Category: Uncategorized

Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, Chandigarh, India

My parents used to tell me that tuna was brain food. Recently that has led to repetitive jokes about how dolphins are nearly as smart as humans, and about how they masturbate, and about how eating cans of tuna is brain food because we are really eating the flesh of thousands of genius dolphins. For some reason eating dolphin makes people upset more than an ugly tuna fish. I haven’t eaten a can of tuna since I heard that tuna are endangered from overfishing and that dolphins masturbate.

I have never lived anywhere near the natural home of a dolphin or a tuna. To me, the natural home of tuna is in a casserole next to macaroni noodles and green peas, carefully prepared by my mother, or a rippin’ sandwich prepared by my father. Dolphin, I mean tuna, must be one meat product that is most commonly eaten out of cans, at least where I come from. Spam is popular in some trailer parks, but is frowned upon by most non-trailer dwelling humans. It will likely be the can of choice when America bombs North Korea bombs Iran bombs Libya bombs The Soviets.

I also used to eat Cowboy Food as a child: macaroni and ground beef casserole, what real cowboys eat. And Hockey Player food: cornbread and syrup, how Gretzky got to be The Great One. Along with my brain food: mayonnaise and canned tuna, Einstein. I have become a master of all things Cowboy, Hockey Player and Brains because of my early youth as a professional eater.

Among these family delicacies were Leftover Restaurant nights, where our parents would trick us into having fun eating those goddamned leftovers. My sister and I would write up a menu so that our parents and older brothers could chose from one of the four things we already ate that week and so that we would think leftovers weren’t the worst thing on earth. The restaurant quickly ran out of each dish.

Stupidity is inevitable.

These days, spanning from semi-adulthood to the stages of late adulthood, instead of allowing our parents to trick us into eating food we didn’t like with names and games, we find new ways to allow stupidity to be a major part of our lives. Stupidity is inevitable, and it is our duty to find ways to avoid it. That is the main struggle of decent human beings, although many are even far from finding out that they are actually stupid. I’d be glad to tell them.

I try to find out how stupid I am daily. Delving into books, browsing photos, jamming to music, all show me how stupid I am, but all encourage me to evolve my high levels of stupidity into what I hope to reach someday: low levels of intelligence. Realizing stupidity means progress when you don’t accept it as permanent and constant.

As our parents used our stupidity to get us to eat healthily, today our ignorance is used against us and it is our responsibility to identify it, change it, and improve upon it. Our stupidity is inevitable, but what is not inevitable is our want to change it.

A man tries to stop the Vietnam War and then he is secretly tracked by the government for subversive actions. The documents of talks over forty years old are just now being released to the public and entail supposed dirty little secrets about The Greatest Canadian, Tommy Clement Douglas. He was a communist, or something. Thank you RCMP for the special report. When politicians draft their citizens to fight in an unjust war it is called progress and patriotism. When politicians talk with movie stars about ending a war it is potential treason and undoubted communism. I like those odds.

The pseudo-documentary ‘Punishment Park’ deals with topics on the same level of Tommy Douglas trying to stop a war, except that the characters in this movie are all shot dead in the California desert. The American government arrested a group of young revolutionaries and took them to the Californian desert with the choice of a minimum five to ten years in a federal penitentiary or three days in Punishment Park.

Through cell phones and rental cars the Canadian government probably knows that while in Ottawa one month ago my brother and I seriously considered pissing on the Parliament building. They undoubtedly regularly read my subversive blog, as I rally the revolutionaries to awake from corporate brainwash and start pissing on more government buildings. They surely know where I live, even though my government assistance cheques are delivered to another address, IP addresses are all they need to track a poor extremist like myself. I anticipate the day when, in ‘1984’ style, someone shows up at my front door and puts a gun to my head while I stand in my violet underwear with my hands on my head asking what I was being charged for and/or what took them so long, fully knowing the answer to both questions. Now if only my subversion was real, active or effective and consisted of more than avoiding jobs, not believing in the democratic system, not eating meat, and writing a mediocre cynical blog that people read for an evening chuckle. I need to start blowing things up.

A friend from Yemen explained to me today the situation in the Middle East. In many countries, he explained, single word of slander against your government and an ‘undercover’ that overhears it will have you killed. We rightfully see this practice as wrong but somehow we give our government credit for being equally but more politically correct or businesslike in their corruption. I wouldn’t and couldn’t compare my life to that of a young protestor in Egypt or Libya or Tunisia, but we cannot deny that we also have had the same leader with a different name for decades and that this leader has been murdering, stealing and spending in more countries than just their own.

Tommy Douglas. The people of Punishment Park. The revolutionaries in the Middle East. They are related by their disapproval of their country’s current situation and their will to change it. Tommy Douglas died of cancer. The people on Punishment Park died by gunshot and desert heat. The revolutionaries are dying in their will for change. The powers that be are constantly working towards a more docile, more obedient populace. We should be the opposite.

Act subversively. It is the necessary means to a more hopeful end.

Watch Punishment Park here.

In an effort to document the hours I spend on my computer I began to compile a folder of screenshots. The brilliant idea stemmed from Skype sessions I wanted to remember, but since passing the one year mark and reaching the stage of ‘too gone to remember’, my screen shots have made the transition from community Skype conversations into a sole man’s streaming sports events and television shows. On a Mac the default screen shot buttons are Command-Shift-3, I believe, but I changed the default to Command-F5 for quick screenshot access. Because you never know.

It is nice to be able to go back and see what moments I enjoyed by myself in front of my own personal screen. It is nice to have a documented means of realizing an addiction. Like a wallet full of cigarette receipts or a backyard shed full of faded empties. It is in this realization that I created for myself twenty four hours without screens. How much more productive and creative a mind can be when sounds are not made, light does not emit and books are properly read.

But I still press on.

If you can name all the movies, games or people I’ll buy you a beer, pack of smokes, new TV, Scrabble board or whatever you are addicted to. I hope your addiction isn’t million dollar hookers.

When you leave the motherland and become an immigrant in a country with a different culture than your own, you celebrate the holidays of the new culture so that the locals don’t persecute you for your antiquated beliefs. Assimilation is beautiful. If you’re lucky you may also have the opportunity and responsibility to celebrate the holidays of your homeland, to preserve culture, and to avoid forgetting where you came from, and more importantly to capitalize on compensated holiday hours.

Thus I have called in a personal/religious/sick/cultural afternoon to ensure that I don’t forget my wonderful Saskatchewan heritage. I will spend my Family Day sitting on the floor eating trailmix missing my family but glad all the same that I don’t live in Saskatoon. I could use the old rhetoric that my friends are my family, but as I don’t have any of those here either I will instead recall stories of my family life by staring at each each almond and cashew and thinking about how trailmix has been a part of my life since I was fully toothed.

I guess Family Day isn’t government celebrated in Quebec because it is not named after St. Family and if it was no one would care anyway because in this pagan province no one is Catholic anymore. Where did they lose their way? With the formation of the new god, les Canadiens de Montreal, I guess.

Family could be the newest religion. Nearly new parents worship their pregnant stomach with soft-porn black and white photos of stretched skin. New parents praise their children by showering them with hundreds of gifts on the holy days of birth anniversaries and Christmases and by sacrificing animals to the health and growth of the children. We are not far from making bronze busts of our first born children and when this happens Family Day will be like all the rest of the holy days; owned by a large conglomerate, signifying a week long sale on cheap goods created by the family of the aforementioned new immigrants who celebrate bizarre holidays just to get an extra two days off a year.

Until then, we remember how much we love those we were born with and how much we miss beating them at crokinole. Save me a spot at the Family Day supper feast,  I’ll be there in spirit.

Attached are the two most recent family photos I have.
Love you all.

The sun exploded yesterday and I only felt it today. By tomorrow we could all be dead. Finally a scientific reason behind 7°C temperatures in the February ‘winter paradise’ of Quebec. Finally a scientific reason behind me fearing everything that moves and thinking about home and migrating. My animal instinct is dominating all parts of my mind because my instincts knew the world was ending before the papers did. Before NASA did.

I know I talk about the apocalypse almost as much as a schizophrenic homeless man or an empowered southern super evangelist who sells prayer handkerchiefs for a guaranteed entrance to heaven, but when the BBC reports that the sun explodes, I listen especially close.

Now all the religious zealots are right; that the hurricanes and the world currency and world language and gay marriage and volcanoes and stock market crashes and crop failures and floods are proof of the apocalypse. Now we cannot deny the second coming. Just have to dive back into the religious texts to see if it prophesied the sun exploding and raining fire or if it was lightning bolts or diseased house cats.

We had begun to wonder what had happened to the animals, why they are coming to the cities with the millions of poor people. Why the birds sang in December and the deer ate from your apple trees. It is not because there is less room in the mountains and fields, because all the mountaineers and farmers are moving to the city to find new riches, so there should be more room for the wild animals. But it is that the sun told them, years before, what would happen in February 2011.

But alas, there is a difference between exploding and erupting. It turns out that tomorrow won’t see the end of our species, although that would likely have been for the best. We now find out that it is just a day of unseasonal warmth and that the apocalypse isn’t tomorrow but has been a constant gradual process since humans existed on earth. That at least should help us sleep at night.

It must be evident by now how badly I want to see the end of the world, just to prove to myself that we are essentially here to question and wonder and little else. How badly I want to see what might happen, if it will be raining fire or lightning or diseased house cats that do us in. How badly I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong, but how either way it wouldn’t matter.

The apocalypse isn’t nigh. The apocalypse isn’t inevitable. The apocalypse is as fake as the rest of it.

I can’t wait to sunbathe.

This book was printed when typewriters were the technology that reflected speed and efficiency. The words are embossed into the paper like braille. The words are three dimensional.

Words on screens don’t even physically exist. Words hand written on pages or napkins or hands are two dimensional visions of what we want to produce. Words printed on pages are formatted, edited, presentable ends. Words typed with typewriters are three dimensional, history holding, weighted ideas worthy of taking time to press each letter with purpose.

When written words become so weighty that they imprint on card paper, that they can be seen through the other side, is when the words are worth reading.
I hope to get there someday.

I was on French TV yesterday. As part of my Francisation class we attended the filming of health/cooking show about a month ago. Kampaï!: À Votre Santé complete with Quebecoise superstar (Mitsou), taste-testing, fake laughing clips (see photo above), and my unshaven face directly on Radio Canada, also known as French CBC.

It was interesting to see firsthand how shallow and fake television programs are, especially of the talk show variety. The first thing we did when we arrived in the television studio was practice laughing and smiling and to record these clips for later use, and the rest of the time we just followed the directions of the rodeo clown. We were his docile heifers for sale, while blonde Mitsou jumped and danced around the ring like a bull with its balls in a vice.

Upon arrival the multicultural students of Centre St-Paul and I huddled next to the CBC/RDI gift shop expressing excitement in broken French. I wandered through the building as much as security allowed me to and eventually started to notice the large quantities of beautiful people that were filing in the building; well dressed, hair done, most likely showered as if they were going out on the town, waiting with the weather torn, transit weary language students. I instantly decided that the beautiful, television-friendly girls would be placed in the front rows of the audience during the filming. That was indeed the case, but much to my surprise, wearing a dirty sweater, salt saturated sneakers, glasses, gnarly beard and pants I haven’t washed since I bought them, got me in the front row, but on the side less filmed. Obviously.

If you are interested bad health/cooking shows, or need some ideas for what to cook for Valentines Day (also known as the world’s stupidest goddamn holiday), or if you understand French, or just want to kill forty minutes this weekend, click the photo above to watch the entire episode. Or if you want to see me in all my acting glory, laughing because of the awkwardness of it all, now you’ve got the chance.

I’d say that you won’t regret it, but then I’d be lying.