this is our one demand

It was a busy, irresponsible summer full of visiting and hiking and revisions. But not much in the way of blogging. I’m not apologizing, I’m bragging. Just to be clear. There may or may not be in increase in posting now that the weather may or may not be getting less cooperative. Then again, there’s hockey to play.

Today, however, I came across the following - a creative, subversive, beautiful, and heart-breaking response to media complaints that the Occupy Wall Street movement has not stated specific goals. That they are just protesting, willy-nilly and all, and don’t have enough direction to their dissent. How dare they not have a published set of reasons! How dare they not have made a list!

This is their response, as copied and pasted from wilderside.wordpress.com: 

This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.

that which does not kill us...

When I was 26 I was driving my motorcycle up the street, about two blocks from home, when a car missed a stop sign and T-boned me doing 55kmh (30mph for you imperial types). It changed the course of my life, as near-fatal accidents are wont to do.

And I will be forever grateful.

It was just an accident, one of those things. She was from out of town and lost, looking for the regional hospital, late for an appointment. It was bright and sunny. A big, white cube van was travelling in the opposite direction to me, on the side of the road from which she was coming, The van missed sparing me by about a foot, her car whizzing past its rear bumper, the light color of the van perhaps making it less visible to her searching, distracted eyes, the van hiding her from me until it was way too late.

In emergency I apparently told jokes while they prepped me for surgery, in between throwing up and passing out. I was a minor hospital celebrity for months. The surgery that day was the first of eleven over the next three years, some big, some smaller, some in my home town, some in Vancouver. I learned cool names for things: Acetabulum and trochanteric femur (neither of which should ever be shattered if at all possible), multiple compound fracture, osteomyolitis, Hoffman external fixator, Portacath central lines, hip-to-knee Mercedes incision. 

If you look real close, you can even read my name - don't tell them I stole the x-ray though

If you learn the lingo, the doctors pay more attention to you – take you seriously.

I learned much of the usual near-death stuff too: Life is short and fleeting and ridiculously precious; pain is temporary, and when it isn’t you can either let it make you mental or stronger, occasionally both; people handle tragedy and trauma different ways, but how they handle it doesn’t always tell the whole story about them.

For me alone, I learned that almost any amount of pain is better than to be made dumb by drugs. I could not wait to be off the morphine pump. I went from accident to T3’s in five days. The morphine stole my mind, and I could not forgive it that insult. That’s maybe just me though, I get that.

I learned that, while shit simply does not happen “for a reason”, we can impose reason on anything if we really want to. For me, the accident didn’t change much beyond the length of my left leg, my range of hip flexibility, and the parameters of possible strength for that leg. Everything else can be overcome. After the accident I took up climbing, martial arts, hockey (I play goal – I’m weak on the low glove side, but I compensate), and returned to writing. These things aren’t why the accident happened; They happened after it, in spite of it, to prove that the accident didn’t define who I would be.

If I was inclined to believe in that “a reason for all things” argument, the writing would be, possibly, the only circumstantial proof in support of it. I was forced to go back to school, to university, which I had skipped after high school. Uni led me back to writing. The return to school was the best thing to come out of the whole mess.

But whether you argue design or “shit happens”, it’s what we do with it that counts. It’s what happens after we wake up that defines us, not the accident or the injuries or the staples or the scars. They shape what happens, but we impose the reason and order and purpose and wildness and joy and everything else that is only a potential, the possibility of a possibility, when the trauma happens.

In this sense, trauma is much like waking up every day. We get to impose our spirit and will. Every. Fucking. Day.

I was reminded of this today when a Twitter friend informed me that she was creating a new blog and a new Twitter account. Melissa, my friend, is doing this because, in some fundamental way, she’s more now than the old account and blog can define all by themselves. She’s moving forward from a trauma that has shaped who she is, what her first blog and account were about, and onto new adventures and joys and frustrations and triumphs.

Her choice inspired me and made me smile.

I know other amazing people, both in RL and online who, like Melissa, have transcended far more serious injuries than mine, and who bear scars that run much deeper than my fleshly ones. They fight paralysis, or cancer, or traumas that make my broken bones and scars and really cool x-rays looks small in comparison. And still, they aspire and ascend and are beautiful doing it.

We all have scars; that’s just life. And... scars are beautiful in their own way. I call mine my "portable wealth".

We are not what has happened to us, as much as it may affect the path we take. We are who we choose to be, and who we will choose to become. Any time I doubt that, I check the scars and remember how far I’ve come from there. Or I see someone like Melissa and the amazing things she’s doing for herself and others.

The evidence is all around us. Nietzsche was right. 

the last twenty minutes

First of all, it’s 2011, so I’m changing the font. Fuck yeah.

_

Turns out I wasn’t nearly as “over” my cold as I thought on NYE. Turns out that working that night from eight until four the next morning didn’t help. Casino hours… what are ya gonna do?

So I stumbled through the weekend of dealing cards and then slept Monday and Tuesday, literally. It’s Thursday and I almost feel mostly human again.

All that down time did let me finish watching the World Junior Hockey Championships though, so it wasn’t all bad. I just set my phone alarm to get up for the games and, in between, slept in medicated bliss. I was back on my feet yesterday though, running around, catching up on stuff, and ended up watching the final (Canada vs Russia) in a pub.

Canada lost in a monumental third period meltdown, going from a 3-0 lead at the start of the period to a final, dismal 5-3 loss, allowing five unanswered goals in what will surely go down as one of the greatest chokes of all time. I’ve mentioned before that I watch hockey now for the joy of the game and not to cheer the home team. Mostly. I was a little disappointed.

It was disappointing to watch the Canadian team blow the lead, but not world-ending. More disappointing was that it was a boring game to watch. Canada dominated for forty minutes, and then Russia dominated for twenty. There was very little of that exciting battle between two equals when they go toe to toe in the kind of display of skill and speed that makes hockey the fastest, most exciting game in the world. (Yes, I’m biased. My blog, I’m allowed.)

So I was less disappointed in the final score than I was in the fact that neither team came out to play a full sixty minutes of hockey.

That sounds uncharitable, and it kind of is. These are kids after all, every one of them nineteen or under and subsequently susceptible to vagaries of emotional vacillation tempestuous enough to sink the Titanic.

Nobody will ever know what exactly happened. It looked to me, though, like Canada spent the intermission between the second and the third imagining what the gold medals were going to feel like hanging around their necks, and then came out worried about not losing them. The Russian team, on the other hand, spent the intermission realizing that they had absolutely nothing to lose, and twenty minutes left to them to reach for the brass ring.

And that, I think, made all the difference.

The team that won yesterday didn’t play the whole game as well as they could have, but they played the most important part – the end. Life is like that, yeah? Not too many people manage to figure out their personal legend, to use a Paulo Coelho-ism, early enough to say they were able to play the whole game. I know a lot of people, like me, that didn’t figure that part out until later on.

Most of the time, we give up. We say that we made our choice and now we have to stick with it. We get fixated on the destination and lose sight of the journey, hung up on holding onto what we've got instead of risking it for the sake of the path. We have a career, families, kids, mortgages*, obligations, responsibilities, and we convince ourselves that personal legends have to come second to those things, because we’re used to lists and priorities that have to be linear.

News flash: They don’t have to be. You can love your kids and spouse and still love yourself and pursue whatever it is that makes your blood sing. And if you can, and if I can, then we all can.

When it comes down to it, how we start is less important than how we end. Lots of us have great ideas, brilliant starts, and then, somewhere in the middle, lose the thread. It’s a marathon, a journey, after all, and there’s lots of time to get distracted, or sidetracked, or bogged down. Win or lose, it truly is how we play the game, the effort we put in to the end.

I lucked out. I truly feel that I found my little bit of destiny to chase after, and I was in a pretty flexible personal position to make drastic changes in order to chase after that fucker. I get that it isn’t always appropriate to flip everything upside down in a life-inversion like I did in order to make changes, but there are always ways. I’m surrounded by amazing people, online and in the 3-D world, that are doing it, chasing personal legends, making it up as they go along, carving out a path through the jungle towards a mountaintop and a cave full of bliss.

They’re reaching for it as if there was nothing to lose, and I find it inspiring to see. It inspires me every day to get in the chair and finish stronger than I started, the skate to the buzzer. Because I have nothing to lose except me, and the only way to do that is to stop trying. Let me say that again: We have nothing to lose but ourselves, and the only way to do that is to stop trying.

I don’t usually do the question asking thing here, but I will today, because I’m truly interested in hearing your truth. What is it in your life that’s worth playing hard for right to final buzzer?

* The word mortgage finds its roots in the French. It literally means “death pledge”. Not surprisingly, they don’t use that particular phrase in French-speaking lands to describe contracts to buy houses. Go figure…

the list post (or why I don't do them)

All the cool kids in the blogosphere do lists. I mean they really do ‘em. They do ‘em to the degree that the damned things are practically art. They:

v      write them for themselves to keep their organized selves all organized and shit;

v      use them to great community-building effect on their blogs, either:

o        Making lists of cool things they’ve learned or done, or;

o        Making lists of questions to ask their readers, or;

o        Making lists of amazing things they’ve found;

v      make them into poetry, with brilliant segues and dazzling syntactic cliffhangers;

I find it awe-inspiring. I’m envious. I’m not a list maker, not at all. Like multi-tasking, I’m capable of writing them, but I find it personally distasteful to actually do. Not in an “I’m going to throw up if I have to write one” way; Just in the sense that it provokes a mild sense of queasiness.

I do write lists from time to time, often for the same reasons that many people I admire write them. I write them to:

v      remind myself of tasks that must get done before I slip back into a pleasantly irresponsible state;

v      order the things I absolutely can’t procrastinate any longer in regards to;

v      create an order of operations so that I can complete boring errands in as efficient a way as possible so as to facilitate slipping back into the aforementioned irresponsible state.

But these are exceptions to my rule of being, things I have to do. They are an equivocation to the way the world is. In my ideal world, the one I usually try to experience in my loopy head, there are only lists consisting of one thing at a time, and a list of one is not a list really, now is it? It’s just an item. I guess maybe I’m an item-maker.

Lists give me no comfort at all. They weigh me down. They loom.

I could have a made a list today about all the things I wanted to get done, but then I would have had to stick to it to gain closure on my day. Surely, on that list, at the end of it, would have been the item: Get to bed at a reasonable time so you can get up early and edit for your freelance job. That is a reasonable and sensible goal to include on a list. And, that item being there, I would have felt a great conflict when, at the appointed time, I decided to write a blog post instead, a post concerning lists, for example. I would have been left with a giant, gaping failure – a huge open check box at the end of my day that would not, could not, subsequently be filled.

I would have been despondent.

You see, I know these things about myself:

v      I am not a goal-setter – I am a dreamer;

v      I do not wish to be a multi-tasker – I desire to be gloriously obsessed;

v      I don’t want to win – I just want to run.

I also have a really hard time making lists longer than three items long, as you might have noticed by now.

I think that maybe it’s genetic or something. I have an anti-list retro-virus, perhaps. We could call it QLV – Quasi-Bohemian Listodefficiency Virus. Or perhaps it’s congenital, a quirk of natural DNA splicing that was undetected in the womb and, in mid-life, has blossomed into an untreatable (I hope) syndrome typified by aimless walks and drives, and ponderous ponderings for extended periods of time during which I could almost appear to be asleep were it not for obsessive chin-whisker fondling, open, unfocused eyes, and occasional, spontaneous outburst of laughter or weepiness.

Here’s the truth: A life without lists feels more to me like the summers of my youth, when I climbed trees and roamed hills and made up stories and even wrote them down sometimes. When I swam for hours, and lay on the raft on the lake and stared up at the clouds all afternoon, seeing heroes and villains and all the characters in between soar over me in a kaleidoscope of private mythology.

Even then, even in my daydreams, I was never the first hero. I was always a supporting character, the dissenting voice on the team, the one that questioned everything, especially himself.

I look back, and forward, from this place and time, and I know these things:

v      that boy was unformed in many ways, but;

v      I was closer to my best self then - I was wild there, and;

v      I need to get back.

So this may be the closest I ever come to a list post. It is, perhaps, too bad, because I love it when other people do them right. I guess it’s just one of those things that I’ll have to learn to appreciate from the outside.

You know, while I’m scratching my chin, happily obsessing, and looking opportunistically for a good metaphorical raft.

the one thing

Prologue:
When I was a kid I wanted to write. I made up stories all the time. Storytelling was my best friend, literally. And then circumstances distracted me. Like life, and adolescence. I was a kid - shit happens. I got a second chance in my late twenties and realized that I still wanted to write. Sadly, I was complicit in my own betrayal and spent another ten years floundering around. A year and a half ago I got a third chance, saw an opening and jumped, sans parachute and without really looking. I’m not sure how this story ends, but the freefall is proving exhilarating. Most days.

Today I woke up and felt pretty fucking depressed. I didn’t want to work on the manuscript. I didn’t want to read news. I felt like I owed a blog post and couldn’t get in any kind of space to write it. There wasn’t even a topic. I toyed with my sense of ambivalence like a basketball, spinning it around and looking for a seam that I could pull open and pick at, but that felt about as close to masturbatory as I am inclined to discuss in this blog.

And then I realized what it was: After five days away, I missed my novel.

Profoundly.

I missed it the way grass misses the spring, the way fish miss water. I missed my tortured characters. I missed their internal and external quandaries, their little moments of joy, hope and triumph. I missed the wide, wild, weeping landscape of the world I’ve created for them. I was homesick.

When I started the life-inversion and took the jump, the goal was to mold a creative life; something with a focus that allowed me to feel expansive. I wanted a one thing. You know, like in City Slickers. The novel has become, joyfully, the center of my own personal little internal solar system, both the thought of it and the creeping, oozing reality of it as it takes shape. It is my one thing, and neglecting it is a bit like not eating or sleeping.

Not good. You'd think I'd have figured this out before now. My obtuseness knows no bounds. (S’okay, there’s a happy ending.)

Here’s my point: I think the purpose of life is to find a purpose, a one thing, and give your self to it, without concern for destinations or accomplishments or milestones. The purpose of life is to know your passion and breathe into it with every breath, especially the last one. The purpose of life is to find a reason, the reason for you, and chase it like a junkyard dog until you get hit by a car and die. Just the purpose and the journey. The one thing.

For me, life works that way. I think.

Dénouement:
My one thing and I were happily reunited this morning. Don’t look! It’s not polite.

Epilogue:
This suggests a question, and I’d love to hear from you on this. Do you have a one thing? If so, what is it? If not, do you think you want one?

World Alzheimer's Day - Sept. 21 - Bloggers Unite

(This is a Bloggers Unite cross-post)

When I was nine my parents split up. My dad, the aforementioned English teacher, left and, with him, so did our family’s sole source of income.

My mom has suffered from chronic depression and anxiety her entire life, has a grade 8 education, was emancipated by fifteen, spent a brief time as a street kid (imagine that in the 50’s), and worked as a data punch processor until she met and married my dad. By the late 70’s when they split up those data punch skills were archaic and useless.

We spent about a year living on welfare.

After Dad left she never spent another night in the hospital due to her depression, perhaps in part as a result of him not being there, but I think mostly because she just told herself that she couldn't. For me.

She managed to pay the bills and the mortgage until she got a job as a graveyard supervisor at a group home for the mentally challenged. She built that job into a career by turning our house into a miniature group home. By the time I was 12, she was caring full time for two developmental challenged paranoid/schizophrenic women. That was her career, seemingly forged out of thin air, and the means by which she kept us in hot dogs and hamburgers.

We never lost the house, I was always fed, always clothed, always loved, and mostly aware of how amazing all of that was. It was, at times, challenging being a teenage boy in that house, but it was also a priceless and unique experience.

To this day, I have a hard time calculating the scale of the sacrifices she made; how much focus and effort a life of service to those two women must have taken; how hard it must have been to not give up or give in to the depression that was and still is a giant cloud over her head; how much she overcame to keep our modified family together.

Thinking about it always leaves me dumbfounded and a little fucked up for a while, but in a good way.

So when I say that she is the most courageous person I know, please understand how serious I am. She is my hero.

Mom turned seventy early this year and has, over the last year or so, been slipping (mostly) gently into the early stages of Alzheimer’s. We’ve had some bad stretches already, but adjustments to her medications have helped her come back twice now, and we’re currently holding.

I know that, realistically, it won’t last forever, but I’m thankful for the time we have, and for her continued courage.

There’s no bullshit around the house. She’s aware of what’s happening and it scares the shit out of her some days, but we talk about it when it does.

We laugh whenever possible. We remember together, and the repeated stories never seem old. She tells me that she’s proud of me and I tell her I’m more proud of her. We say ‘I love you’ all the time, more than we used to, and that’s never a bad thing.

So far it’s a pretty gentle experience and we’re thankful for that too. We know that it won’t last forever, but while it does… well, while it does we’ll be in the moment and appreciate it.

Every moment. Every story. Every hug. Every ‘I love you’. Every. Fucking. One.

Hell, she’s my hero and this is just life. You deal, right?

It’s what heroes do. My Mom taught me that…

September 21 is World Alzheimer’s Day.

Maybe your folks are fine, maybe not. Either way, be thankful for the time you have. It’s precious and too short.

...one of those days...

Do you ever have one of those days? You know the kind....

One of those days when the overwhelming weight of the world just seems to be bearing all of its deep gravity well down on you? When all of the culpability of the species just seems to be unfucking avoidable and you have to own it, hold it to you at the same time that you're trying to tear it out of you?

One of those days when you can't resist to the urge to take on the sins of your race, your country, your gender, your species? When every story, every song, every image reminds you of the incredible fuck up this all is, all of it, in spite of the good things, because of the unmitigated horror of the bad?

When the black hole is so dense that it's hard out get out of bed, off of the floor, out the door? When the sunlight hurts and smiles feel like razorblades? When the thought of peace, the ephemeral unlikelihood of it, the whisper of its possibility and the truth of its goddamn improbability, reduces you to tears?

When you want to slap every child you see push another down, ram your car into every self-involved driver that didn't see the person they almost ran over, strangle every self-serving politician you watch lie, again and again and again, destroy every person that ever hit their spouse in anger, knowing the whole time that it's the wrong answer to every one of those situations and not caring?

Knowing that even if you could, the shame would just be worse afterward?

One of those days when you can't see the hope through the fear, or the love through the hate, or the intelligence through the ignorance? When bigotry seems to be the rule and tolerance – not even real acceptance, just tolerance – looks like it's about a million fucking light years away from being possible?

When laughter makes you want to cry, crying makes you want to scream, and honesty makes you want to smash every mirror in the world?

One of those days? Do you know the kind I'm talking about?

I'm having one.

Sometimes it's good to just sit in awe and fucking own it for a day.

S'okay though. It's just a day. Tomorrow's a new one, and things'll be better. It's just one day.

‘Can this Onion Ring get more fans than Stephen Harper?’ Facebook Fansite Page, 02.04.10

Yesterday a Facebook group started asking this very question and inviting people to join up. By the time I found it yesterday afternoon membership had already exceeded 45,000. This morning it has exceeded 64,000 fans and is growing at a rate in excess of 1000 fans per hour.

‘Free advice is worth the price.’ Robert Half (part deux)

Dear Mr. Obama,

Whew, you’ve been one busy beaver (in Canada that’s not dirty) this week: The SOTU, dangling the spending freeze, then this latest, the question and answer period in the dragon’s den. Er, I men, the congressional GOP room. It made for some exciting television unless you include the media coverage. (Couldn’t we just outlaw big media? They suck.) I managed to avoid most of the infotainment coverage however, and stayed with online feeds as much as possible. I visited my mom yesterday and she had CNN on, but I managed to escape with only a slight hemorrhage behind one eyeball and felt gratified by the knowledge that I’d squeaked out of a really close call.

Although I know you didn’t read my last missive, I think we were on the same wavelength on a few points. In the spirit of bi-partisan ship, even if I don’t qualify for that dynamic on account of my Canadian-ness, I thought I’d write another note to let you know how it all went down in my eyes, and to offer some more free advice. This also allows me to re-use a quote, which I love doing – it always makes me feel cheap and dirty in a sexy kind of way…

Anyway, in regards to the SOTU, I have to say that you almost lost me. The first half of the speech was so… so… motivating, but in an anti-motivating, ‘I’m listening to a speech intended for ten-year olds’ kind of way. And all of those disingenuous and fallacious standing ovations by a bunch of middle-aged corrupt men and women? Blech… It made my teeth hurt a bit in the way gorging on Halloween candy does. I was ready to rush myself to the hospital at one point to demand a shot of insulin. Instead, I said just about this very thing on the Whitehouse FB page and felt immediately better.

That desperate act allowed me to hang on for the second half of the speech which was, I’ve got to say, much better. When you started calling them out, each group, one by one, and instead of cheers garnered mutters and grumbles, then you had me. The looks on the faces of the Joint Chiefs and the Supreme Court made me feel giddy. And when you finally got around to threatening all of their corrupt asses by targeting the lobbyist system? That was beautiful, man, just beautiful. Like I said in my last letter, I think you’ll know that you’re getting somewhere when they all hate you utterly.

And the GOP question and answer session? Well, the Whitehouse blurb called your performance “inspiring”, but my impression fell a bit short of that. Gutsy, for sure, and very adequate. You did a hell of a job there, no doubt. I’ll be inspired when you do the same thing, just as publically, with the DNC representatives. When you call “your team” to the carpet just as directly and vociferously, then I’ll really be impressed. One of the CNN pundits suggested this very thing, in fact, but said that you should do it behind closed doors “obviously”. Not obviously, not at all. Make it public. Be a real leader and expect, nay demand, more of those on your side of the room than of those in opposition to you by ideological default.

Which brings me to today’s free (and worth every penny, dammit) advice.

I think you need to go much, much farther. Frankly, while the SOTU touched on a few nerves, you stopped shy of where I’d have enjoyed seeing you go. Too much wiggle room, my friend, too much. Same with dressing down only one side of the room in the Q&A: Not far enough by far. Thus, my advice to you, the thing that, I think, would make you an instant icon and the adored leader of the majority of the country, is the following:

Go independent. I’ll say it again: Cut your ties to the DNC and go independent.

No, seriously, I’m not kidding. It was the independent voters that elected you after all, so drop this façade of partisanship altogether and send the congress and senate a real message. You’ve been so politic in the way you’ve criticized the DNC and I think that you have to drop the gloves with them the way you’ve been willing to with the GOP. I think that, as much as I know that it might be political suicide, you should give the American population a sure sign that you are beholden to no one other than them, so take all of the red and blue ties out of your closet. Go with some really cool colors or, for serious occasions (they all seem to be serious ones these days), try some nice gray ones. And that’s only if you absolutely have to wear one because, like I suggested last time, those of us that think the system is a joke hate ties anyway.

You told the GOP representatives that you weren’t an ideologue and I like that. It mirrors much of the “whatever works” rhetoric from your book and I prefer believing that you are serious about that stance, so take that final great big leap and declare it to the country and the world in a tangible way. I’ll even give you a politically expedient out: If you really think that you can win a second term, wait until after the next election. Frankly, considering how massive your bottom-up support was, I can conceive of you running as an independent and winning. Now wouldn’t that be historic?

You keep saying that you want bi-partisan support, cooperation, and a non-partisan attitude, and this way you could really, really show you mean it. You could condemn the whole system then, without any doubt that you consider both sides of the aisle equally complicit in the corruption. You could declare a level of Presidential autonomy that would eliminate any appearance of ideological favoritism or compromise. I’d stand up and cheer. Hell, I’d apply for citizenship (whatever little hope I have that you can really change things down there, it is infinitely larger than the faith I have that Canadian politics can ever be redeemed). I’ll go straight to the border and swear my allegiance to the flag right there, and I hate, hate nationalism (outside of amateur junior hockey) with a passion, so I’m talking about a real sacrifice here.

I know what you’re thinking: It’s too soon; it would eliminate any chance to accomplish anything; I’d lose any momentum I have and betray the responsibility I have to put the public interest first; they aren’t ready for it yet. Excuses, all of them. Well, maybe not, but I keep hoping that you can be to the “last remaining super-power” (who the hell came up with that and how can they ignore China?) what Gorbachev was to the USSR. Break the broken system so much that something new has to be constructed to replace it. Shake ‘em up so bad they can’t go on like they have. Make it impossible to continue down this path of denial and corruption, and possible to actually move forward.

Then you might really change things. Aw hell, that might actually change the world.

Yours sincerely,

Michael

CC. The Whitehouse

“Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.” Henri-Frédéric Amiel

I hit a wall over the holidays in regard to my writing output. It’s of little consequence, but the blog is a sideline for me, something to do to save my non-fiction muscles from complete atrophy and provide a vent for the angst I feel whenever I’m forced to pay attention to what’s happening out there. I obviously have some angst… 


Anyway, I hit a wall, and it affected me most profoundly in regards to the novel I’m scratching out. The blog is essentially fun, even though I’m often feeling grouchy when I pick a topic; the novel is what I’m pinning, have pinned, my future on. It’s kind of important. Paradoxically, while the novel is the part that takes the most effort to work on sometimes -it requires the most conscious choice - it is the one that provides the most happiness and satisfaction to me. This dynamic makes me wonder why it is sometimes that we, as humans, seem most inclined to choose (or not choose, and by not choosing make a choice) those things that make us least happy in the long run.

So, over the holidays; maybe it was the tryptophan, or the good company, or the weather and the shortest days of the year. You pick. They’d all be excuses, not reasons, so I don’t care what the actual machinery was. The bottom line is that I got lazy and abandoned what little discipline I manage to exert over my creative and intellectual life. And it’s time to get back to work.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not one of those that perform annual reviews upon my self, set a myriad of goals which I record in a book and track via spread sheets and data bases – I hope to live a less regimented life than that. Call it a prejudice if you like, but I find that kind of organization, even the thought of that kind of organization, personally demoralizing. I know it works for some people – okay, a lot of very productive and successful people – but I refuse to comply. I’m looking for a more romantic version of productivity, one that builds few roads and ignores fences, preferring to scramble over loose rock and run across open plains under a hunter’s moon. I refuse to give up on that ideal, but I have realized that it is still up to me to do the running. I must put one foot in front of the other and overcome my internal inertia all by myself.

But a little push once and a while is nice…

Three strange things happened in the last week to give me the required kick in the butt to overcome my lethargy, three separate and unsolicited confirmations that I’m on the right track, so to speak, and should keep on it and keep after it. And just when I needed it. I don’t know how exactly I feel about the interaction of choice and destiny, but anecdotally there seems, at times, to be evidence of some sort of grand scheme in the midst of our daily choices. I think that they dance together, cosmically, and try not to step on each others’ toes too much.

We don’t have a destiny beyond being the best version of ourselves that we can be, and that destiny is made up of ability, opportunity and the choices we make to take advantage of the former and create the latter. So I guess, if it’s a chicken and the egg kind of question, I’ll vote for choice first. There is no such thing as destiny without choice, or at least nothing I’m interested in. That would just be boring. I’m glad, though, that whatever destiny there is has the patience to wait for us to make the decisions we need to make, overcome whatever inner demons we need to vanquish, and realize that better version of ourselves while we’re fighting our way through it.

So, to those friends that provided the boost, thank you: The timing was impeccable. My little rest is done now and I’ll get back to really working; to taking advantage of the light.

‘It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past, rather that the hope of creating the future, dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.’ Bertrand Russell

I was reading a critique of the US educational system, the focus of the article being on the alarming downward trend that was extant in US achievement standards over the last forty years in spite of the increased attention and funding that the system has received. (This trend, although perhaps not so dramatic, is extant in Canada as well, just so I’m clear that this isn’t some sort of nationalist argument.) The ultimate point of the argument was that the failure of the system to improve the overall educational system was no failure at all; rather, it was the original intent. The crux of the argument was that a government capable of over-seeing NASA and space flight, capable of mounting multi-billion dollar military campaigns, capable of facilitating a multi-billion dollar taxation system, would not be as utterly incompetent in the creation of a better education system unless the greater failure of that system was their intent.

Think about it for a minute: Why is it that our governments can be very successful at accomplishing those things that support their control and political infrastructure, but seem incapable of accomplishing anything that will actually benefit the public? I would suggest that they fail, at best, because our benefit is inconsequential to politicians who, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, are concerned only with their own security and comfort, their own consumption, and their own ability to affect some sense of power. At worst, it could be argued that the general ignorance of the greater population is a crucial aspect of a system designed to increase social and intellectual stratification. A dumb majority is more easily controlled.

We live within a secular system. That’s a simple fact. Our society, the world around us, our cultural values and the influence of all of these dynamics on the system itself are in a constant state of flux, ostensibly evolving in response to the pressures that are created within that system and affected upon it. It could also be argued convincingly that this social evolution has been co-opted in a short-term sense; that our secular system is currently engineered contrary to how it might evolve in the absence of a culture that uses as its primary impulse the generation of revenue, and worships as its primary deity the concept of free-market economy as the savior of the species. Of course, evolution will re-establish pre-eminence sooner or later, either when we smarten up and begin to establish a social construct that seeks a more harmonious state of equilibrium with our environment, and a truly democratic and egalitarian social system, or when we drive the global meta-system to the brink of collapse and drive ourselves to extinction. One of the two will happen, for the free-market commitment to profit at any cost is at odds with our long-term survival as a species. It’s a one-or-the-other dynamic.

To make the right choices as the fourth dimension exerts its influence over us, it is our children (perhaps their children too, depending on which version of climate change and social dynamic theory you adhere to) that will have to stand up, where we have and are not, and reclaim our future. And yet they are the very ones that are being subverted by the educational system to avoid free thought at all costs, to become sheep within the herd and focus on nothing more than accumulating the largest amount of the newest stuff possible – to focus only on the fuzzy butt in front or beside them, and be concerned only with doing as well as or better than that fuzzy butt.

In spite of all the work our governments are doing to undermine the educations system, there ironically seems to be a growing sense of discontent and this says more about the sovereignty of the human spirit than anything else. Young and old alike are standing up in greater numbers to say, “Hey, something isn’t right here!” or, “We know what isn’t right and we’re going to do something about it.” From the script of The Network, many are starting to say, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Our freedom starts where our trust of our current political and social institutions ends. They aren’t looking out for us, but the inclination to stand up for ourselves seems to be increasing. If the systems that educate all of us, from the education system to our daily fix of mass media, aren’t going to foster our potential, I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves, educate ourselves, motivate ourselves, and find a non-passive yet non-violent way to affect change, the change that we desire for the whole of our species and planet.

If those who are paid to serve us feel rather that we are here to serve them, then stop looking to them for inspiration and hope. It’s like looking to a rock for comfort, or maybe like looking to a shark for it. Instead, we should be looking within ourselves and, when we find that spark of hope, we should be passing it forward. It is our responsibility to inspire each other and the next generation; our right to stand and be counted; our dignity that is at stake; our survival that hangs in the balance. If the system won’t be inspired or inspiring, then I guess it’s up to us to look forward with realistic hope and pragmatic idealism to “be the change we want to see in the world.”

Honk if you agree…

"Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working." Pablo Picasso

Except for the blog I haven’t written much for the last three days. I spent an evening updating the map for my novel so a friend with artistic ability can continue her project helping me out, spent today working on my TJ so it continues to run, and spent a day volunteering down at the climbing gym with 8-year olds in exchange for a bit of free climbing time.

All worthy endeavors and I don’t feel a bit of guilt, but it doesn’t change the fact that the novel isn’t going to write itself. Today I’m back on mission.

Some great writer, it may have been Stephen King (yes, I consider him ‘great’ – maybe not always, but taken as a whole, and for "On Writing" alone if need be…), said that the difference between a good writer and a successful writer is that the ‘successful one put’s his or her ass in the chair’. Every writer has their own ritual or system for getting the words out, but there is a system, some commitment to discipline that puts them, ass in seat and hands on keyboard 9or pen, or pencil, or microphone) to do the writing.

That sense of self-discipline (or lack thereof) is one of the things that I’ve had to deal with over the last seven months. I have my excuses, ones that are fairly typical for writers: fear of failure, fear of rejection, deep and abiding commitment to procrastination, yada yada… 

I call them excuses instead of reasons because I believe that once we know about a dynamic of some weakness, it stops being a reason and starts being an excuse. If we know about it, we can start to correct it, change it, and make the choices that will eliminate it. If we don’t make those choices, using a flaw or neurosis to explain not doing something just becomes an excuse.
I think I’m mostly over the excuses now. 

The writing discipline has become a good habit now more than not, and when I miss more than a day or two, I really miss it, like an ache in my bones. The blog has helped in the way a hobby can, but it’s no replacement. More like a supplement in place of a meal – it leaves me healthy but still hungry.

So tomorrow I’m placing my ass eagerly back in the chair. When inspiration comes knocking, I’ll be in the right place at the right time. I have a world and characters waiting for me, and I find that I care about them quite a bit. 

What’s your mission? What are you doing, or what should you be doing, so that inspiration can come knocking and get a warm welcome?