Heart Openers

We had a yoga class last night with our friend Angie in Fall River. She used to teach a regular class years ago, which was great, but now it's a rare occasion when you get to yogue it up under her tutelage. But this was a special benefit class for Japanese disaster relief.

There was some last minute debate on our part over whether we even actually still wanted to go, but because it was for charity and because it was a good excuse to get to see Angie (and her husband, Cliff), we bit the bullet. Good thing, too. I'd kind of forgotten just how enjoyable a yoga class can potentially be. I think I'd started thinking of it as just work that you have to do sometimes. But every moment of Angie's class was a pleasure, and we felt great afterward, like the world was a nicer, more friendly place. Plus, there was a whole feast of chili and salad and cookies after the class. Thanks, Angie, for such a nice time.

The Merkel Boner

There's a house on Merkel Street, not too far from here, that is one of the craziest mishmashes of architectural eras and styles I've ever seen. Alison and I used to walk past it on our way to yoga classes years ago, and it was so ugly and insane looking that we started referring to it as the "Merkel Boner," a reference to the infamous baseball play in 1908 by New York Giant, Fred Merkle. (Different spelling, I know, but too good a joke to pass up.) If you don't know the story, check out the video below — it's seriously one of the most interesting sports moments ever.



A couple of nights ago, we ran into our friend Benn at the grocery store, whom we hadn't seen in a long time. We asked him where he was living these days, and he said Merkel Street. So of course I immediately asked him if it was the "Merkel Boner." And then of course I had to explain my clever joke, and I guess I was kind of long-winded about it and said the word "boner" probably about fifty-three times. In my defense, it is a complicated story, about which Daniel Okrent says, in "Inning Two" of Ken Burns' Baseball (which I just now finished watching), "Trying to explain the Merkle Boner in twenty-five words or less is like trying to explain relativity to kindergartners." I really wish, by the way, that I had the Burns treatment of the story to show you here, because it's quite masterful and poignant and much better than the video above, which, however, will do.

Anyway, when I was finally finished, Benn just kind of said, "Welp, bye!" and scrammed out of the store with his groceries. I say he was hungry and looking forward to cooking the food he'd just bought, but Alison's convinced I came across as a complete lunatic and actually frightened him. I guess the two explanations aren't necessarily mutually exclusive...

Oh, and the answer was no — it's not his house. Too bad.

You Cannot Serve Both Fog and Money

Well, I bit the bullet and paid the government yesterday. My dad gave me some advice that managed to knock almost 500 bucks off what I owed, so thanks for that, Dad! He thought it was pretty ironic that I was trying to pay as little in taxes as possible while voting for the NDP, but I don't think it's so surprising that I wouldn't want to give my money to the government when I don't like what they're doing with it. Plus, 27.7% — come on! I mean, we're not exactly high on the proverbial hog over here.

Today is quite foggy and dreary, but in a spooky, quiet way that's not completely unpleasant. There was a blue jay sitting in the tree outside my office window when I sat down to start working, and the whole scene made me think of this song. Possibly my favourite George Harrison number. I always wonder whether he intended the neat counterculture pun, "Don't belong."

Gloomy Tuesday

Did anyone else feel incredibly bummed out today? I guess saying goodbye to two thousand bucks probably had something to do with it. But also, Tuesdays in general I always find to be downers. Way worse than Mondays. Monday at least is a change from the weekend. But Tuesday just feels like you've still got the whole week ahead of you, except you've had a day already to get stuff done so you'd really better get on things, and what exactly is the point, anyway? Plus it was rainy and cold. I dunno, man... Something I really don't like about Tuesdays.

We went to see Jane Eyre as it was cheap night at the movies. It looked really beautiful and the acting was fine and everything. I guess I just didn't realize what a straight-up romance the story was, having never read it. Kind of boring. That'll teach me to make assumptions about the classics.

Eurrrrrggghhhh!

I just finally did my income tax return today and I owe like 2,000 dollars more than I'd planned for. Wah! I've been putting aside 30 percent of everything I take in all year (including 15% HST), to cover my HST remittance (=10%) and income tax. I.e. 23 percent of my gross income set aside for federal and provincial income tax and CPP contributions. Should be enough, you'd think, right? But no, they want over 27%! What the hell, man? That's a lot. And I had actually been looking forward to seeing how much I'd get BACK. Oh well, easy go, easy go, I guess. Rats!

Happy Eostre!

Hope everyone's annual rebirth is constructive and not too painful. Spring cleaning is healthy, but throwing everything away can be disorienting and scary. Sunshine and chocolate are good remedies for the discomfort of reentry. We've been lucky enough to have some of each today.

Thinking? Um... therefore?

The Richard Rorty book, by the way, is so far just fascinating. I won't know till I've finished it whether I completely agree with everything he has to say, but it sure is making me think, and I find myself really enjoying it. He's quite radical in his rejection of both objective reality and the self as the ultimate location of truth. Check this out, e.g.:

"As long as we think that there is some relation called 'fitting the world' or 'expressing the real nature of the self' which can be possessed or lacked by vocabularies-as-wholes we shall continue the traditional philosophical search for a criterion to tell us which vocabularies have this desirable feature. But if we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences."

I know, right? Maybe it's because I went to sleep reading such heady, abstract stuff right after my last blog post that when I woke up I knew all at once, as deeply as you can possibly know something, the ultimate refutation of Descartes's Cogito ergo sum.

Here's what happened. I was lying on the couch, having unintentionally fallen asleep and therefore completely unconscious in that dead-to-the-world way that only happens when sleep grabs you by force. I don't really know how long I'd been like that, but the phone rang and woke me up. Except that even though I was awake, I found that I had no idea not only where or who I was, but even whether I was. Sometimes you wake up to a phone ringing and at first think, "What is that noise?" or "What am I supposed to do now?" or something vaguely panicked along those lines. This went way beyond that. Even the questions "Am I conscious? Does the world exist? Do I even exist?" don't adequately describe the state, because those questions would immediately be countered by the Cartesian-smart-alecky "Who wants to know?" No, the only way I can express the ultimate doubt I experienced in that moment, which included my own very being in its scope, is as a profound and unanswerable "Huh?" I find myself sort of wondering now whether maybe I actually didn't exist for a brief period of time...

It was Jeff on the phone. He was calling to say he'd be meeting up with us later. Sorry, Jeff, that I didn't answer, but thanks for the very interesting and mind-expanding experience.

Easter Weekend — Oh Yeah

So far it's been as relaxing and pleasant as can be. Just got back in from a bike ride around the town with Alison. We went for brunch and then did a bunch of errands. It was a nice, sunny spring day, a little on the chilly side but not too bad, and we ran into lots of folks we know and like. Now it's colder and overcast.

Tonight we'll go to see the always astounding Bad Vibrations do their terse psychedelic punk rock thing at the always sketchy Gus' Pub. The Robins, Mark Gaudet's Moncton old-school hardcore band, are headlining. Mark was/is the drummer behind Eric's Trip, but he plays guitar in this band. Here's an interesting and funny video featuring both Bad Vibrations and Mark Gaudet. Plus some very informative stuff about Bigfoot.



Our friend Jeff is in town from Toronto for Easter, so he'll be attending the show with us. We got to hang out some with him and the BV gang last night over Chinese food. There was a very drunk guy yelling on the other side of the restaurant, and the waitress gave us meat spring rolls by accident, but it was still a fun time.

The night before that I attended the art college's annual Wearable Art Show. It was quite a well-run gala event, aside from the fact that you couldn't hear anything anyone said into the microphone. A reliable source told me the sound tech didn't know what a D.I. was when it was suggested he should use one. Nerdy techie gossip, but pretty funny and unbelievable if you know anything about sound production.

But anyways, there were lots of people there, and they were all dressed up and having a great time. The runway ran very smoothly and the modeling was impressive. Some of the "art" leaned a little too far into the wearable end, I thought, but some was kooky and interesting. Highlight of the evening was the "collection" that consisted entirely of giant body-painted logos. As in, no clothes. As in, eight models of both genders walked down the runway completely naked. Shocking and hilarious. The logos looked really great, too.

God's Cronies

Here's a little tune for you. Enjoy!

New Morning Sounds

Before you thought of Spring
Except as a Surmise
You see—God bless his suddenness—
A Fellow in the Skies
Of independent Hues
A little weather worn
Inspiriting habiliments
Of Indigo and Brown—
With specimens of Song
As if for you to choose—
Discretion in the interval
With gay delays he goes
To some superior Tree
Without a single Leaf
And shouts for joy to Nobody
But his seraphic self—

- Emily Dickinson

(There's also a dog and a hobo in there.)

Postscript: Oh, man, I just realized Garageband has been using my computer's built-in microphone as the input for everything I record, even when I have a good microphone running into it through a decent preamp. What a ding dong! No wonder that piano sounded so terrible...

Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's Reading Rorty

I've somehow been avoiding Richard Rorty for years, but finally picked some up the other week, and just started reading it. Our old next-door neighbour, Scott, is a huge fan, and was always trying to sell me on him. His wife, Andrea, painted a portrait of Rorty from the cover of the book I'm reading, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, for Scott's birthday one year.

Rorty was a "neopragmatist," "ironist," "postmetaphysicalist" American philosopher. He used interdisciplinary methods to try to reconcile the public and the private, while recognizing that they can never both be accounted for by one overarching philosophy. This recognition, he thought, would create a new kind of liberal culture. He seems to be fighting against a lot of my enemies, but also against a lot of my heroes, in an attempt to transcend the analytic/continental divide in twentieth-century philosophy. I can't tell yet whether I'll love him or hate him, but it's probably going to be one or the other. I'm sure it'll be fascinating, either way.

Baseball

Ali and I started watching our VHS copy of Ken Burns' Baseball 9-part documentary tonight, in anticipation of softball season. I'm not sure exactly when the season starts, but now that curling's over I need a new excuse to get all worked up with a bunch of alcoholics on Sundays, and this is always a good way to get excited about the game. I think this is the third time I'll have seen this series. So far we've only made it through the "top of the first inning," but I'm already hooked. It's such a great and beautiful documentary, but it always gets me all choked up. If I were American, I probably couldn't even watch it.

What I Got

Shoot! I didn't blog yesterday. I've been trying to post something every day for awhile. Guess I'll have to do a second one this evening. Meanwhile...

Here are the records I bought on Saturday. Taz were having a great sale where all secondhand stuff was buy-two-get-one-free. I'm especially excited about the Sidney Bechet — a 3-record set for ten bucks, and it's got "The Mooche" on it, which is one of my all-time favourite jazz recordings.



Jonathan and Ceti Alpha, by the way, were both wildly entertaining. So much fun looking through records while great live music is playing. Oh, I wish it could be Record Store Day every day!

Backing Up

I can't get this song out of my head. So glad someone is doing something with autotune that's not completely evil. OK, maybe it is completely evil, but at least it's funny.

Record Store Day!

I hope everyone gets a chance to go out to their favourite local record merchant, here some good music, and buy some records. Me, I'm about to head over to Taz to hear the fabulous Ceti Alpha and Jonathan Andrews. I watched this documentary recently, and it was really good, so I'm all excited about supporting one of the few independent record stores still hanging in there.

Fear Itself

It's so nice when synchronicities happen. Sometimes, when I'm reading a few books at once, certain ideas from one book will seem to somehow spill over into another, as if the two books want to help me keep their contents fresh in my mind by cooperating with each other. That way, each book gets more neural pathways in my brain and therefore more chance of my putting its ideas to use. It really is a good way for the universe to get me to notice something.

I've been reading this one book called Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life by Ezra Baydra. It's all about how to take what one gains from meditating regularly "off the mat" and into daily life. This passage about the importance of humour from the "Practicing with Distress" chapter recently struck me as significant:

"Once when my Pandora's box [of stressful problems] was opening wide, I went to Joko [Beck, his Zen teacher] to describe what was happening. I felt dark and grim and was embarrassed to reveal that I was experiencing so much fear. She smiled at me and said, "That's pretty interesting. Let's look at this." I got the sense that it wasn't me we were talking about but just "stuff." Here was a wider perspective. It's not that the fears were an illusion and could therefore be ignored, but that they were simply my particular conditioning. Putting them in this context allowed me to look more lightly at "my fears." I even saw the humor in the fact that my father, in repeatedly quoting to me the line "There's nothing to fear but fear itself," had succeeded in convincing me that I should be afraid of fear—quite the opposite of his benign intention. Cultivating humor and a larger perspective was instrumental in helping me to emerge from what had been a lifelong tunnel of fear."

Then last night I was reading a chapter of The Pale King about a 12-year-old boy who would break out into embarrassing sweats in public for no good reason, and I came across this:

"What he thought of as easily the worst day of his life so far followed an unseasonably cold week in early November where the problem had started to seem so manageable and under control that he felt he might actually be starting to almost forget about it altogether. Wearing dungarees and a rust-colored velour shirt, he sat far from the radiator in the middle of a middle row of student desks in World Cultures and was listening and taking notes on whatever module of the textbook they were covering, when a terrible thought rose as if from nowhere inside him: What if I all of a sudden start sweating? And on that one day this thought, which presented mostly as a terrible sudden fear that washed through him like a hot tide, made him break instantly into a heavy, unstoppable sweat, which the secondary thought that it must look even creepier to be sweating when it wasn't even hot in here to anyone else made worse and worse as he sat very still with his head down and face soon running with palpable rivulets of sweat, not moving at all, torn between the desire to wipe the sweat from his face before it actually began to drip and someone saw it dripping and the fear that any kind of wiping movement would draw people's attention and cause those in the desks on either side of him to see what was happening, that he was sweating like crazy for no reason. It was by far the worst feeling he had ever had in his life, and the whole attack lasted almost forty minutes, and for the rest of the day he went around in a kind of trance of shock and spent adrenaline, and that day was the actual start of the syndrome in which he understood that the worse his fear of breaking into a shattering public sweat was, the better the chances that he'd have something like what happened in World Cultures happen again, maybe every day, maybe more than once a day—and this understanding caused him more terror and frustration and inner suffering than he had ever before even dreamed that somebody could ever experience, and the total stupidity and weirdness of the whole problem just made it that much worse.

"[...] He could not understand why he was so afraid of people possibly seeing him sweat or thinking it was weird or gross. Who cared what people thought? He said this over and over to himself; he knew it was true. He also repeated—often in a stall in one of the boys' restrooms at school between periods after a medium or severe attack, sitting on the toilet with his pants up and trying to use the stall's toilet paper to dry himself without the toilet paper disintegrating into little greebles and blobs all over his forehead, squeezing thick pads of toilet paper onto the front of his hair to help dry it—Franklin Roosevelt's speech from US History II in sophomore year: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. [Emphasis in original.] He would mentally repeat this to himself over and over. Franklin Roosevelt was right, but it didn't help—knowing it was the fear that was the problem was just a fact; it didn't make the fear go away. In fact, he started to think that thinking of the speech's line so much just made him all the more afraid of the fear itself. That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which was ridiculous and weird."

Pretty good coincidence, right?

Incidentally, this type of fear-of-showing-fear, bootstrapping, unwilled but conscious behaviour recently happened to me, not with sweating, but with blushing. I was in a hospital waiting room with Alison, where she was having some semiroutine testing done, and the nurse called out the name "Heather Faulkner." I looked up immediately, because I had known a Heather Faulkner in junior and senior high school, and had in fact had a huge and not very secret but unfortunately unrequited crush on her. The woman who got up and followed the nurse out of the room was, I could now see, the same Heather Faulkner. She looked a lot older and I probably wouldn't have even recognized her without being forced to look up at her and determine whether it was Heather. But I was forced, and I did look up, and I did recognize her, and she recognized that I recognized her and smiled a little inscrutable smile without returning my gaze, which was in fact part of how I recognized her.

I asked Alison whether she thought I should say hi when Heather came back, and she said of course I should. But when Heather did return I wasn't looking up and didn't notice until she'd sat down across the room from me, again without looking at me. Alison was gone herself at that point, and I'd missed my opportunity, so I continued reading my book while trying to figure out how best to negotiate the reintroduction.

Then I suddenly thought, "Wouldn't it be hilarious if I started blushing now, the way I used to uncontrollably when I was a teenager? Good thing that doesn't happen anymore." That thought was immediately followed by the thought that no, it wouldn't actually be funny at all, it would in fact be downright horrifying, so I'd better not even think too much about it because I remember that it used to be very possible to make myself blush just by thinking about how embarrassing it would be to be noticed blushing. And then of course I felt that old familiar heat rising up my neck, which caused a mild panic at the thought that there might already be a bit of ridiculous, visible redness, which brought the heat farther up into my head, etc., etc., until I could feel that my whole face had become a blinding purple and might as well be a high wattage lightbulb.

The only way I could think of to keep my head from actually exploding was to look demonstratively at the clock, feign remembering something, and walk very quickly out of the waiting room and down the hall. For some reason, my shoes made a really loud squeaking sound all the way to the elevator.

I went downstairs and bought some snacks. When I got back to the waiting room, Alison had just gotten back too. She was happy to see the snacks. Heather was still sitting across the room, but she was soon told she could leave, which she somehow managed to do with even less than the zero amount of looking at me she'd already done, but also with still the same inscrutable smile that I now didn't find nearly as charming as I had thirty years ago. I wish now that I had gotten over myself and just said hi, how's life, nice to see you again. She deserved that much, and I really would like to know how her life has gone, and it even was nice, for a minute, to see her again. But at the time all I could think was "Good riddance," as I sank into my chair, pale and exhausted.

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

I know I've recommended this website numerous times, but you just have to check out the latest post on Bibliodyssey. It's a bunch of beautiful old illustrations of various sea anemones and related critters. The colours are comely and the critters creepy. Reminds me of some of Jim Woodring's rococo flora and/or fauna.



Last night I checked out the new Duncan Jones movie, Source Code. Jones is the son of David Bowie, and the same guy who directed last year's Moon. I really liked that movie, and this was another philosophical sci-fi offering, so I figured there was a good chance I'd like it. And I did, but it felt a little too much like a rehash of the same kind of story as in Moon to really be great. Again we have a guy awakening in the midst of a mission whose purpose and ultimate end he doesn't really understand, experiencing the problems of multiple identities/realities.

This story's less sad, but could just as easily have turned out as badly as the first one did. The premise this time is also a little bit silly and inadequately explained to be taken seriously. One interesting subtheme: Jake Gyllenhaal plays a soldier who keeps trying in vain to contact his dad from an unreachable reality, and I couldn't help but think of the director's own dad in his "Major Tom" persona, "floating 'round [his] tin can, far above the world."

One very nice part of the moviegoing experience was that they played the trailer for Terrence Malick's newest film, Tree of Life. Only six years since his last film, and this one looks to be beautiful, meditative, and poetic, as usual. Can't wait for it to come out!

Oh Yeah...

I forgot to show you these cute li'l glam rock guitar key covers Meg gave me as a thank you for playing at her benefit show. Pretty nice, eh? She's so great.

Showtime

Well, yesterday went about as well as it could have, I guess. My curling team won the trophy handily (11–1!) and I played the benefit show and didn't die or anything. There were some microphone and tuning issues, and plenty of muttering and fumbling around with equipment, but the crowd was very kind and appreciative. It was a nice show all around — small, intimate audience; quiet, personal songs; and there was still light outside when it was over. And it seems like a fair amount of money was raised for Japan through donations and purchases, too. Thanks, Meg, for putting together such an all-around winner!

Benefit organizers Meg & Ami

Chief Thundercloud — I was still at curling for this set, but I guess it was quite something.

KC Spidle, aka Husband & Knife

Me & the Incredible Sinking Microphone

The effortless Laura Peek

Ill Health & General Discomfort

A friend of Alison's has a whole case of film that fits our Polaroid camera, so we've been taking some snaps. It's really old, though, so you never know what you're gonna get. Well, actually, you do: very washed out colour with some random areas that don't develop.

Ali's sick with a cold right now, but Buster's keeping her company. I've been gobbling up echinacea and ginseng left and right over the past few days, in order not to have the cold for this solo show I'm playing today. And I think it's worked. Yesterday morning I was kind of hoarse, but today the throat feels all right. Now it's just butterflies and shaking hands I need to worry about.