Chagal4's Blog

If I stand in the middle of a room and turn in a complete circle it becomes evident to me almost immediately. No event stems from a single cause. Yet I never want this to be true. I suppose it’s because with a single cause the effect can be avoided in the future or punished to oblivion or blown  away with the convenience of an explanation. We’re great believers that explanations are solutions…so having a single cause to blame for an event or effect makes things…easier. It’s the lone assassin theory of psychology.  Not long ago I sat in the tangle of my blankets and considered cancer…my cancer…not for the first nor the last time and when the hairs on the back of my neck begin to stand up and shiver…I know I’ve arrived at the state I call “Very Fucked Up”. This is not something you want to wake your loved ones with in the middle of the night…no phone call…no nudging your partner.

Years ago I was driving in British Columbia somewhere that lower mainlanders refer to as the “interior” . I’ve always loved that concept. It conjures up lions and tigers and bears or mountains too tough to tame and strange people peeking from the bush on the side of the road..dressed in tourist rags and wearing ten year old dead Walkmans as totemic jewelry. But no, there was none of that on this particular trip. Instead there was a level crossing and one of the worlds longest trains commenced to pass before my eyes as I sat there…the only car on the road, it seemed. That train had two engines in front and two more in the middle so you know it was long and headed for the mountains (too tough to tame). If that train had a name it would have been Epiphany and of course, like some of the best Epiphanies..this one didn’t dawn on me for years. It was a simple thing. At one point, because the of the perspective and the length of that train, I couldn’t see the beginning or the end. Sat there in the summer sun with the top down and listened to clatter and clickety click of the wheels. I couldn’t go anywhere until it passed…and going back would not get me where I wanted to go and eventually the train would come to an end..light another cigarette and push the seat back. But…wake up in the centre of a cold dark night with cancer on your mind and you see that train going by…and going by …and going faster and it could go off the rails and you can’t start the damn car and you dropped the fucking lit cigarette onto your lap and it rolled under you…and there’s this huge black truck pulled up behind you so you can’t turn around anyway…and smoke is curling up from your crotch and the train wheels are roaring in your head and you are..very…fucked…up. Try explaining that to your pals. I preferred not to. I couldn’t find the words to explain what was happening to my mind…and I wanted the words to be normal sounding…with nice round vowels and reassuring consonants. All of the words in my head had sharp corners…I didn’t think I could say them…I thought I’d have to spit them.

I figured that if I could find a single cause…it would lead me straight out of “very fucked up” . Just putting that single cause out there ..everybody would go…”Oh…that” and understand and just like that the train would have passed and we could all move on. Well…no. The train does pass but the single  cause isn’t there. I suppose it’s because it’s not the cancer that fucks me up…it’s the thought of trying to explain my life from the beginning of the train to the end…in terms of the cancer.

So much easier to blame it on the “nuclears”…if “blame” is the right word. Where I grew up the “nuclears’ were a big topic back in the day. Those suckers were the credible explanation for hens not laying…for the car not starting…for one cold too many last winter… for the colour of sunset for three days in a row last June…remember that? I like the idea of the “nuclears” being at the bottom of it all. It allows for a free flowing anger about man’s endeavours to be clever…about people messing around with stuff they shouldn’t be messing with and it absolves me. It permits me to say “It’s very fucked up” and not”I’m very fucked up”.

And sometimes that’s all I need to get back in my warm blankets and off to sleep.

And there’s this too…Each time I see that train in the middle of the night…I am more confident that it will pass. I realized that I didn’t have to explain it to anybody…it’s just me trying to understand it all. There are lots of different trains in all of our lives that make us stop and ask…”What did I do to deserve this?” and the answer really is…”Nothing” or “Everything” So what?  That train doesn’t even know your name.  Go back to sleep…wake up tomorrow…Keep going.

O.K. I’m not anti-poverty, I’m anti-wealth. Saying it up front like that should give you the chance to stop reading now. I don’t know if I was always anti-wealth…it was radical chic to be “anti -poverty” for decades or at least to say that you were. But see, the thing is that in spite of almost every-one I knew and loved being anti-poverty and millions more besides…the levels of poverty never seemed to get any less. With all of these people being opposed to poverty you’d think that over time there would be, should be, less. Yet everywhere I look there seems to be more…and it appears to be worse. Now, it’s possible that I just wasn’t looking closely enough before…Maybe it’s always been about the same or even more…before. Maybe because media have expanded so much in the past two or three decades I’m just seeing more of what was already there. And I can’t deny that some places in the world where great poverty was endemic now appear to have improved significantly. But then there are places like Flint, Michigan, Sheffield in England, the great American rust belt, and there are rumours starting about a new dust bowl somewhere in the mid-west. These are places that once enjoyed prosperity only to have it snatched away by caprice…like a fresh baked pie off granny’s window sill. And there are whole countries in Africa that are redefining misery.

You’d have to be blind not to know that the gap between the obscenely wealthy and the too-damned-poor has grown outrageously. And yet like slum dog millionaires we are still seduced by the possibility that in a society that produces fabulous wealth, a poor wage slave with a bright idea can hoist his tired body out of poverty purgatory and cruise the mean streets in his very own Maybach…and it happens …just ask any rap music mogul. I was amazed to discover that there were poor people in the United States opposed to a public health care system…because it was going to cost more taxes, I suppose. It is to be presumed that most of these people don’t expect to be sick. And of course the wealthy don’t need a public health care system and wouldn’t participate if there was one…so who does that leave? Sick people with no money…or sick people from the middle class who will soon have no money if they get seriously sick. It’s a bitch to have to mortgage your house for heart surgery and get out of the hospital and have nowhere to live. Never-mind…you’re still alive….if you hadn’t had a house to sell…you could be dead. It’s the dawning thought of this reality that is striking people who look at Wall Street and say…”O.K. that’s enough” I look at the people who “occupy” and think…jesus …they’re so polite.

So what’s happening here? Well, the biggest baby boom generation in history has reached the edge of old age and they realize that the chances of winning the opportunity lottery and leaping the poverty/prosperity gap into the big home in Malibu are damn near nil. Having believed and supported the wealth system all their lives with that vague hope that they or their off spring could join the monied class…they’ll be lucky to drive that five year old Chevvy toward the sunset (and with the price of gas…)not all the way. Yet these people are light years removed from the people who are truly poor in the world. Personally I think the global poor  never really knew just how poor they were until the modern age of high technology. Oh, they knew they were poor…but just HOW poor is hard to know unless you have some comparison. If you’re only looking down the street…or at the next village…well, some are a little better off…most are about the same. But if you can get access to computers, to cell phones, to the internet, six month old magazines…then you can look at a much bigger world for comparison…on a full time basis. That “full time basis” is important because it means that you can always know how abysmal you are and also where the money went. And when people got to see what Wall Street and the big banks around the world did with the money and the collusion that governments fell into with the bankers…it was like watching the future curl at the edges and go up in smoke.

We have always been the victims of propaganda and our own self delusions. Big business in the developed world has argued, still argues, that they are the spinners of productivity, prosperity, jobs,wealth etc. and that they therefore deserve special status. Tax incentives, freedom from “excessive” regulation, no scrutiny of compensation packages, protection from whiners and whistleblowers, government assistance to invade other countries, to enforce and impose tariff protections, favourable loan structures, access to intelligence. And if…especially if, the general public might object…government should assist in keeping them uninformed and quiet. Back in the day…”big sugar” and “big fruit” even got their governments to invade foreign countries that didn’t want to play ball. How ironic that now some of the best baseball players come from those countries.  What about here and now? Well,I think that the “occupiers” are right. The bullshit about “too big to fail” and “the engines of prosperity” wont sell any more. Yes, business and corporations have created jobs and prosperity. Yes, without them we’d probably be rubbing sticks together for heat. Yes, there are businesses that behave ethically, share the wealth…relate to their communities, listen to the music. Maybe they are the majority. I’d like to think so, but if so it looks more and more like a slim majority because the gap between the rich and poor is growing so fast and the tiny percentage at the top are accumulating so much that they might as well be on another planet.

Business and corporations in the name of progress have all but but wiped out family farms. They  had to, according to them, because the family farms had become too inefficient to feed our populations…but agri-corps can do it and make enough profit to grow huge crops in foreign countries, export the product to more profitable markets and watch the local people starve. Ethical? Corporations call North American workers unproductive and move their factories off shore…where the pay rates are ten percent of North American rates…and then sell their products back to north Americans . The oil companies punch a hole in the Gulf of Mexico and two years later the president of the U.S. gives them back their toys and says “play nice this time”. Think he had a choice?  The oil companies want a pipeline from Canada to the Texas refineries. Did the Canadian government ask Canadians if they thought this was a good idea? Did you know that Canada is one the world’s biggest oil producers and yet we pay more for our gas than Americans do?  Corporations have essentially taken tax breaks…(as good as revenue to the accountants) and used the money to lobby government for grants, subsidies and incentives to move profit centres off shore where even less tax is charged. In effect, many corporations have become nation states whose “citizens” are shareholders, whose governments are board members, whose presidents and vice-presidents are managers and whose budgets are often greater than the national treasuries of small countries. To imagine that these “nations” are not political is delusional. They don’t need diplomatic status at the United Nations, they have lobbyists and they can and do buy and install politicians to do their bidding. They have the best educated strategists and legal experts, they plan ahead, they are global. The question is…if they’re so fucking good at what they do, why are we in the mess we’re in….and why is the poverty gap growing so fast? And the answer is ridiculous. It’s because they’re so fucking good at what they do. And what they’re so good at is amassing wealth and power for their “citizens” at the expense of the rest of us who have absolutely no real access to that process. And the terrible dilemma we face is that there are actually good and ethical and moral people in these corporations and they don’t have the faintest idea of how to stop this process. Recently we’ve seen billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others having some kind of epiphany…turning out their bank accounts to “give something back”. Good? Yes the money will do some good things, maybe great things…Fundamentally good? No. It’s frightening. It means that these billionaires at the top of the corporate world have no idea how to keep the machine they created, or built, or inherited, from pouring more and more wealth into their pockets and those of their “citizens” and the only way they can compensate is to reach out to the greater society with their own purse. Does this redistribute wealth or reduce the poverty gap? Not even close.

Stay tuned…I need to think some more about this..So should you.

A trial opened here the other day for three people charged with murdering four other people. If you only read or heard that much…you might think this was a biker gang shoot out  or a bad Saturday night in China-town. You could reasonably conclude that drugs or money were involved. You’d be wrong. On trial were a husband, a wife (the second) and a son. The victims were three daughters of this family and the first wife…who may or may not have had the momentary joy of divorce. If there is a heaven for those who have been so violated…she may have the eternal joy of never seeing this family again. This was a so-called “honour killing” although one could be forgiven for seeing it as an “honour slaughter”. The women were found in a car submerged in a lock on the Rideau Canal near Kingston, drowned. It happened during the night. According to the father/husband they were asleep at a motel…the women in a separate room…and as far as he knew the former wife decided at 2:00 A.M. to have driving lesson …so she “took” the keys to one of two vehicles and  loaded up the three teenaged daughters and eventually drove them all into the lock . End of story? Not quite. Somebody witnessed a second vehicle driving away at speed… It was an S.U.V. and it appeared to have pushed the other car into the lock. Of course the witness didn’t appear until later. Meanwhile no one…not even the cops could imagine that this was anything but a tragic accident…although it would have taken some seriously tricky driving skills for  a beginner to run into the canal at precisely this spot in the middle of the night in a strange town. Pity they didn’t look at the front end of daddy’s S.U.V.

O.K. so the not very apparently bereaved family heads off home to Montreal and the polis proceed to investigate. A surprising and alarming number of small ahahs appear in the situation. The rear bumper of the car in the canal is dented…at least three of the victims (the daughters) appeared to have made no attempt to escape from the submerged car although there was one window through which they might have. So, were they dozing off at the time or drugged? The former wife seemed to have been moving after the car sank. Back in Montreal the good son smacks the S.U.V. into a post and heads off to the body shop for explainable repairs to the front end. Everything goes quiet around the miserable household and the mystery in Kingston begins to grind its gears toward the unthinkable conclusion. Questioning of the family reveals a few details.

The family had gone to Niagara Falls to celebrate the nuptials of one of the late daughters, hmmm, minus the daughter’s husband or husband to be or husband recently annulled (these things suffer from translation don’t they?)…They decided they didn’t like the place so they left Niagara Falls for the long drive back to Montreal in two vehicles…the car and the S.U.V. .  Dad was driving the S.U.V. and the good son was driving the car…not clear how the passengers were distributed through the vehicles. They got tired of driving and stopped beside the highway to talk it over…the son was dispatched to find a motel. They were right beside Kingston. So far so good. They check in. The next morning they find the girls and the former wife missing with the car. Oh dear! When the Polis got around to sharing the bad news…the words “canal? what canal?” glowed unconvincingly in dull grey neon across the foreheads of father and son. Mom’s mind was visiting outer space one presumably and no neon appeared on her forehead. At this point the input from the surviving family members got extremely limited and no amount of translation from native tongue would help. Eventually interviews of other family members…neighbours, friends of the dead girls began to surface. The family was relatively well off, The father had bought a small strip mall in Montreal for $2 million. This greatly facilitated and fast tracked his immigration. It was a strict home…father was very upset about the daughters transition to loose north american culture. One dared to marry without dad’s blessing…rage was called in to sort things out. The former wife was part of the household although it’s not clear what part exactly…Dad thought she was encouraging the daughters to bring shame upon his noble head. Rage left town and something cold and dark arrived.

What was once unthinkable back in Kingston was suddenly very thinkable….and once thought there was only one ultimate conclusion. From that moment…a trial was merely a formality whose purpose was to decide whether all three of the remaining family were in on it. For the legally minded the question is whether the prosecution can prove who did what…and how. For most people on the street that question is trivial.

It isn’t amazing at all that our minds have learned to leap beyond the hideous details of this case to assume that this was an honour killing. Forty or fifty years ago…maybe even thirty years ago virtually no one in North America would recognize the term or what it meant. Now we’ve been exposed to a culture clash that makes the term all too recognizeable. This isn’t the first case to happen in Canada and it won’t be the last. It is by far the worst and it’s likely to remain the worst. In the court of public opinion the family and by extension their culture have already been convicted. One of the dismal consequences of this business is the fact that people are condemning the culture; are less tolerant of people who come from other cultures.

Our culture has lost its frame of reference for this outrage but it wasn’t so very long ago that families here in North America were ostracizing daughters who got pregnant out of wed-lock…who went off with the “wrong” boy. We saw young men disinherited for “bringing shame to the family name”. Along with these things there were young women locked up by their families, brutalities and beatings, forced abortions and a whole slew of greater and lesser evils. Is it possible a hundred a fifty years ago our culture had “honour killings”?  Sure it is. Our culture was still lynching people less than fifty years ago.

Knowing any or all of that does nothing to make what happened in Kingston anything less than monstrous and a ghastly perversion of any notion of humanity. I don’t know what sort of justice will emerge from this trial…maybe none. but if there is any justice at all it should include an unmistakable message to any who are here, who come from here or who come from elsewhere that women are not chattel…that there is no honour in this…that this behaviour goes so far beyond dishonour that it needs to be extirpated from all societies like the cancer it is.

Two dismal things happen in September as far as I’m concerned. Summer ends…and the politicians come back to Ottawa to start a new session of what they are pleased to call democratic government. The end of summer is dismal only in the sense that it leans on your shoulder…tugs on your sleeve and whispers “winter” in your ear. First there is Autumn of course and Autumn is often heartbreakingly beautiful…the trees get all dressed up in brilliant colours and dance away in the wind ..The sky is a blue so crisp you could eat it like an apple. Autumn is good sleeping weather too, with those cold nights and early sunsets..Still September is a warning of dismal to come. In early September there is a fire sale all over this country on dark suits. Black ones, blue ones, snotty pin stripes cheap ones, expensive ones…well tailored and ill fitting, they all appear on the streets of the capitol like escaped clergy. Dark suits are the uniform of serious intent…There’s a hidden label in every one that says “we mean business”. And those who wear these uniforms, men and women…old and young…liberal or conservative…usually do (mean business). The trouble is that we too often don’t quite know what business they mean. The business of politics has become increasingly arcane over the years and as they constantly remind us…much too complicated for ordinary people to understand. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that upon election and sanctification into the sacred precincts of cabinet…ordinary people are transformed into extraordinary people. This is especially true of Prime Ministers, who, prior to becoming Prime Ministers, may have led the most ordinary of lives (they beg you to believe) only to become bloody brilliant, at last, as they stand in front of the Queen’s representative (this is Canada) and raise their right hand, saying “you bet, Liz” in both official languages. Is it any wonder the return of these humourless suits signals the threat of dismal?

I was trapped in traffic on my bicycle today. It was sunny and warm, a gorgeous day if I disregard an unfortunate half hour with an unfeeling doctor earlier. Suddenly the air was filled with the unmistakeable howl of Old Spice…and Aqua Velva…and there is nothing as democratic as those two aftershaves. I can remember my first few shaves and the shock of slapping a hand full of liquid fire onto my face…blowing my eyes open like a pair of broken barn doors…cauterizing every nick and cut instantly. My head snapped around in search of that mingled scent but I already knew it would be a horde of dark suits and fresh haircuts.  Ruthless white shirts with tight collars cinching red necks glowing with summer tans, they stride purposefully across the intersection oblivious to the waiting traffic…They are on the nation’s business. Of course it could have been nothing more than fifty rubber necking conventioneers…but no…I don’t think so.

This country, like most of the so-called G-twenty countries is wrestling with the question of just what democracy is in the modern world. It probably wouldn’t be a serious question at all if we weren’t trying to sell some mystical version of it to developing countries while practising another variety altogether here at home. Thousands of people launch themselves into the streets every year or so to point out the more glaring inconsistencies of the rhetoric and reality and the suits bring out ever more sinister looking quasi military police dressed in more and more medieval costumes to reinforce the message that “reality rules” and rhetoric gets its ass kicked. Well…we elected them…or at least somebody did and now they’re extraordinary people with responsibilities that we simply cannot comprehend…but come September, even though I am seized with the passing of summer…I watch that horde of dark suits flowing up the street like black smoke…and I think it’s high time we made an effort to comprehend and hold those suits accountable for the brand of democracy we’re sliding into.

Well I don’t know…I wake up in the middle of the night, like a lot of people do…to pee. Apparently it’s an old age thing….needing that middle of the night pee.  Most of the time I make it back to the rack and drift off on a dream…alas it’s almost never the one I left when I got up. Sometimes though I find that the little canoe of dreamland has drifted way and left me beached and awake with a head filled with unwelcome thoughts. Not terribly unwelcome, no, but maybe annoying. Usually it starts with some unfinished thought from earlier in the day…and I could have looked it up on the web in two minutes…but now I’m wrapped in warm sheets half awake and too far away from the keyboard to consider that route. Last night was not one of those. Instead I was stuck on the phrase “centre of excellence”. I used to hear it all the time when I worked in the government and even found myself a few times in the exact location of one of those centres of excellence. M-M-M-n-n no, I looked around pretty carefully and excellence didn’t raise it’s hand. Of course I asked…and found that people had been trained…and now tried to approach “clients” with polite smiles and helpful demeanours…and to take special care with their needs and to file the appropriate papers in the appropriate places in case some other excellent public servant might be called upon to follow-up. Naturally those things are often not immediately obvious to the casual observer. I, for one, have always figured we could all use a little more excellence in our lives. Finding it seems to be a problem but I certainly want to encourage it at every opportunity. When I go to the corner coffee dealer for a treat…I’ll say…”could I have one of your excellent chocolate chip cookies please” and they hand the poisonous little thing over with a smile. They’re not deliberately poisonous, those cookies. Only to humans. I’m sure most small animals could survive a casual encounter with one or two.

Centres of excellence are bogus propaganda tricks employed by people and organizations who dare not admit that  most of their operations fall far short of superlative and who want to wave a flag over the few sites that may rise to the level of mediocre in some less than obnoxious way. It struck me as I was thinking about it in the middle of the night that the scheme isn’t working too well.  They’re not exactly tourist attractions…unless you count the flack catchers and senior suits who get paraded through on occasion to encourage excellence in the most official way possible…”Uhh keep up the good work guys…we’re all damn proud of you”.

So it seemed to me, last night anyway, that centres of excellence were a terrible declaration of our failure as moral beings. I mean if we’re not aspiring to excellence…what the hell are we doing? And if we were aspiring to excellence as a philosophical precept…why would we need “centres” of excellence?  Does that mean that the only people who should expect good service need to find one of these centres?…What about the rest of us? You can see how dangerous it is to wake up in the middle of the night. I wanted to leap out of bed and hit the internet to search for centres of excellence…what the hell…there might even be one in my neighbourhood that I didn’t know was there. I didn’t…and I wont. I’m surrounded by excellent friends and extended family. They’re as good as it gets and nobody ever calls them a centre of excellence. I’m thinking of campaigning for “centres of deplorable”. Where people could identify places, businesses, services that were just terrible experiences. Maybe start up a guide-book. I’d start looking in those places that have “centres of excellence”. Good night.

All art is about choices…hundreds and hundreds of small choices…managing the muscles of the arms, hands, fingers…the choice of colours, of the curve or line or dot or spot. Sometimes, not always, agonizing. Because it matters. You don’t do these things to throw them away. They are the evidence, not only of your existence but how you chose to record its moments. You can leave them behind…hide them to be found later…but not throw them away. Some artists, painters…return to canvases and paint them over…change them. They’re allowed…but I choose not to. For me the discipline is part of what I learn about myself. When the thing is done, whether written or drawn or painted I want it to be the best articulation of what I’m trying to say  that it can be at that time. Coming back to it a year or even a week later I know I wouldn’t be the same person…wouldn’t be talking or thinking about anything in quite the same way. My work is a gang of bugs in amber. I may not like the bug after a while but I’m not interested in digging it out of the amber and trimming its wings or lengthening its tail. I like it when people like my work…hate it when they call it a hobby…I’m not overly bothered if they don’t like it because I’m sure they don’t dislike it for the same reasons as I do. I respect that. I personally loathe some of  the things I did years ago and even some of the recent drawings. I could choose to destroy them…and I have jettisoned  some…threw them at the sky hoping they’d never come down…but I don’t know whether I’ll come around to liking some of them again…and I might even recall what I was trying to say…so I keep them. Mostly I hold the whole business of choosing, of choices…to be a sacred concept. Well maybe not “sacred” sacred…but pretty close.Freedom is the right to choose…isn’t it?  The commerce of art is subversive…it invites you to pander to a taste, find a marketable “style” and stick to it. How Andy Warhol must have love/hated that fucking soup can…and Picasso must have known that Guernica was the end of the line. After all he’d been locked in “blue period “jail by dealers who couldn’t get enough of that stuff. Maybe it’s all an egotistical delusion…this elevation of choice. We all make choices a million times a day…and we all live in a world where the choices are limited by a multitude of factors. Yet, there is magic in art…in poetry …in music…in dance…in war. Oh? Yes. It’s the magic of inexplicable choice. Is to be enlightened to know why you’ve made these choices? I think then that enlightenment is finally unattainable. Of all the things…all the choices I make, the ones related to my artwork are the most accessible. It’s there and I can look at it and ask myself over and over …why this colour and why that line? And most amazing…most astonishing is that the answer doesn’t matter as much as the question.

Blues: May 2011

Well it was a gift wasn’t it? Somebody phoned up and told us…it wasn’t as if we went looking. It’s early in the campaign…we’re more into…you know…getting the message out. So, no…I don’t think anybody looked into it too deeply, we were all too busy. It was some junior staffer is what I think…that was the way it was…some volunteer kid just put it out on the wire. We looked into it afterward and I think that’s what we found. But no…no it wasn’t an ad per se…more of a note, if I can say that. Well, yes, it ran several times…and I can see how some people might have thought it was an ad…and then the media picked it up and sort of ran with…you know …made it more than it was…some junior staffer. No it isn’t our kind of politics normally…We run on the issues …always have…but this thing…well you can’t…you can’t have people like that in office…really, can you?  No…no…of course we can’t prove it…yet…but you know how these things are…it was reported to us and we just couldn’t take a chance that it wasn’t true. And that other part …no…no…that other part about, you know…well that didn’t come from us at all…not our style…come on…we don’t go around commenting on things like that…the small size of his equipment…who uses language like that? And even if it’s true…that and the incest thing…no, it has nothing to do with the issues in this race…and like I said …it didn’t come from us. I’m sure it will all come out…you can’t keep a thing like that under the table these days…you media guys are too sharp…but not from us…that stuff. All above board…that’s the way you have to run these things. Keep it clean I always say and let the voter decide…and nine times out of ten the voter is going to see that integrity. We have it…We have it…and maybe the other guy has some things…you know, let’s face it…there’s always a thing or two that you don’t know about the other guy…and when they come out…people can see what’s what. I never believed for a minute that business about the latex suit and his secretary and the great dane…Where do people get that stuff?…Just vicious…that is. Never believed it myself. No…you never know… Well I laughed , of course…it was just ridiculous…wearing black rubber and a pink skirt, was it? Absurd! Probably some party prank. Must be hard for him to keep his mind on the campaign with all this going on. I had a drink with him a couple of weeks before this all came out…he likes a drink, you know…damn nice fellow…he looked a little tired I thought. Of course he was having two to my one…I like to keep my mind clear, you know. It must have been nagging at him even then…it hadn’t come out yet…damn junior staffers…we all have to use them…so enthusiastic, and great kids…you know. Well we’ll get to the bottom of that I can tell you…but I could see that some thing was on his mind. I told him…you can’t keep things bottled up…these campaigns can be rough. Things come at you from any direction. I told him to pay it no mind…don’t give them the satisfaction…whoever they are. Well one of my campaign guys said “What if it’s true?” and I shut that down right away. Never true…these things. He was pretty upset about it I heard…as I would be…as you would be…No..no…nothing to do with us. I was telling my wife Joyce…twenty wonderful years…yes thanks…I was just telling her…it was Sunday and we were coming out of church with the kids…yes…all grown up now…yes, well they were on the bus last week…Family values…that’s the thing…Oh yes..so I was saying to Joyce that these awful rumours and things pop up in campaigns…come at you from who-knows-where. Hasn’t happened to me, thank goodness…no…no…well people know better don’t they…there’s nothing to find…let ’em look, I said, and if they say anything then it will be all lies won’t it?…nothing there…so they don’t get any traction . Him? Oh No…no..I don’t think he’d dare…stuff like that? Glass houses …you know… glass houses…I mean really! Can you  see it..him and his little dick and his ridiculous rubber suit? there are probably pictures of that stupid pink skirt. Hell…No..Pardon my language but no way that sleazy little fucker would come over with stuff like that…O.K…No ..No..Time’s up I see…That’s enough now. I just wanted to set the record straight. None of this came from us…and you can quote me on that. B.C.

We have an election coming up in Canada in a few days…and like many elections in the past few years we have been besieged by vicious attack ads filled with malice and innuendo. They are designed to agitate and polarize rather than educate and inform voters. It’s time we let candidates know…enough is enough.

Before I start this rant I want to say that I have enormous respect for health care workers. I know they have an increasingly difficult job to do in most places and I know too that hospital administrators face the difficult choices of where to allocate scarce resources. The population is aging and with that aging people find their bodies breaking down…making bigger demands for care strategies. Governments in Canada and the U.S. have insisted on cutting taxes to stimulate the economy and incidentally to buy the votes. In a lot of ways it couldn’t come at a worse time. The income gap between the incredibly wealthy and the working people is beyond huge…and the proportional taxation is practically criminal. Canada has what we call a universal health care system …meaning that practically anyone can get into a hospital for treatment and their costs are covered. It is becoming difficult to maintain but it is holding. Wait times for surgery are getting longer in spite of major efforts to reduce them. Emergency rooms are virtually never empty. There aren’t enough doctors and amazingly cost cutting choices in a hospital here has the administration cutting twenty five staff…not administrators…but nurses and care givers! A few days ago I found myself in Emergency at a local hospital with severe pain in my abdomen. I didn’t know what it was and I was spooked. I’ve spent enough time in hospitals in the past six months. It turned out to be a kidney stone and I’m not writing to whine about that. It hurts…it will be dealt with. When I got to Emergency with my own true love…we found that we would have to wait four to five hours to see a doctor. Doesn’t sound like much does it? Four to five hours. The waiting rooms (plural) were packed with people in varying stages of anxiety and agony along with concerned and frightened family or friends. I got some medication for my pain and settled in to wait…closer to seven hours. I looked around the waiting room…there was nothing much to do otherwise and it struck me that the whole design of these places was stupidly wrong. It seems to me that health care ought to begin in the waiting room. I don’t mean that doctors should be working on patients there but the space ought to contribute to improving the patient. I’ve been in dozens of waiting rooms over the years and every one of them was an architectural dead zone. Money and design time is spent on operating rooms, treatment spaces, board rooms, class-rooms, administrative offices, laboratories and specialty spaces. Waiting rooms are neutral spaces connected to an intake kiosk . The are stocked with cheap and durable furniture that gets more traffic than your average taxi. I’ve never seen a comfortable chair in any of them…in any event, spending four hours in pain on almost any thinly padded chair is likely to produce ass paralysis in the toughest people. We endure it because we have no choice.  I think waiting rooms need to be redesigned as part of the health care protocol. Furniture should be specifically designed for easing pain and easy cleaning. The rooms need to be brighter, cleaner, and designed to absorb and reduce noise and aggravation. There is clearly little chance that waiting times will improve dramatically over the next few years. If these hard minded right wing governments have their way…only those who can pay will have access…but there will be more than enough of them to fill waiting rooms. In the short term existing waiting rooms could and should be retrofitted …brighter lighting, better paint choices, some acoustic tiles  and a serious search for some furniture that belongs in a waiting room. This is a critical piece of the puzzle. You’re sick, or in pain, you’re scared, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you…you’re sitting in room full of sick people in a chair that has been continuously occupied by sick people who may have contagious illnesses. Nobody washed or sprayed that chair before you landed in it…and nobody wiped it when you left it. That doesn’t mean they’re never cleaned and it doesn’t mean that you’ll catch some virus or bacteria from being there. But the chances are better than they would be if you were walking in the park and it doesn’t inspire confidence as you’re sitting there watching a guy vomiting into a bowl in the corner chair. So chairs that are upholstered in some easily sanitised material and that have a design that can give some comfort to pained people for four hours or more.  But the key piece of the puzzle has to be the “active waiting” room. There needs to be waiting room staff. Maybe not fully trained nurses but aides with some training and they need to be there to provide information, let people know what’s going on…how long their wait will be…how close they are to the top of the list… to provide water or reading material…TO SHOW CONCERN for the patient and any family or friends…bring blankets. Act as intermediaries with intake nurses…alert them of increased pain in patients or emerging crises. These shouldn’t just be inspired volunteers (although anything is better than nothing) but trained and paid staff whose function is understood and integrated into the care strategy of the hospital. If this could be done…I believe that patients would be less anxious, more communicative and better able to assist in their own diagnosis when the finally see the doctor…and perhaps reducing the time and difficulty in dealing with upset patients. Moreover, providing some assurance and concern in the waiting room would enable family and friends to get past their own anxiety and act as more supportive strength for the patient. These are positive outcomes. Am I asking for a Cadillac version of hospitals? Hell yes…I’d like there to be Cadillac schools and Cadillac governments too…but everything is relative. I know that these aren’t choices that cash strapped hospitals will make…I just want to see some new thinking…some steps in the direction of overall care…I want want waiting spaces to be caring spaces. If you can’t reduce the wait times…at least try to make the waits more bearable.

A young woman,twenty years old, from London Ontario and three friends cross the border into the U.S. In the dead of winter last week…and believe me the winter in London in the first week of February couldn’t be deader…They headed into a motel filled with yesterdays dreams and tomorrow’s mistakes. They were there to get black market plastic surgery…no hospital…no clinic…just a motel room. She was expecting to put some money down and leave with an enhanced booty…a butt implant. It killed her. The speculation is that they learned about this illicit opportunity on the internet. Not an isolated case…no. I expect that there are hundreds of motel medical teams roaming the world on secret missions of cosmetic beautification.  I’ll get to the idea of enhanced ass in a minute but first I have to take a second to wonder how it became an acceptable proposition to search the internet for someone who would do this…and having found someone… what kind of peer group approval process made it reasonable to load up the car with like minded pals and drive to a motel in the middle of winter?

O.K. enhanced ass…Say,  you’re a teen thing sitting there with your home girls watching a Beyonce video…or Youtubing J.Lo…or the viral Kardassian sisters…and somebody suggests you check the full length mirror to see how you rate your booty. No that doesn’t happen, does it? Your boy friend in an unguarded moment of social insanity says…”uh…yo booty is lacking” and you think…”Lacking!” And then somebody says “I heard about this website…” while this little voice in the background is shouting  “start the car…start the car”. NO…Do not start the fucking car. Leave your ass alone…get a brain enhancement instead. Look here I’m not dissing the young lady who died. I’m sorry and saddened and all kinds of mixed, mostly angry emotions. Even though she made some decisions, she didn’t get there alone and the path to those decisions was travelled by plenty of others.  No ass enhancement is worth dying for…I don’t care if you’re booked into a sex audition with Justin Beiber.

I once had an office next door to a place that made prosthetics. They made legs and arms and hands and things for people who had lost theirs. An honourable business. I’d often talk to the guys  that worked there…between our back doors…over a cigarette or two. It occurred to me that the things they were making ought to be …somehow…more. Like yes they have hands that can actually function now and arms that act like they have muscles…but back then…not so much. I wasn’t thinking along those lines anyway. I knew that would eventually come. No, I was thinking that if you got an arm it ought to have a radio or a watch or tape player in it…a hand could have battery powered razors…tooth brushes…screwdrivers… I was thinking a Swiss Army kind of prosthesis. No reason artificial legs shouldn’t have electronic attachments…storage spaces…We had to stop seeing them as cosmetic or merely functional but…more than that. With today’s miniaturized electronics those prosthetics could have everything from tazers to GPS and telephones…they could have computers and T.V.s…and still have all of the new age functionality available.

I often have odd conversations with total strangers…It used to happen a lot in airports. They’re such sterile and impersonal places, those waiting areas…and really…you’re kind of anonymous. Certainly none of the airport staff give the slightest damn who you are…so I sort of figured it was a license to be whoever I wanted. So this guy and I are talking and he tells me he’s on his way to a clinic in California to get a penis implant. And I immediately thought that was fucking amazing…my imagination picturing all kinds of possibilities. I mean if you’re getting a dick implant it has to have vibrating potential, no? maybe a flashlight? one of those little L.E.D. jobs? Maybe you could get different shapes…hexagonal? Square? Cork screw? Reading the terrible story of this motel tragedy reminded me how bleak our society can be. I was not distressed when I first heard about breast implants . I’m a guy, of a certain age. I was raised on breast  fantasies. At sixteen…the list of things I desperately wanted to get my hands on was elegantly short…my own car and Nancy’s boobs…not necessarily in that order . So breast augmentation didn’t seem all that alien to me…until it became a deadly epidemic and then I had to think about it. I see young girls with boobs like perfectly spherical softballs looking as hard as old Cadillac bumpers…and I’m thinking…why? Do they play music? Do they have some new age humming sound that tranquilizes you when you get too excited? Do they help with swimming? And I’m not unaware that it’s hundreds of years of male breast fixation that has contributed to all of this…and  modern science and modern confused morality that added fuel to the fires. Ass enhancement…surely, that’s enough, and if it isn’t then let’s put it in the absurd perspective that it deserves…How about different shapes? hexagonal? square? How about creased…so it looks like you have two butts? How about with built in massage for those days when you’re on your feet too long and your ass hurts?

And all those young guys out there thinking that this is just girly vanity. Forget dat…guys are getting implants and enhancements, ass jobs and chest jobs…liposuction and silicon…and let’s not forget those ads that pop up on our computers promising a penis that can drive your car when you’re too busy texting with both hands.

No more young people dying in motel operations.

Please…Stop.

A friend once told me that there is no such thing as stupid…which, considering the guy, was pretty much an open question and charmingly self-serving. He went on to defend himself on a dealing charge (after selling a suitcase full of weed to a couple of cops) by claiming, first of all, that he was temporarily insane because he was on acid at the time…and secondly that he should be tried by a jury of his peers…therefore…they should be on acid too…or at least have used it previously. Oddly he was almost on the right track since Harry Anslinger had generally convinced the government of the United States and several other countries, back in the sixties, that marijuana made you crazy…the insanity defense should have worked, especially with the acid argument. Alas he was but one among many of my friends and relatives (and I must count myself among their company) whose bizarre antics have kept me in stitches for over sixty years. My seventieth year is fast approaching and I’ll count myself lucky if I make it, but it has stirred a bubbling kettle of ruminations and looking back at some of the bone headed moves I’ve made I began to wonder why “stupidity” got such a bad rap. I mean, where would we be without it? There is probably no other single thing that so occupies our time as much as pointing out stupidity in others and thus demonstrating our own brilliance. You’re walking down the street, it’s a lovely day, sun shining, birds singing in the trees (assuming the trees and the birds) up ahead there’s a young man dressed in the fashion of the day…pants belted somewhere in the O’zone between the waist (what’s dat?) and the knees. He’s busy walking and doing something electronic on a small gadget in his hands…when WHAM…he walks smack into a parking meter that jumped right into the middle of the sidewalk. O.K.  you saw it coming. You’re at the airport…it’s been a long day and it’s getting longer by the minute…there’s a line from here to last month at the check in counter and you can just see from your place in line that the agent is swamped and way over her head…she’s as red as a Mexican sunset and she’s hot enough to steam people’s glasses six places back in the line. The over head signs have been announcing flight cancellations for three hours. You finally get to the counter and the guy in front of you says “Hey lady…when’s the next flight out of this dump?” H-M-M-M-M I’m guessing in about a second and a half. Then there’s my pal Bob who climbs a ladder with saw in had …rests one foot on the ladder and the other on the branch… You know the rest. Over dinner a year later you can still smile about it. These things happen a million times in a million places every day…they’re part of the human condition…and I’ve already told you about my incredible car cover …so my credentials are solid. I guess my problem is that we’ve come to overburden “stupidity” , piling on malicious baggage. Stupidity has somehow acquired the odour of evil intent…or worse…the implication of terminal inferiority. Balderdash! I think we’ve been using the term inappropriately. When our esteemed politicians and captains of industry, having arrived at high office, make pronouncements that rattle in our ears like a pocket full of loose change…our expectations of common sense and wisdom are shaken out of proportion. Seemed like a good idea to give weapons to Saddam Hussein until he started killing the wrong people…Drilling holes in the Gulf of Mexico brings the oil closer to Cleveland than that stuff that comes from Saudi Arabia…except that it’s a hole in the bottom of the sea!!! Weren’t they afraid the water would run out? Did they forget that the oil was under pressure?… and who was watching Wall Street when the money disappeared? And whose idea was it to give our money to the guys who lost our money to replace the money that they lost? Why didn’t the government just give the money to us? Stupidity? Absolutely not. These things are happenings on an entirely different quantum. Stupidity ought to be returned to its rightful owners…you and I…and our pals. There are plenty of other terms that come to mind when we see some of the grand scale catastrophes engineered by people who should know better. Sometimes they don’t know any better…or at least they say so after the fact. Corruption, criminality, greed, malfeasance, ignorance, avarice, malevolence, congenital banality, habitual illegal parking and the urge to disregard warning signs are all in a different category from stupidity. I say we should liberate stupidity…take it back…before somebody does something really bad…and blames it on stupidity. Well..yes…I suppose it’s too late. What was I thinking?