Balls of Rice

Author: Nic Olson

  • Summer of the Drunk Bike Crash: A Physics Lesson

    Milky Way

    In a group of ten cyclists at 2am, third from the front, he hit a back tire. The first rider swerved and cut off the second rider who cut off the third, who flipped over his handlebars in a mess of birthday terror in front of the ice cream shop. He bled from his face, his teeth seemed intact.

    After riding a block sitting on the curved handlebars in moments of pure dumb pleasure, he landed on his face and didn’t get up. Brothers have been killing their own brothers since Cain and Abel, sometimes accidentally. On a normal day, killing a brother would have just been a bad day. But on the day when I learned of his forthcoming marriage, killing my brother would have been a manslaughter of biblical proportions. After I knew he was alive and taken care-of I rode home with a helmet on and compared my upcoming and pathetic life to his upcoming and exciting one.

    In these experiments with physics I learnt about absolutes. The first crash taught me that particles do not have a well-defined position and velocity, rather a quantum state, which is combination of positions and velocities as defined within the limits of the uncertainty principle.* As I swerved from left to right I proved this correct in that my bicycle and myself had no well-defined position, and because of such, a handsome actor nearly lost his face. There is no absolute space, there is no absolute position. In the second crash I learnt about personal absolutes. I compared his life to mine, contemplating which was the right path.

    From day to day I can’t decide if I think that I am God’s gift to the world—intelligence, wisdom, tact, social-graces—or if I am Satan’s shit-stained underwear. I can’t decide if my lifestyle of frugality and abstinence is effective or internal. For some reason I can’t conceptualize myself in any other way than the absolute best or the absolute worst. I battle between a hunger for knowledge and a hunger for rest and in doing so I watch episodes of inane teen dramas from my highschool days in between enjoying chapters about quantum mechanics in Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time, the simpler version of the science classic, still too complicated for me.

    I can’t decide if quitting my job was the worst decision of my life, or the best.

    As if I were at my first day of second grade, sitting in a circle on a forest-green area rug stating my favourite colour, food, and subject, I instinctively feel as though there is a best and worst for everything. This summer I caught myself looking out upon the prairies, sitting atop the hill at Buffalo Effigy, the warm wind pelting my face with the view of thousands of miles ahead, the green gullies and yellow hills, and I internally stated that I thought I liked the fields better than the mountains. As though in the universe there were a clear winner as to absolute beauty, or as though my personal preference mattered even the weight of a quark fart. I caught myself creating absolutes for things that didn’t matter and have ever since been attempting to stop from deciding favourites. Having favourites—the best dessert or band or sports team or brand of shoes, is a childish form of having absolutes, and according my new favourite book, science doesn’t seem to have many of these. Such absolutes are the cause of conflict as minor as neighbourly squabbles and as horrendous as genocide.

    My mind has always stated the situation as being The Right Way To Live versus The Wrong Way To Live, and leaves out the third option, which is simply, and most importantly, just fucking living. I possibly have been conditioned to draw this binary because of early ties with an absolute God, (which is likely, because every single thing I write is either a secular sermon or a parable or both). But certainly there is no absolute. There is no right or wrong, black or white, good or bad. There is no God’s gift to the world and no Satan’s shit-stained underwear. There is no worst decision of my life, and no best. There are simply decisions, and there is simply the process of living, and the process of creating absolutes for such things destroys science, and destroys humanity.

    I have generally given every other person the free pass of just living, but I have yet to do so for myself. Maybe today is the day. Now to decide if that is the right decision or not.

    …a star that was sufficiently massive and compact would have such a strong gravitational field that light could not escape: any light emitted from the surface of the star would be dragged back by the star’s gravitational attraction before it could get very far. Such objects are what we now call black holes. (Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time, Chapter 8, p77)

    …a person that was sufficiently delusional and introverted would have such a strong introspective field that positivity could not escape: any positivity emitted from the person would be dragged back by the person’s bloated or deflated sense of self-worth before it could get very far. Such people are what we now call people. (Nicholas Olson, This Moment of Time, Chapter Sept8, p2014)

    *Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time, Chapter 9, p91-92

  • Moreland to Spring Valley

    Moreland IMG_4793 IMG_4811 IMG_4833 IMG_4865 IMG_4889 IMG_4904 IMG_4923

  • How to become a monkey-of-an-uncle.

    I’ve never been legally married before. But in my head—since the age of ten when I listened to sappy songs about girls and attributed them to specific crushes and fantasized about sitting next to them, marrying them, then growing old with them—in my head I’ve been married a dozen times or so. I hope to never be married again.

    I quit my job. It is hard to be married without an adequate job to sustain you, I’d imagine, so maybe now, with no job and zero prospects, my hope to be never married again will stay true. But even without an adequate job to sustain you, your mind can get married as many times as it wants. I may have finally unconditioned myself to the concept of marriage, a terrifying prospect, but my mind still creates its own relationships to the point of me truly wondering what is reality and what isn’t. What happened and what was fabrication.

    Quitting was like getting a divorce from a young spouse of several years, I assume. Your interests are solely based on those of the other person for two years, because that is what love is, right? Then you start to hyperventilate and feel the weight on your chest about how little you actually know about yourself and then you drift away, mentally threatening, then verbally threatening, to leave. Then one day, after swimming in a chlorinated pool, you come to the peaceful realization that although you were meant for each other for a while, you weren’t meant for each other forever. Who gets the house? Who gets the years of irreparable anxiety? And then when you realize that you have no backup, no consolation to make you feel better about yourself, you panic that you made the wrong decision and hope to hell that they’ll take you back.

    My father recently retired, and my mother for the second time. Just over fifty-five. The fearless soon-to-be grandparents. And in envy I quit my job to travel simultaneously and thus I’ll end up being the monkey-of-an-uncle that still feels eighteen years old when he hits fifty-five. My sister’s child will be born with more natural social instinct and maturity than his uncle, truly demonstrating who the monkey is in the relationship.

  • See you at the movies.

    Abstinence of joy in pursuit of character and knowledge is something I learned from reading Gandhi’s autobiography when I was 18. If I remember correctly he wouldn’t eat anything but fruit and nuts, he wouldn’t even consummate his marriage with his faithful wife. I use it in explaining why I don’t have television or the internet, or why I eat a particular diet, and even something I used as a reason not to sleep with someone in the past. I use it as a noble way to cover less attractive qualities in myself such as cheapness, cowardice. I should have known that reading even a positive influential piece of literature when in the developing years can do a person harm if it is not fully understood. And it wasn’t.

    Unlike Gandhi, the intellectual giant and human phenomenon, the abstinence of joys has produced in me an uneven pattern of mental health. For when people are watching Netflix or eating ice cream or having sex on a basement floor, that is, when people are engaging in normal human activities, I am sitting on my couch staring out the window, trying to hide the light from the digital billboard behind a planter pot in order to further abstain from screens. Instead I stare out the window, the sky an apocalyptic yellow, picturing a tornado tearing off the corner of my building and sucking me up two hundred feet in the air before dropping me to the road below and flitting away. Think about how I abstain from distractions and personal weaknesses so that I can spend my time ruminating on philosophical truths and creative outlets, when instead I end up overthinking relationships and decisions and contemplating toenail length and streetlight schedules. My attempts at character building, knowledge gaining, wisdom seeking develop into anxious, panicked sweats. Or I think about thought; admonishing myself for not thinking about the things that a person of intelligence should think about. For not further studying into the history of Palestine, or the teachings of Tagore, or civic policy and politics.

    Only when I lay to sleep do I understand that every thought is regurgitation, and therefore not productive. I hear the voices of peers, or my voice repeating things I need to do, or a replay of the things I read, or advertisements plopping out of my subconscious. When tired, the regurgitation of thoughts intensifies. They blow around in your globe and bounce out like the next bingo ball. Meditation; be it unconscious, accidental, or purposeful, is where newness arrives from. From the back shelves, where things have been sorted and stashed. Meditation is being immersed in the lack of thought, either while gardening or biking or baking or sitting in a yogi pose or sleeping or eating. Demanding original and creative thought after ten hours of being pre-consumed and used up is impossible, and the pressure to do this has given me a new relationship with what mental health really is. Abstinence hasn’t ruined me, personal pressure and not knowing the limits of human energy has. And I will be surprised if I truly understand it before I break.

    I am learning, despite my previous conditioning, that a proper distraction will do more for an eager mind than eagerness itself. See you at the movies.

    What do you think? he asked me again.
    How it feels to go crazy? I asked.
    Yeah.
    I don’t know, I said. Sad and easy, I guess, like losing a friend? You say a few wrong things, you ignore the obvious, you act stupid in an unfunny way. Travis told me that Kafka or someone like that had said insanity could be defined as the attempt to reconcile one’s overwhelming urge to write things down with one’s overwhelming conviction that silence is the most appropriate response. Oh, I said. Okay.

    -Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness, Chapter 18, p 149-150

  • Slow Code Colonialism

    The following essay was published in the Summer 2014 edition of Transition Magazine, a Canadian Mental Health Association publication. Digital copy available here.

    You are lying on the street in cardiac arrest. I am obliged to inform your unconscious, breathless body of my newly acquired First Aid training. This, for some reason, is supposed to reassure you, as if my knowledge to enter three digits on a phone grabbed out of a bystander’s pocket changes the fact that your heart has ceased. All I can do is Check, Call, Care, and call bystanders to action, but according to the brawny male firefighters who taught my First Aid course, this should be reassuring. The fewer bystanders, the better, they said. According to said firefighters, CPR and portable defibrillators are so effective that you—unconscious, vulnerable, responsibility of the provincial healthcare and social services systems—shouldn’t worry about what will happen if you don’t wake up, but rather, what will happen if you do.

    The day after I became First Aid certified, I heard a piece on public radio that spoke to the misconception of the effectiveness of CPR. When it comes to the point where a human is in cardiac arrest, known as a Code Blue, healthcare professionals are obligated to administer life-saving procedures. When doctors are confident that CPR will not save a life, or will greatly reduce the quality of life that remains, they will often fake it, for it “looks and feels like a really gruesome way to usher someone out of this world.”(1) They go through the motions of CPR without actually trying to save the life. They do it so the patient can die. Slow Code—they even have a name for it. When family and friends are watching a loved-one slip away, they cannot understand a doctor who would stand by idly and let their family member die. CPR, in this case, is a system for the conscience of the bystander, not for the person in emergency. The professionals do this because the system of resuscitation is flawed.

    A friend was recently in the hospital. He got into a fight with three men half his age, he told me. Others claim that while inebriated, he tripped, the side of his head the first part of his body that struck the ground. Skull fracture and brain swelling which led to brain damage and memory loss. I visited him regularly—I sat there as an idle bystander contributing to his deteriorating health by supplying him with cigarettes which he forgot he had, as he basked in the overwhelming nature of his life of abuse and addiction. We played cards as he mumbled through the imagined traumatic experience of being locked in a house with three family members who beat him until he bled from the ears.

    When my friend is discharged, he will leave the hospital to no home and to a family who can no longer give him the support he requires. The hospital can’t keep him forever. The rehabilitation centre says he is too high-functioning—a man who cannot remember where he put his paintbrush or the names of his brothers. The province cares not for the marginalized. An ethically responsible governing body cares for the vulnerable, but my friend will end up homeless in a week, one inevitable head injury away from complete debilitation. He has never met his social worker. The social worker in his ward blankly stated that it isn’t her problem once he is discharged. The workers search on their computers and make phone calls in vain, aiming to satisfy the bystanders, knowing that whatever they do, it won’t save his life, because, whether or not they know it, the system of resuscitation is flawed. To those within the social welfare system, this is the most receptive the state will ever be—just another case file in the colonial shell game that is the Canadian welfare state.

    Those who have not dealt with the system imagine that it works for all. They imagine that the cracks through which people slip are fairy tales told from faraway lands. They can’t imagine a circumstance where someone would be left out in the cold after a traumatic event, because, they think, this is Canada, land of universal healthcare and equal aid for all. This liberal notion of equality of opportunity fails to understand the systemic racism which is fundamental to the colonial state. The gaps exist on purpose. The system of resuscitation is intentionally flawed—it is designed to appease the conscience of the bystander. But unlike a medical Slow Code, it is flawed in its design to take resources and power out from the trained field workers through lack of programs that offer proper supports. Fifty-percent of the Saskatchewan provincial budget is devoted to healthcare and social services, totalling over $5.5 billion per year.(2) With such a significant portion of the provincial budget devoted to two departments of human services, the general populace can only assume that the dollars are sufficient and effective; however, gaps in the departments are purposeful and widespread.

    Aboriginal communities have been stunted by the implementation of provincial and federal social assistance programs, contributing “to the persistence of individual and community economic dependency.”(3) These programs run on outdated living allowances, low earning allowances making a transition to employment impossible, and lack of adequate supports for Aboriginal people living in urban centres or dealing with HIV/AIDS. These programs run on cycles of poverty and death. A growing number of Aboriginal people have been forced from reserves to urban centres, where it is exceedingly difficult to live as a traditional Aboriginal person. It is a direct extension of settler colonialism, originally performed under the mandate of pre-confederation’s Indian Affairs, whose policies to ‘civilize’ Aboriginal populations introduced the residential school system. Residential schools were decentralized into the provincially-run Ministry of Social Services, a ministry which continues to perpetuate the same exterminatory mandate. Slow Code Colonialism—neocolonial institutions created to emphasize the desires of the bystander and ignore the needs of the sick. Neocolonialism is already the disguise for cultural eradication and is further masked as the unavailability of programs due to lack of financial support. Where supports exist, resources do not. My friend qualifies for a bed in a home for those with Acquired Brain Injury, but only after sifting through a waiting list of several months, and not if he continues to battle his addiction. Fairytale cracks become real. The ministry that originally took responsibility for my friend as a young boy sent to a residential school, now waives this responsibility and deliberately leaves him to flop around on shore, their program near completion.

    I was taught to Check, Call, Care. As your consciousness flickers, as shock sets in, I brush your hair from your forehead and tell you it will be alright. I lean close to your face to check your respiration. You are not breathing. Since I do not have my recommended mouth-cover, I begin compression-only CPR. I tell a bystander to call for help. I break your ribs and bounce up and down on your sternum with my arms locked at the elbows. The paramedics arrive. They are trained in emergency and begin Slow Code CPR, feigning an attempt at revival because that is what bystanders expect of them. There’s nothing we could do, they say, but I am appeased because of their valiant attempts at resuscitation. What they don’t tell me is that they were thinking about football when they were supposed to be pumping blood through your chest. You somehow survive despite the Slow Code, but you wake up with broken ribs, brain damage and you are expected to survive when you have no place to live and no family to care for you. And the system of resuscitation wins in its purposeful defectiveness.

    “Sir John A. MacDonald’s policy of starving First Nations to death in order to make way for the western expansion of European settlers,” along with the residential school system, “meets the criteria of genocide…by omission, if not by deliberate commission,” says a letter to United Nations Rapporteur for Indigenous People.(4) The policy of nineteenth-century Canada differs from today’s policy of intentionally defective programs of social service only in thin veils of supposed goodwill. There is no greater place to hide genocidal policy than behind a department of human services. The only other difference between Canada’s previous policies of starvation and the policy of today is the time elapsed in which the extent of the genocide could be fully understood. And time will again pass.

    The only way to stop Slow Code Colonialism is through a remodel of the system of resuscitation. The Ministry of Social Services is just one of the administrative programs that force subjugation by stamping out hope and dignity through “a complex web of city agencies and institutions that [regard] the poor as vermin,” Chris Hedges explains.(5) These programs work together to perpetuate the accepted state ideology by operating under the guise of being a protective force. The police who mine for crime by making arrests in communities of lower economic status work as the frontline of the repressive arms of the state. The military who break up blockades of First Nations fighting for liberation form another wing of Slow Code Colonialism. These structures work to protect the status and wealth of white middle class Canada, while ensuring the poor Aboriginal populations live in abject poverty, utterly subordinate to those who control the state. These structures project an image, and behind this image is a bloated bureaucracy focused not on remedying social evils, but on keeping these injustices out of the field of vision of polite society.

    The system must be remodelled to one that does not look to appease the taxpayer, but rather to adequately serve the marginalized. This starts when bystanders become involved and demand that governments stop these hegemonic structures of administrative programs such as Social Assistance, the judicial system, the police and RCMP, and unregulated resource development that make up the branches of colonization. This will dismantle the less visible forms of  “a very active system of settler colonialism.”(6) It starts with education and partnership that leads to real reconciliation “grounded in political resurgence” that “support[s] the regeneration of Indigenous languages, oral cultures, and traditions of governance.”(7) The system will be reformed when the programs intended to assist people do just that, instead of control, institutionalize, and cripple. As with any cooperative and proactive social system or community network, a welfare system administered by those to whom it caters is a democratizing step to reconciliation and empowerment. Aboriginal participation in the development of such strategies and programs is necessary to eventually eliminate the economic gap.(8) These state apparatuses will require more than just reform to make them democratic, but will require revolutionary change encouraged by grassroots movements like protests at Elsipogtog and Idle No More.

    First Aid isn’t as futile as it may have seemed at first. Although I still tread in the overwhelming nature of ignorance of how to respond to an emergency more serious than hunger pangs, I at least know that the symptoms for stroke, diabetic shock, and extreme inebriation are identical. I now know that the systems they taught me are evolving and changing because their legitimacy is still highly in question. I am no longer a bystander, but a person of direct action. The fewer bystanders, the better, they told me. With fewer bystanders, Slow Code Colonialism can shift to a more balanced paradigm of moral care for all.

     

    1. Goldman, Dr. B, (writer). Goodes, Jeff, (producer). 2013. “Slow Code.” White Coat, Black Art. CBC Radio 1. (http://www.cbc.ca/whitecoat/2013/10/18/slow-code/)

    2.  Saskatchewan Provincial Budget Summary, Ken Krawetz Minister of Finance, Government of Saskatchewan, 2013-14 GRF Expense, p44. (http://www.finance.gov.sk.ca/budget2013-14/2013-14BudgetSummary.pdf)

    3. Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People. 1996. Ottawa, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 5, Section 2.9 (http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/webarchives/20071211061313/http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/sh88_e.html)

    4. Fontaine, Phil. Farber, Bernie. 2013. “What Canada committed against First Nations was genocide. The UN should recognize it.” The Globe and Mail. October 14. (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/what-canada-committed-against-first-nations-was-genocide-the-un-should-recognize-it/article14853747/)

    5. Hedges, Chris. 2005. Losing Moses on the Freeway. New York, NY: Free Press, Chapter 1, p17

    6. Simpson, Leanne. 2013. “Elsipogtog Everywhere.” October 20. Retrieved October 21, 2005 (leannesimpson.ca/2013/10/20/elsipogtog-everywhere/)

    7. Simpson, Leanne. 2011. Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back. Winnipeg, MB: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, Back cover

    8. Painter, Marv. Lendsey, Kelly. Howe, Eric. 2000. “Managing Saskatchewan’s Expanding Aboriginal Economic Gap.” The Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development. Volume 1, Number 2, p42

  • The Adirondack Haystack Still Tours

    The Adirondack Haystack Still Tours Mini Book Tour/Camping Trip

    July 12 – Kokopelli Salon w/ Son Howler, 2052 Commercial Dr, Vancouver BC, 8pm
    July 16 – Oaklands Sunset Market, 1-2827 Belmont Ave, Victoria BC, 4pm
    July 18 – Pages Books, 1135 Kensington Road NW, Calgary AB, 7:30pm

    See posters below. Click below for PDF versions.

     The Adirondack Haystack Still Tours The Adirondack Haystack Still Tours Poster

    Market July-page-001

    July 16 – Victoria

  • Yes, Coal.

     

    IMG_9278In a brief moment of respite, I stopped the the work van, a recently discontinued Dodge Caravan, and idled behind a small compact car. I sat there with a weight on my chest, my first break seemingly in a week, my work anthem playing in the background as I read a slogan on the back of the compact ahead of me in line to the next red light. The owner of this car was either very uncertain of his convictions, or was so sure of the resale value of his import, that instead of sticking the stickers on the bumper of the car, they were scotch-taped to the rear window. On the left side of the window was a sticker-length version of a memorable Albert Einstein quote, written specifically about politicians. The right ‘window sticker’ was probably a vote of support for solar power, or unions, or The Brotherhood of Solar Panel Installers Local 179. Sitting sweaty in the van, I applauded his uncertain efforts.

    Grandma gave me a calendar for Christmas. It was a monthly wall calendar for 2014 which she thought held daily thoughts and inspirations for someone like myself; a person with flagrant internal rage and one of those websites that a person can say whatever they want to inflate their self-worth. She wanted to give me ammunition to write more often and write about things that mattered. The calendar, it turned out, only had one piece of knowledge per month often no greater than, ‘When I am sad, I dream about owning a million pairs of shoes’. I told Grandma that the calendar unfortunately didn’t have daily advice, only monthly, and shortly thereafter came a box came in the mail with a new calendar—a daily flip calendar with real thoughts that transcended the very real epidemic of retail therapy. On March 24, the uncertain bumper/window sticker reappeared.

    Albert Einstein observed, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

    In Saskatchewan, social change generally means the grand opening of a new tavern or the retirement of a washed up wide receiver in the CFL. Students greet tuition hikes with annoyed tweets, and any sort of popular movement gets propagandized to become the ire of the middle class. Fear-mongering using the threat of economics convinces the friendly neighbour to become selfish, survivalist, and hateful. Bumper stickers and social media are considered a form of real protest and social involvement.

    A friend recently arranged a community art exhibit entitled ‘Hands’. The exhibit encouraged a discussion of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada aimed at discouraging victim blaming in both conversation and in the media’s portrayals of the violence, and to focus on the perpetuators of the violence, not particularly on individual levels, but rather on a larger societal level. She greatly succeeded in allowing those with the luxury of purposeful indifference to participate in the greater discussion of which they may not have otherwise been a part. She succeeded in partially shifting the obligation of the solution from the perpetuator to the people.

    Calling on the federal government and RCMP to conduct a public inquiry, which is a common and ongoing demand of this movement, is asking the perpetuators of the gender violence to either point fingers at individual abusers and victims, or to give reasons and excuses for their long-lasting colonial violence. In doing this, nothing will be solved because people with the same level of thinking will be at the helm. The responsibility of finding a solution needs to be transferred from the policy-makers to the people.

    The gender violence that is a part of Canada’s history with colonialism cannot be solved by perpetuators of colonialism. Real social change will occur, as Hedges states, “among the poor, the homeless, the working class, and the destitute.

    As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our only hope is to connect ourselves with the daily injustices visited upon the weak and the outcast. Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. We must hand out bowls of soup. Coax the homeless into a shower. Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly abandoned on city sidewalks, take their medication. We must go back into America’s segregated schools and prisons. We must protest, learn to live simply and begin, in an age of material and imperial decline, to speak with a new humility.”

    By asking the perpetuators to solve the problems which they themselves created, we hand the wheel of a fast moving car to a driver unwilling to keep their eyes open. If we do that, not only will bumper sticker protests be too smashed up and damaged to be read, but calendars will no longer be a place for profound thought, but only a place to count the days between abominable genocidal events. Change can begin with personal investment in the gaining and sharing of new knowledge and an independence from oppressive arms of the state. In such ways, communities and movements are formed.

    Bumper stickers and internet campaigns only temporarily quell the liberal guilt of such complex problems. As with most ignorant attempts at change, they are divisive; they take complex issues and turn them into two-word statements of certainty and damnation.  It is “in the tangible, mundane, and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others that we will kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back, that we will articulate an alternative.” (Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class, Chapter 5, p156)

  • Self-Portrait

    Pile of Shit

     

     

  • The Ignorance of Idealism

    We couldn’t count to eight. The consumed beverages we attempted to count inhibit most mathematical abilities, so it makes sense. It made the following morning’s cash deposit at the bank a bit more taxing than it normally would have been. It seemed that the irresponsibility of inebriation seeped from my pores with such potency that the bank teller just knew I needed the guidance of the branch’s Relationship Manager. Relationship Manager requirements: divorcee with three estranged children, an addiction for buying high heels, 45-year mortgage. I was being shanghaied. After three minutes of portfolios and mutual funds and MER%, I realized that she wasn’t just switching my bank account over to the new no-fee account (which I still don’t trust). She clicked around and looked down her nose at my banking information, took a short survey of my current life situation and she told me what I already knew: that I need to start saving for when I get old.

    Invest. She told me. Invest in one of these three packages so that you get richer. She said.You get richer, I get richer, my company gets richer. This, she didn’t say. But in my understanding of history and of capitalism, as one party gets returns on their investment, another party gets returned to the ghetto with less than they had before. Prosperity for all is a harsh myth. Sask-a-boom is a shoe in the face of those without investment plans.

    She dismissed me as a clairvoyant dismisses a non-believing truth-seeker, knowing I will come crawling back once I experience the real life of a wife or child or house or car and hand my convictions in with my loneliness. Only she won’t be the lucky Relationship Manager to sell me a package of ‘Ethical Funds’ that will give me a 10% return.

    I am 25. I’d rather work until I die—to let work be my life and my death—than to participate in the death of millions of others. The weight on my chest multiplies. This, my friends, is what they call idealism.

    I am 65. All my peers are retiring and relaxing on large boats. Sitting in the staffroom at work, I rub my stubbled face with my ugly hand, reading this passage on some archaic form of screen, shaking my head. I curse the fact that I was too stupid to understand the energy sector or financial firms, or investing and commoditizing ‘Consumer Staples’. My self-disappointment is inevitable, like one of those commercials where the 65-year-old couple realizes that they didn’t save enough to retire and end up spending the best years of their life selling groceries to 20-year-olds with retirement plans. The difference is that I neglected to start saving for retirement not because I didn’t think about it at all, but rather because I thought about it far too much.

    I am generally ignorant about the things in which I claim to root my convictions. Ignorant as the people I have grown to believe are selfish and stupid, only allowing a different sect of intellectuals to sway me a different direction. I have the ignorance of idealism—I am holding on so tightly to an ignorance that I call morality. More recently I have attempted the opposite, the ignorance of realism—accepting life as it is, and using purposeful ignorance as an act of self-preservation.

    And now, as step one is complete, as I walk into purposeful ignorance in the name of personal sanity, I wonder when step two will finally become reality. When I will cast my convictions aside and assume my rightful place as a another investor in this wonderful system of economic exploitation. For the comfort of my golden years, I pray that this day is soon.

  • Act Like You Know

    I planned a successful yet wildly overbudget kitchen renovation. Successful in the fact that the new space looks like a kitchen, and it looks like a nicer kitchen than it did before. It has yet to be used, so its functionality is still highly in question. My experience working in a commercial kitchen for one week washing dishes under the feet of thousands of Habs fans, scrubbing pots with my tears of jealousy, along with working six months in a kitchen the size of my closet, gave me obvious authority to run a commercial kitchen renovation.

    I wrote a second book. The first one received wild acclaim from my aunt in small town Saskatchewan, so I figured I owed it to the world to write a second, to be released in a matter of days. In the process of repeatedly underlining one paragraph of the 300 copies of my book with a red ball-point pen stolen from a private Christian high school, I tried to come up with an explanation for one of my stories for when Peter Mansbridge inevitably asks me about it on The National. Well Peter, this story represents the inevitable Marxist revolution coming within our generation. Peter will share the book with an aging baby-booming generation of liberals and will send it to the swoopy-haired tiger-beat of Jian who will publicize it to the slightly more liberal but slightly less informed generation of thumb communicators.

    I recently began as the Housing Coordinator at work. This position, usually held for academics with experience, was given to the best candidate, an anti-academic with zero experience. I am to guide people on the margins of society through an Orwellian world of bureaucracy and gently nudge them towards the racist, classist, stigma-soaked free enterprise rental market so that they survive another month. My experience living in suburbia and going to private school, as well as that three months of volunteering at the food bank in Montreal was all they needed. I was a shoe-in.

    Before you begin to congratulate me on how wide my knowledge base is, how successful I have become, and how multi-talented I am, please know that my recent successes have been entirely based on this:

    If you don’t know, act like you know.

    Disclaimer: If you abide by this creed but you are a visible minority, we cannot guarantee positive outcomes like those listed above. We suggest you bank on your contacts, that is, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” to bring you out of the muck.

    In daily dealings of all three of the above projects I get asked about my background. Each time I instinctively want to respond “Swedish and Irish,” but then realize I’m not at a settlers reunion. Actually, people want to know why they should give me the time of day. My publishing history. My construction experience. My participation and perseverance in systems of institutionalized education. Justify yourself in two short phrases. And while I find the request foolish, I can’t blame them, since I am the first to admit that people have zero reason to take my word for anything. I am the hack of all hacks. I do, however, I appreciate the chance to make myself look foolish.

    You didn’t get lucky, some might say, you worked hard. As true as this may be, my luck cannot be downplayed and my privilege cannot be ignored. Hard work pays off is a sentiment that attempts to justify the oppressive systems of capitalism and neocolonialism. In the cases that it is used to congratulate someone for a job well done, it often ignores the contextual advantages that actually contributed to the finished project, and fails to recognize the reasons that hard work doesn’t pay off for the majority of folks, besides the fact that they “just didn’t work hard enough, I guess.”

    After three days of a new position, clients have actually said to colleagues, “I met Nic. I like him because he really knows what he’s doing.” The illusion stands. I’ve tricked my boss, I’ve tricked clients, and now the goal is to trick you. And by the time the illusion falls I hope to be in a tropical country indulging in coconut-flavoured depressants. That is something that I am undeniably versed in. No acting necessary.