Author: Nic Olson

It falls from the sky. It washes our pimply armpits. It saves people from burning to death. It satisfies thirst. It is the universal solvent. It is what astronauts search for on other planets because it is the only thing we know that is necessary for life. We’ve reached a point where it is not available to everyone on the planet. Water is wealth. The majority of wealth in the world is distributed among a select few. The majority of clean water in the world is distributed to the same select few, those who can afford to pay for it.

It is Blog Action Day. I believe I partook in this event last year and that obviously changed the world a great deal when it comes to climate change. This year the topic is water. I feel it is important to use this tool of evil, Balls of Rice, for good every now and then. Like most people I feel it is adequate to devote only a tiny and selfish portion of my time to the benefit of others*, one day a year to writing about more than my feelings and try to have a positive impact on the world. Because that is the western way.

*I saw a bag of Starbucks coffee, (Red.) brand. $1 of each $20 bag of coffee gets donated back to Africa, where the coffee came from. The coffee was not fair trade. Makes about as much sense as using child labour to build an orphanage. Or drowning a person who is dying of thirst.

Here is my advice as to how to avoid water waste:

1. Shower less! Showering everyday is absurd. Showering twice a day makes me vomit. It is possible to smell good for several days without showering, people have done it for thousands of years. If you bathe because it feels good or it wakes you up in the morning, you need better reasons. It would be like eating human meat because you like the taste, or killing your neighbour because he eats his supper with his hands. Over-showering is cannibalism and racism.

2. Don’t drink bottled water. Ever. Yeah, it is possible to go without it no matter how thirsty you think you are. The fact that there are even places in the world that it is recommended that people drink bottled water could be taken care of if wealth was distributed properly. If you don’t already know that the water in the Evian (spell this company’s name backwards) bottle is the exact same water as what comes from your tap, you should at least be smart enough to realize that paying $2 for a litre of water is mathematically worse than paying $1 for a litre of gas, and just as bad for the environment.  No matter how cool their bottles look, or how many ‘environmentally friendly’ seals and certificates it gets, it is about as trustworthy as the government. Don’t be a moron.

3. Leave your house. The sooner you travel somewhere that isn’t your own bed and doesn’t have heated flooring, the sooner you will see what the real world looks like, and the sooner you’ll understand your water consumption compared to the large portion of the world, and how much less you could use.

4. Don’t flush the toilet more than twice a day. Don’t abuse your privilege to having a toilet.

‘More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet. Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to toilets. This means that sewage spills into rivers and streams, contaminating drinking water and causing disease.’

Just because you have access to a cell phone and a toilet doesn’t mean you should abuse both. The only place in the world that has more shit than a toilet, is your text inbox.

5. Put a brick in your toilet tank. Save some water.

6. Read. Think. Make a change in your lifestyle. Don’t be a consume-only moron.

‘Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Water, or rather lack thereof, causes 42,000 deaths each week.’

The pessimist in me says that this post won’t change anything, and that soon enough we will run out of water and it will be sold like gasoline or diamonds. The optimist in me, yes there is one, says that in five years it would be possible to give every person in the world access to good water, if that is something we want to happen. Step one, I feel, is to realize that we can’t waste what other people don’t have. Stop showering.

Stats were supplied by Blog Action Day.
I gave to Water.org under the name ‘The Honorable Nicholas Olson’. It is endorsed by Matt Damon, so you know it is cool…

When I was driving to the airport the sun’s rays bounced perfectly off of the rearview mirror. The second reflection that a rearview is intended to make, for night driving purposes, was lined up perfectly with my primary reflection so that my second reflection’s eyebrows lined up just above my primary reflection’s lip. With a slight tilt of my head I had a moustache as good as one of my eyebrows. If my moustache were as good as either of my eyebrows, I’d be a regular Stalin.

On the drive back from the airport, I was alone, so I could verbally express my brilliant ideas, and I wasn’t listening to music because the car I drove only had pop punk CDs and I wasn’t occupied because my nose was clear. I quickly invented a game involving short poetry and license plates. These were some my favourites. I laughed myself home.

373 REE
Read every book.
Especially ones that you think are dull.
Even the Bible.

CJR 546
Can’t forget to buy bread,
Just make it fresh
Rotten bread’s for birds with VD.

012 ZXB
…
Xylophones:
Bad ass.

420 SFO
Smoking doobies can kill.
Fat dollars,
Owed to the Hells Angels down the road. You’re dead.

I have invented the new Haiku, only more potent. Zeroes can be ten letters or zero. If you get the simple pattern I encourage you to create some of your own. The only activity more enjoyable while driving is picking your nose. And sometimes there just isn’t anything to pick.

October is always a month to be reckoned with, but this year there is statistical reasons behind this reckoning. The Tenth Day of the Tenth Month of the Tenth Year will occur in three days, which happens only every 100 years. The next day is Thanksgiving.

Thanks to the research of some bored statistician this piece of information was given to me by someone: This October has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays all in one month. It happens only once in 823 years. A month of weekends. A month of parties. Then it is Halloween.

I go to school with twenty-nine others, many of them immigrants. We went to a Job Fair today, and while dozens of them earnestly searched new jobs where they might not have to use their limited French abilities so that they could properly support their families. I wandered around, read up on a few things of interest and ducked out early. At one point in my life this might have been interesting to me, and at a point later on in my life this may interest me again. But right now, lacking education and lacking ambition, it was just a bunch of French speaking people in nice clothes in front of nice displays of nice jobs that I would very nicely deny if they were offered. A huge job interview in a language you don’t know. There can’t be much worse.

After I left I found myself sitting facing a fountain. A 50-something-year old man walked by, sifted through his pocket for a while and pulled his hand out, put it out flat and poked around to find the right coin. He threw one in the fountain, thought about it for a while, and threw in another one. I don’t know what he was wishing for, and never will. Maybe he was wishing for a job, he looked like he hadn’t worked in a while, I could have directed him to the Job Fair. Maybe he was wishing for world peace, be he seemed wiser than that. Maybe he was wishing for a future for his family. I hope to be this man someday. Old, yet hopeful, walking and wishing. I will be wishing until they stop coming true. And then I will wish twice as much.

October hasn’t given me any decent time for thought or any new ideas, but there must be months in the year where ideas stop and time for thought happens subtly and the month is just as decent as any other, if not more. So far it looks like October will be that. One month in eight hundred and twenty three.

Just like a sitcom character, I went to the laundromat today. First time. It is on the street a block away from everything one might need to live. Pizza Place, metro, mechanic, cafe, post office, drug dealer. Soap is free on Wednesdays.

I sat outside clipping my fingernails and reading poetry, peeking in the door to make sure the man with painty sweatpants wasn’t going through my delicates. The voice of a twenty year younger Oprah beat against my ear through a twenty year older television set, the shopkeeper’s time-pass. Oprah was even speaking English. A bald man in a suit came in closer to the end of my cycle. He was carrying a suitcase. He placed it on the table, leaned against a running washing machine and stroked his bald head. Hanging out at the laundromat. I couldn’t blame him, it was high times in there.

I wondered if a laundromat could get a government grant to replace their machines from my grandparent’s era, for new, low volume ones. Probably not. It is always peculiar to me that the money that the government takes from me, which you can be sure isn’t much, gets to be spent on things I disapprove of: destroying natural water habitats in Alberta, etc, etc, which are based on the opinion of a guy I haven’t met, or wouldn’t care to meet. Democracy is perfect. And then water is wasted overwashing underwear at the same time. And then water costs $2/litre, if you are too good to drink what the tap makes. I guess the government gives me money and doesn’t approve when I spend it on food and beer in Quebec, clothing for children under the age of 14, three of the least taxed things I know of. I don’t buy those often.

Growing up seems exciting until you realize that it just means dirty underwear and less friends. I leaned against the newly painted door frame, mowed on a slice of pizza and could definitely say growing up wasn’t as good as it is cracked up to be, but it still wasn’t bad. I licked clean two bowls of pumpkin pie filling yesterday and my toilet got repainted a golden pumpkin colour. Childhood meets ‘adulthood’.

Grade Three was the most important year of your life, you just don’t know it. You learned cursive, a staple in the world of computers. You learn how to solve mathematical problems that include different colours of pants and different prices of donuts. It is also somewhere around here that Mrs. Miller asked you what your favourite season and expected you to give her a reason why. That is how Grade Three differs from Grade Two. Reason.

Every year I exclaim my love for autumn. How cold it gets and how much better the warmth feels than usual. The harvest season. The inevitability of a long and horrendous winter, which I also love. One time my friend Dave told me not to knock the weather, because without it 80% of people wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Dave is wise. Somewhere along the line people lost their Grade Three reasoning and let the weather dictate their mood. This type of person is as logical as those ‘Mood Rings’ that girls wore in Grade Three that changed colour based on the mood of the wearer, but were actually just based on the temperature. As smart as a circular piece of metal and a semi-precious gem. Maybe not as smart. Complaining about the weather is like complaining about a terminal illness, it is not going to get any better and you sound like an ass.

This is my first full Fall I’ve spent as an independent. The first year I had to bake my own pumpkin pie. So I made three. And two apple pies. This means I’ve never seen Fall in another place. How things fall, or what leaves look like after two days of laying in the gutters, how some people have never eaten pumpkin pie, or rarely celebrate Thanksgiving. Culture shock. If there was such a thing. At least there is football and the beginning of the glorious hockey season. The beginning of purpose.

I went apple picking last week. Got 20lbs of apples for $11. It was heaven, stomach ten apples full, batting rotten apples out of the air with an old branch, crushing apples barehanded, singlehanded. Since I ate my first complete apple, core and stem, one hungry day working construction in the Fall in Regina, apples have been my favourite fruit.

I don’t know how I reasoned in Grade Three, but it was likely almost as wise as my reasoning of today, except now I don’t hate weather. I appreciate the season that is nothing more than the death one season and the beginning of another. The middle man. I appreciate the reasoning of a Grade Three kid, and how it is likely more solid than that of any adult.

I’m not thankful though. Not until next week.

Courtesy of the Blizzard Fan Blog.

But hope is not about a belief in progress. Hope is about protecting simple human decency and demanding justice. Hope is the belief, not necessarily grounded in the tangible, that those whose greed, stupidity and complacency have allowed us to be driven over a cliff shall one day be brought down. Hope is about existing in a perpetual state of rebellion, a constant antagonism to all centers of power.

-Chris Hedges

Essays are good because they are short. If I printed this out and sent it via mail, it might actually be read with attention. But I won’t. But this article, essay, editorial or whatever it is, is far more interesting than whatever else you do on the internet. Like read my blog. And since I can’t offer it here, I can at least link you to a page with something worth reading.

Finally an article with a reference to Facebook that is worth reading. It is a sad that I had to plug that webpage to get anyone mildly interested. Makes the article more true than ever.

It [mass entertainment] forms us into a lowing and compliant herd. We have been conditioned to believe—defying all the great moral and philosophical writers from Socrates to Orwell—that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained. If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods.

Please read this article.