Chagal4's Blog

I don’t come here to express myself. I come here to un-express myself.

There ought to be places…like store-fronts with signs that say “NOTHING”, where you can go and buy a few minutes of nothing. I look around and see a lot of people who seem to need a little nothing.

I went into the mall last week. I was looking for a pair of socks, orange perhaps. Suddenly I felt as if the air was draining out of my head. I couldn’t remember what I was there for. There was too much of everything, everywhere…and every shop and every window was competing, barking and snarling for attention. It was like a runaway commercial for prosperity. O.K. I thought, there must be other places to buy socks, orange perhaps. Indeed there are. These days you can buy socks at the grocery store…another place where there’s too much of everything. The hardware store sells socks…supposedly for the working man since they’re heavy, grey and wooly.

It’s not that people don’t need things…I know that. I also know that there are people who have nothing…who have nothing in a most terrible way. Somehow the overwhelming tonnage of things that stuff our stores and finally, our lives, is more of an insult to the soul (whatever that is) . “Souls” whatever they are. must be buried under all this stuff. I feel a little embarrassed for not noticing this before now. Well…actually I suppose that I did. I suppose that most of us did. I think that most of us choose to ignore it. Because having all this stuff around all the time makes us think that everything is O.K.. Makes us think we’re doing fine…even when we’re not.

Seeing a homeless person standing outside a shopping mall should make us angry…sick…embarrassed

There would be no homeless people in the “nothing” store.They already have more of that than they need.

I’m not proposing that the nothing store should be educational or therapeutic…no. It should be more a respite, a refuge. Once when I was broke and depressed I went looking. I wasn’t sure for what. I went to a big park in Toronto but it was busy and kids were laughing and shrieking…people were walking with intent and I could hear them thinking of nothing significant. I wandered over to the cathedral and I was surprised to find the doors locked. Nice big doors too…locked. There was a painted sign on one of the nice big doors listing the hours of opening…when the doors would be unlocked to let in the flock…to be sheared surely. There were several “hours” listed…and I chose one that I thought would be of the least interest to the flock. I had very little fleece at the time and being sheared didn’t seem like a good idea.

Still a cathedral is a large place…and if they keep the doors locked most of the time…they must have a lot of peacefulness locked inside and I wanted some of that…with maybe a whiff of incense lingering to trigger childhood memories. I went back at my chosen hour and the big doors were indeed unlocked and sure enough the flock had chosen another hour and I was practically alone. And sure enough there was peacefulness and the ubiquitous whiff of incense along with furniture polish. There were dust motes dancing in light beams of colour from the stained glass windows. It was quiet rather than silent…tiny creaks from wooden pews…slightly louder cracks echoing from ceiling beams…old wood easing and stretching in the heat of morning.

It was the biggest nothing store I could find and I didn’t even know that I was looking for it. I sat down and absorbed it. I went back several times over about a year and almost never encountered the flock, sheared or un-sheared and never once met the “nothing salesmen” that I knew were there somewhere. That was a good thing too because I didn’t want to buy any of their brand of nothingness. I used to think about those nice big locked doors and wonder if they’re still locked. Of course I’m sure they are. When you have a large supply of nothing…you don’t want it to escape.

In Toronto there used to be a place that had a sign that was just a large ear. I don’t recall whether it was a restaurant or a store that sold noise but I loved that sign. It was the idea of a place where you could just go and talk or make a sound… and it would be heard. It’s amazingly rare these days, to find a place where your voice can be heard. There was another sign on Yonge Street that was a giant nose…I didn’t even want to guess. I love signs. In cities and towns all over the world signs have become a universal language. A neon sign that says “food” or “drugs”or “beer” is understood in almost any language. I don’t know what I’d put on the nothing store.

Maybe a large zero.

Oh…Arnie, we knew you had to go. We knew it from that first e-mail months ago. You said that you would fight it…of course you would. It was in your nature wasn’t it.

I wish it could have been longer. We might have visited, should have visited. What would we have said? That it was nice knowing you? I don’t think so, even though it’s true. We would have talked about the weather and Donald Trump and what our doctors had to say. We all have doctors with things to say. We would have talked about Paris and people that we know…maybe laughed and thought about what we would have to eat. That’s what people do. That’s what friends would do.

Ours was a passing friendship I suppose. I really hadn’t known him very long. A couple of conversations, a few E-mail exchanges. Dinner in New York. I don’t know what it is that defines friendship. Sometimes it just seems to happen. In other cases it builds up and one day you just realize that it’s there. With Arnie I knew right away. He and Elizabeth were friends of Louise…that’s usually a good start. We meet in Maine…Kennebunkport. Two men, no longer young, on a veranda at a resort hotel watching the sun dancing on the waves, kids running on the beach and people letting summer bake the cold and damp from winter battered bones. He was comfortable to be with. But maybe not for everyone…I think I might be that way too.

We kept in touch.

I have a lot of great friends…and this is what I think. I am glad to know that they exist. I am made richer knowing all of them. I want them to know that I love them

So Arnie…that’s what I wanted you to know. Now you’re gone and I knew you had to go. And if the mystic allows it to be so…we may meet again on some distant sunny shore…sit and share the afternoon on a veranda looking at the sea…sipping rye.

Blues

June 2017

He’s not Hitler.

At least not yet,

But

Hitler wasn’t Hitler either,

Until

He was…and then,

It was just too late.

It’s not too late.

At least not yet,

But

If we wait, it will be,

Surely,

It will be…and then,

It will be too late…

Again

20/05/17

Well, I turned seventy five last week and I’ve been sitting here trying to think of something clever to write about it…but to hell with it…I just don’t feel very clever right now. I mean how clever do you have to be to wake up one morning and you’re seventy five? It just happens doesn’t it? Besides it’s been raining for what seems like weeks and the entire area around here is flooding because the soil is saturated and the water-sheds are over loading the rivers. Hundreds of people are watching the water climb out of their basements and into their living rooms. Folks are being evacuated and they say the rivers haven’t reached their peak yet…even after the rain stops the run off up stream will still keep flowing into the rivers and they will continue to rise. I’m listening to the rattle of rain on the windows right now and I’m thinking that maybe one day people will ask me if I remember when I turned seventy five…and I’ll say “Oh yeah that was the year the Ottawa River flooded.” Clever not…bummer yes.

Aside from that, the past year or two have served up a porridge of political misery and mean-ness that swept the world like a cold brown fog and seemed to suck the air out of every bicycle tire on the planet. As I write this, most of the people in France are fast asleep…but two days from now they’re going to have to choose between two people that seem to have all the charm of carnivorous plants…well dressed but lethal. It’s as if France along with many other parts of the world is suffering from some kind of battle fatigue. The terrorist attacks, the refugees, the slipping and sliding European Union (Brexit), the rising tide of youth unemployment, the fear of senior citizens falling into old age with not enough resources…and the constant hiss of the hot air escaping from the mouths of politicians. And let’s be honest…some of these people open their moths and flies come out. So, ordinary people are pissed off and they seem to be ready to vote for anybody who comes with some new bullshit as long as it’s not the same old bullshit…and of course even self delusion has it’s limits…so people certainly do know that it’s all bullshit.

Being seventy five provides no clever insights to any of this and as I look around I see a world that young people have inherited that I really don’t know much about. I’d love to be able to offer some small pieces of wisdom and I know that I have some tucked away in the corners of my mind but I haven’t the slightest idea which pieces might be useful to them.

I hear myself sometimes railing about “When I was young” followed by some faded story intended to illustrate a nugget of truth…and I think…”Christ! what a bore I’ve become!” Maybe this little insight is the clever thing I should write about being seventy five.

I’ll probably keep telling the stories though because they entertain me as much as they do my listeners…and really, at my age boring isn’t the worst thing you can be.

For nearly two years we have been flooded with vitriol, toxic rants, outright lies, innuendo, bitterness, fear mongering. My ears hurt, my eyes hurt and the thought of breathing the same air as some of these people burns my nose and throat. I know they’ve always been there…some with a chip the size of a railroad tie on their shoulders…the ones with mean faces and a mouth as puckered as a chicken’s ass. You wonder where such a reservoir of hate can build in a country as wealthy as they are…no…countries as wealthy as we are, because my country has a fair share of the same rage. But wealth isn’t the issue…the sense of powerlessness is the issue. Look here…you have a good job, built a four thousand square foot ranch house…got a car for the wife, a pickup with big wheels, a boat,  a motorcycle and two snowmobiles…a riding lawn mower with shock absorbing seat and you’re paying it all off with ten hours of overtime a week…and some ass hole in a suit a thousand miles away closes the mill…and you’re done.

There is a legitimate rage…we live in a world where somebody is getting screwed constantly and the injustice of it all is a righteous boiling passion. So I’m not knocking rage. It’s the main emotion that gets some people through their day or week or a terrible illness. But there are rages that cannot be justified. They are based in ignorance and prejudice and some are the product of deliberate misinformation. These are rages and hatreds that solve nothing, that tear families, communities and nations apart. And we’re living with this now.

Like a lot of people, I spend a fair bit of time surfing the web. At my age it’s better entertainment than the T.V. ever was. There’s damn near nothing you can’t find on the net and the mass and volume of data is huge. And that’s a problem.

My father, back in the day, believed everything that was printed in the newspaper. He said it was because they were bound by law to print the truth. Even when I was twelve years old I didn’t believe that and it was one of those kid things that made me wary of believing my father. I wanted to tell him that most of the time he was probably right…but even newspapers back then could make mistakes, both inadvertently and deliberately. It wasn’t until years later that I understood that there were editorial policies in media that slanted news one way or another…and that a lot depended on who owned the paper and how much pressure advertisers could apply. It’s not all propaganda but there’s more than enough of that on important issues to make media less than trustworthy.

The same is true of the internet. With the incredible volume of material and the millions of sources of input, simple logic says that a large proportion of the stuff is bullshit or worse. And the ignorant rage of millions of people is being fed by material on the internet that they believe implicitly, because…hey…it’s the internet dude…they can’t put wrong stuff on it. That’s like saying that a note written on a bathroom wall is true because hey…who’s gonna lie with their pants down?

This past couple of years  I’ve wondered more and more about the need for censorship. That some body should be responsible for truth and honesty in all of the medias including the internet…But then I realized immediately that it’s too huge…it’s too pervasive…and besides I’m opposed to censorship of any kind. I’m opposed to the censorship we already have…so having more “thought cops” whose own bias may be driven by hidden agendas…no thanks.

So in the end we have to be our own censors and screen out lies and hate…educate ourselves and know the difference…be flexible and accept that what’s true today may be overtaken by a greater truth tomorrow…stay wake.

In the mean time get a blindfold and earplugs and take a break from the haters.

It’s January 21, 2017 and the United States has just inaugurated its forty fifth president. Some people are happy….some frustrated and angry…some are spooked enough to imagine that he’ll be the last…that this man will start world war three and we’ll all be atomized before the end of next year. That’s the trouble with imagination…once you make a little leap…and let’s be honest, with this guy anything is possible…once you make that little leap it’s easy to go all the way to thinking nuclear holo-fucking-caust. Of course imagination is pretty much all we have to go on because in spite of his rants and twitter snits only broad brush stokes of his personal “inclinations” have emerged. Millions of people believe that he said this or promised that but this is a man who can deny today what he said yesterday even if it was caught on tape…He has made millions promising gold and delivering gold paint…or not at all. Now that he’s in the driver’s seat (let’s not talk about “THE BUTTON” or “THE RED PHONE”) he’ll do what all new car owners do. He’ll rev the engine, check the mirrors, turn up the stereo, check the gas and blast that baby straight out of the driveway. And at that point not even he knows where the hell he is going. So how can we?

There’s no point on speculating on the nuclear end of days or the dozens of other full-scale disasters that could be triggered by a rogue emperor penguin and his personally chosen minions. We can see that protectionism and hard core conservatism are on the menu…that global warming and the environment are not (what the hell is “clean coal”?) …and if your home is on a shale slope…your back yard could be fracked. But whatever is deemed to be good for American business will be good for …uh…America? So now we have to look to the notion of American business being the only governing restraint on the new government. But you know….surely not all American businesses…do you think? Anyway it doesn’t sound good for foreign interests…or foreign trade…or foreign affairs.

Well, regardless, the thing is done. As one of my friends said…a short armed, toxic, twitter troll with mad hair and a whole first family that looks like it escaped from an eighteenth century French novel now occupies the capitol. (If they make Barron a baron will he be Baron Barron Trump?) Our task is to learn to live with it all while finding ways to protest and resist the most egregious pieces of business that might flow out of the doors of Washington.

Hating all of this is a bit like hating the weather. Personally I hate winter. I didn’t always hate winter…I used to ski and loved it. But then I ended up in Ottawa and here…there’s a lot of winter to hate. Still one finds a path…between shovelling snow, scraping ice off cars, wading through slush and slipping on icy streets that the city can’t seem to keep clean. Oh and short dark days and wrapping in layers…but one finds ways and even joy with bright crisp days that steal your breath and your heart…and somewhere out there Spring awaits.

Hating doesn’t hurry Spring nor does it soften winter. Being creative, adapting, adjusting, getting outdoors anyway, being smart, gets us through winter. And love…Taking care of each other a little more…paying better attention to those we care for in winter is important. Because winter can be hard. So, the thing is, we can no longer imagine a White house without Trump..a man whose name is a noun an adjective and a verb. And that looks like a long cold winter to me.

And so the end of another year is upon us. After seventy or so they tend to blur together. A lot of people will remember 2016 as a ghastly year for very good reasons. The wars and tragedies in the middle east…the refugees…the terrorism…the hurricanes and earth quakes…floods and famines. They’ve all been going on for years now but somehow last year was worse. The divisive and splintered politics in America and elsewhere and the rising tides of xenophobia and racism have combined to promise more anguish in 2017.

We lost a lot of well known people in 2016…and some of us have lost people close to us. Many have died from demogaphics. It’s not a new disease…demographics. It just means that our warrantees are running out. The baby boom produced a huge bump in the population…now they’re reaching an age where the natural wear and tear of life has taken its toll. we wish them well…we hope the ones remaining stick around for awhile longer.

All of us will confront the coming year in our own ways…I hope we can do it together and that we can help each to avoid falling into despair. So I just want to say…

Never Mind

Never mind the madness…It’s a bag of broken glass. It’s a box of broken hammer heads…a jar of rusty nails. It’s a sagging table out on Maxwell Street in 1956 with shrunken heads that could be real…if you’re only fifteen years of age…and painted scraps of splintered sticks…It’s a stack of books with twisted spines…and holes in every page, where mice from several families ate breakfast every day.

Never mind the madness…it’s a restaurant for fools. There’s apple pie with LSD and ice cream filled with weed. And if you doze off long enough they’ll crank you up with speed. There are needles filled with mystery and bottles filled with …need. There are tears behind your eyelids …and when they fall you bleed. There are fingerprints on all the glasses…and noises in the walls. You can’t hear the giant redwood whisper when it begins to lean and …falls.

Never mind the madness…it’s a child with scabby knees…It’s a big black dog with fleas. It’s a little boy with a plastic gun shooting at the rain. It’s trapped inside an elevator full of promises and pain. It’s a wrong number that just keeps ringing. It’s one shoe that doesn’t fit. It’s a man on a corner at midnight swearing at nothing. Or everything. It’s the blinking eye of the shattered head of a doll from long ago.

Never mind the madness…it’s the job you didn’t want…it’s the job you didn’t get. …It’s raining on your one day off…It’s nothing on T.V..It’s murder down the street…It’s kids in cars with pistols and nobody knows who did it…It’s the head-cold that lasts forever. Oh man it’s a toothache and knee repacement. It’s that house at the edge of town with broken windows and sagging doors and something dark behind the curtains.

Never mind the madness…It’s a garage sale of broken pots…it’s a toilet filled with flowers standing on the lawn. Its a baby Jesus in a manger in a tire in the yard…It’s the last of those old Edsels…It’s a coin operated vibrating bed in a humid motel in northern Ontario…that doesn’t work…or doesn’t stop. It’s always, always there…the slippery spot on the sidewalk.

Never mind it all…because there’s so much more. There are mountains with snow capped lids…there are rivers where fish laugh and shadows dance over ripples and pools. There are children born with dimples and gorgeous little fingers and toes…shining eyes and button noses. There are days that take your breath away. There are Sunday markets on Paris side streets that sell olives marinated in magic sauce that make you gasp…and you can’t get the damn things anywhere else. There are sunny days along a bicycle path with friends and the wind in your hair. There are long open roads leading to wave washed beaches…or the great big sky of the prairies. There are French toast breakfasts that take the blues away…There is love…and the ones you love…and in the end…there’s really nothing else.

Never mind…just keep

Going.

It wasn’t even on the list of things I’d hate to hear a week before Christmas. There was no place on that list for it. There have been some horrible things that happened this year and I kinda wanted to put them all to one side and focus James Corden’s Car Karaoke…damn, I just love Adele doing that thing with him. Or maybe watch some kittens on late night T.V. or a couple days of non stop National Geographic. You know…the kind of gibberish that stuns your brain like a five pound sledge hammer between the eyes…(No, No, I mean that about loving that Adele thing with James Corden). So I wasn’t prepared to hear that bug -brain- soon- to- be- leader- of- the- free -world calling for a renewal of the nuclear arms race…and building up the U.S. nuke arsenal until “the world comes to it’s senses”. I didn’t even stop to wonder by what definition this man could determine that the world would come to its senses…Like, would the world have to line up at the gates of Disneyland and kiss his ring and promise to eat at MacDonalds forever?

I remember a sunny summer day in 1958 walking down a street in Detroit. Sirens like a banshee wailing from hell went off, deafening the whole city. You could hear those sirens in Chicago!…Cops ran around like Keystone clowns and rushed cars off the little side street…a kind of small park with shrubs and grass and a few benches ran along the block and suddenly smaller sirens whoop-whooped along with the big ones (which didn’t stop) because this was what Armageddon was supposed to sound like. People stood rooted to the sidewalk and the little park split down the middle and folded open like a giant green clam shell and a gleaming white missile cantilevered out of the earth like a promise from Satan.

We were deep in the heart of the “Red Menace” the ‘”Cold War”and those Russian commies could fly over any time and blast the industrial centre of America into cinders and ash. So this was a test of the warning and response systems. The sirens to blow out our eardrums and the missiles to blow those rascals out of the sky before they could drop their hellacious bombs. I know I felt much safer after that day.

So this is what king Donald meant when he said he wanted to make America great again. More and bigger nuclear weapons to scare the ignorant foreigners back into  a shivering mass of quiet consumers of American goods, services and political wisdom. This means that it is time to invest heavily in apple pie factories.

I was caught, as if in mid stream of a satisfactory pee…my mind kind of froze for a second or so. Did I really hear that right? Are there sane people around the world listening to this shit? Why aren’t they rushing to New York or Washington with buckets of tar and bags of feathers? Blue nosed conservatives want to arrest little girls for exposing their breasts on the internet (nothing as dangerous as a young boob!) and they let this fool say this kind of shit?!!!? What’s up with that?

Oh…and no I don’t think it’s a good idea for young girls to post pictures of their boobs…and I certainly don’t think other people should be sharing and shaming them….but let’s be clear…the danger of a single sordid tweet by this man is in another universe of insanity.

There will be no more.

A silent emptiness echoes

On the porch down the street.

People will pass by and nod,

Unconsciously glance to their left

Start the smile that says

Hello…or bonjour…and they’ll know

That something…someone is

Missing…his bench is

Vacant.

It’s almost as if

The whole house fell down

Overnight.

It’s something more than gone.

It was the second lightning  storm

In his brain…caught him sitting

In his chair…at home.

A few more days he waited

In darkness…speechless

for the sound of angel wings

to take his soul away.

I would sit out on my balcony

Look over to his front porch

And he would look up and we would wave

And nod and settle accounts with the street.

Sometimes we’d talk…inside my head

Always short and sometimes funny

Often wise…or maybe silly.

This what I think he’d say

About the weather…

“Can’t do anything…only talk about it…”

Twenty below

In a foot of snow

That was exactly what he said.

He was born on this street

In that house…they say.

I don’t know if he ever

Went away. He saw it all

Change…as these streets always do.

Saw strangers come and go

Saw seasons come and go

He knew which way the wind

Would blow.

I suppose he knew, that someday

He would have to go.

R.I.P. Bob

October 09 2016

This is for Dannie and for Arnie.

I turned seventy four and took a break from my blog because I’d begun to think about what a sorry species humans are. It was a thought that had always occupied a comfortable chair in a quiet corner of my mind…but one day it just got up and started walking around inside my head like it owned the place. Terrorists, mass murderers, serial killers, shooters, looters, baby snatchers, drug barons, child abusers, master pimps, white slavers, black slavers, corrupters, venal medical men, haters, deniers, false prophets, criminal social workers, government assassins, drone hit men (and women), kidnappers, thieves, fiends, witches and demons and politicians of course, ordinary people who had lost their way…who never knew the way. All of it running  around like naked freshmen across the pages of the media. I just couldn’t think straight anymore. Everything I sat down to write came out sounding like a frightened rabbit ranting about wolves. Everywhere I looked there were big fucking teeth and ugly little yellow green eyes. It was like I was back in the old drug days only it was all bad trip and no happy high.

O.K. maybe it wasn’t that bad but it was certainly bad enough that working on my blog was a dismal chore and it was never supposed to be, even though I enjoy a good rant. It’s one of the indulgences of my age. I know they say we’re getting fitter and less gaga…more mellow…but where’s the fun in that? You live this long, you want some reassurance that you’ve learned a thing or two…and you have to put it out there in growling contrast to the behaviour of younger self-righteous assholes who have seized the steering wheel and insist on driving us old folks to hell. Just the other day I read about an old couple who have been together for sixty years…and the government …in its wisdom, split them up and put them separate care homes miles apart, because one needed more “support” than the other. Now I suppose that the bureaucracy figured that after sixty years they both needed a break from each other. Idiots! After sixty years separation is amputation…they’re conjoined twins…and these assholes performed surgery with a rusty meat cleaver. Sixty years! How many years have they got left anyway…give them a tent or a travel trailer. How about we find the bureaucrat in charge and take off their right leg. What the hell…they’ve still got the left one right?

Sorry…I digress.

So I took the summer off and to be honest I wasn’t certain that I’d ever get back to blogging. I mean, what was the point. There was nothing sensible to be said about Hilary and Donald. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, watching the two of them on a large T.V. screen was like watching a rehearsal for a black mass. You know something bad is going to happen you just don’t know which one of them is going to be holding the ceremonial dagger.

Now autumn is just around the corner and after riding more than a thousand kilometers on my bike, wind in my hair, birds in the trees, sun in my eyes and bugs in my teeth…I’ve managed to coax the thought of our sorry species back to its chair in the corner. True, I think we are a little sorrier than we used to be but it ain’t like I need a long robe and a sign that says “The End Is Near”.

I’ve decided that I’m going to start again…and I’m thinking of writing a piece on how the older you get the less visible you become. You walk along the street and younger people just don’t see you anymore…until finally you reach an age when you can walk into a store and you’re like a fucking ghost…nobody knows you’re there…nobody asks if they can help you…You could rob a bank and just walk out with your stroller or walker or whatever they call those things and nobody would even set off the alarm. They wouldn’t know they were robbed until they counted the money at the end of the day.

Ageism they call it…and I’m its enemy.

Blues

September 11 2016