Chagal4's Blog

I wake up some mornings and I don’t know what the hell…where the hell…just what. It’s as if the word “what” has been painted on the inside of my forehead. Does that ever happen to you? If I’m rational I can recall where and when I went to bed…but it’s like I must have moved in my sleep. When I was in the Army there were these stories. I loved them. The Army had houses built on the bases for married soldiers called Personnel Married Quarters, PMQs. But like everything the military does …they chose a design and built two hundred of them…all on little identical streets. Well it’s obvious isn’t it? The stories about Harry getting hammered in the mess, staggering home kicking off the boots and laundry…up stairs and into bed with Mable…and George…who’s already there…of course, since it’s his house not Harry’s. And the stories were true (and not always accidental either).

In my case this morning, it took a minute or two to collect my wits. My own true love is away in Italy…I had rolled onto her side of the bed…and the world does look different from there…but the fact that she wasn’t there was the “what” number one. I looked over the side to see if she’d rolled out of bed…ridiculous!

It was only a moment of disorientation but somehow it made me try harder to wake up. It was almost like I needed to be ready in case some other reality had changed over night. Used to happen often back in my druggie days. Reality could change in minutes…still can.

Summer’s over…the day is rank grey and cold…the red moon has come and gone…along with the Pope. Seems like the seasons are having a WTF moment. The suits are sneering across the power tables and our politicians are rat fucking each other while smiling and shaking hands at bogus “debates”. I’m looking for a warm sweater and hoping that none of these guys gets elected…Now that would be a reality change. Maybe I should go back to bed.

At just about this time of last year I posted the painting below along with a note about missing and murdered Aboriginal women across Canada. More than a thousand of them. The red dress is also about redress because our federal government continues to insist that these are crimes (they are) and they should be treated as crimes (they should…and they should not) This is an issue that has been studied and continues to be studied from a number of directions. The Native Women’s Association of Canada has produced a report on more that five hundred and fifty cases with statistical breakdowns on murdered, missing, by strangers, by partners, by family members, whether on reserve or off by aboriginal or non-aboriginal persons. It would be wrong to say that nothing is being done but it would be fair to say that treating each individual case as a separate crime is myopic and begs much greater questions. Could there be serial killers targeting aboriginal women? Absolutely. Is there a deeper rift of abuse on reserve involving aboriginal girls and women? Also absolutely. Do young women “escape” to the cities ill prepared to cope with the culture shock? Do they end up vulnerable on the street? Yes and Yes. The stark reality is that a large percentage of all murders are domestic and committed by family members. The motives are simplistic or obscure but they are crimes that are relatively easy to solve. Murders of street people…by strangers, are less easily solved. Investigations of these crimes are costly and complicated. I’m not saying that police don’t try…but I am saying that resources have limits…and bodies found in ditches or in fields or lakes months after the fact don’t provide a lot of clues despite the advances in scientific forensics.

I’m not suggesting that the police should stop investigating the crimes or stop looking for the missing…but I am suggesting that the federal government (because this is a Canada wide problem) should invest in a deeper analysis of the condition of Aboriginal women (and non-aboriginal women) who are victims of violense. Patterns of behaviour need to be identified. Techniques for intervention should be developed, support systems should be put in place.

The NWAC report says that Aboriginal women make up approximately 3 percent of the general population…yet they are 10 percent of murdered or missing women.

This painting has hung over my drawing board for ages and I’m so used to it that I forget to look at it. Yesterday there was a change in the light and I saw it again and smiled. The stories of these people are tucked away in my head…I love the valet parking guy’s disdain and the bird-like haircut on the big guy. Her eyes stare at nothing like she doesn’t give a shit…but she’s the one with the keys. When I was painting it…I wondered where they were going. I worked on it for three months…hid it behind a door for longer than that. Then I made the lime green frame and loved it.

It’s mixed media: acrylic, conte, ink, Krylon, sidewalk chalk.

They say there’s going to be a “supermoon” tonight and I believe them , whoever they are, because they almost never lie about things like that. They also say that the supermoon will cause higher tides than usual and I think that’s true too because I can feel it already pulling my blood and bodily fluids up and up…making me taller. Of course when the moon returns to normal I’ll slouch back into my usual  shape. I don’t know what it is about these events that makes me feel a kind of kinship with other humans and even a few animals on the planet. Maybe it’s because it’s something we can all see…that’s beyond us..that doesn’t happen every day…and what we see is the same remarkable thing. It doesn’t require explanation, translation or definition. It just is. And it reminds me that so much of what we experience is moderated or modulated through another perspective. Some bullshit analysis or interpretation fed through the media…to tell us what we saw or heard or felt. It makes us intellectually lazy. We watch and listen but we don’t absorb things until some one comes to tell us what it was…then we say “Oh…O.K.”

But tonight…when it gets dark, I’m going to fix myself a rye and coke…grab my blanket and cushion and go out on my balcony and look at the sky…look at the moon and feel the high tide of my blood sit me taller in my chair. And I’ll be thinking of all of you who are doing the same thing.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t get sucked into the long campaign leading up to Canada’s election. The lead up to the polls is usually half the time that was allotted for this one which happens next month. You would think that the longer time line would provide more opportunity for the parties to explain their positions and voters to get enough information to vote wisely. Of course it doesn’t work that way. As it happens in the U.S. the U.K. and elsewhere these campaigns focus on the leaders of the parties. The leaders become the primary spokes-persons for the party and voters get the information and analysis from the media. This is a great flaw in our system it seems to me. We are being asked to elect a government…and regardless of the party, governments are made up of teams of people who are appointed by the successful leader to head the various ministries of government. These ministers become the “cabinet” of the government and together direct the business of government. In Canada their decisions on major issues are submitted to the parliament for approval and the party with the majority of votes gets to approve what they want. In fact it’s much more complicated than that and hundreds of decisions are made by cabinet ministers and enacted without ever seeing the parliament. In any modern government there are simply too many policy and management decisions to be made. Some governments rely heavily on the bureaucracy of the public service for advice, guidance and minor operational changes and adjustments. Generally, conservative governments keep a tighter rein on the public service and this tends to slow things down. More liberal governments rely more on the experience and expertise of the bureaucrats and concentrate on larger policy issues. Our problem as voters is that we know little about the teams of the various parties leading up to any election…who might be Finance Minister or Defence Minister…or Attorney General. These are extremely important people in government. All of the ministers are. Not knowing who the prospective ministers might be is a big problem for me. Politicians will argue that trying to identify them all before hand would be impossible because some of them may not get elected. I can live with that. Tell us who they might be…let us peak at their qualifications…It might help us decide to elect them. But trusting a bunch of so called “leaders” to do the right thing, is getting less and less rational. Especially since we have a growing body of evidence that the “right thing” has so often been the wrong thing. The core of the problem is that successful parties assume that they have carte blanche to make hundreds of decisions over the next four years or so because the voters have approved  their “platform”…their general policy direction. In fact parties work very hard to keep their message simple in order to get elected. They believe that voters don’t want to be confused by complicated details about government. They’re probably right, up to a point…but in the past three decades party politics has come to rely more on polarizing attack advertising and less on any clear information on the future direction of the government. In Canada the past ten years has seen the growing rhetoric that anyone not supporting the conservative position is a left wing crypto commie…and the other parties see the conservatives as right wing fanatics. And while the polarization has hardened positions to the point that party loyalists on all sides support the party no matter what… none of the parties have a monopoly on left or right wing thinking. The world has become too technically complex to take such rigid positions. As long as we continue this bullshit, systematic, muddy-water, politics we’ll continue to elect people who prove time and time again that they’re in over their heads…and voters will be be pushed further and further from any understanding of what’s going on.

And now I promise not to get sucked into this mess again…until later.

She had two little dogs…white and fluffy dogs…well, not luminously white, actually. A bit frosted grey around the edges. They had puffy ribbon bows around their necks , one in sky blue and the other in pink, naturally. She must have fed the little monsters amphetamines because they zipped around on the end of their leashes like tweekers on welfare day. I tried to drink my apple juice  while those things snapped and yapped at passing strangers…I kept looking around for a pit bull…There’s never one of those damn things around when you need one.

She was a round lady…I had the impression that if she tripped on one of those leashes she’d roll end over end. I wanted her to be unpleasant. It wasn’t her fault . It was just that kind of day. I wasn’t even sure I was seeing her correctly. She might have been taller and less round than I thought. An argument with my bank…a split in the seam of my car seat…missed my tax deadline…I tied my shoes carefully because a broken lace would have sent me back to bed. And it was grey and cloudy and summer was just over….and the early alarmist warnings about how cold winter will be were just filtering out of the fear mongers. Look, I just wanted to drink my juice and read my book and chill for half an hour or so. But there was that hat. Where the hell would one get a hat like that? Maybe she made it…in which case, maybe it was art!

About three tables away she was sitting…and for a minute the sun broke through and lit up that weird hat. And just for an instant I was blown away to Paris in the thirties and a dragon lady called La Mome Bijou. Drinking absinthe and collecting gossip…knowing and seeing and enduring the sarcasm and smiles of the “smarter set”…she left a poignant memory of the person within…and a warning that the cult of beauty…was a fraud. A lot of us older people feel that way now.

So I silently thanked her…withdrew my nasty little thoughts…and went back to my book…feeling better about everything.

I had my six month meeting with the oncologist a couple of days ago. I spent the two weeks preceding the visit elevating my blood pressure and anxiety while pretending that it was just another visit. I made my wife miserable and I apologize. For me I think it’s a kind of anticipatory stress syndrome. I don’t want to fall apart in the examining room if the news is bad. To add a little extra frisson…the oncologist who walked me through four years of these anxious visits…has retired. i wish him well…good seas and a following wind. For anyone in this medical specialty it cannot be easy. So I was meeting my new oncologist for the first time. She was running two hours late and I was tired and so was Louise. When she finally arrived all I could think was that she seemed so young. Honestly, at my age most people are starting to look pretty young. It doesn’t matter of course and I realize that it’s a stupid prejudice…but then the whole business of cancer is a perplexing, frightening, deeply personal experience. She just became part of it for me. The meeting turned out to be O.K.

“Come back in a year” she finally said. That’s shorthand for …we’re not watching you every six months anymore. On the one hand…that’s good news…on the other there’s this reluctance to let go of those six month visits. So I got dressed, thanked her and we left… It takes a couple of days to come down from those nerves and yesterday I rode thirty hard kilometres on my bike to blow it all out of my head…and to be sure I was tired enough to sleep.

Sitting in the waiting room at the Cancer Centre for a couple of hours is a daunting experience. It’s a modern, recently renovated and decorated space filled with light from high, wide windows and open  interiors. The place is furnished with comfortable chairs and short couches because they know that people arrive here to wait as couples…husband wife, daughter parent, son parent…those configurations. Or just friends…that’s good too. Because it’s not a place you want to spend time alone. As you look around you see people receding into themselves…withdrawing to wherever strength resides. They smile and nod and talk but their minds like mine are already standing outside the examining room door. It’s not so much a lesson in humility, although it may be that…as a lesson learned every time about humanity. And as much as I wish Louise didn’t have to be there…I’m glad that she was.

This a painting called “Spanish Dancers” .

One of the biggest car makers in the world thinks that environmental testing and emissions controls are a joke…so they invent a gizmo that beats the testing. One of the biggest business consulting firms in the world  appears to have assisted millionaires in Canada in avoiding taxes…and they also appear to have friends in high places in the Canadian government. One of the biggest construction companies in Canada is alleged to have paid bribes to the Libyan ruling family. Should we be surprised at this? No…we shouldn’t. This is business…Oh, and what about the entrepreneur who buys the rights to a drug produced back in the fifties which sold for about thirteen bucks a pill and raises the price to seven hundred and change per pill…It saves lives…this pill. The entrepreneur says that saving lives should cost more than thirteen bucks a pill. Hey…good thinking dude.