Chagal4's Blog

In a few days the map pin holding my old fashioned calendar on the wall will automatically drop out and the map of days will fall on the floor. It’s tired, that map pin…it was a heavy year. A lot of us will remember 2015 for a whole lot of unfortunate reasons. And yes there were, no doubt, some damn good times during this year too. That’s the way it is…always. The good things seem to make the bad days seem worse while at the same time they help us get beyond the bad times. Back at the beginning of the summer I was working on a little carpentry project…I smacked my thumb with the hammer…I dropped the damn hammer on the table while I cursed about my thumb…and then the hammer fell off the table onto my foot…double damnation…But see…I almost forgot about my thumb.

I know people are hoping that 2016 will be better than 2015…as if wishing will make it so. I’m not one of those. I can’t see into the future but looking backwards I can’t see anything that would encourage me to believe. O.K. well, Justin Trudeau got elected and the despicable Harper and his malignant minions were banished to vindictive valley of the Official Opposition. The Official Opposition has an old and mostly honourable tradition in our parliamentary system…but I’m pretty sure that the toxic cloud hanging over this opposition will have us all choking many times over the next four years. Still…the odious proctophiles are out and their forked tongues are busy licking their wounds.

But I digress. I’m not expecting 2016 to be better but I’m not expecting it to be worse either. I keep hearing the warlords to our south claiming that the ISickles are done for…and the same time they’re saying that only a few more billions are needed to prop up the colossally corrupt puppet regimes in those ravaged countries. I can’t imagine what kind of diplomatic deal from hell would put ISIS back in the crypt from which it sprang and in fact I can’t imagine that anything positive has been done for the damaged and deluded kids who join those murderous gangs in the first place. So no…I don’t think that the attacks in France or the U.S. or U.K. or Canada or Germany or anywhere, for that matter, will stop in 2016.

I don’t expect the war on drugs to end next year. I certainly don’t see an end to poverty here, there, anywhere. I don’t expect to see water magically appear in drought ridden Africa until most of the people in those parts are dead or gone and the big European agri-businesses buy up the land and plant fruit and vegetables to sell back to Europe. I don’t expect slavery to end…because why would it as long as we can buy boat loads of stuff cheap. And these are all bad things.

There was an accord reached in Paris in 2015 that made some promises to Mother Nature. They’re now wondering where to mail her copy. Personally, I think she’s still plenty pissed off and the paper chase in Paris isn’t going to improve her mood. I’m one of those who think that she’s still carrying a monster rage about those nuclear firecrackers that the Americans and Russians and Chinese and French and who knows who else shot off in the fifties and sixties…”For the good of mankind”. The accord? A step in the right direction.

So…all of this…dismal shit is enough to depress a person. Forget that…we can’t afford depression. We can’t afford despair. We need to be optimistically alert. We need to stay awake and look for opportunities to make it better…and seize them…even if it’s only something little. Mow the fucking lawn…pick up the trash…recycle and bicycle…buy the bum a coffee. Kiss your mother in law…give some asshole the benefit of the doubt. Tell your pals you love them…buy less shit that you don’t need…take care of yourself. Recognize fools for what they are…not who they are. Give yourself a break.

Some time ago we developed this stupid habit of believing that if we could name a thing we could manage it. But if that “thing” is bull-riding…there is a fair chance that repeating those words over and over will not get you out of the field in one piece. Being able to spell “psychotic” won’t make the word a better place and all of the conversations you’ve had about tsunamis won’t turn one into sushi. So, repeat after me. “Naming shit will not manage it.” I’m thinking of having tee shirts made. I would like to have had that thought before the Paris conference on the environment.

The recent news about intense air pollution in China conveniently appeared in the media while the debate fogged the conference rooms in Paris…And it didn’t take long to note that along with China, India, Pakistan, Iran and other countries had air pollution indicators that were far off the scale for human consumption. I don’t want to be crude but sometimes when the sky is sick…it vomits. Using a cute name like “smog” doesn’t stop it…doesn’t explain or fix it…doesn’t analyze its parts or enable you to breathe.

And the western world has no business being smug about smog…back at the turn of another century the great fogs of London killed hundreds of people…men were hired to carry torches in front of vehicles moving at a slow walking pace because one couldn’t see ten feet. There’s a story about people wearing fog hats…with a light on top so they wouldn’t get hit by cars. The industrial revolution ran on coal…and houses ran on coal and oil…and vehicles…and the air was filled with vapours of every kind. I’m surprised that noses didn’t drop off the evolutionary table.

When I was a kid (default phrase for tedious old people)…I grew up down river from Detroit, Michigan. And just so we all understand how rivers work…if Detroit is up river and my town is down river…throw a stick in the water in Detroit, chances are it’ll float past my town. And if the only things that got thrown into the water were sticks …things would be joyful. The city of Windsor, Ontario is right across the river from Detroit. It’s up river too. Detroit has steel mills and stamping plants and heavy industry and Windsor does too. There are distilleries for whiskey and chemical plants and one of the biggest salt mines in North America all up river. They all dumped their waste into the water. And of course, hundreds of thousands of people. One day when I was about twelve I went down to the river and it was orange from shore to shore. Apparently they were flushing slag and rust out of the Bessemer converters…up river. Fish died. Chemical plants turned the water milky…and some days in the summer there was a smell…like turpentine or benzine…burned  your throat and eyes. Fish died. Soon fish developed weird shapes…I didn’t actually see any two headed fish…but I heard that there were some caught with little legs like they were thinking about learning to walk ashore…and get the hell outta there. People died too…I’ve never seen the statistics on cancers and heart disease and lung diseases and kidney diseases…but you know…there were an awful lot of those around there. O.K. so I know and hate pollution and hate it still after sixty years. So I feel for those people in China…and India and elsewhere. They have a name for what’s happening to them but that doesn’t stop it…doesn’t make it go away.

I hope those folks in Paris think of something…but I suspect that with so many countries and politicians involved…and the great political elephant chained in the corner of the room…It has a name too…”The Economy”. I suspect that when all of the words are sorted and stacked and filed and pressed and analyzed…this is what they’ll say:

“We’re working on it…meanwhile…Don’t Breathe.”

Like millions of others last night, I spent three hours, off and on, watching a train wreck. The fact that it was news…that it was happening in front of our eyes…that it had become familiar enough that we knew what the “experts” were going to say before they said it…was obscene. News networks have managed to elevate the adrenaline levels on these things while filling airtime with non-information and sticking microphones into shocked and worried faces to demand…”what did you see?” with the ghoulism of “did you see any bodies?”. And all the time we know what they’re doing…They’re being us…They want to see the blood because we want to see the blood…they want to hear the shooting…because we want to hear the shooting. We do. We do because we want to follow it through to the climax…we want to see the bad guys caught or get killed and know that this train wreck is over. Later on we’ll want to know how and why it happened.

We have a horrific reality…not unlike the one in Paris that rips beyond entertainment. The loss of all these lives should not be entertainment. And yet because it is framed within a context in which movies and video games and T.V. portray hyper violence constantly…the format is no longer chilling…it’s familiar and the meaning is rendered “common”. All morning I kept hearing the media in Europe saying “Yet another American shooting” as if “American” is an adjective describing a particular kind of shooting rather than a place where it happened. Yes, there are a lot of them…many more than in any other country but these incidents certainly do happen in other countries.

Under it all you can feel the frustration of all of us…that more of these horror shows are inevitable…That there will be more surveillance, more cameras, more security checks, more police, more people buying and carrying weapons, more words from politicians, more promises, more questions with no real answers, and more drive to find an enemy off-shore to go after. And we’re not stupid people…we know that while there are enemies off shore…there are also people who may live down the street and around the corner. People you may have known for years, grew up with, went to school with, who flip out and start blasting. We certainly know it but we don’t want to think about that.

Because there’s even less that we can do about that than we can do to an off shore enemy. And when it happens we can’t just change the channel and there ain’t no wait a minute.