Author: Nic Olson

On any walk in St-Henri you will walk past piles of shit. Half of the time you won’t be able to tell if it is human faeces or just large, horse-sized dogs. Some of the time you will watch the excrement dropped from the dog’s body. And the rest of the time it will be a small black plastic bag tied neatly and then promptly stomped on like it was on fire, squirting dog shit in every direction that the bag tore. The process of picking your dog’s crap up with a plastic bag, tying the bag neatly with a bow and then proceeding to two-foot stomp it is new to me, but it is a wide spread phenomenon in St-Henri. I could see it catching on.

My new home has thin walls and thin floors. I was watching hockey while sitting on the floor one day, trying to slide more blanket under my ass because my tailbone was starting to get sore from sitting on the floor for more than half of the day. I heard a guy in the apartment under mine, voice clear as if he was in my room, ‘Ahhh, no. Ohh, man. There is dog shit everywhere. Shit! There’s dog shit all over the bed. Fuck. Nooo!’ Birthing children and raising dogs is a thankless job. Probably because no one wants to thank you for filling the streets and landfills with more shit and shit related merchandise.

My room smelled like a litterbox when I moved in and I’ve been burning incense religiously since. I have a small shrine on my inoperative built-in heater with a family photo, my grandmother’s painting and a stack of books. It smells great, but is colder than the coldest parts of hell. After a few days of renewed cold and incense free room, subtle scents of the ingrained smell of cat excrement returns. It is saturating my pores.

Shit is a delicate subject, and a delicate word. I couldn’t say this word in front of my mother as many times as I’ve typed it here, but psychologically the best way to get someone accustomed to a new song or new word they don’t like is to repeat it over and over. And I couldn’t possibly write an entire article about ‘poop’ and I quickly ran out of politically correct synonyms for ‘stools’.

But the doggy bag stomping still reeks in my mind. How close can we get to completing a positive task before we decide to do exactly the opposite of what we are in the process of doing?
It is like washing your car and then somehow deciding that if you used your own urine it would work better.
Or like cooking a healthy meal of vegetables and rice and proceeding to cover it in ranch dressing or melted butter.
Or like holding the door open for an elderly lady and then deciding to kick out her knees when she walks past.
Or like painting a picture to fundraise for the Defunding of the Arts.
Or like volunteering in a developing country and half way through deciding it would be a great place to open a large bank chain.

The incomprehensibility of human nature is as simple as shit in plastic bags.

This photo is related to the Photo of the Month for October. These are the people that ran Delhi Dhaba. That’s all I am going to say about that.

We are everywhere.

I woke up as a human.

I went to school with a bunch of immigrants. We the people talked about blue collar workers and white collar workers. We went to the Fine Arts Museum to see paintings by Otto Dix and other painters and artists and nihilists. I came home, thought about how I wouldn’t consider myself a writer but if I did I would be a lazy-ass one, a student who doesn’t care about his studies, an Anglophone who will never make it in the big city, a pessimist who writes about his pessimism but calls himself a realist. I left home to see a convention of anarchists and communists and protesters, and I watched hipsters chant about G20 capitalists and fascists. I went for supper at an Irish pub with some Christians who talked about Freemasons. I wasn’t a very good vegetarian because I ate fish. I came home and read essays about Muslims and homosexuals and articles about Liberals and Conservatives and socialists. I laid in bed and thought about pacifists and philosophers and atheists and friday night hedonists and legalists.

Somehow you and I transformed from human beings to something else through the course of a single day.

I went to sleep a defeatist.

No one cares about other peoples dreams. I have come to understand that while listening to anyone tell me about their dreams and never being able to listen past the point where their best friend turned into their mom while they walked on top of Everest riding a dinosaur. I think they mean something, and maybe I am just too rude or impatient to care. But I had a dream last night, and based on my previous words here, you have the choice to skip it, pretend to read it, or think about your own dream you may have had recently.

I was walking in a valley, golden in colour and I saw a herd of moose. I saw a dieing cougar. I saw a jackal attacking a gazelle. There was fire, there were dead trees, it was golden in colour. That is it.

I didn’t have the day off today, I am not sure what this province considers as a holiday (no Remembrance Day or Family Day and barely a Thanksgiving) but I guess it doesn’t matter. We had a minute of silence today at school at the request of the seventy year old Nova Scotian man and while I stared at French cartoons ’Preparing for Work’ in my textbook, I thought about my Grandpa (Read here, and here.) I started to think about the old canvas duffel that my Grandpa gave me for graduation, and where it had been, and what it had seen and who had touched it, and how many other duffels were stuffed beside it on massive airplanes crossing the Atlantic, or in army trucks driving across erupting lands. I thought about what my Grandpa had seen in comparison to his duffel, and about his garden, and about saying, ’Not you again!’ every time I walked into his house. He is the only man I know who was a part of all this and I am glad to have someone to think about when the time comes.

I have a hard time rationalizing war at anytime, but my disagreement with it stems from the ideas and motives of the decision makers and not the soldiers. Remembering people is healthy and important and thanking them for things we’ve got and for doing the things they did to give us our daily comforts is necessary. So here is to the people.

My dream meant nothing. It was there for you to sift through what meant something and what didn’t, like you should on a daily basis. There are days that mean something and days that honestly don’t. Most of my days end up meaning very little, and when a day rolls around that actually means something, I try to recognize it, and this is the only way I know how anymore.

I am also thankful.

A man who works long hours has a wife. The man is at work one night and the wife leaves the house to go adulterate with another man across the river. On her way to the river a crazy man tells her that if she crosses the river she will die. She takes a boat-taxi across the river and once she arrived on the other side she realized she forgot money. She went to her man-mistress’s place to get some cash, but he denied and told her to leave. The boatman told her she couldn’t get a ride back, so she took the bridge to go home. On the other side of the bridge the crazy man stabs her and she dies. Whose fault is the death?
Obviously the woman for being a slut.

A restless boy moves to a new city expecting to find new hope and inspiration for creativity. Once arriving he is warned by a crazy man that if he stays past six months he will go lose his mind again and not find what he was searching for, although he didn’t know what that was when he left. The government gives him money. The boy didn’t understand the crazy man because the crazy man only spoke French. Whose fault is it?
Same logic applies, except the slut part. Maybe.

I spend hours playing Scrabble, or a version of Scrabble on my iPod. (If you have an iPod or iPhone and are interested in beating me at Scrabble, let me know.) Spelling words like ’DYKEY’ and trying to spell words like ’REFOP’ or ’QUJAZ’ on a Triple Word/Triple Letter span. Lately I have been playing as much as possible during class in the afternoons. When a language teacher doesn’t like answering language related questions it gets pretty discouraging pretty fast. Like a blind optometrist or a toothless dentist or a penisless gigolo. Teachers who shouldn’t be teachers are like that.

We sit and discuss the merits of marriage or who is in the wrong in old tales of attempted adultery or which abomination is worst on a scale of one to ten, rape or exterminating a species of whale (we actually do this), listening to militant European women students tout their undoubtedly correct points of view.

A year ago tomorrow I bought my computer. Today it is in the shop. My one year of free warranty ends tomorrow, so I figured I might as well get a free screen while I still can. I bought said computer in anticipation of moving here and writing books and essays and short stories and poems and Pulitzer Prize winning novels. It has done me well in the movie watching department but not so well in its purpose of being: a recipient of new words and phrases.

I have been riddled pretty hard. Nearly a year has gone by and I have made very little progress mentally, literally, physically, lingually, or socially and the reason for that always lands upon my own matted, greasy, hat-haired head. The answer to the riddle lands no further than the slut who decided to leave.

And this slut accepts that.

This Sunday, November 7th, 2010 while you are laying in bed, sitting in church, getting tattooed, or eating Fantuz Flakes, the people of Burma will be having an election. Or at least that is what they say. The last time there was an election in Burma was 1990 where an overwhelming percentage of the population voted for a small woman named Aung San Suu Kyi and just two percent voted for the existing military party. But instead of giving Aung San Suu Kyi the title of Prime Minister, the military regime put her under house arrest indefinitely for activism and marrying a white guy (I just found out that I walked directly past her place of house arrest when I was wandering the streets of Yangon). She gets out in a little more than a week from now.

Aung San Suu Kyi is a leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Her face is painted on a building in Pittsburgh (above), her words from her book ‘Freedom from Fear’ are quoted below. She is an advocate of peaceful demonstration.

Because of new laws put in place earlier this year Aung San Suu Kyi could not be a part of the election. The NLD has decided to boycott the upcoming elections because they are being carried out unjustly by the currently governing military junta. The NLD fears that the elections will be fixed so that the outcome favours the military which they will use to justify their rule. Not only are the elections in question due to the rule of the military, they have also been accused of hundreds of other human rights atrocities in their own country.

For the junta, holding the elections is the final step of their ‘roadmap’ for so-called a ‘disciplined democracy.’

The 2008 Constitution that the military carefully engineered for 15 years will be ratified by parliament after the elections while ensuring human rights violators ‘immunity.’ Moreover, the Army will play a leading role in Burma’s politics by reserving a quarter of parliamentary seats and key cabinet portfolios such as Home, Defense and Border Areas, as well as a control over a powerful decision-making body – ‘National Security and Defense Council.’

It is now much clearer that the military-backed political party ‘USDP’ and its affiliates are set to win in the elections by means of intimations, bribery and fraud. Therefore, the current election in Burma is not only meeting the lowest level of international standards, but also is a process of legalizing the military rule that is against the democratic principles and the desire of Burmese people in the establishment of a free, democratic and prosperous country.

Source: Canadian Friends of Burma

During my short time in Burma, the military rule was hidden but evident. Only some hotels were permitted for tourists and certain areas of the country were forbidden. The military checked up on where you were, when you checked into hotels, and monitored and regulated how far you could travel from certain airports. Internet access was sparse, and where it was available many websites were blocked permanently. Cell phones were very rarely owned by anyone and when they were, the network was extremely minimal. Tourists were not given access to the local currency, ‘Kyats’, and where it was found the exchange rate was half of what it was worth. American dollars could be used anywhere you went. There was an obvious presence, not often talked about and not often seen. I have Burmese friends who have known nothing but fear and restriction their whole lives, and there is possibility for this to change.

It is not by living to the age of ninety or one hundred that one lives the full life. Some people live well until they are ninety or one hundred without ever having done anything for anyone. They come into the world, live, then die without doing something for the world. I don’t think that is living a full life. To have the full life one must have the courage to bear the responsibility of the needs of others – one must want to bear this responsibility. Each and every one of us must have this attitude and we must instill it in our youth. We must bring up our children to understand that only doing what is meritorious is right.

-Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom From Fear, Page 222

Knowledge is the beginning. For information on times for local demonstrations please click the Canadian Friends of Burma link below. The fact that it is a struggle to find up to date information on the situation makes me aware that this woman’s story and this country’s struggle need to be shared. And if you’d like to laugh too, check out the link to Will Ferrell’s relevant video below.

Sources: BBC FAQ, US Campaign for Burma, CBC, Canadian Friends of Burma, Will Ferrell Burma Video, Aung San Suu Kyi Poems

New home, new photos. Fourth apartment in ten months. Zero leases. Zero problems. Zero heating.

Since I can’t grow a moustache, nor have I the money to support those who can, I will advertise. Click the photo to see Jeremy’s Movember page where you donate to prostate cancer research and support the growth of his gnarly month long moustache.

Someone changed ‘No Shave November’ to Movember without telling me, but I guess it was for good reason. I personally haven’t shaved for all of October, and will go November too, but it doesn’t mean I will have a moustache by the end of it. Support Jerms and his upper lip endeavours.