The Last Statement is True.

There is a man.
He was born at some point or other in the 1960s or maybe early 1970.
He did not grow up in Toronto – he either grew up in London (Canada) or in some small town in a mid-eastern state of America.
Let me pick small town America. I’m not knocking the US, any small town would do. But it’s easier for me to pick up on the extreme characteristics of the boons in America. My ‘small town in Canada’ life was more or less humorous because all houses were decorated with trendy toll paintings on cut out wooden shapes rather than deer antlers, or carcasses creatively hot glue gunned to tin porches.
(To be fair, I got this impression from Hollywood films, so blame your own published biases for my opinions.)

When this man was a boy of 5, he had a cat and a dog and he lived in one of the better homes inside the town boundaries. It had a porch made of wood. There was no area where children amalgamated and played, apart from the invariable dirty stream on the wrong side of town where all the bogeymen lived, but really it was just Ecoli.
So to amuse himself, the man who was then a boy dressed his dog up in garments lying around the house, and when the dog refused the suspenders being pinned directly to his skin, he bit the boy and refused all other friendships.
This was the first affront by way of friendship the boy suffered and he took it very hard.
He was mostly quiet except when all of the boys cheered, or when all of the boys played pranks on his teacher he was there. He never directly understood the excitement of sports or the meandering, effortless pranks, but he played them none-the-less.
Nearing the end of the public school years, and heading on into high school, things began to shift. He didn’t follow the paths of those heading to the sports activities, he grew bored with the academic and cheeky with the art teacher. He didn’t fall into drugs, because his mother was very clean and also valued cleanliness. Marijuana was stinky, and he was not dexterous enough to roll it. I’m sure it was all a front to replace the friends he did not follow into suspensions or sports – those being the very few social groupings in a remote high school in a town with no natural landscape. So he read and was convinced that he was beyond such a dingy town as that, and by all means he was probably right but there’s nothing wrong with learning from simplicity and ignorance. In fact those who dwell on growing up too fast, and running away too soon often miss the point of the present moment and seem lost while wandering through Paris because there is no enjoyment in the fact that there is a day, and one is in it. Mostly that person just wants to be anywhere but in his own skin, and only a talented artist or a pure genius can transcend biological capabilities. It’s rumored that drugs are also good at that, and why waste a good trip to Paris on acid?

Anyway, indeed he dreamed of bigger better lands. He didn’t go to University (because he was not an academic, nor could he manage dental school or other “menial” tasks). Instead he went to Vegas. I’ve never been to Vegas but I can imagine that going there alone would make it a very scary place. He liked the simple honesty of it all, visited a low-brow pornography theatre, a few costume stores. He met a queen outside a casino who said “Beautiful man looking for a date?” The man scoffed and said he was far too busy and important for such idolatry. I’m sure he didn’t realize the queen was once a man who had since been liberated.

He did drugs once, woke up in his own vomit on the shag carpet of a 70s style room with other men and no memory to account for. The man I am describing is by no means heterosexual, nor a homosexual. Just asexual. And to have been knowingly engaged in any kind of sexual act made him feel sweaty, dirty and used. He disgusted himself, and went to rinse the filth (the touch of unwashed hands) from his body, when he found vomit in the bathtub, and ran out of the building holding his shirt closed because there were no buttons.

He cried on the street, showered in his own apartment, left rent and a note, drank a coffee and took a bus to Toronto. Well, a few as I’m sure there is no direct route. He came into Toronto haggard, well assured he had hit “rock bottom.” The human conception of necessary suffering is such an odd thought. Why must one perceive things always from the “bottom” or the lowly. Why so low? It is necessary in order to gain appreciation, or by of comparison to have something that symbolizes greatness. But why seek out something that will find you in its own time?

Anyway, in Toronto, over years, he survived. I’m sure he perceived a far greater happiness than what actually existed. A cloak of acceptable perception I suppose.
He had a job, not a great one because he bullied ideas far too much, and tried to sort out problems that were not problematic. “Micromanaging.”
One night, he was on his way home from a work staff party. A party held out of office. He went, and he socialized as best as he could. But as people got drunk, he became frustrated and lost. Should it not have been the other way around? He started to feel the same filthy humanity around him. He flagged a cab.

As it so happens, I was biking along the same route as his cab. His window was wound down to get air I heard him pompously yelling at the cab driver. “Oh my God! Why do you idle in traffic? The fumes are hurting my throat. My mother’s going to Kill you!”

Another stupid precipice.

There is 50 minutes. And it will be spent without editing.
So in advance I beg forgiveness for the poor coordination of these fingers.

The precipice, as it occurs every day has grown strange.
It’s no longer defined by its fear of height, or that sensation of falling where your heart makes your throat choke and then you die before you even hit the ground. There’s no remembrance of that.

What is so different is that it’s static. So I can meander along this brink as much as I want, but there is a horrid calm before some storm and it is freeze framed like in the national geographic. Or a paused frame in a film.

Even more accurately defined there is shaved tree – a tall one – that has fallen across a crevice between two tall mountains. Miles apart. It was a very big tree.
There is no concept of wind. There are no sounds, except what sounds muted under water. It is my breath. There are no animals, no homely picture inviting me on either end. The end where I am leaving, and the end where I am going.

In fact, I’m sure there is no air – I’m just hearing my breath because it’s normal to hear yourself in times of true silence.
I used to think, when I was a child, that baths were far more exciting than showers because I could hear the bubbles of my shampoo while I scrubbed my hair. And I heard it once in the shower. And I thought maybe, since I was 9 when that first happened, that I would hear them again at precisely twice my age. That it was some gift bent on doubling and that it denoted some right of passage. Not necessarily into womanhood but maybe into some kind of calm.
I grew up in the country. Chinese people read tea leaves, I listen to shampoo.

The nonsensical fear of passing across this bridge - “perilous” as it would be described by a cheesy smut writer, was that I would fall. And as I said the fear was not that I would keep falling, not that I would swallow my own fear-induced vomit but that utterly nothing would happen. That I would float. I would be caught in suspension in the air of this dark hole. Unable to “swim” to either rock face to start climbing. No flying. It would be like Jesus falling off a boat into the middle of the ocean, not drowning, but that he would be caught, able to move joints, unable to disposition himself. Like fly trap paper.

This moment can also be likened to that frozen point where you think you are about to die, or that you are about to incur serious wrath, or that point where you hear bad news. It is stasis. It is the silence before the understanding. Except a life time long.

It is on going. I am walking. Because I have to. The cows know the grass is greener on the other side – that’s why they used to jump the fence when I chased them. So I’ve decided to walk.
People who sit on the first side of nothingness are depressed. In the very least the journey across a large stick seemingly placed between two different planets will be a learning experience, even if I never get to write those experiences down because I fall into limbo fly traps.

I’ll throw a big fit – especially during the 8th day or the 2nd week where I’ll scream and pound my fists and cry and be especially insulted when nothing happens. Walk on indignantly and in the end come out to some other unknown.
I wish I could picture it being sunny but falling into a sunny limbo denotes a tan and that’s definitely not ominous.

All of this because a strange man kissed me and I put my life into perspective. Apologies to that man who kissed me because I thought about it. It wasn’t your fault!

Blue is No Lifer

Lifers take it easy.

Lifers are the people who prefer the ‘word’ safety to the ‘fact’ of banality. They wash their vegetables and their fruit. Run on treadmills until they have the sustainable thin film of fat around their edges. Are about maintenance. Efficient.

Lifers take it easy and are, therefore, not up for debate.

Blue is born. Shoved out of a small whole blasted with cold air, man handled smacked, stabbed, and bundled.
Blue it subjected to reality. Colours, feelings, shapes, dimensionality, voices, music, noise, man made objects, nature.
Then blue learns to name all of these things – all while suffering growing pains and the invention of teeth. Blue’s care taker – whom he trusts completely then spurns him, makes him chew his own food, and begins leaving him to his own faculties.
As Blue grows, he is told what to do, how to act, how to talk. He’s introduced to more people his age where he enters an unparalleled world of exploration and imagination.
Blue has an imaginary friend until some dim witted 12 year old tells him he’s a sissy.
Blue suffers any number of scabbed knees and bandages, learns coordination – gets slugged with a few balls in activities classes where he learns to catch. Blue’s sexual hormones come into play. He goes through all stages of irrational anger, shyness, pride, masturbation. Blue might kiss a girl who doesn’t like it, so he’ll be rejected, he learns about deodorant after someone calls him names. Blue gets tones of zits learns to deal with reality that his body is as it is and no wellwishing or magic charms will make a girl like him, nor will his penis grow.
So Blue heads through a secondary school where he has to choose a career path while confronting any number of people who are so stupid and selfish that it’s blasphemous, meanwhile questioning what he believes, being satisfied with the answer that “man knows” nothing, becomes a genius, focuses on his grades, loses his viriginty while he’s drunk at party – becomes “the man” – and is suddenly popular three days before graduation. This all while at home having yelled at his mother for the first time, being forced to get a job, no longer getting birthday cards from cousins and aunts and uncles, and watching his parents go through some form of mid life crisis. Blue takes up smoking, is satisfied he knows how it courses through his veins and trades it for casual marijuana.
Next step Blue reaches university where he lives up the lack of supervision makes a few creepy friends whom he spurns two weeks later after the liquor wears off and settles down to be a serious student. Now considering himself a man, blue goes through 4 years of some university he picked out of a hat, taking Philosophy and meeting any description of a human being. His first serious relationship was spent with his dreams of marriage floating in the air with romantic sweet nothing being discussed over brunches of waffles and strawberries that Blue made himself. Not the strawberries. She leaves him for Japan where she teaches English and Blue continues to discover how small ideas are meant to become big thoughts as papers balloon to 35 and 40 pages. Degree in hand(despite the frustrating lack of books at the badly organized library) Blue exits the horrid tight world of “young adulthood” and is thrown jobless, with few qualifications or handy job skills to find a job, a friend, a town, a house, an experience, a favorite coffee shop, and maybe at some point a beautiful woman (or man).
Is Blue a lifer? Does he choose the well beaten desert path?
No. Determined not to be bored Blue picks up a trumpet and plays day and night, pays a bum for some lessons, and decides that love doesn’t matter that he’ll just have a good life and write an autobiography. As all people uncertain of their choices Blue floats from town to town afraid he’ll become too settled if he stays longer than a year. In a coffee shop in Prague – THE coffee shop for his neighbourhood - Blue meets an exchange student who is intelligent and isn’t afraid of spiders in Africa. So they pick up and move, documenting Africa like well traveled anthropologists. Blue grows a beard and she thinks it’s handsome. They volunteer on any number of African committees, help build towns until they’re both exhausted and ready for air conditioning. They both agree that their migratory season is up, venture up slowly and resignedly to France where both write and explore the country side as well as the cuisine. They open a bed and breakfast – both bickering about money, but in the end no one cares. Blue writes books about philosophy while the exchange student from Prague opens a craft store and volunteers in the community.
Adulthood though is fraught with random illness – each person in life being allotted at least one medical mystery, the questions, the adventure, the what ifs, the decision of offspring, the decision of beliefs, and standpoints, the fights, the quips, the snoring – all of it cumulative to the point where at 80 they sit down -after having begun this process for two other lives now gallivanting somewhere in the world – on a bench to contemplate the stillness of this one brief moment.

These are not the lifers. These are the explorers.

Crime, an evil instigator of early morning rational thought

The tired is sitting on my eyes. It oozed out and solidified and now my eyes are in constant stupor. Glassy, unfocused, and rolling whither they will.

I was awakened at three this morning. Very timely indeed. Someone broke windows somewhere so what was heard was the smashing of the glass, the yelling, and the faint pulsing alarm. It wasn't nearly as classy as a 1930's black and white car chase movie, nor a 1950's Western bank robbery.

After the statements and the descriptions and a potent cup of chamomile tea, I attempted to sleep. And there wasn’t any to be had. As I lay on my back I thought of myself – and my perception of myself. I thought it was very strange that for a history student, I am not a bit grounded in the feelings and actions of my ancestors.

I don’t have small idols to worship – carved with a few specks of old paint, I have only photographs dating 4 generations. I don’t have incantations, spirit guides, or a familial god. Only an internal understanding of something personal and baseless.

I am almost truly unfamiliar with the life paths and discussions of my grandparents because they were older and sometimes altered. Time eats brains. Mostly I remember a comfortable feeling, a few moral childish lessons and PG13 stories. Quips meant to accompany a lesson.

And so historically – all that remains are a few facts. I hold these facts – well, as factual as any fact can be. (All of history is up for a debate at all points in time, even philosophically if we actually exist and if time is a forward thinking line.) So somewhere in my “past” there were things that “happened” and my family was seemingly good. And these small facts, dating only until 1776, are probably equally as tangible as the few artifacts I hold deemed historically relevant.

And I know that I am consistently unaware of all of it.

I wonder if the person who smashed the windows and stole feels grounded in any kind of ancestral or historical ties. Does amorality denote a lack of faith or tradition? Sometimes, in bad times, it means need and it is an imperative occurrence. But is duty-bound honourability a sign of respect for the past, or is it a sign of a singular person acting with a singular conscience?

I lay awake wondering about my place in history – what it would feel like to always be aware, to be informed. It was either the beginning of the dream or an answer to my question when my eyes fell back into my skull, and plunged down – unfortunately like gravity but they never hit matter. They didn’t split the earth to the billion degree core, they went backwards from my head, and my head, in a dream, is not necessarily pointing to anything that was ever real or law.

Things were moving so fast. Things as in: the space in the tunnels running backwards. Like watching the image of a train running by at a singular point. Motion sickness ensued; I woke up, and reeled for the rest of the night.

The point of this story is that one should not – in the very least – commit a loud crime while another is sleeping. A: I’m going to call the cops you jerk and B: The brakes on my brain are non operational at wee hours and you get a blog entry like this.

I hate bees

There was a colony of bees. Not simply a bunch of bees. These bees were bred and born together. They were simple friends, if that’s possible. Or co-existing relatives – the cordial introductions never existed. More of a stony working relationship. That’s what the bees were like. Those who fight and work together, bleed and die, without any sort of emotion. A necessary blood tie like a feudal state?

Anyway – they were certainly well acquainted. Millions of them.
I was sitting in an airplane with one of my friends – more of an intimate acquaintance than a working colony. Working colonies lose and gain and breathe the same air. I do not re-breathe the air of my friend. We breathe, discuss, and come about with two different creations, rather than one stalwart wall of work.

None were on this plane but ourselves and the stewardess. Indeed the airplane was navigating itself well on autopilot. A clear view to the wide open cockpit showed a cheesy ice blue sky, cotton ball cloud wisps. I’m sure the plane wasn’t actually locomoting. I only expect a plane to move while in the air because scientifically they are not suspended from the sky on wires. This is a nightmare inspired by the airplane safety video.

The bees, all friends swarmed in. They appeared en masse, growing thicker the more I become fearful. So the stewardess, her head in the clouds of swarms of these bends down and in a perfect toothy and compassionate plastic smile says – “Dear, you will die if you don’t get them out.” Instead of pulling an Alice in Wonderland evading the Jabberwocky simply by not believing, I get hit on the head by a broom stick. It fell from whence the parachute or the personal flotation device should have been. My friend turns to me and tells me to hurry.

And the fear of these bees makes my movements broken and stiff. I swatted at the bees, my shoulders uncomfortably high around my ears, protecting me from the sound. The buzzing. The noise. And the threat of a crashing plane. The airplane itself was making that falling noise like in World War II movies. It was non-sensical since my airplane was suspended from the sky, unmoving. There was a door with a screen on it. I broomed the bees around in such a fashion as to propel them on to the screen where they stuck. All the bees, millions of them, crowded the screen door making it a solid wall of buzzing.

And my friend, in his apparent divine genius, pushed the screen door as if to open it – however it merely made the door disappear. He shut it into itself and the bees disappeared into what in my mind was “history” - a dimension of something that no longer existed.

So here’s my question. Because he shut the door on the bees – propelling them backwards into time is that why they kept duplicating? Does he keep sending them back? Will I eventually drown in their fur because we keep pushing them away? Not to deal with them now – or in the future. But will it make it so that I won’t be able to continue reliving the past, and therefore, that present, and the future based on the bees being shut out – will that outcome eventually be negated??

Oh Star Trek – why won’t you answer that important scientific question?

Are you a Conforming Betty?

There is extreme joy floating around the world. Extreme even more so than sports which require some form of maiming. And this leaves your body intact and your heart exploding. As long as ‘society’ keeps its quick nimble fingers out of the pots of this extreme joy it will always be real.

It sparks from the ungoaded, unscrutinized, gently encouraged spasms of a child’s heart. As long as they are run from the divine “right” of their core they could relinquish the laws of gravitational pull. It is true, that without the law, or the understanding, or the science built in history one could leap the tall buildings, be and do anything the heart desired, and sleep soundly under a different sky.

There were once unicorns and winged men before people decided to create the laws of science.

So a child’s best laugh comes when it is her joke, her understanding and her surprise. When she’s playing in her rules and the rest of us remain baffled and left out. We are the squares and sometimes too sheepish or lazy to ask her the questions. Since when were the elders considered wise?

As I biked down the streets of a smoggy hot city, wearing clothes less bright, less decorated, and brown shoes with no pressurized lighting devices on the heel, no rhinestones, no pink and blue plastic beads, obeying traffic signals, my serious face in tote, my bag of tradesman’s tools on my back, saying nothing, observing yet making no expressive comment due to moral and intuitive restrictions, I biked past a shrieking joy.

A shrieking joy tearing down the side walk streets with socks pulled up to his knees with little khaki shorts and a blue and green painted shirt – he ran. He ran screaming, making noises I’m assuming were to be that of a cowboy OR the hobby horse enlisted around his waist. The horses legs flailing as he ran, its head bobbing – as it would have had it been alive by my grown up definition. The little boy stood in the middle, where the horses stomach would have been. He ran and yelped with such earnest enthusiasm I’m almost positive it wasn’t exactly a horse he envisioned hanging from his waist. There was no time. Where ever he was going there was no time.

Once – I had done the same. Oh society – why I am such a conforming Betty??

A Lesson in Photography

There are many great details in life. Any painter would tell you that.

In fact, anyone whose work reflects these days creates shadows.

How does a person draw upon details in a way that is advantageous?

How are they knit?

So I hand fed a bird. And sparrows eat my lunch with me.

I watched a man ride a wheeled chair pulled by two huskies down a city sidewalk.

I saw an apple-cheeked older man with a red nose bobbing along the street in jovial strides with decorative cocktail drink umbrellas in his Canada Flag-inspired hat. He waved and grinned at my stares.

A 69 and 70 year old man sat down to discuss law and dancing Scottish ladies over cake with my friend and me. I don’t know their names. I’m only 22.

I ride the streetcar early in the morning with a Japanese man with perfectly chiseled features and a mysterious and wise air. We would discuss myriads of books, most of them scientific and philosophical. I’ll describe, he’ll explain.

A 17 year old boy sitting in a full subway car flipping a Rubik’s Cube in one hand, spinning colours to and fro, solving it every 30 seconds. Scrambling it takes longer.

I called a little girl a muffin with her crop of wild curls. She declares she’s no muffin, giggles and runs away.

And so on. Some things are smaller. Some things are only ambiance. They only really strike if something changes in perception. There is the 50 % contrast, 50% brightness setting on every day life. It’s not really a quality description, nor is it the bare minimum. It’s like a person’s salary. And the things that I notice that move me, are when the light changes, or the composition is astounding or when one is paid in something other than money. Like a smile.

How do I tell you about the shifts of a percentage without boring you? How do I use them to tell you a story? They relate to nothing. There is no advantage to you knowing them. They are my personal enjoyments. So I ask you how.

But the why is easy. The shift in focus makes it seem like a missing community experience. Something that you would report in a small town newspaper. It would be entitled “Important Things” and in the wintertime would be a column next to the list of completely frozen ponds that await figure eights.

Regarding Circumstances

There is a great precipice.
It stands between the hard ground that represents: sanity and the intended forward line. And the air, and your possible gravitational pull through it represents: chaos bent as described by natural law.

My great precipice is 10 feet tall. It depends on the wind and the amount of sediment. Mountains are rebuilt through sleep. Millions of years at rest meant to redistribute the masses, only to awaken a few known hours later.
Alarm clocks are deceptive.

Yesterday, as an historical example:
I received a message. A description from a five year old about “Why people are friends.” The age doesn’t matter – it’s the spirit behind the words. It is important that you know that I was 5 years old when I asked that question too.

I posed the sentence fragment seven days ago. The essayist response was 5 days later. And now I sit and vacillate.

‘Because they are kind. Because you love them as a person.’

And I sat and thought about it. It was a profound answer.

I suppose it is the answer concocted from a fragment: Some other small fragments. I would have been excited had someone asked me the question. To sit and be a philosopher.
I loved my five year old. I really did. We were married on the school yard under the only oak tree. We honeymooned in the plastic tube slide. He kissed my eyebrow.
He was describing a friendship when I really wanted to know the selfishness behind it. I wasn’t wondering about the amiable qualities painted upon such a word as friends. The term “friend” is already cocky enough. It needs not seek compliments.
I was looking for the reasons to seek that life out.

Because a friend makes you feel good. That’s why you keep them. You give them your hearts, so that you feel good about yourself: You made them happy – and you are rewarded with happiness in return. Sometimes they give you something without asking for happy returns. Then one feels generous and hopeful.
Such a thought – of a life built in personal gain through others. I was wondering what then was true. Because a five year old only knows that books say “You love friends because they are kind, good, faithful people.”
You love friends because you have to. An innate selfish demand.

So my precipice was at least 200 yards as I sat and thought of using and being used.
And then I slept. And I left my five year old boy on that mountain contemplating a different answer. And I was somewhere else, perhaps on a lower Japanese rolling hill with a serene calm, as not all selfishness is bad.

Only if you never return such trinkets to those who love you best.
Sometimes there shouldn't be an exceptions clause.

Tea?

No Precedents

There is no excuse for it all. I only excuse my cell phone when it rings unbearably loudly. Or when someone else steps on my toes. I usually blame others for causing me to walk into them.

However, I will create no precedent for myself with any formal introduction until I deem it necessary. Historical facts are unneeded until there is a point to prove or an event to avoid. Not unlike opening a second front towards Russia, especially in the winter. I usually suggest otherwise.

And most likely there is no formal beginning either. I often complain that art has no formal introduction, and that unless one is born into its culture and submerged in seeing show after show, and even creating a show - one will never know that train of thought. You'll only hop on the boat part way through. And to be fair to all - I will create no "once upon a time."

And so it continues.