A Heartfelt Apology

I'm sorry, blog, that I've been ignoring you so much lately. I guess I just haven't felt much like writing at length about the details of my life recently. Everything seems either too important or too unimportant to be material for your entertainment. I wish I had some nice little pithy stories to tell you.

And, OK, if we're being completely honest here, I've also become involved with another website. I know you've probably heard the rumours, so let's just get it out in the open. Yes, it is Facebook. Does that make you feel redeemed? Is there a kernel of enjoyment now in your disappointment, because my betrayal is so predictable and pathetic that it makes you morally superior? Well, good. I'm glad that something nice can come out of this for you.

Aw geez... This is meant to be an apology, and here I am already getting defensively bitter. I'm sorry. In all sincerity, I really do want only the best for you. And I'd like to continue giving you the best of me, if you'll have it. I just might not be able to devote as much time to you as I used to.

I don't actually know how long this thing with Facebook is going to last, but it's something I have to pursue. I can have the lightest of general conversations or the most in-depth one-on-one discussions. Either way, there's a give-and-take there that I feel like I need now. And that's just not something you've ever been able to offer me. I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but I think you deserve the truth.

Look, I'm not accusing you of selfishness here — I honestly value your passive nature. I know that I have a tendency to talk at you at length, while you're expected to sit there and listen politely. Believe me, I'm grateful. When I think of all the times you've gotten up in the middle of the night, never complaining, just to hear me hold forth on whatever stupid stream of consciousness has seemed important to me at the time, well...

You've been a great sounding board and guardian of my thought process. I will never forget that. And if my hope that we might even continue such a relationship on a less frequent basis strikes you as unforgivably presumptuous, please understand that it is only a testament to your unswerving generosity and goodness.

OK, gotta run for now. But we're good here, right? There are some funny cat videos I have to go and look at, but thanks, as always, for your sympathetic ear.

Much love, Andrew.

Happy Birthday, Ali!

Thumbo!

Photos courtesy of Alison & Instagram.

Good Day

I'm at my parents' place in Markham, Ontario, right now, ostensibly for my mom's 65th birthday, but also escaping the stresses of my life in Halifax for a short recharge. Yesterday I biked over to Stouffville to see my sister Erika's family and their new house.

It was such a nice day and a beautiful ride. A flat, straight road under a giant, cloudless sky. Lots of lush marsh- and farmland between the two towns, once you get past the latest ugly developments, which extend a bit farther north every year. But there were birds greeting me the whole way, and then I saw a small airplane pulling a glider ahead of me.

The two went back and forth a few times, and I wondered whether the glider would eventually be let go to continue on its own. Eventually I noticed the motored plane over to my left, and couldn't make out the glider with it. I searched the sky ahead, left, right, and behind, but couldn't find it. I'd just convinced myself that the other plane WAS the glider, when a large shadow passed over me from behind, making the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

I looked straight up, and there it was, silently coasting right over my head. It was so slow and beautiful and free. I pulled over to the side of the road and got off my bike to watch it. The sun was also directly above, so I had to shade my eyes quite a bit to see it, but it circled around me four or five times before heading off in the direction I'd seen the other plane in. I couldn't tell whether the people in the glider were actually communicating with me or not, or even whether they could see me, but I waved to them. It was kind of a mystical experience. I felt happier than I have in a long time, and in a way that I haven't since I was a kid.

Baiku

Needed some outdoors today, so I went for a long bike ride. It was warm, but very windy. This haiku came to me.

Trees are not waving
Goodbye in the summer wind —
They are just waving.

Personification in haiku is a definite no-no, as the point is to depict what happens unadorned. That way, the reader is able to have the same experience the writer did, rather than just be told what the experience was. So pointing out the absence of personification in one's own haiku is probably a sneaky trick that's just as bad, when it comes down to it. I like it, though.

Get Out While You Still Can III

In yet another example of cynically inappropriate song repurposing by television advertisers (see Iggy Pop's ode to heroin addiction, "Lust for Life," used to sell ocean cruise vacations, and then this), tonight I saw Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" promoting a cell phone!



It's only one of the most devastatingly bleak critiques of the technological age I've ever heard. It's 1981, and humans are replaced by their answering machines. Love is replaced by justice and then force. Mom is replaced by electronics, chemicals, and the military.

In case you think the producers of the commercial spot didn't bother to listen to the lyrics — making them not actually cynical but just lazy and dumb — the ad's storyline features people jumping gleefully out of an airplane. Viewers are thereby induced to start singing, "Here come the planes."

The unsettling irony created in the song at this point by conflating images of pleasure trips with those of air warfare is here reduced to a plain old post-modern embracing of opposites. Why shouldn't parachuting be a military exercise AND a fun thing to do with a bunch of friends? Why shouldn't love be human AND technological? As long as you can afford it, why not wrap yourself tighter in those electronic arms?

Two Things

1. R.I.P., Maurice Sendak, beloved crotchety misanthrope and children's book writer/illustrator.

2. Another one of those poems appeared on a blackboard in front of the house on Harvard Street. This one's a real winner too:

The Weather in Space

Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we’re certain to lose, so alive—
Faces radiant with panic.

- Tracy K. Smith

I keep stopping by to reread it, and I smile every time.

How are these two things connected? I don't know. Can't you make up your own story, for once? Or better yet, just appreciate two unconnected things WITHOUT a story around them? Geez...

Chaotic Forces

I seem to have adopted a cat. At least, temporarily. Her owner is a client of a friend's mother and can't take care of her for awhile, so I'll be looking after her indefinitely. I hadn't planned on getting another cat, but she needed a place to stay, and I could use some company.

Apparently her name is Cuddles, but I refuse to call her that while she stays with me. Haven't decided on a better name yet, though. So far I've just been alternating among generic nicknames like Kitty, Buddy, Monkey, Weirdo, etc. She's a cutie — very playful and a bit of a comedian. I can tell she's going to stir up some trouble around here.

Here's one Alison took on her phone while the cat spied on us from across the room.

And speaking of allowing nature's complexity into our rigidly simplistic human lives, here's a really great talk by the incomparable Alan Watts, recorded for television in 1971. I just finished reading The Wisdom of Insecurity again and discovered this yesterday. Low quality video, but highly recommended.

Hard Times

Oh, lord. What HASN'T been going on? Let's see, let's see...

1.  I gave Stephen Harper $12,000 to do with as he sees fit.


2.  I watched Lars von Trier's Melancholia (see fig. A, above). Twice. I feel like I want to tell you all about it hyperenthusiatically but can't because I'd have to give awesome surprises away. Let me just say that I was not much of a fan of Trier's before this (although I'd forgotten he also made The Idiots, which I did kind of love), so if Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark and possibly Dogville all made you angry with their brutal treatment of angelic female characters, don't let that stop you from checking out this one. You'll be thinking about it days later, in a good way, I swear. And when you do, ask yourself this bonus question: Does Melancholia, the planet, bring on melancholia, the condition, or vice versa? Hmmm?


3. Buster has apparently been ignoring his food and leaving presents on Alison's living room floor that would be better positioned in his litter box. I may have to take him back.


4. Amber is in the hospital for three weeks, having had a giant growth removed from around her knee. She probably won't be able to walk for two more months after that, during which time she'll be living with her mom on the Eastern Shore. She's not exactly happy.


5. My eye rash has finally cleared up, possibly because Buster and his weird cat litter are no longer living here (but see point 3, above).


6. A client who is months late in paying me $300 has outright refused to pay the further $1,700 he has accumulated in late fees over the past couple of years. He's also stopped giving me work or returning my calls, and I've seen posters advertising his services around town that were not done by me. I'm going to have to take him to small claims court.


7. I gave notice to my landlords that I won't be renewing my lease at the end of July as I can't afford this place by myself, not least because of point 1. Where I will be living and with whom are undetermined.


8. My lower back is giving me problems and I'm not sleeping well. It's unclear which is cause and which effect.


9. Even though I never have any money, I seem to be so overwhelmed with work that I can barely get it done. How is this possible? See points 1, 6, and 7, I guess?


10. Wah.

HowEVER...

I'm still playing and writing a lot of music, and really loving it. I've also been to some great shows recently (Bad Vibrations, Monomyth/Hymm/Air-Fire/JFM) and read or reread a few inspiring books (Black Swan Green, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Freedom Evolves). And I'll be spending a week with my parents and sisters in Ontario for my mom's birthday later in the month. So all is far from desperate.

Rock Talk

Lest I be accused of disappearing off the face of the Web, here's some footage from a Record Store Day show I played yesterday. Somebody thoughtfully recorded the whole in-store set and put it on YouTube in three installments.



That's my new bass backing up Matthew Grimson's songwriting genius there. I've just recently been enlisted in this band, and this was the first show I'd played with them. You can kind of tell. I think it generally went pretty well, though, and was a lot of fun. Taz, the record store, gave us each a $50 gift card for playing, which was a complete and welcome surprise. I picked up Thurston Moore's first solo album and the new Shins record, both on vinyl.

The Lodge played a poorly attended but well-received show the weekend before at Gus' Pub, which turned out to be our last. Mike's got too many other projects on the go to continue being a puppet/clown shouting our ridiculous lyrics while we hide behind him. Fair enough — especially since those other projects are both more lucrative and more creatively fulfilling for him. But Charles and Cliff and I will carry on in some, likely instrumental, fashion. Might just take us awhile to regroup. Meanwhile, there are some unfinished Lodge recordings that we still plan on releasing eventually.

And Guts, a.k.a. Kristina and me, continues to develop its sound weekly. We have about seven or eight songs that are slowly getting hammered into some kind of presentable shape. I want it to sound really good before we unleash it on the world. Watch for a public unveiling in, oh, I'd say a couple of months.

Celebrating Spring by Staying Inside

Hope everyone had a good Easter weekend. Alison and I spent a nice couple of days together at her apartment, doing the crossword, eating good food, and playing arcade-style video games from circa 1983 on her laptop.



Burger Time was a running favourite for awhile, then we got hooked on Phoenix. I was starting to get the hang of dealing with those aggressive little pixelated birds and ignoring the nightmarish computer squeals that accompany them, but not really getting anywhere near as good as I remembered being at the game in my youth. I couldn't figure out what was going on, until I accidentally pushed a different button one time and suddenly realized there was a SHIELDS option I'd completely forgotten about! Total game-changer.

Alison's taken Buster the Wonder Cat to see how he likes it at her place, and he seems to be settling in OK now. At first he just curled up in one of her jackets and didn't move for about a day, but when I came over he perked up a bit and is now exploring and generally owning the place.

I was supposed to go for a hike along the coast on Sunday with some friends, but we got a big pile of wet snow in the morning, which is how I ended up spending hours dodging digital bird poop instead. But here's a photo Alison took a few weeks ago when we went for a Sunday walk on Crystal Crescent Beach.


It's a bit springier now than it looks here. But not much.

Hey, I just realized what a direct contradiction of my last entry this entire post is. Hilarious!

Coming Out

Time to bust open this cocoon I've been in all winter. It seems to really be spring now, and the weather's a lot more dependably seasonable. I've started getting out of the house more — socializing, playing music, and generally wandering around in the sunshine. I even had some windows open today.

I guess work and band practices have been keeping me indoors quite a lot this past week, but the bike has also seen its fair share of use. And yesterday I went to the park with Amber, where we spent a good part of the afternoon cloud-gazing and watching the sunlight twinkle on the water. I hadn't really done the former since I was a kid. Highly recommended, if you can make the time. We saw a giant cyclopean skull, a banana fish, and a lot of mutating water vapor.

This week will see me doing my income tax, but even that can't put a damper on this vernal spirit. I'm a fresh-air-breathing, lyric-writing, instrument-playing, friend-greeting machine!

Grooving in the Music Room

See? I'm back again already. Here's a new song I wrote for Guts. It'll be a lot more aggressive-Neil-Young-meets-Sebadoh in that format, but this is the prettier acoustic version. It's called "Been Away."



I've also been spending a lot of time with my new bass, mostly figuring out and practising this song, which has probably my favourite bass line of all time.



It's actually the Hatful of Hollow version I've been learning — a bit more subtle and soulful. I can play it OK with a pick, but it really requires finger style plucking to be done right. It's about time I learned how to do that, so maybe this is a good excuse.

I got to see The Smiths in the summer of 1986 on their The Queen Is Dead tour with my sister. Remember that, Dana? Still the best rock show I've ever seen. It was outdoors at Canada's Wonderland in Ontario, and it rained gently until the band came onstage. Morrissey said, "Sorry about the rain. We blame The Queen!" and they launched right into the thumping title track of the album. Very exciting. The rain let up in the middle of the song, and stayed away for the remainder of the show.

The big finale was "How Soon Is Now?" where maybe 50 people got up on the stage, swayed back and forth, and sang along with Morrissey. Johnny Marr's tremolo guitar seemed to be everywhere at once, pulsing through all our chests in a wave of love and misery and solidarity that felt like it would never end. It was completely transcendent. When they walked off the stage in triumph, the rain immediately started up again in big, plopping drops.

Somewhere at my parents' house I have a tape of that show, recorded on a Sony recording Walkman that I'd spent a lot of babysitting money on and smuggled in, in a backpack. It probably sounds terrible, but I sure would like to dig that tape up sometime, as I think of that show as one of the defining moments of my adolescence. Then again, maybe it's best to leave those kinds of memories intact in their erroneous perfection.

Still Breathing

Just so you know, I'm not dead or anything. I HAVE been sick again, I'm embarrassed to say. Week-long cold, eye rash, stye, the whole chimichanga. I even grew a beard, of sorts, while I was spending so much time indoors alone. It wasn't a pretty sight.


But now spring is here, things are happening, the weather's fine... It's 26 degrees out there right now! What am I doing in here, sitting in front of a computer? Should be out on the bike.

Yesterday was equally nice, and I biked over to Dartmouth in the evening for a band practice with my friend Kristina. We've been jamming mostly weekly, putting together a scrappy little project called Guts. Me on guitar, Kristina on drums. There was a third guy temporarily involved, but we're back to a two-piece now, and loving it.

I'm theoretically in five bands right now, if you can believe it. I bought myself a new (to me) Fender Jazz bass yesterday with some money that finally came in for a big project I'd done. I really needed a bass for some of these bands, plus I wanted to get myself something nice with the money before it all disappeared into various debts.

Anyway, gotta get some work done now so I can get outside and enjoy the sunshine a bit. I just didn't want any undue worrying. I'll be back soon — promise.

Happy Women's Day!

I've been reading this book, The Fall, recently, in which Steve Taylor presents a convincing case that the insanity behind our current culture started with a giant "ego explosion" 6,000 years ago and is not, as usually supposed, due to "human nature." According to him, societies were cooperative and egalitarian before this event. It was only when the ego developed — mostly in men — as the result of a radical environmental change in a large geographic area that the world began to see the ugliness of war, social inequality, patriarchy, materialistic greed, alienation from nature, lack of empathy, and a general dissatisfaction with human life. The book really could have used a good copy editor, but the thesis is so fascinating that I almost don't mind the many, many syntax errors throughout it.

I like the idea that all these terrible problems have the same root cause. And I especially like the idea that they're not an inevitable feature of human beings. I was beginning to think that there's just something biologically wrong with men, causing them to orchestrate the destruction of their own species. Like maybe that Y chromosome is a malignant mutation that we might want to start categorizing as a dangerous virus. But if the problem is just a cultural one, albeit one that's been around for six millennia, it means there's still hope for us, and the feminist project is more than just a frustrating waste of time.

Here are some songs I like lately by women I would consider not only "female positive," but musically worth your time as well. I.e., no Indigo Girls in the bunch. Enjoy!

Little Boats on the Horizon

I mentioned back in January that I'd been working on a musical project that would be finished around the end of the month. Well, it's still not finished. But I'm getting there!

The project is a collection of solo recordings from the past nine years or so. I've got all these songs sitting around, and mostly they've not been heard. I used to put some on my myspace page every once in awhile for anyone who happened by, but that site has become pretty much useless. So I've finally decided it's time to release something like a proper album for public consumption. I chose thirteen songs that seem to belong together in some sense, ten of which are completely recorded and mixed already. Each of the other three still needs a bit of work, but nothing too difficult.

I've done a mastering job of sorts on the ten that are done, so that they're all similar in volume level and EQ. The remaining three keep getting put off, but I'm determined to get around to them and put the whole collection up on Bandcamp. It will be released under the name "Pale Son," and called Little Boats. I've got the artwork designed, and a friend of mine is doing a painted version of it, for extra texture. I'll let you know when it's all ready.

Meanwhile, here's a fourteenth, instrumental piece I just finished recording. It will be the last track on the album. It's called "Same Window Next Sunday."

I'm Your Man

"I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. There's a certain humor in realizing that. I can never figure out the kind of tie to put on in the morning. I don't have any strategy or plan to get through the day. It is literally a problem for me to decide which side of the bed to get out on. These are staggering problems. I remember talking to this Trappist monk in a monastery. He's been there twelve years. A pretty severe regime. I expressed my admiration for him and he said 'Leonard, I've been here twelve years and every morning, I have to decide whether I'm going to stay or not.' I knew exactly what he was talking about."

- Leonard Cohen

I interviewed last week for a new job. Not that I'm looking for a job — at all — as I'm generally quite content doing what I'm doing. Having built a decent client base, I'm now lucky enough to do work I enjoy from the comfort of my own home and get paid fairly for it. Pretty sweet business.

But this was a job I'd long dreamt of: designing for an international magazine in collaboration with its art director. The art director, whom I know, had brought the opening to my attention, which I took as a pretty solid foot in the door. It would be full time, meaning I'd have to give up my current clients to take it. A real life-changer, in other words, but it seemed too good an opportunity not to at least try for. Did I want my life changed? Maybe, maybe not. But I could put off making a decision about that until I was actually offered the job, should it come to that. And what could be a better state of mind going into a job interview than not caring whether you get it? Right?

There were, unfortunately, many hurdles before I could arrive at the real decision. I had to update my fancy, non-standard résumé; write a cover letter; put together an impressive portfolio; and spend money I didn't have on some wool pants at Club Monaco that are probably way too fancy to ever wear again. That all took a few days away from my work. And then the day before the interview I had to spend a few hours making sure I could talk about my portfolio in a way that made a story out of all the pieces, illustrating exactly how multitalented I am and why I'd be the best candidate for the job in question.

So, by the time I got to the actual interview the next day, I was well prepared, but also incredibly nervous. Weird how much I can still care what others think of me, even when I'm not sure I want what they have to offer. A friendly but very probing panel of four people had me recount my job history for them in the office of the magazine's editor-in-chief while they took notes. It turned out that they didn't want to look at my portfolio at all. Instead, they grilled me with questions about my professional and personal interests for an hour or so, often throwing things I'd said earlier back in my face if they detected inconsistencies in my alleged character. It was brutal — felt like a psychotherapy session on which I would be graded at the end.

Mostly, the questions kept coming back to why I wanted the job, what was going to excite me about it, how it fit in with my career plans. They knew I'd had some uncertainty about whether I should even apply for the position. They wanted evidence that it would keep me interested for awhile, that I wouldn't just find something new to become curious about in a couple of years.

I finally had to say, "Look, I'm not really what you'd call an ambitious person, and I don't like to think too much about what my future will be like. If I can work at a job where I like the people and the environment, and there's some degree of variety to what I do, I'm pretty good at being happy, whatever the actual job is. The only reason there's been any dilemma about this job is that I'm already happy where I am, and I'm also convinced that I'd be happy here. With no other factors pulling me one way or the other, I'm forced to turn the decision around into what I can give, rather than what I can get. I like you folks and the message of your magazine, and I think you're deserving of the services I have to offer, even if it means denying others those same service, so I'm here offering them to you if you want them."

I didn't get the job.

It kind of depressed me for a couple of days, I have to admit. I guess I'd gotten more excited about the prospect than I thought I had. But now I feel OK about it. My situation is exactly as it already was, and I'm glad that I don't have to give my clients — most of whom are pretty nice people — the old unjust heave-ho. I just sort of wish I'd never heard about the job in the first place, you know? I suppose it was a useful exercise to go through, although I really don't plan on applying for any other jobs, so an updated résumé and some tough interview experience are not completely useful to me. And I could've done without all that emotional drama, not to mention the wool pants.

Plus, Happy Birthday, Carol

Not sure whether she reads this...

Happy Valentine's Day

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

- Alan Watts



Instead of seeing love as something that will make you happy if you can get enough of it, consider the possibility of love as a way of being, of love as a state of consciousness. As such it is independent of any particular person or set of conditions. In other words, love is unlimited, impersonal and unchanging. It cannot be lost nor can it be hoarded. This kind of love is both a choice and surrender to something beyond your ego.

- Deborah Anapol



To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change. The ego singles someone out and makes them special. It uses that person to cover up the constant underlying feeling of discontent, of “not enough,” of anger and hate, which are closely related. These are facets of an underlying deep seated feeling in human beings that is inseparable from the egoic state.

- Eckhart Tolle



In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty. Beauty is not something you see — not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind. But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.

- J. Krishnamurti



Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.

- Carl Jung



At the heart of Buddhist philosophy is the notion of compassion for others. It should be noted that the compassion encouraged by Mahayana Buddhism is not the usual love one has for friends or family. The love being advocated here is the kind one can have even for another who has done one harm. Developing a kind heart does not always involve any of the sentimental religiosity normally associated with it. It is not just for people who believe in religions; it is for everyone who considers himself or herself to be a member of the human family, and thus sees things in accordingly large terms.

- The Dalai Lama



You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else?

- Jesus Christ



One result of our freedom from neediness is that our love expands to touch all people. We love others because we and they are intimately connected to one another. There is not a separate self anywhere in sight. Compassionate love is the natural response to the human predicament of suffering and the human truth of interdependence, and it lightens the burden of finding a special someone.

- David Richo



Romance is the chief delusion, elixir, and magical potion of our popular culture. It is itself a Shadow fantasy, for in this blissful state, one's wounds are healed, one's needs met. But because the seductive power of romance is so powerful, it distracts from the accountability of consciousness. Who really wants to examine relational dynamics with a critical eye? Who wishes to look within when it is so much easier to look for rescue without? Yet without a knowledge of our history... who could really expect any current relationship to be better than its archaic paradigm?

- James Hollis

Street Art

The other day I was walking down Harvard Street toward Quinpool, on my way to buy some of the fancy cat food Buster likes, and noticed that someone had attached a tall blackboard to the front of their house. It was full of chalk handwriting. I stopped to look at it, and this is what I saw:

Lines for Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

- Mark Strand

It was quite cold and grey out, as in the poem, and I was feeling particularly miserable that day. So I was touched that someone had gone to so much trouble to inject a little bit of hope into the bleakness that is Halifax in February. "There is an infinite core to you," the poet seemed to be saying, "and it is lovable, so just remember that, no matter what else is going on in your life, and everything will be fine." Very nice.

Except that something rang false about the whole thing for me. For instance, what if I don't want to hear the same tune no matter where I find myself? What's so comforting about that? Sounds kind of like a nightmare. And why should I have to "tell myself" these things, if they're true? Shouldn't I just be able to perceive them somehow? Am I supposed to lie to myself as a small consolation while I keep trudging along pointlessly, pretending that I know about some deeper meaning that in actual fact eludes me completely? I decided that this poet, and by extension the owner of the house, was well-intentioned but ultimately misguided.

I started walking again and tried to think of another poem about winter that would be a quick and devastating rebuttal to this one. I had the idea that I would write it on a piece of paper and attach it to the blackboard the next time I walked by it. Something about how winter is gloomy and discouraging, but you might as well just face it, because it's going to kill you in the end anyway. (I told you I was in a miserable mood.)

Well, I never did come up with just the right poem, but something interesting happened when I looked up the Mark Strand one in order to write this post. On reading it a few more times, I began to think that my reaction to it was not actually an argument against it, but the one intended by the poet.

Check it out: "Tell yourself" is a very interesting way to begin an instruction. It brings to mind well-meaning friends and self-help books, but does also suggest that what follows is not necessarily the truth. Since it's repeated twice more, the author must mean for us to consider such possibilities. Right?

And then there's that "same tune" that you'll keep hearing as you continue on. Later on, the tune turns out to be what your bones play, which is all that you know, which is... nothing! Definitely some irony involved in comforting yourself with that bit of permanence, then. And when you realize that, you get to stop your forward striving in order to lie in the snow and enjoy the warmth of the stars, i.e. no warmth whatsoever.

So now I see the whole thing as a kind of sarcastic argument against will and self-deception as antidotes for suffering and death. In other words, the poem is the perfect refutation of itself I was looking for! Except that there's still some hope at the end, because if life beats all the delusion out of you until at death's door you realize that you are nothing, then you can tell yourself — not through an act of will this time, but through pure experiencing of the "flow of cold through your limbs" — that you love that nothing. And really mean it. Pretty neat trick!

So thanks very much, anonymous Harvard Street resident, for introducing me to what may now become one of my favourite poems.

Sick of Being Sick

So, after I got over that 2-day flu, I caught a cold almost immediately. It's taking its time to get lost, too, sneaking around into different locations every day so I can't get a good shot at it. Today it was my right eye, and it's not pretty, I tell ya. I am literally a sight for sore eyes. No, wait, that's supposed to be a good thing, isn't it?

Anyway, I guess maybe I've been a little too busy working and meeting with folks and attending birthdays... Why do I know so many Aquarii, anyway? There are some exciting projects and possibilities in the works, including still the musical one I was telling you about a few posts ago, but mostly I can't really talk about them here. So if you could just be ready to be excited at any given moment, that'd be great. Thanks.

There hasn't even been much time for reading or movie-watching. Last Tuesday I did go to see A Dangerous Method with Alison. It's a really boring period piece about the relationship between Jung and Freud, in which the two never say anything that anyone with the most cursory knowledge of their theories wouldn't expect. Keira Knightly hams it up as Sabina Spielrein, an unfortunately hilarious mental patient of Jung's. Otherwise, there's nothing to see. David Cronenberg directed it, but nobody's head blows up, and nothing turns into a bug. Not even in a dream sequence. In fact, there are no dream sequences — just dry descriptions of dreams and long-winded guesses about what they could "mean." Come on!

I also saw Shame last night with Amber. Another psychological drama with only one female and two male characters, but this one was miles better. It's a study of individual sex addiction in a sexually addictive culture, as well as a compassionate portrait of a brother and sister with an unspoken incestuous relationship. Heavy stuff, in other words, and at times it teeters towards heavy-handed, but mostly it's quiet and suggestive and compelling. Check it out, but maybe not on a first date.

A Fun Little Puzzle

I just read this intuition confounder from Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Brian Eno, and it's really messing with my head:

You want to tie a ribbon around the Earth (which we assume to be a perfect sphere for the sake of this hypothetical story), but you accidentally cut the ribbon a bit too long — you're off by a metre. If you distribute the excess ribbon evenly around the circumference of the Earth, how far above the surface will it hover?

Math nerds, resist the urge to work it out, and just take a guess. It's meant to test your intuition. The actual answer, which I've verified with basic geometry and put in the comments section, will astound you.

This bit of mind-blowery is brought to you by Edge.org's list of interesting thinkers' favourite "deep, elegant, or beautiful explanations," Eno's of which is "The Limits of Intuition." Thanks, Jenny, for the endlessly fascinating link.

The Nature of Desire

Lately I've been feeling like I sort of actually get what J. Krishnamurti's always talking about. I mean, he's always had something valuable for me, philosophically, whenever in my life I've picked up any of his collected writings. But these days it's like I go for a walk and I can totally catch my mind doing exactly what he says it does, like deep in there at a fundamental level, and then the catching itself puts a stop to it and everything is just as it is for a few moments. It's very exciting, which of course sends my mind back into webs of desire and memories and hope and all the rest of it...

This short commentary in particular, which I read on a bus to Dartmouth the other day, really opened up some important spot for me. I don't know whether it'll do the same for you, but I thought I'd share it, just in case. It's from 1958.



My flu is completely gone now, by the way.

Sicko

Got the flu over here. Yuck. I'm cranking the heat in the apartment and spending a lot of time under the covers. Unfortunately, I'm also quite busy with work, so not as much rest as I'd like to get. But that means income, which means I get to eat, so hooray, I guess.

I'm also working on a couple of musical projects, one of which should see the light of day around the end of the month. The final stages are a little boring and time-consuming, but I think it's going to be worth it in the end. Stay tuned.

And, by the way, if anyone ever gets the chance to see a local musician named Gianna Lauren perform, they should jump on it. Caught her last weekend and it was just jaw-dropping. Here's a vidya.



Now back to the blankets...

Beach Day

Ali and I took a little drive to Lawrencetown Beach on the weekend. It was a cold January afternoon, but plenty of crazy people were still out there surfing. Here's some cool pictures Alison took. Nice textures, hey?

We Now Return Our Regularly Scheduled Program, Already in Progress

Feels good to be back into the swing of things. Work is trickling in appropriately, my yoga class started up again last night, and there's generally been a lot less partying. I have still been socializing some, but in a more low-key way. Dinners, brunches, dog-walking, watching full seasons of crappy TV shows, and the occasional rock jam or show. Oh, and I went skating once last week with a few friends... OK, I guess there's still plenty of social life going on.

Not that I didn't enjoy my holidays. My parents came to visit for a few days, and we had a great time wandering around Halifax and eating lots of great meals together with Alison.





There were also plenty of parties and shows to attend, many litres of soy nog to be drunk, and lots of around to be sat with a crossword puzzle or a good book. So I was never bored or anything, but it just all gets a bit... unstructured, after awhile. It's counterintuitive, but I seem to need limits on my time in order to get anything done. A very bourgeois problem to have, I guess. Anyone else feel that way?

Let's Make 2012 the Year of Conscious Attention

"'Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

David Foster Wallace
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Another Green Year

Happy 2012! Hope everyone had a fun New Year's Eve and a regret-free New Year's Day morning. Here's my resolutions for this year. I guess I prefer to think of them more as aspirations to keep in mind, rather than things to be dogmatically resolved about. Anyway, thought I'd share them with you (see #2). Anyone else got any for the record?

1. Listen.
2. Share.
3. Be more committed to the truth than to a pat answer.
4. Be more committed to love than to any particular self-image.
5. Accept what life brings with gratitude, enthusiasm, and even enjoyment.
6. See projects through.
7. Keep up relations with the people I love.
8. Meditate twice a day.
9. Exercise daily.
10. Get enough sleep.
11. Read more fiction.
12. Write more poetry.
13. Play music daily.
14. Don't worry about money.
15. Look for beauty and mystery everywhere.