Balls of Rice

Category: Books

  • Blogging will save the world..

    White Butte

    I was accidentally put on a ‘panel of experts’ discussing homelessness at a recent documentary release. Politicians mingled with professors and service providers in an eatery that neighbours the dry men’s shelter. Concerned citizens arrived early to bounce pleasantries off one another, nibbling on fine sausage and kalamata olives. I showed up late, downed a whiskey to calm the nerves, and shook with anxious rage throughout the entire documentary.

    The panel discussion concluded past its allotted time, and the moderator hurriedly spilt the plan, funding model, and hopes for the upcoming year in the industry of homelessness, with no one really understanding what it all meant. The crowd left restless and confused as to how to help, and the panelists left more disgruntled than before, and a month later, mid-October, there are still people sleeping in the alley in Regina.

    As a white male, when I speak, people generally listen. They listen for two or three sentences until they realize that I don’t know what I’m saying, then they rightfully daydream about food and sports and sex. On this year’s Blog Action Day, a day where organizers attempt to unite writers under one socially-driven topic (a day that I use the prompt to get off my ass and write something off-topic), people were asked to consider the title Raise Your Voice. Writers, artists, and journalists have the responsibility to tell the stories of those who are unable to do so. But an important part of this is to give people the platform to tell their own stories. Those whose voices need to be heard—the marginalized, the people of colour, the refugees, the LGBTQ2, the Indigenous, the working class—are denounced because a wealth-driven patriarchal society determines whose voices have worth. For completely unjust reasons, I have a voice. Instead of only ever using my voice to amplify the voices of others, I attempt to use my voice and my actions to create a place where others can be heard without need for amplification. When you create a place where people have inherent value, their voices will inevitably be heard.

    To Raise Your Voice in the digital era by blogging, sharing, liking, or ranting is as effective as leaving scraps of paper with motivational slogans blowing in the gutters. Divisive and irritating, the internet only further entrenches beliefs and perpetuates ignorance. While speaking on the panel I kept repeating this idea that we can pressure and lobby government until our heads explode, but that this is only one, arguably ineffective, means to creating change. That the only way homelessness and class-divide will end is through a system-wide change, altering how we treat and relate to one another, and changing the wealth and social inequalities that oppress minorities. I left the event feeling empty and sick, for I sounded like a politician—pushing for an idea while offering no tangible examples of how it might work and while participating in no organizing that may lead realization of the idea.

    Appealing to the judicial, legislative, or executive branches of government in the hope of reform is as realistic as accepting the offer made by the March Hare during the Mad Tea-Party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:
    “Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
    Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.
    “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.
    “There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

    -Hedges, Wages of Rebellion, The Post-Constitutional Era, p 61

    On Thanksgiving Monday I biked to the advanced polls to participate in the experiment of democracy. My hands numb in the wind, I waffled left and right each time I saw an election sign posted in a front lawn, truly not knowing who’d get my vote upon arrival. I’d rather waffle left. I voted in a way that reflects my values. I voted in a way that is considered a throwaway. This is because I do not believe in the ability for real reform under the current economic system in which the major parties function, but I simultaneously participate in this economic system and rarely make an effort in being a part of breaking it down. When I raise my voice but drink my sorrows, doing nothing to participate in making true change, I am complicit.

    Later on Thanksgiving Monday I lost a game of cribbage to a person who I’ve only known for a few months. It definitely wasn’t the first game of crib I’ve ever lost, and sure, I gave away several pairs of sevens to the crib. After he pegged out and we congratulated ourselves on a game well-played, I laid on the floor and watched him paint while we listened to new Northcote and RahRah. My new friend has been housed for three months, homeless for years before that, and still requires regular and extensive assistance to live a healthy life. I am extremely privileged to be employed by one of the few places that actively works to repair the damages caused by the wealth inequality synonymous to the capitalism, however, continually cleaning up the messes left by a system that purposefully destroys the lives of a particular cultural group is ineffective. Working within the current system is necessary to a point, but a total dismantling of this system is required to ensure real, lasting equality.

    There is no morality in words. Morals are behavioural, based in how a person acts. A person can raise their voice to the heavens while sitting in their recliner. If you raise your voice without breaking a few walls, no one outside your already-converted group will hear you. Breaking walls means breaking laws, breaking norms, supporting (verbally and physically) oppressed minorities, and thinking outside of the “cult of the self”* in which we find ourselves.

    And I can say with certainty that I’ve never broke down a wall in my life…

    *Hedges

  • Books of the Year: 2014

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

  • The Adirondack Haystack Still Floats

    THE ADIRONDACK HAYSTACK STILL FLOATS

    Click on cover art for more information.

  • Books of the Year: 2013

    When you finish reading a book and you know that it was one of the three greatest you’ve ever read, it is what I would, in my perpetually-single state, relate to the meeting of a soulmate. Likely better, because though the belief in soulmates is silly bit of fatalism, that book will remain in the library for at least a decade until libraries are shut down after the potash, oil, and uranium resources dry up and revenues can no longer sustain the economy and public services begin to close like Blockbuster movie rental stores after the plague of the internet. That’s love. Very rarely will a book make me cry, not out of despair or an emotional plot, but out of basic human discovery presented perfectly through dialogue. For me, this was East of Eden.

    I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is a great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
    At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
    Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
    And now the forces marshalled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
    And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

    -Steinbeck, East of Eden, Chapter 13.1, p130-1

    My discovery of Leanne Simpson has also begun a personal interest in Indigenous thought and storytelling. Her aptitude in both fiction and non-fiction is stimulating, and a genre-blurring project that presents the tone of a piece of work unlike I have ever experienced, specifically through the songs of Islands of Decolonial Love, is a remarkably refreshing experience.

    “Reconciliation” is being promoted by the federal government as a “new” way for Canada to relate to Indigenous Peoples, and it isn’t just government officials that are promoting the idea. I have heard heads of universities talk about reconciliation; I have read journalists’ op-ed pieces; I have heard mayors talk about reconciliation as they open local Aboriginal events. But the idea of reconciliation is not new. Indigenous Peoples attempted to reconcile our differences in countless treaty negotiations, which categorically have not produced the kinds of relationships Indigenous Peoples intended. I wonder how we can reconcile when the majority of Canadians do not understand the historic or contemporary injustice of dispossession and occupation, particularly when the state has expressed its unwillingness to make any adjustments to the unjust relationship. Haudenosanee scholar and orator Dan Longboat recently reminded me of this, when he said that treaties are not just for governments, they are for the citizens as well. The people also have to act in a manner that is consistent with the relationships set out in the treaty negotiation process. If Canadians do not fully understand and embody the idea of reconciliation, is this a step forward? It reminds me of an abusive relationship where one person is being abused physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally. She wants out of the relationship, but instead of supporting her, we are all gathered around the abuser, because he wants to “reconcile.” But he doesn’t want to take responsibility. He doesn’t want to change. In fact, all through the process he continues to physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally abuse his partner. He just wants to say sorry so he can feel less guilty about his behaviour. He just wants to adjust the ways he is abusing; he doesn’t want to stop the abuse. Collectively, what are the implications of participating in reconciliation processes when there is an overwhelming body of evidence that in action, the Canadian state does not want to take responsibility and stop the abuse? What are the consequences for Indigenous Peoples of participating in a process that attempts to absolve Canada of past wrong doings, while they continue to engage with our nations in a less than honourable way?

    –Leanne Simpson, Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back, chapter 1, p21

  • Thou Mayest

    I sat at the Housing Strategy Public Forum at noon on Thursday. I listened as four city representatives justified a plan to fix a city, scrambling to answer questions from dozens of disgruntled citizens about housing in various forms. Providing housing for the masses is a priority, they said. Just not as serious of a priority as making a lot of money, they neglected to say. The citizens’ sole chance to have their say in a hotel lobby with free cookies and Fruitopia. Democracy works.

    I wondered whether it counts as having a voice if you are speaking to those do not have ears.

    So mom said this, “I think sometimes for your own sanity you have to believe that people will eventually do the right thing.” I genuinely do not believe that people will eventually do the right thing. I only have so many years of life to impatiently wait. What I do believe, for my own sanity, is that people can do the right thing. They have the choice and this puts me at greater ease. Because I expect nothing. Because I am not waiting with fried nerves for the sun to explode. I’ve got to believe at least this or I will give up, and giving up is a cardinal sin in anyone that matters. I’ve got to believe this or I might kill myself. I’ve got to believe it whether it is true or not. My cynicisms no longer reach as far as believing in an inherently evil humanity. I have passed that point in my perpetual anger. If that were the case, we would have starved long ago.

    “Maybe it’s true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.”

    -Steinbeck, East of Eden, Chapter 51.2, p568

    Though we may not be an evil people, we are still not inherently good. We are inherently selfish, and this to me seems concrete. As animals we instincually make decisions to ensure our personal survival. This is not news. Humans can, however, break this conditioning. There is still a choice.

    In East of Eden, Lee studies the story of Cain and Abel.

    Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”

    “Yes, I see. I do see. But you do not believe this is divine law. Why do you feel its importance?”

    “Ah!” said Lee. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I even anticipated your questions and I am well prepared. Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in the sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interefere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” Lee’s voice was a chant of triumph…

    “…This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that gilttering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed because ‘Thou mayest.’”

    -Steinbeck, East of Eden, Chapter 24.2, p301-302

    I still question the effectiveness of a political process that is so inane as a public relations exercise with five different types of cookies. I question the point in trying to penetrate the infinitely-layered inclined mountain of bureaucracy. But possibilities arise. Thou mayest triumph over sin. Thou mayest triumph over ignorance. Thou mayest triumph over selfishness. This, Steinbeck says, is what makes man great. He still has “the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.”

    It doesn’t matter what others do—I must remind myself of this. Letting the poor decisions and monumental mistakes of others disrupt your progress along the line of choice is foolish. Thou mayest. Or thou mayest not, and it doesn’t fucking matter to me what the innumerable morons of the world decide to do. As long as I remember that both they and I had a choice.

    Because ‘Thou mayest.’

  • Four Years of Life

    I have now been alive for four years. I have learned nothing.

    What I have feared when I began writing is potentially coming true. I don’t believe that there is a limit to discovery or knowledge, however there might be a limit to the ways a man can express new knowledge in a certain medium. And although there is no limit to discovery or knowledge, a man can indeed stop learning. I am running out of things to say, because I am only so good at recycling. There are only a few ways to write the same sentence.

    There are perhaps two ways to stop gaining knowledge. Either you eventually come to know absolutely everything, or you come to a point where you give up. Each year, once or twice or sometimes thrice, I come to a point where I contemplate giving up. To stop treading, stop kicking, exhale completely, and sink to the bottom. To retain nothing new because it seems that there is no purpose to do so. Birthdays, and Near-Death Birthdays are sometimes the cause. Just another year since I have seemingly learned nothing, and another year where I contemplate giving up, if I haven’t done so already without even knowing it yet.

    I still climb rockfaces I know might kill me, which suggests I haven’t given up, because it takes a grand effort to even choose a rockface to climb. I still climb rockfaces, which seems to suggest that I haven’t learnt a damn thing since April 17, 2009. By these very facts, I must hold all the knowledge that exists in the world.

    Or my hypothesis is wrong.

    I guess I’ll keep writing.

    “It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.”

    -Steinbeck, East of Eden, Chapter 30.2, p373