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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.

Weren’t the biographies of all great men filled with this same kind of youthful groping, this same kind of rebellion against their fathers and their father’s ways? He could even be grateful in a sense that he had no particular area of interest: in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

-Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

A friend recommended the book ‘Revolutionary Road’ by Richard Yates not long ago. I read it in a week. Books rarely are swallowed this easily for me, even my favourites. I wouldn’t consider this a favourite by any means, but I would give it the recommendation to any one of my dearest friends, similar values or not. Any book touted by K. Vonnegut or J. Close is something to be taken seriously.

I don’t even know how to write an article in the standard form anymore. So much of my writing has been in such an informal setting since high school that when I try to write a real formatted essay to prove to myself that I am just as good as those nerdbags at Concordia I just can’t do it. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe the world needs less formal, traditional, forced literature and more random bullshit like this. The idea still gets across, I hope, just in a less deliberate and organized way.

I read a chapter of one of the Twilight books once. I heard that it was truly bad writing, like I heard they were truly bad movies. I watched the first one, alone, in my parents house one night. Could’ve been worse. Then I read the first chapter of the second book, and that was worse. Worst. It is nice to know that although people can make lifetimes of money writing about vampire sex, there are people who can write books about real relationships in an honest way, and make it relevant for fifty years. That’s this book.

Reading has been my best friend for the past two or three weeks. I would recommend to you, that even if you have friends, school obligations, addictions to hockey, that you should read something of your choice for your own pleasure and self-expansion. Read this book. Quit your job. Move to France.

‘Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody every said ‘hopeless,’ though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can.’

-‘John Givings’, Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

-Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

It is the last week of September. The older you get, the faster the days. Sure, I’m not old, but lately days pass faster than coffee through a senior. I have a healthy 23 hours until I start school on Monday. Seven and a half hours of that will be spent asleep. Four hours of it will be spent at the Bell Centre. Half of an hour of it will be spent eating bagels. I can make lists like this all day to put a gap between me and the things I don’t really want to do. When you’ve got a job or go to school or do anything in this world, you have little choice but to rely on time and its strict structure. Even if you don’t let time bother you, you will still abide by its rules so that you make the hockey game in time, or don’t get fired from your job, or know how long you sat on the toilet for. I’ve got a calendar on my computer that is full of dates, organized by colours, and updated until time infinity. I often try to imagine my calendar without the grid, just numbers and events and dates, but not in list form, in floating form. It is nice. Imagine the week without these formulas for time and it could be liberating. Wake when the sun rises. Eat when the body yearns. Learn when the mind asks.

But there is always something comforting about powering through a week so that a Thursday feels almost rewarding, and it almost feels good to ‘measure and apportion’ the days and months and years, even of a fictional manmade system such as time. A calendar was invented to give fools the belief that there is something big that they control, can manipulate, and gives an endless source of comfort, however imaginary it may be.

My birthday will highlight my 9th month of being here. I can look back on the 270 odd days and remember a lot of things, but the grids and the lists and the schedules aren’t what I’ll remember, and they aren’t even what made it happen.

I don’t remember the exact occasion, but one time last year I was in Saskatoon, at my brother’s house, staying over after a show or something. What I do remember is that he left for work in the morning, and I was leaving for Regina a few hours later. My mind was preoccupied with the task of trying to scrounge some food out of his bacon and beer filled fridge, of trying to get out of that damned city as fast as possible, and trying not to forget anything so that I didn’t have to return any time soon. I did my business and headed out the door. Several hours later my brother sent me an email, cursing me out for not knowing how to flush a toilet…

Every other day I am struck with the overwhelming fear that I forgot to flush the toilet before I left the house. It hits me like it hit Mrs. McCallister on the plane when she realizes that she left her son, Kevin, Home Alone! on Christmas, and my face probably looks like that of Macaulay Culkin on the cover of the VHS when the realization hits me. I close my eyes tight and go through the motions of my morning, trying to remember if I heard a flushing of running water while picking my nose in front of the mirror and washing my hands. Only once has this been confirmed to be true, and it was at my brothers house. He didn’t discover it until he was done work. Killer prank.

A few years ago my sister told me that when you flush the toilet, poo particles shoot up from the bowl eight feet in the air, and that you are supposed to store your toothbrush in a drawer, or else you are brushing your teeth with a utensil that might as well have been used to check for prostate cancer. Since this day I have put the lid down when I flush, because if I do that, I don’t have to hide my toothbrush. I use that thing rarely enough, that if it is cached away in a drawer I would use it even less, if that is possible. I mean, if someone would have taught me how to use the toilet properly in the first place when I was four years-old, I probably would have done already. It is much easier to forget to flush when you put the lid down and can no longer see the bomb that you need to send shooting as far away from human exposure as possible. I would also say that I only push the metal flapper one out of every three times I urinate, depending on its exact hue, amount, how often I have been going, or if it is my place or not. Unless your pee is toxic and glowing green like the ooze from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Secret of the Ooze, it is irresponsible to use five gallons of water to rid a liquid you can use to cure Athlete’s Foot. There are also many toilets in the world that flush themselves based on a small motion sensor behind the seat. These don’t help anything, especially when the flush prematurely and become like an impromptu bidet.

Because of these habits, as well as my slight obsessive compulsive disorder, I regularly go through the days worried that I forgot to put a finger on the plunger and it gives me a sick feeling in my stomach until I obsess over something else, or until I come home and don’t get persecuted by one of the three girls I live with. It has yet to happen, but I fear the day is not far off.

I considered using a picture of a toilet between each paragraph here, because I do have a lot, and maybe the sight of so many of them would maybe burn the habit into my mind. I have learned to close the fridge door from months passed, and I am sure I can train myself to flush the toilet.

Potty training at 21 years. It is a fine age we live in.
Two bathroom posts in a week.  It is fine literature we read.

‘There have been reports of stray dogs, stagnant water, workers urinating in public, and human feces being found at the unfinished village where the athletes will live.’

…Indian officials defended their record.

“Please try to understand … They want certain standards of hygiene, they want certain standards of cleanliness, which may differ from my standard,” said Lalit Bhanot, spokesman of the Delhi organizing committee.

-courtesy of Yahoo! News

I love this quote.

I have several problems with the world, as you may well have noticed. I don’t know what to do with them, as you also may well have noticed. The celebration of the past, current and future oppression of the British Empire in a sporting event, the Commonwealth Games, is one of those things. Had they known what the Empire has been reduced to today, I believe those who were oppressed by the Empire in the past would be saying something like this: ‘If I would have known that their plot to take over the world was actually aimed at a future sporting event of exclusivity, then I would’ve totally seen what they were trying to achieve, rolled over and let them use my culture as a stepping stone to greatness.’

My standard of hygiene differs greatly from that of my mother, but it doesn’t mean we couldn’t live together for twenty years. If shit on the ground is a health concern enough to make them shut down an international competition, then they better close down two thirds of the earth, as well as all the homes of those with children under two years old. Poop flies everywhere.

And as usual, as the country falls apart, as trains crash and people drown mere miles away, we worry about if snobby amateur athletes are seeing locals pee in the alleyway, or seeing a dog run across the street. I truly hope that all the athletes can triumph over their impossible living situations for the five days that they compete in the most important of world events. If our Canadian athletes can survive stagnant water and unpainted dorms, then they will come home champions even if there is nothing hanging around their necks. True world champions.
God save the Queen.

Dreamer, circa 2007

Dream come true, circa yesterday. Still a nerd.

Apple loaf. Housewife material.

Apple Crisp. At least not having any friends means that I can bake every other night. Food is better than friends usually anyway.