “Possible oddball” (using “oddball” in place of another, more anatomical seven-letter word). In what universe is it acceptable to bring a gun to a Thanksgiving dinner, for God’s sake? But apparently he had. Not only that, but he appeared to have been drinking.

Well sure, I figured he’d left it in the cab of whatever pickup he’d driven. But who would assume that the imbecile would be bringing a damned gun anywhere near a friendly dinner party? This is Canada, thankfully.

He clearly wasn’t at ease, and at first I’d put it down to being “Mom’s boyfriend.” But one of the first things he’d said was that he’d rather have been “up in the bush, with m’brother.” He said he’d spent years out there.

I’ve met bush dwellers, a few of ‘em. They generally aren’t much at home in what you’d call polite society, even one as relaxed as that dinner’s.

The conversation was light pop-culture, TV, strippers, and sex, mostly. Three of us up that end of the table kept a large part of our lives on the internet, a place he clearly felt was much like the surface of Mars.

Thinking to take the conversation to ground he might be more at home on, I asked him his occupation. He was a glazier, it turned out, and had just come (he shook his head as he said this) from a job at Brandi’s, a strip club in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. That link, by the way, is definitely NSFW.

He’d been moving some mirrors around on the ceiling:
“They were gettin’ in th’way of the air-con. They keep those places cold, see. So the girls’ nipples stand up nice ‘n’ hard.”

When the job was finished:
“I took th’key the guy gave me and went up one floor like he said. And holy s__t, through these two glass doors come two gorgeous chicks … ‘Can we do anything for yuh?’ I said ‘No’ … Hell, people pay a thousand bucks an hour for those things.”

“Sorry,” I asked “What things?”
“Y’know, the girls … I call ‘em things.”
…
The table down our end went a bit quiet. I tensed and slowly turned my head to look at my wife, who is rarely the most retiring of shy violets, particularly when confronted by misogynists with compensation issues.

Lorraine, who knows where The Swedish Touch massage parlour is and has likely met some of the workers, was also watching Lori.

Who put down her fork and said “Pardon me?” In a tone like a fancy Katana gliding from its sheath.

“It’s just my way,” he looked a little off-kilter “I call ‘em thin–”

“They’re people.” Lori hissed. Our end of the table was silent. Henrietta was trying to find a place to look. Steph was red, but looked like a dog that knows it’s in trouble, trying to avoid meeting Lori’s gaze. He was visibly seething.

Me, I’ve worked with Stephs before. But the last one was a long time ago, very far away, and it had never seemed as important for someone to school them when I wasn’t married. Now I was thinking about ways to make sure he didn’t get up if I had to knock him down.

“They. Are. People.” In the fragile silence it sounded like a countdown.

“Aw, that’s just my way. I mean, once they’re on that crack, that meth, they never get off … Kinder to–”

“That’s not true.” Lorraine spoke. She lives in that neighborhood, she’s worked with sex-trade workers, she interacts with the angels and demons every damn day. So she’s considerably more informed than Steph was.

“Nah,” he said, dismissively, angry and off-kilter but sallying forth anyway: “Might as well shoot ‘em. When you’re an addict …”

“No.” She stopped him flatly with her crafted Talking-to-Idiots tone: “I’ve met people who’ve gotten off meth. Some people can do it.”

“Well, some …” he acknowledged. But the tension bled from the moment as he found himself unable to assert he was right, but simultaneously unable to admit he could be wrong. The moment passed, Steph mumbled something and looked into his lap. Light and colour flooded back into the room.

Unfortunately several people left the table at once, leaving me with Steph. Here’s a sampling of his ideas:
“I went driving up that King George Highway one time, ’bout five in the morning there’s crack whores out there … them crackheads … there’s millions of friggin’ crack whores up there.”
He paused and eyed me up:
“Friggin’ things … They try and crawl in the cab with you …”

I drove truck for a lot of years. I know whereof he speaks. Still anyone driving slowly around the KGH at five a.m is usually coming down off a hard night and looking for a little company.

“So you find a polite refusal doesn’t do it for you, then?” I asked, fascinated.
“No, them f__kers won’t ever listen. There’s guys too, down there,” he said, assembling evidence of his righteousness. “I tell you, I’d liketa go down there sometimes and just open up, y’know?” He mimed using an automatic weapon to spray an invisible sidewalk. And smiled at me.

I let myself relax and listen, wondering quietly whether he had any kids and whether it was too late to sterilize them all. Coincidentally he was on about something similar.

“I figure, the second the kids come out, y’know, if there’s anything funny with ‘em, just give ‘em the hammer. That’s how the Spartans did it. How nature does it. Humans, we’ve got compassion, and it f__ks everything up.” Apparently the Spartans weren’t human. He swung an imaginary sledge toward a fictional deformed baby’s head. Then to ensure I understood he pantomimed a single pistol round across the table.

He continued to sculpt himself into a parody of working-class Nazism. There was more, against women, immigrants … you pretty much name anything but white middle-aged males and he wanted them shot. But I’d stopped listening.

There is a point where your opponent says something that translates as “I’m not fit to converse with adults or children who have mastered basic verbs.” He’d hit that point as soon as he opened his mouth. But I’d given him rope enough to hang himself. What’s more, he just kept doing it.

He was still red in the face. And I found myself unable to respond to him. Mercifully he hoisted himself from his chair and left with Henriette. I was able to avoid having to mumble any kind of pleasantry as he went.

I had no idea how badly the preceding moments with Lorraine and Lori had affected him until the following day, when Henrietta’s oldest daughter happened by our house:

“Oh, Henrietta said he was really swearing up a storm: ‘F__king bitch, who the hell does she think she is?’ and that sort of thing.”
“Well thank Sod he’d left his gun in his car,” I said.
“He had?” she asked.
“Well he told us he’d brought the damn thing,” I answered “I mean, what fool brings a gun to a Thanks-f__king-giving dinner?”
“No,” she said “He brought his car?”
“What?”
“Well Mom drove them there in her van. She said she didn’t know he had the gun on him. He had a hip flask in his pants too.”

If I ever find out Steph’s license plate, I think I’m going to shop him to the cops. By his own admission he doesn’t belong in civilization.

Meantime I hope he goes back to the bush. It’s be nice to think that he and his brother could stay there, nice and isolated. By themselves and far from any humans.

I had been concerned that he might have continued his involvement with Henriette. But when they had their family Thanksgiving the following day, he failed to turn up.

Whatever happened to him, I hope it’s nothing trivial.

Fretting about the swine flu vaccine? I can’t argue with that.

I’ve been involved in some earnest discussions on Facebook with some friends who really ought to know better. One is herself a health-care practitioner. She works with pregnant women. Lately she’s posted two links that I have to say objectively are misleading at best.

One was a link to FOX news video of a doctor who claimed the swine flu virus was deadly, and that he wouldn’t give it to his kids. The other was an internet broadsheet from an anti-vaccination outfit that claimed that vaccines in combination were dangerous and repeated an old and debunked canard about mercury and autism.

Well first off, Mercola is a site run by a doctor who sells “natural” health products. And FOX, well, FOX usually gets it wrong one way or another. I raised that issue, as surely credibility of one’s sources is key.

I also posted saying that a) the miniscule amount of mercury in vaccines isn’t dangerous; b) Canada doesn’t use it insofar as possible; and c) while there might be a rational reason not to get inoculated from swine flu (although my personal concern, that receiving the jab after a seasonal flu shot might make one more vulnerable, has recently been debunked), mercury wasn’t the issue.

I should have known better. Immediately two people rushed into the fray.

In this conversation, one person is a schoolteacher who claims that “I’ve seen the number of kids with disorders (ADD/ADHD, autism, etc.) rise to over 20% in a classroom.” She also goes on to say that many kids in her classes suffer from “non-Ministry-of-Health categorized conditions.”

The other is a mother who claims thimerosal in vaccines turned her kid autistic: “You weren’t there to see my little boy fade out. And you have no idea how hard it’s been this past decade to get him to where he is now.” She also challenged my initial claim saying: “I’d like to see the empirical research saying mercury has no effect on the brain,” and linked to the Mercola site.

I can’t argue with these people. And it’s because of the power of anecdote.

In the first case, I’d like to explain that the increase in “special needs” kids in classrooms is an artifact.

1) There’s been a concerted effort to get them in there. My primary school had a chain-link fence down the middle. The “special” kids were on one side, the “normal” kids on the other.

2)  There’s been an enormous increase in the diagnosis of autism and the AD disorders.  More on that in another post sometime.

3) A “non-Ministry-categorized condition” is simply a non-diagnosis. The kid is presumably fine in the eyes of the family doctor.

But I can’t explain that in the face of her passionate conviction and her intensely personal story. And that goes double for the mother. It puts science on the losing end of the discussion to say “I don’t care what your anecdotal experience is with your child: Mercury has nothing to do with his autism.”

Anecdote is emotionally powerful, but lacks logical flavour. And that’s all that supports any mercury-vaccine-disorder links.

And I’d quite like to point that out. But only an idiot intentionally interposes himself between a mum and her child.

A friend once said she wasn’t going to vaccinate her kids because she considered the vaccines more dangerous than the diseases. When I pointed out the extremely low incidence of adverse reaction, she shot me a withering look and said:

“When it’s your kid, it’s always one hundred percent.”

Meanwhile, here’s a sensible look at things, from a much more credible source.

We’re All Part of the Big Pile

I grew up on folk records, classical, and what would nowadays be called “classic” rock. That is, Dad owned a single Rolling Stones album, ditto The Beatles.

But my formative years were full of folkies. If anyone were bored enough to ask my irrelevant opinion on the matter, I would say that the hostility of what passes for political discussion these days may be attributed to the near-death of pop-folk and the rise of rap, along with some of the incredibly whiny, self-absorbed stuff I hear now that I’m an ancient curmudgeon of forty-or-so-ish. [Seriously, when'd you last hear a top-forty song about anything but "me" and "I"?]

Think about it: Folk music values inclusiveness, commonalities, and shared prosperity. Rap is about the glorification of the self, being the biggest, loudest, richest, most excessive … Even the rappers who claim to have some kind of social justice message don’t seem to live it. They travel in the same stretch hummers as the ones who go on about bling and bitches.

I would be delighted it someone could show me I’m wrong on that. After all, it’s my half-assed theory, not exactly science. Drop a name and a link in the comments.

I grew up with Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and The Weavers. And I got to thinking about them today. I was out in the garden, taking a bit of a break. I have a big compost box.

Lee Hays was a Methodist singer and activist who helped form the Almanac singers (who disbanded as a result of  the Second World War–antiwar songs having lost a lot of their popularity). He also was a founding member of the Weavers (a “leftish” group which disbanded as a result of the lunacy known as McCarthyism) alongside Seeger.

In the mid-eighties I saw Hays, speaking from a wheelchair, to which he was confined by diabetes. The interview had taken place in about June of 1981, and he was speaking of his impending death, which he might not have expected but happened some two months after the interview.

He was an enthusiastic gardener, forking over his compost pile, and at some point I remember his saying something very like: “We’re all part of the big pile anyway.”

After his death, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were scattered into the pile. I think that’d be a lovely way to pass on. And (assuming I live long enough to die) that’s the way I’d like it. Spread me around the garden and grow roses, or tomatoes, or whatever. Among other things, it occurs to me that I could tell people to “eat me” and mean it.

Whoa dude moment:

Hang on … What if they shovel me into the grow-op?

My friends are an embarrassment

Of riches. Truly they are.

From a shortish distance my friend Justin could be taken as a surly thug with fascist tendencies (up close, he’s just Welsh). But he sometimes has a remarkable gift for the unexplored moment, the new idea, or the apposite gesture. He’s also crazy.

He’s an enthusiastic motorcyclist,  photographer and carpenter. In both hobbies he displays a preference for old-fashioned techniques: Hand tools, print film, and motorbikes that can be repaired with a nail and duct tape.

He once built a coracle–That is, a boat roughly four feet across, circular, made of half-inch strips of plywood covered by a bedsheet painted with rubberized paint. Shortly after construction he persuaded a friend to drop him and the boat off in Hope, BC. Whence he pushed off and drifted to New Westminster, with a nap in Mission.

So his latest scheme is pretty sane, by Justin’s standards: He’s going to cross the Alps on a 200 cc motorbike. With a passenger/co-driver. And baggage.

His friend Shona, whom I’ve met before, is apparently just nuts enough to join him. They’ve just started a blog which you may find here.

Good luck to them, says I. And I hope they won’t need it.

Mountain Musings

So my Fanhorde has doubtless been wondering where I’ve got to, right?

*Crickets*

Well I’ll tell you anyway. This’ll sound a little self-absorbed, but that’s where I’m at, I think–Fully in the grip of an unexpected mid-life crisis I thought I was too pragmatic to ever have. So blogging it is probably a safe outlet. Who’ll see it besides us two, eh?

Last week I spent some time with my father. If it’s not baring too much of my psyche to say so, he’s the guy I continue to measure my accomplishments against (and I can never help thinking that I come up a bit short).

It was a tradition through the nineties that when I was available I would join him for a hike around Labour Day. Usually we went up to Strathcona Park, a sprawling area of back-country trails containing most of the highest peaks on Vancouver Island.

We haven’t done that in a decade or more, and as my fortieth year trickles into its twilight I felt a need to resume the practice. It seemed important to me. When I was younger the hike was where I learned about Dad’s history, ideas, ideals.

On this trip I had certain questions I thought I might ask. But then I found myself descending the flanks of Mount Myra and realizing that I wasn’t likely to get around to it.

We’re just too different now. The answers I got to many of the deeper questions wouldn’t make sense to me anymore. Our life experiences and philosophical outlooks have taken us in extremely different directions. From what starting point could we establish any connection at all? And then it hit me:

We were here, on this mountain, together. In a place where most of our friends and acquaintances had never been. The point of us doing this thing together was the thing itself, the establishing of a little square of common ground, 1800 metres up.

Requiem on a G string

… and an A, B, D, and two Es.

His sound has filled our lives. All the boys and not a few girls have rocked out before bedroom and bathroom mirrors to his invention. He made possible Chuck Berry, The Guess Who, KISS, Metallica, and all the other greats.

But he wasn’t just for the stars: “Guitar Heroes” everywhere would be sitting on their couches empty-handed right now if not for him. He made it possible for people who’ve never learned a note of music to make the big time.

(I, for one, will never forget the 14-year-old humilitation of being caught doing … Was it Huey Lewis and the News? … in my underwear … by my mother. I only wish I’d looked as good.)

Tonight I’m going up the road to my nearly-weekly jam session where two players will carry instruments based on his groundbreaking technology. One of them is playing a clone of the instrument that bears his name.

He was still playing in 2007, at the age of 92. I hope I’ll still be jamming at 90+.

Lester William Polfuss has rocked out.

A sort of administrative pretzel

That’s what dealing with the storm damage is getting to be like.

Not that anyone’s been intentionally difficult so far. I would like to put a plug in for Family Insurance, who had good answers for the plethora of initial questions I had. Capri Insurance, our broker also did good work, although through a minor error and me not being quite urgent-sounding enough, I got routed through their non-emergency system. Which was okay. It’s not as if the tree was going anywhere. Or at least it wasn’t going any farther.

I’ll also mention ArborTech, for amazingly quick work. My neighbour behind lost four massive trees. All gone within two days save the stumps. I also want to thank Stutter’s Disaster Kleenup and Deckside Pool and Spa.

But there are complications. Anyone remember the song “The Bog Down in the Valley-O”? You probably sang it at camp or in Scouts or Guides or something:

And on that flea there was a germ/A rare germ, a rattlin’ germ

Germ on the flea and the flea on the bird and the bird in the nest and the nest on the branch and the branch on the limb and the limb on the tree and the tree in the hole and the hole in the bog and the bog down in the valley-o!

Well in this case it’s:

Hedges ’round the fence and the fence ’round stump and the stump by the hot tub and the hot tub on the deck and the deck around the tree and the tree in the hole and the hole in my back-yard-eo.

It all stems, as it were, from the tree. We need to replace it. Out of our own pockets, most likely.  But replace it we must. It’s the sole shade over our deck in an area where high-thirties temperatures are common through the summer. Without it our yard is a barren-looking expanse of yellow grass (I’m not very enthusiastic about watering). Losing it may have taken up to 5% off the value of the house in this desert climate. To say nothing of our comfort and a certain amount of privacy.

(I have lately realized that those little cloth panels called “sheers” should in fact be called “transparents” and are inadequate to ensure that the neighbours behind us will not be scandalized.)

And no tree can be planted prior to October, at least not in the size we intend to get. The idea, as I understand it, is that the tree is more-or-less dormant then, and can focus on growing its roots, instead of its leaves.

But the deck is already being sized and measured up. And if they build it to the original size, then the tree can’t be planted. Meanwhile, it looks as though the hot tub may have to be raised to allow proper fixing of the deck. And the damaged chain-link fence has to be removed before the stump of the old tree can be ground out.

In short, everything has to be moved before anything else can be moved so that anything else can happen.

Ah well. So far it’s relatively painless.