And I still think so

In recent days there has been the vouchsafing of the idea that California, Oregon and Washington should share bed and board with Canada as a reaction to the election of Trump and his vile and idiotic gang of knaves. I like the concept because it revisits ‘Cascadia’, the mythical west coast land of my dreams. Happy to have California as part of the mix.

There is an essential formula for life in which, if you remember this ratio, you will do OK and won’t lose hope about the state of the world. That formula is the 80/20 split. Some optimists go so far as to suggest that it is a 90/10 split, but I suggest they have led sheltered lives or have been smiled upon much more benevolently than maybe they were entitled to be. Me? I’m a realist and opt for the 80/20.

What this means is that 80% of the people we deal with are essentially (in varying degrees) just fine, but that 20% are hideous manifestations of humanity in some respect and are to be avoided, or shunned, or locked away, or shot, depending on the extent and severity of their depravity.

I’ll give you a couple of examples of how this works. The idea originated in my mind from my counselling of alcoholics and addicts. There is therein a verifiable statistic in most societies that indicates that 80% of all alcohol is consumed by 20% of the population. Obversely, the 80% remaining consume only 20%. That is why stats showing per capital consumption in any society are skewed, because they reflect only the habits of a fifth (appropriate, somehow) of the population.

By the way, 80% of all social, legal and medical ills can also be ascribed to that 20% of hefty boozers.

In the broader spectrum of life I have found that the formula still prevails. For example, on Saturday night, sometime in the wee small hours, some assholes of some sort drove their vehicle up into the playing field of the park across the street and turned wheelies on the ball diamond and just thoroughly messed the crap out of a well-maintained facility designed for the pleasure of all. My first impulse was to think that this should be a capital offence, and if I’d been given a gun I’d have gladly pulled the trigger. Such trash has no right to continue to share the planet with the rest of us. The same thoughts apply to graffiti daubers, spitters, utterers of the vilest of profanities within earshot of the public, and so on.

Of that incident, I have no doubt whatsoever that the perpetrators were juveniles. Juveniles who will, however, fall into that moronic and dysfunctional 20%. That is, even with kids, 80% are (in varying degrees) decent, hard working, pleasant, and non-threatening. I can walk into any high school in absolute comfort, and I know from my own teaching days that most kids are (and always will be) pretty darn nice.

The 20% however, are the ones that will populate our prisons, break into our homes, and terrorize us wherever we go. The solace is, however, when you are walking down the street in any city or town, eight people out of ten are just like you, and will not harm, mug, assault or rape us. Keep a wary eye out for the other two in that crowd of ten, however. They’re bad. Bad to the bone.

I’ve found that even in groups that may have issues that have rendered them less than functional, the 80/20 formula still prevails. Working at a rehab I even found that 80% of even crackheads were still OK human beings who had simply messed up in a tragic and potentially lethal manner. My heart went out to them.

Of course, as a final thought, we have to apply that 80/20 to our own behaviors. That is, 80% of the time we are thoroughly decent, but during that 20%, well, even Jimmy Carter confessed to lusting in his heart for people he wasn’t supposed to be lusting over.

The circus ain’t comin’ to town – no more.

After more than a century the big guys in the biz, Ringling Bros/Barnum and Bailey are rolling up their big-top tents and calling it a day.

And not a moment too soon, I daresay.

For many years, pre-television and movies, the circus was a big deal. In cities and towns across North America it would arrive in the dark of night, originally by circus train and its presence punctuated by the distinctive sounds of a steam calliope, and there were lions and tigers and bears, oh my, along with elephants and high wire trapeze artist babes, not to mention goddamn clowns.

But in recent years the concept had grown stale. Increased sensitivity to the suffering of animals was a punctuation point.

I think I first saw a circus when I was five or six. It was at the PNE and the Vancouver Shrine Club brought them in. What I found was it was not as enchanting as I thought it would be. The big cats were bedraggled looking and they disappointingly did not maul the guy who was tormenting them. The ‘hot’ trapeze artist close up was as lined as my grandmother and likely her age despite the peroxided tresses. I did like the high-wire artistry though nobody fell. And even then I loathed the clowns and could only think, don’t get close and try to talk to me.

Then a few weeks ago B&B announced that it was all coming to an end. The ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ had been running since 1919. I commend the proprietors for bringing it to its denouement.

Bloggers are losers!

So says a University of Calgary prof – and who can ever argue with a tenured, publish-or-perish academic, since such people are so much brighter than the rest of us?

According to Prof. Michael Keren, as stated a few years ago in his timely tome, Blogosphere: The New Political Arena (catchy title, that), bloggers are living in a world where emotions may be real but everything else is make-believe.

Damn! Here I was going along, thinking I was a relatively well-adjusted and affable fellow with a petty wide array of real-time friends and acquaintances, who does a decent job of whatever I’ve turned my hand to, and have served on countless ‘real’ boards and committees, and have even earned some ‘real’ writing awards, and have traveled to ‘real’ foreign countries, and even make ‘real’ love to my ‘real’ wife, and yet I find that only my emotions are real, and everything else around me is a wispy hologram.
l
Yes, the good professor argues that individuals who bare their souls on blogs are isolated and lonely, living in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships or helping to change the world. Shit, I guess I better give up my committee and board work since it seems that by being a blogger I am doing nothing whatsoever to change the world – unlike overpaid academics are wont to do for putting in what? Fifteen, maybe 20 hours of work a week for about eight months of the year.

“Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills,” the author says.

Well, I must confess, labouring hack writer that I am, I am impressed by such literary allusions as “Don Quixote”, and finding it necessary to mention the “tilting at windmills” cliché, just to make sure everybody ‘gets’ his drift.

But, metaphors notwithstanding, I am more impressed by those who make sweeping generalizations about not only their findings, but about those whom they might choose to indict.

Or maybe we, my friends, are just failures as bloggers. I haven’t noticed a great impulse among my friends here to carry out a lot of rebelling against mainstream society. Oh, we may be pissed off about certain things – and probably should be pissed off about much more, but I have yet to notice any cry of “Aux barricades!” or even slight suggestions that blood should be flowing in the streets. I guess some of us aren’t with the program that Prof. Keren suggests we are.

Oh, and not to be outdone by his Don Quixote reference, Keren adds (I suspect to show how ‘hip’ he is) a reference to Father McKenzie in the 40 year old Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby, who is writing a sermon nobody is going to hear.

“Some of us (bloggers) are going to be embraced by the mainstream media, but the majority of us remain in the dark, remain in the loneliness,” says Keren.

Oh, woe. Not just loneliness, but ignorant and dark loneliness. OK, come clean, how many of you, when you got the impulse to blog, foresaw a Pulitzer around the corner, or maybe a desk job at Newsweek? No? Me either.

So, why do you write your blog?

I write mine because I really enjoy doing so. It gives me a space in which to express myself and to hope that others find some tiny germ of truth in what I write. I also write it because I am a professional writer, and blogging is like callisthenics. It warms me up for my day. And finally, I write it because it has allowed me to connect in a very pleasing way with people from throughout North America and the world in general. I like my blogging friends, and have made some valued associations here and I like my ‘real’ friends. I have also met some of my blogging friends in real-time and found that I didn’t notice a huge disparity between who they are as breathing human beings, and what they present themselves as being on their blogs.

At the end of it all, however, I’d like to be an academic. If you are an academic you can make relatively unfounded assertions, disparage a good section of the populace, and still bring home nice bucks.

On the other hand, I bet those Calgary winters are cold and lonely. Maybe Prof. Keren should try blogging.

I don’t like to whine. Truly I don’t. Don’t believe everything my wife tells you. But right now I think I am entitled to a plaint.

On Friday I went to see my sawbones to address once again a condition I have been distressed about for two-plus years. In essence my walking ability has become hugely compromised. Now, I love to walk, and if I have a pup in tow, so much the better. Of late those perambulations have become truly challenging.

Wendy first noticed a couple of years ago that I was dragging my left foot a bit. Well, it all sort of went downhill from there. In the meantime I have had virtually every test know to medical science; MRI, CT-Scan, Inner ear scan and so forth. I have also taken physiotherapy programs and for a lazy bugger like me that must mean something ain’t right.

Meanwhile my walking continued to deteriorate. Added to which I developed a propensity for falling. Like those old TV ads “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” they are no longer amusing because it’s true. I have bruises on my knees to attest to my reality and frankly it scares the shit out of me. It scares Wendy, too, because what if I go down when she’s not here? I just have to make sure I don’t. Meanwhile simple procedures become challenging. A couple of weeks ago I slipped getting out of the shower. To thwart my fall I grabbed the shower curtain. That didn’t work for shit. The whole thing came down and I whacked the back of my neck on the edge of the tub.

I have since learned to not be blase about any task and that helps considerably.

Anyway, my condition has a name. It is Vascular Parkinsonism. Not the same as Parkinson’s Disease and it is not progressive in the same way, blessedly. It stems from a series of small strokes I have had since 2008.

Will it get better? That remains to be seen. The ailment has a tendency to ‘plateau’ at times in which the symptoms can abate somewhat, though they don’t go away. It won’t kill me and it could be something much worse.

But I don’t like to ‘faw down and go boom’. Can you blame me?

Thanks for your tolerance for this intensely personal blog.

When he wasn’t obsessing in a fetishistic and creepy manner about his wife, Nora, or writing the virtually incomprehensible Ulysses, Irish writer James Joyce invented a literary device known as epiphany. That was very clever of him, because it is a device that transfers profoundly to real life.

Epiphany comes first and foremost as a Christian reference in that the day of the calendar is the day that Christ’s divinity was revealed to those at the time who might have been hankering for such a thing. In a literary sense it means, in barest essence, an incident or a time in which after a momentous change has taken place, we can never go back to what life was like before.

In that sense it certainly applies to the Christ connection, but it also applies to some of those events that have transformed you and the world – not always in a good way, I might add.

In a recent poll taken in Britain it was found that the three most traumatizing events in the modern era were, in descending order; 9/11, the death of Princess Diana, and the assassination of John Kennedy. Those were the kinds of events in which those who lived through them will not only remember the events with huge clarity; they will also remember the circumstances around first hearing the news. That is, if a person first became aware of the 9/11 horrors shortly after breakfast time, they also would be inclined to remember what they had at breakfast that day, and maybe even what they were wearing.

It’s understandable, by the way, that the Kennedy assassination should be at third place, mainly because to have been aware of its actuality, a person would now have to be in his or her late 40s to have had comprehension of the magnitude of Nov. 22, 1963.

As for Diana, I remember I got a late night phone call from a lady friend in Toronto who told me the news.

Of the Trade Center incident I can recall exactly what transpired. Wendy and I were in the Cook Islands and we’d gone in early in the morning to a little shop in Avarua, Rarotonga, to order some custom-embroidered sweatshirts. We gave our order, and the guy (an Australian) told us to come back in an hour to pick them up. When we returned, he ushered us into the cluttered back office of the shop. “Look at this,” he said, pointing to the computer screen. I couldn’t make it out at first, and was wondering why he wanted to show us a picture of an airplane crashing into a skyscraper. Then he explained what had happened. To say we were aghast would be to state the case mildly.

And, as we all know, from that day on, the world changed, not just a little bit, but monumentally. And, which is most important in the case of epiphany, ‘we can never go back!’ All about us has changed, and we as individuals have been transfigured and transformed. It’s a natural impulse to long for a return to normality. It will never transpire. We suffer from posttraumatic shock, and then we go through the stages-of-grief, and then we realize we will always be slightly diminished by that moment of epiphany.

Of course we, as human beings, have our personal moments of epiphany, and they aren’t ‘lesser’ events than the big cataclysmic ones, but possibly greater, because they shatter us within our own domains.

I can remember after my abrupt separation from my second wife, awakening in a state of shock and unreality for weeks afterwards, filled with denial about what had happened, and obsessively yearning to go back to just minutes before her uttering the words: “This isn’t working for me any more, so I want you to leave.” This utterance came virtually without warning that anything was amiss, by the way. So, you can imagine the profundity of that epiphany. And it was over. And I never went back. The blessing ultimately was that I was glad I never went back.

But, we have also suffered deaths of parents, sometimes spouses or partners, siblings and friends. We can’t have them return, but we are never the same as a result.

If we are strong enough, we grow from such experiences and we alter our perceptions, hopefully for the better.

Anyway, I would love your comments on your epiphanies (by the way, there can be very good epiphanies, too, such as meeting somebody and knowing virtually in an instant you love that person desperately – yes, I do believe in love at first sight – and that your life will ever after be altered) and what they meant to you.

Had a telephone conversation with my brother yesterday. I like chatting with him mainly because I like him and feel blessed in having a fraternal link that means a lot to us both.

Whereas topics were once about our houses, cars, which ‘hotties’ were of interest, vacations, respective families and so forth, I realized after a time and certainly retrospectively, we’d had an ‘old guy’ conversation.

Instead of chatting about agreeable, even inspiring or arousing stuff our subject areas went to health. He and I are both suffering from ‘conditions’ that sap our quality of life to a degree and discussed how we are dealing with those things. I thought for a moment I was listening to my grandparents. Neither are life-threatening as far as we know – actually, ‘life’ is life threatening – but they are vexing.

And then we got into longevity. Once I passed the age of 50 I started perusing the obituary columns in both the local papers and the big city ones. I revelled in subjects that had lived good long lives and hated reading about ones that had died before my age. Somehow I took solace in the person having been a suicide because he/she made that choice; it wasn’t God who did.

I also hated reading about people who I knew or had gone to school with. And then locally I found people I just might know quite well, and that could be devastating.

Then our conversation segued into our own longevity. As it stands I have already outlived my mother, but she didn’t take very good care of herself, poor soul.

So we discussed aunts and uncles who had lived to a very ripe age. I have one aunt who turned 100 a short time ago, and another who made it well into her 90s. Whew. Those are blessings. I had two great aunts who made it past their centennials. It’s all about genes, we are told.

So that seems to be where my bro and I are these days, Kind of dreary..

“If a gentleman is to break wind in an elevator he should first remove his hat.” An etiquette rule from 1894, I believe.

Sorry, that little crudism is to indicate the topic of elevators will dominate this blog. Or, if you live across the big pond, then ‘lifts’, which I actually think is a preferable word as it is shorter and offers less chance for error.

But, about breaking wind in elevators – nah, I think enough has been said and we likely all have our horror stories, and frankly I don’t want to hear them.

Nowadays we take elevators for granted, yet did you know that prior to their widespread use most buildings were no higher than six floors. With the innovations of Elisha Otis in the 1850s, elevators became widely used quite rapidly and this led, ultimately to the advent of the skyscraper. Otis, did not actually invent the elevator, what he invented was the brake for when it reached assorted floors, rendering tall buildings of the sort leapt by Superman feasible.

Some people are phobic about elevators and have anxieties about their cables breaking and the car plummeting to the ground at breakneck speed. But, as WC Fields once opined it’s not the plummeting that will kill you it’s the abrupt stop at teh bottom that’ll do the damage. Surprisingly perhaps, very rarely has this happened and more people have been killed by falling into open elevator shafts.

Lift phobics are also apprehensive about being trapped in an elevator that ceases functioning in mid-voyage. You hear tales of people jammed up in stuck elevators in which it has taken at times many, many hours to extricate them. This has left me with the question that if it was a long time, where do the people go to the bathroom? How do they decide on the appropriate urination spot? Do they take a poll if there is a few of them in the car? And if they are boys and girls there is bound to be a bit of embarrassment.

I was once trapped in a lift in a London hotel. My co-passenger was an attractive blonde lady. We were only stuck for about a half hour but when you don’t know how long you will actually be in the situation you tend to get uneasy. Fortunately we weren’t there long enough to have to worry about nature calling in an embarrassing way. Oh well, it would have enabled us to get to know each other more intimately than we’d intended, what with English reserve and all being put to the ultimate test.

The oddest elevator I ever rode was in a Brussels hotel a few years ago. It was ancient and tiny and invariably made us uneasy since it seemed to be the vintage of an Otis original. On one ride a young female hotel staffer joined us and noted that “I so hate this lift. It’ s so old i always think it’s going to crash to the basement.” Her comment wasn’t reassuring.

1evators. I think they’re cool and a bit like going up in a helicopter as the ground disappears beneath one’s feet. Wendy, who does not share my height anxiety cannot, however, ride in them.

Prior to 9/11 doubtless one of the most terrifying elevator moments came in July 1945 when a B-25 bomber crashed into the 79^th floor of the Empire State Building. The impact, which killed 14 people also caused an elevator to plummet earthward. Blessedly, safety devices in the lift stopped its progress and the two women in the elevator survived their injuries. Wonder if they were able to ride an elevator again?

Nowadays, as we see our cities grow up and up ad infinitim Babel-tower wise I am sometimes left with the thought that maybe Mr. Otis’s innovation hasn’t served us all that well in our phallic-building obsession.

I rather like the idea of the Island of Kauai that steadfastly holds to a construction rule that deems there cannot be any structure taller than a coconut palm.

Maybe it’s much too early in the game
Ah, but I thought I’d ask you just the same
What are you doing New Year’s
New Year’s Eve?

Dateless on New Year’s Eve: what could be worse? You had to plan months ahead sometimes – at least until you had a steady – to make sure you wouldn’t be without a kissy-face partner for when the ball dropped at that mystical time.

But then I found, once I had that kissy-face steady, that sometimes there were spare females wandering around a larger social gathering back in the days of my callow and heedless youth. Consequently, one time, after having visited the beverage site with too much indiscretion, and having noticed those spare females, I engaged one in very, very fond embrace in an upper hallway of the house in which the party was being held. In fact, kissing her passionately, and with my hand well down the back of her long skirt, my steady’s best girlfriend wandered by. Any excuse that I was administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation wouldn’t fly, I knew.

Anyway, girlfriend’s girlfriend never told my steady, but she was notably chilly with me for a few months after Jan. 1. As for the other girl; I have no idea what her name was.

And that to me epitomized all that I particularly loathe about New Year’s Eve. And, as the senseless hedonism of youth loses its allure, I find this fabricated festive time even more irksome.

Over the years I went to house-parties galore. Then we went to a couple of soirees held at local hotel ballrooms. They were singularly detestable exercises in forced frivolity. Do you really want to kiss somebody you don’t know, have never even seen before, and don’t even find especially attractive? I know I don’t. Not any longer I don’t.

So, it came as no surprise to me to read that a majority of Canadians, especially those past 40, essentially do absolutely nothing on New Year’s Eve. That news was also comforting. It let me know I am not either weird or antisocial. Well, the jury might be out on the weird part, but I’m not antisocial. I just don’t want to be told that this is an occasion in which I should have no-holds-barred fun. I’ve had that (see girl with long skirt) and it was a tiny bit enchanting. I no longer want that, anymore than I world want to wake up to an aching head due to overindulgence and lack of sleep.

Anyway, it’s never been the same since Guy Lombardo shuffled off this mortal coil.

And as festive celebrations go, I think I prefer Groundhog Day to NYE.