it

it's not that i want to be completely abstract, but sometimes the pressures of these complex realities can't be explained except in metaphor. explain that in a metaphor, huh?

10:36 AM on 09/03/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

Nod and smile.

Is it truely bad form to herald the collapse of modern society? It's not like I'm going to go purchase a sandwich board, write doom-sayer phrases in bold letters, and parade myself up and down Jasper Avenue. At least, not quite yet. But, more often it seems, there is an apparent antagonism towards the warnings of our imminent changes.

According to sources, the American debt is a little less than eight trillion dollars. Perspective? That works out to about twenty-six thousand dollars per person in the US. That's a lot of money. Work that out across time, and that big ol'debt number is generously increasing by roughly, say, the equivalent of my mortgage -- every two seconds. Sure, the Canadian economy is trudging along fine right now. But that's like saying this: you're out for a Sunday bike ride and feeling just fine -- until the elephant to which you're inexplicably chained lurches, sways, has a heart attack and tumbles over a steep cliff on the edge of the road.

Yoink!

But then it's bad form to mention the elephant, isn't it? Shhh! Everything is going along fine. [Evil eye! Evil eye!] My endurance is holding up very well, thank you. I just had an energy bar, checked my pulse, and swallowed a splash of fresh, clean Canadian spring-water. My legs aren't even tired. [Pedal. Pedal.] What do you mean I'm actually in serious danger. Nod and smile.

The average person has so much credit card debt that if the economy lurched too far to either side, let's say tomorrow, they would go flailing off into the vacant spaces of eternal banruptcy, their wallets collapsing from the vacuum of poverty. Poor people. I don't have that kind of debt, but so what. Should I think that this makes me safe?

There was a thread on Fark this morning. Dismal. Sad. Disappointing, just how thoroughly the discussion deteriorated into an abject denial and utterly baseless defence of the strength of the American economy. For all our short tempers, many of the canucks on the site were simply trying to play the resolute and sober friend: "I really don't think you should be driving, George. You're gonna crash that thing and hurt somebody."

A gurgle of international curses is quickly followed by a "don't tell us what to do." Nod and smile.

This discussion quickly falls into an us-versus-them arguement: we're apparently simple folk, living up north in the ice and cold, unable to think for ourselves because apparently the strength of our reasoning capability is directly proportional to the size of our hive-like mentality. We're small, and stupid, they claim. Nod and smile. What do we know about big things like economies and social security, debt, and wars on terror? Step aside, the grown-ups are talking now. I could refute this, but step back leaving the fodder-droppers to their own.

It's like a religion. "We're right because we say we're right, and denying our inherent rightness is exactly more proof that we're just as right as we thought. Right? Why am I asking, I know I'm right!"

Shrug. Yoink! I shouldn't care, but I don't want to go tumbling off a cliff chained to a lumbaring elephant just yet.

We, it seems, are in denial. Our corpocracy dictates the need for us to spend our money. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. All that stuff he's telling you about saving those pennies: it's wrong. It's blasphemy. Fiscally responsible individuals, why, they're just supporting terrorism. They want to destroy us all: hoarding and saving. Money is a fuel, after all, and fuel only works when we throw it into the fire. Nod and smile.

We are slaves to the drug: affluenza, is the modern epidemic. Avian flu, AIDS, Anthrax, Ebola? Bah! These are ruses. They are red herrings meant to throw you from the real killer: big gas guzzling cars, fatty hamburgers, immaculate homes large enough to house an entire enclave of family members, unwatchably huge collections of DVDs. You know: stuff.

Ah, but I'm just another crank, right? I'm just here spouting off my mouth about the fall of society: extreme scenarios never really happen, after all.

Everything will work out in the end. Nod and smile. Nod and smile. Unless... well...

03:52 PM on 04/03/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

coming together / falling apart

Don't you hate it when your website falls into utter and total chaos? Okay, so it's not completely relatable angst, but two weeks of it is very much a pain in the ass.

Things are coming together. If you've managed to read this, drop me a note and let me know that you care! Ha!

03:51 PM on 03/02/2005 | comments (2) | trackbacks (0)

spamdam

I've been cleaning the comment spam from my blogs. The vulnerable lost.in.vancouver was apparently wider open than I thought, and over the course of Friday and Saturday recieved nearly 300 rogue messages advertising for hair loss treatments and debt relief. I ultimately wrote a little script that lets me seal the doors (previously just hidden) with an iron-lock. In fact the door is pretty much welded shut, and I'm going to start locking comments off after they are older than about a week. It's just too much work to bother with the whole thing. In other words, get your say while you can.

In wandering the ancient pages of old blogs, I rediscovered a few infamous memes I was working on. One of my old favs: words I see from where I sit...

More Coffee Flavour
Music by Alan Menken
ACTION CANCEL
Trinitron
Principles of Biochemistry
Sonic Mega Collection Plus
Risk
Before initial use, recharge handset for about 8 hours.
7 1/4-in . CIRCULAR SAW
Omnivision
Montigo

11:50 AM on 16/01/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

comment spam

I don't know how picky the spam scrubber on this blog can be, but sometimes it will reject those comments of yours out of sheer spite. At random. Who knows...

Lenore tried to write this:

Hehehe.... Heck, it's almost as good to have a surprise as I make my daily check of your blog.... April 5th, sounds like a good date to me!! It's only 1 day off Liz's birthday!! :)

And they originally told us July 22nd, and we got July 15th, so it could be even earlier! Then again, you're doing construction in the winter which has a little more weather influence...:)

...after reading this morning's entry. As astute readers will notice, and others will endure, occasionally some malicious bloghacker will fill blog comments with rude, crude, and unwelcome garbage. It's a ratings-thing, you see. If their link shows up in my comments then Google thinks I'm linking to their page. I'm not, but Google for all it's wonders and inventiveness can't really tell the difference yet. It looks at any link as good publicity and ranks it a little bit higher in their search results. Oddly enough, the spammers don't realize that Movabletype cleans all the HTML from their comments, and their links are spam-buffered-redirects of some sort. They're shooting blanks, in other words, but still making a lot of noise, and causing a lot of hassle for my readers (case-in-point Lenore) who has to struggle through the filters to post a legitimate comment.

Sigh. The scope of the problem is represented clearly in the system logs of this blog: my scrubber rejected no less than one hundred and twenty-two comments because of questionable content -- things like "casino", "poker", "online", "russia" are some of the top blocked URLwords -- and that's JUST in the last seven days. To put that in perspective: I've only written eighty five entries in this blog, and my readers have only posted thirty-two legitimate comments. And that is over the span of seven months!

Last week Slashdot had a poll about something like this... And sorry, folks, it's just going to get worse.

01:41 PM on 09/12/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

six lobsters

I'm really supposed to be working right now, but events being as they are one often needs to reflect simply -- a bit -- before one can settle back into the routine of life...

It works that way, sometimes. Memories are a funny thing.

When I was twelve years old (and as I can also say of literally half my life) I was involved with Scouts. Being twelve I don't think I fully appreciated the innocence of it all. I don't think I truly soaked myself in the experience and let it wash over me. It was just something I did. As such, the details are often cloudy, misrepresented, or fragmented in such a way that I might not even be shaping them properly here and now. It was Tuesday nights, maybe, whenever. It was the occasional weekend camping trip. It was wearing my dorky uniform in public, selling chocolate almonds or collecting bottles door to door to raise money. It was a group of guys who I knew one night a week, and who went to different schools than I did. It was a step out of my routine of the day, whatever that is for a twelve-year-old.

And that year -- that year of being twelve years old -- was especially taxing. It was a CJ year. A Canadian Jamboree, where ten-thousand pubescent boys and girls converged on a field to camp and be dorky scouts in unanimous cohesion. I was twelve. I was getting on a airplane. And in a cloudy sort of memory, so much that I can't say I even recall the flight, I was in Prince Edward Island in a dirt brown canvas jacket carrying an oversized blue backpack across an unfamiliar coastal field. I remember arriving late at night, in the darkness, trudging to our plot of assigned land for a week of camping. I recall setting up tents in the way that twelve year old boys do, arguing, more goofing around than acting responsible. I seem to recollect that upon drawing the figurative short-straw I wound up sharing a tent with Paul, whom I don't know if I liked, or hated, or (edging away from a twelve-year-old's simple emotional states) pitied because everyone seemed to pick on him, steal his underwear and throw it into the trees, or try to tilt the port-a-potty while he was inside. I know I wasn't entirely impressed, but I don't know why. I remember throttling someone for stuffing dried grass down his pants. I remember wading into the water, in rocky sand on the beach, both of us up to our waists and collecting fresh crab for dinner. I have a vague memory of these things. Hiking, walking, chatting. Memories are a funny thing.

I also have this memory about lobsters. The troop had gone into Charlottetown for the day, to explore and buy tacky souvenirs. We went for lobster for dinner, and impressed as I was by the cuisine, convinced Paul (or perhaps it was the other way around) to buy our own to ship back to Alberta. We arranged the details with the gruff salesman in the store. I ordered five one-pounders, Paul one five-pounder, iced and delivered to the airport to be picked up in Edmonton a few days later. The moral of a much longer story is that twelve-year-olds should not try to ship expensive live food across the country. Many phone calls (by parents) later, refunds by airlines for mis-directed shipments, and some dead and rotten crustaceans I never did see for myself, it just so happened that neither my family (nor Paul's) ever did dine on fresh Atlantic lobster.

Or at least that's how I remember it. Memories are a funny thing.

We came back. Time passed. Paul and I hung out in grade seven, a little. Not too much. I was a follower. He was wild. I went academic. He shoplifted from 7-11. Needless to say, and not-regretably, we drifted.

He quit Scouts. Found new friends. Every once in a while I'd hear a story about some chunky thug who was beating people up for money. Or later I'd read a newspaper article about some distantly familiar person who'd been busted for an armed robbery or for hiding stolen goods. I speculated about how and why and where, and wondered how it related to past and present, drugs, alcohol, or organized crime, perhaps. He terrorized the little populous of my hometown, you might say. Or maybe that's all speculation and I don't know what I'm talking about. Who can say? Memories are a funny thing.

I escaped Red Deer. I went on. I moved on. I travelled. I learned. I got a job, and a life, and I did those things that one is apparently supposed to do. Things are ok.

Last week Red Deer escaped Paul. Accidentally, they say. A gunshot. An unthinkable sort of death. An unthinkable sort of end. The gap is too large to say anymore but once, a glimmer of time ago, he was a good guy. I'll give him that. Memories are a funny thing, after all.

09:55 AM on 06/12/2004 | comments (1) | trackbacks (0)

an unusually blunt

Typically I step back from the hypocritical whining of the Monday-Morning Distressor. Yes, mondays are painful, dragging oneself to work after a weekend of whateverness, but they are also repetitive, predictable, and inevitable. There is rarely ever cause to fluster one's emotions over the return of the work-week illusionstate.

But this was a weekend.

A real weekend. A painful weekend of late-dancing-or-driving-nights, ten-kilometer-early morning-runs, box-hauling afternoons, and long winded days of too much food that I wouldn't normally eat.

This morning I woke up at 4:30, walking to get a glass of water from the bathroom, crashing into doors in a combination of groggy-barely-awakeness and I-can-feel-every-muscle-in-my-body pain-ness. That's what the weekend did to me.

It's not that I'm out of shape. It's that these types of weekends are meant to be spread out over three or four. Saturday mornings are for visiting the pancake house for a stack of blueberry waffles, not moving six truckloads of moving boxes and dislodging someone's trailer hitch from where it detatched from the bulb and rammed through the torn metal of his tailgate. Sunday afternoon are for sitting in Starbucks with a coffee and the weekender section of the newspaper, not running through the rolling river-valley of Red Deer. Friday nights, are meant for parties, which is where we were, and that's okay, too.

It was all good. And every once in a while we need a weekend like that to remind us why we dislike Mondays, perhaps, occasionally: because we seem to be one step closer to the next painful weekend.

On a different note: Kudos out to Mom and Dad, and Aunt Laurie and Uncle Dale who all pledged us money for the run on Sunday. Our team raised a cool $300. And our event (the Red Deer Terry Fox Run) raised a whopping $23,000!

08:52 AM on 20/09/2004 | comments (0)

jackhammer fun

The hills are alive witth the sound of music... Correction: The jackhammers have returned.

Close, but it could have just been a short meaningless dream.

At some point we thought this was all done: they had ripped out ninety-seven percent of the flooring on the perimeter steps of our office building. There was noise and piles of broken tile the colour of brick. And then for two weeks : nothing.

The crew emerged from the hidden depths of the city again this morning. They came with their tools. They have been making a whole lot of noise all day.

They seem to enjoy it.

I seem to think they are not working fast enough to make tomorrow a quiet day. Pity.

03:54 PM on 17/08/2004 | comments (0)

slow food

I don't know what disturbs me more: that McDonalds sold twenty-two billion dollars worth of hamburgers last year in the US. Or that Americans ate a little over a trillion dollars worth of fast food last year. Stats. Click here.

09:47 AM on 13/08/2004 | comments (0)

heat sink

Some of us already know this story.

It was raining in Saskatchewan this weekend. As haunting cold drew us from the city to the nether-lake-regions of our neighbor's north. We pondered the brevity of life, and mused at the complexity of life in a tent. It was cold, but the meals followed in quick succession and the beer flowed like water.

Saturday was morose. Glum clouds hung heavy, and the air was damp, moist, and threatening. I nursed a maple malt from the banks of False Creek, hunched deep into a red lawnchair, and pulled a dog-eared copy of Adam's second classic from my car as I settled in for a quiet, and dislocated, afternoon.

One chapter later, there was a scream.

The campsite was full of kids. It was the modern parking-lot campground, trailers, boats, recreational vehicles, cars, trucks with idling diesel cummins engines purring in four directions, almost within arm's length. It was the kind of place you bring families, because the wilderness is cautiously kept at bay by the hum of humanity. The campsite was full of kids, pushing their bikes, toys, and siblings through the sandy soil. The campsite was full of kids because it was exactly that type of place.

And the air was full of shouts, hollars, and screams --playful and casual, in the way of children lingering too long in some immature state of mind which defines them as children.

But this scream was different.

I looked up from my book, tipping the rim of my hat back far enough to observe the surrounding maze of trees and metal pushed through the rugged complexity. A ten year old boy had run, darted, leapt in fear and agony into the raodway, his shirt and pants dancing with a scortching trim of fresh flames eating away the fabric faster than his naive soul could comprehend. In a moment that seemed to pull time like cold taffy, stretching tendrils of glistening, sugary pain into fragile webs, he had dropped to the road, screeching, brushing the attacker into suffocated oblivion.

Another moment stretched out.

Mute. But the screems continued.

And people tried to do something worth doing. It happened and then it was over. Odd how that works. Odd how a moment can linger in your mind. Odd how you would never imagine it so odd.

12:09 PM on 09/08/2004 | comments (0)

more?

There was more here once.

You may have noticed.

A long time ago, lost within the glistening epochs of time immortal, I was something other than what I seem to be now. I don't know where that is, or how it goes. If you don't like it, imagine how I feel.

Days pass. The city rages.

I was peering down some path not taken, peeking around corners yet explored, and I realized that I had seen it all before. It is a frightening thing. It is epic. And I find some connection where once there was much.

The folds of our simple existence are trapped like so many lingering thoughts. Did I say that already? Did I mention that something is following me through the streets of this place, lurking. I can feel it. I can hear it. Taste it. Warmth, waiting just beyond the firmness of absolute perception.

I crossed the grid last night. No one noticed. Not even me, until it had happened. Am I being too cryptic? Are you missing the point? Are you not seeing any of this?

I'll slow down and mention something completely unrelated. We went to the store last night. I bought a lock. Why? Because sometimes one just needs a sense of security. The price on the rack told us six dollars. The cash register rung up an unexpected one hundred and eighty dollars. Scanned. We waited while price checks, alterations, modifications, and authorizations were performed. It was marginally amusing.

But then there was this thing, see? A thing of something else, and something was somewhere doing more than I can ever describe. It was nice.

And then there was the city. I waited in the city. Lingering. Watching. Peering over my shoulder because I knew there was something following me, and that should I ever stop for a few minutes, open my eyes to that essence that is washing over the something, it would be more than just a tag-along, suspected but never proven.

I should wait.

I should sit down and let it find me. What could happen? Maybe then I would have more words to sell. Here. There. But mostly here.

11:40 AM on 22/06/2004 | comments (0)

some light on the subject

It's that monday thing again, the time when I sit back, put my feet up, and panic that I did nothing on the weekend but socialize and think about all the things I have yet to accomplish before I can say my life is complete.

I think, in some bizarre way, I'd rather it just spotted along, regular-like, and never mind all this onagain-offagain reality.

And then again, variation is good, too.

We drove grandma home last night, plunked her down in her house, installed her snoopy (don't ask) and drove away, waving, our temporarily clean car once again speckled by bits of dirt, salt, and highway-snow residue. It's like we live here again. Oh yeah. We do.

A stir-fry appeared on my plate last night. I think I went shopping for the ingredients, but the with the blur and the busy-ness, I'm not even sure. It was spicy. I have leftovers for lunch again. Leftovers! Do you know what that means? It means we have enough food in our house once again that I'm even forced to consume it at work.

My other adventure -- which I marginally do remember so hold onto your hats -- was the trip to Safeway to buy a light bulb. Yes. One of those experiences of settling: you finally sit down in a living room that isn't filled with boxes, on a couch that isn't cluttered with stuff, to watch a television that is actually plugged in and connected to other appliances, and -- voila -- no lightbulb in the lamp.

Hardly and emergency situation, I know, but rather that stare vacantly at Survivor (wherein they dragged out a story where everyone already knew dull ending) I wandered out the door, pondered the wonders of residential lighting in the brightly lit aisles of the local grocery store, and purchased a handful of various energy efficient bulbs.

It was an elightening experience... pause... groan.

11:29 AM on 10/05/2004 | comments (0)