Chagal4's Blog

Well…it’s a number. Seventy four. They come along in sequence. Last year it was seventy three. There’s a temptation to attach some significance to each one…but the most remarkable thing for those of us over the sixty something mark is that we’ve made it this far. The accumulated scratches, dents, aches, pains, scars, ailments, additions, deletions, complaints, defeats, arrivals and departures , successes and failures don’t add up to any particular number.

We were just back from Spain, the Costa del Sol. In the Spring northern people fly to the south. Happens everywhere.  In Spain thousands of middle aged and senior citizens wash up along the reef of hotels along the coast. I don’t think about my age much other than to marvel that I’m still here. But when I’m in Torremolinos, surrounded by hundreds of older folks There are more than I’d encounter in any whole year at home. And they come in all shapes and sizes and states of rectitude. I find myself sitting at the table in the dining room, looking around, wondering about these people…and considering my own age. It’s pointless, really. What is to be done?

Enjoy it I suppose…make the best of the good days…try to make sure there are more of those than bad days…and endure the bad days as well as we can. Keep going.

For me…I’ll mutter through tomorrow (Birthday) and try to forget the number until next year…And to all of my friends…don’t remind me…my mirror does that. Love to all of you,

Blues 

After the second world war, fathers, uncles, brothers and sons came back to our town. Women too…mothers, daughters, aunts, cousins. And there were many who didn’t come back and some who came back but not quite all the way…or missing parts. They didn’t come alone. People…strangers came…from all over Europe, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Dutch, Brits, Greeks, Hungarians and Germans. They weren’t called refugees at the time although they came from places ravaged and desperate. Some were grey and gaunt and all were subdued. They were called D.P.s…Displaced Persons…and they weren’t hated (except maybe the Germans) they were resented. They intruded on our grief and mourning…and the re-bonding of families. They were a constant reminder of misery. And they came because it was the industrial centre of America and that’s where they could find work. They often had better education and better industrial skills than local folks…and once they learned the language they got better jobs. Resentment increased.

In working class culture there are a lot of resentments and a few hatreds too. In those days, in that town…whites hated blacks, catholics hated protestants, workers hated bosses, the poor hated the rich and vice-versa in all cases. It was managed hate…didn’t flare up often…but it was just there all of the time. Hatred has anomalies. One could have black friends and still hate black “people”…or hate catholics and have catholic friends and even have catholic family members. People in our town were used to their hatreds…had grown up with them. The new D.P.s were aliens…strange creatures…with strange accents…who didn’t fit…who seemed to try to be invisible. Being invisible in a town of five thousand is impossible. Place like that…people know the names of family dogs from across town. There was “friction”. I remember my parents talking about the “friction”, when the aliens went to work on assembly lines with the locals. It was sometimes ugly…but there was also a belligerent recognition that those men were trying to feed their families…were trying to recover from horror…were working hard to do it. And so eventually came respect…less resentment and after a dozen years or so…a surly acceptance. Oddly the new comers often remained “D.P.s” while their kids didn’t.

As this current wave of refugees floods across Europe carrying their personal cargo of tragedy, loss and misery it’s accompanied by great humanitarian gestures as well as stunning political failures. While efforts are being made to help…there is also a ground swell of resentment, fear and anger in Europe and North America. The incandescent madness of ISIS and their ilk visiting atrocities upon European cities adds fuel against the muslim refugees.

The experiences of my youth and my town have no legitimate comparison to what’s happening today. The surge is too great, the problems of integration too complex, the acceleration of fear and resentment is building too fast…and the volume of people trying to escape a series of wars that have targeted  mainly civilians is increasing even faster.

For the past decade here in Canada we’ve had politics that promoted divisiveness and anger. The hatred promoted by political attack advertising…the abusive policy measures taken by the government…and the constant attempts to identify, isolate and attack “enemies” has created an atmosphere of resentment and apprehension that makes any effort to assist anyone and especially  refugees suspicious.

And this is what we need to resist…not just because the ordeals of these displaced people are incredibly difficult to over come…and will leave scars on them for years…and as humans we should recognize their need and help…but also because we need to resist the resentment and hatred for ourselves…so that we are not defined by it…not identified by it…not aligned with the circumstances and monsters who shoot and loot and rape and kill and drive ordinary citizens from little towns and big cities where…like us…they once had ordinary lives…and now they don’t.

I want to hear the sound of

Japanese kotos and

Bamboo flutes…with an alto sax in the back

and a clarinet playing something else

from the transom of an old Chris Craft

Anchored at dusk…

I want to see the last rays of day

turn gold and soft coral on the skin

my true love’s face…and see

the edge of indigo climb the sky

and watch the diamond wink

of stars appear like magic.

I want winter to fade and fall behind

The dancing breeze of spring,

behind the silvery curtain of the rain

That  comes to wash the dirty grey

of lingering banks of snow.

I want my aching knees to bend

And stretch and walk again on ice free

Streets…to greet the day,

To feel the flow of life,

of love and the sound of birds returning.

I want to laugh and shrug the madness of this winter

From my shoulders and my mind

To leave the Trumps and trumpets

and the Isis- not- the- goddess…far behind

I want to take wing on my bike

and sail away along the green trails

and paths of summer.

But first…

Spring!

…I carried that book with me until I emptied my foot locker a couple of years after I left the army. I never managed to finish it and it sat in the bottom corner of the foot locker collecting more dust. It never got better than that first sentence and even though I wasn’t a very acute reader back then…I knew it wouldn’t. The tiger only lasted a few pages…and it was down hill from there.

A life is filled with little mysteries and inexplicable inconsequential events. In any given day you can ask yourself a dozen times….”what?”…and get no answer. I love that. I love making up my own answers to those stupid little puzzles. This morning watching soccer on T.V. I saw a player being sent in to replace a guy who was injured. The replacement crossed himself three times, pulled up his socks twice, reached down and pulled several blades of grass from the field, tossed them into the air and kissed a tattoo inside his wrist…all before going onto the field. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen these little rituals performed by all kinds of athletes. There must be hundreds of little private gestures in locker rooms and dressing rooms all over the world. They’re supplications, prayers, wishes, incantations…”let me do good”…”let me not get hurt”…”let me win”.

I don’t know where they pick up these rituals…how they become habits…why they continue even when they don’t work. I imagine some older more experienced athlete taking the younger aside and saying;

“O.K. here’s what you need to do before you go on the field”

I wish somebody had said that to the guy who wrote that awful book all those years ago…might have worked.

Maybe he was fulfilling a dream…may even have gone on to write more and better books. I’m glad he tried. I’d like to say that I learned something from that book of his but I didn’t, really.

But here’s the thing. After writing that post the other day I was going through my portfolios and purging old prints and drawings that I’d done years ago and now hated. They were bad and I knew they were bad. Should I keep them or toss them? I thought about that stupid book and the guy who wrote it…and I wondered if he thought it was good when he did it…Probably, yeah. And what would he think years later? I tossed the drawings.

I probably didn’t cross myself in the right way the day I did them…or I didn’t remember to throw the grass in the air. Whatever…I thought that they were good at the time…and I’ve moved on from there. I think that the things I’m doing now are pretty good most of the time. Tell myself little stories while I’m doing them…talk to them…make up mini mysteries about them. I don’t know if I’d like them a few years down the road. It doesn’t matter. I’d like to think that I’ve kept the ones that are good enough to leave behind. That somebody will find them…or some of them and wonder what’s the story. And maybe somebody will see one and say…”Wow! that’s a really ghastly piece” But it’s the next sentence that counts.

“I wonder what he was thinking.”

Yep, I’d like that too.

There really aren’t enough awesomely bad books.

There are thousands of mediocre, disgusting, ugly, juvenile, sickeningly sweet, dead boring, horrible and virtually unreadable books out there. And I’ve read a lot of them. Yet none of them have reached that awesome plateau that is so bad that you want to share it with all of your friends…so bad that you can’t really believe it. Did some publisher read this shit and pay cash money to put into print? Wow!

One of the worst I ever read…and that’s what got this post started…a vagrant memory that intruded last night while I was on my way to the bathroom. One of the worst I read, happened more than fifty years ago. While I was in the army still. In those days we weren’t at war with anybody but the military likes to keep it’s troops on a sharp cutting edge just in case. In my corps (Engineers) we maintained a cutting edge sharpened by all things alcoholic. But what can be done? You can only march around a parade square, remake your bed, shine things, iron things, fold things, paint things, salute things…for so long before dangerous youthful exuberance causes problems. So the army organized a kind of summer camp far away from normal humans. It brought trucks and jeeps and tanks and artillery. It brought tents and kitchens and hospitals and water purification plants. It brought tons of guns and hundreds of soldiers and even brought some from other countries. There was mud and dust and rain and mosquitoes and black flies and bad food and latrines and twisted ankles and gallons of beer…There was a month and a half of playing war. To say that it was nothing like the real thing would be the understatement of the year.

The place for all of this was a military preserve that included a couple of expropriated hamlets in eastern Canada. It was a glorious summer by any weather standards…and as we were “working” only about three hours a day…there was plenty of time to explore…(watch out for poison ivy, poison oak, snakes, other soldiers on war parties, and don’t get lost). So three of us found an abandoned farm house on the edge of a non-existent village…spread our ponchos and  poured on the sun tan lotion…settled in to catch some rays. It was still early in the day…the sun was simmering on the long grass and a fine haze signalled another warm day. There was a distracting buzz in the air but aside from that…hey…we were nineteen, in great shape, playing with tons of boy toys and getting drunk whenever we could.

Black flies. If you’ve never met one…don’t. The little fuckers are less than half the size of a house fly…but they have the teeth of a full grown pit bull. They settle down at night in the long grasses and  wait until the sun warms up the morning, dries their wings and then about a million of them jump out of the grass looking for breakfast. O.K. now…honest to god, I have no idea how any living thing survives in that part of the world because those little bastards will eat anything. And they don’t sting…they bite. And fifty of them hit you at once…you bleed and there isn’t enough calamine in the world to deal with that itch… and the itch stays for days…maybe months.

We couldn’t dress fast enough and you had to be careful not to trap them inside shirts or pants because they just kept biting. They bite anywhere…have no shame…bite right through cloth. Bite inside your ear…and those army issue undershorts? feel like canvas when you first get them…but those babies didn’t even slow those black flies down.

We grabbed everything and ran…(later I counted twenty two bites) I made it back to my tent and got covered in calamine…and drained two or three beers…unrolled my poncho to make sure there were  no little demons hiding there. That’s when I found the book…it must have been lying in the grass under my ground sheet. I say “book” but it was missing the first fifty pages and seemed to have been ravaged by weather…I wondered if the previous owner hadn’t been devoured by those imps. It was ratty and water damaged…but I shook off the dust and started to read.

“The tiger walked across the kitchen floor, huge fangs dripping saliva on the linoleum…”

Well, I had to read the rest didn’t I…and combined with the merciless itch of  two dozen black fly bites…it was by far, the worst book I ever read.

They don’t make them like that any more.

Having read a recent review in the New York Times, of a book* that painted an exciting picture of the despair we can all look forward to in the promised land, one of my pals asked a tough question. There are a number of books and articles and opinion pieces pointing the finger of fate and bad management in all sorts of directions…but the gist of the story is that the former carburetor of capitalism…Saudi Arabia and its pals seem unwilling to turn down the taps on the oil wells…while the U.S.A. through the judicious use of fracking and other hideous tactics have reached a kind of energy independence. Well…that served to drive the global price of oil down. Good for the driving public but not so good for the oil aristocracy and the economic oligarchs. You would think there would be rejoicing in the streets…Uh—No. Then China with its great surge and huge population caught a serious case of consumer flu…The stock markets climbed the stairs like drunken bankers until Beijing said …”Slow down dudes and dudettes”. Beijing apparently, can say those things and mean it. The stock markets took up sky diving.

So those are the essentials of the story but there are details that are frighteningly consistent. It looks like the western world of good and plenty is still pretty good but there’s a lot less “plenty” on the horizon. That usually means that the one percent filthy rich will have to make do with the old yacht for a couple of years longer than expected…alas like all privileged classes…these people are generally unable to suffer alone. Naturally the un-monied classes will be making do with no yachts at all and the prospects of a rowboat or two are fading into the future.

So my friend was asking if this means that the “party is over”.

And that is a question riddled with shades and nuances. For millions and millions of people this last century hasn’t seen much singing and dancing. For them the party isn’t so much “over” as maybe “over there” somewhere…elsewhere. For those of us with spare change…we’ve seen it shrink a bit…seen jobs disappear…seen friends and relatives fall through the system…seen things get worse.  ..seen whole cities go to hell…but we keep going. So the answer I guess…is that the party is still going on. Some of us just are no longer invited.

If I had to reach over my shoulder for another analogy…I’d say it’s not about the party…it’s about running out of paved road…

*The Rise and Fall of American Growth :by Robert J. Gordon

Reviewed by Paul Krugman

Why do we let them get away with it? I don’t know how many stories I’ve read in the media over the past few years where the reporter…or editor insisted on telling us that a source spoke “on the condition of anonymity” or my favourite…”source cannot be named because he/she is not authorized to speak” or just plain “source not authorized to speak”. What is this? We’re supposed to depend on the integrity of the diligent reporter who risked some sort  of danger to seduce this “source” into revealing the facts of the matter? What fucking source?” It’s getting really annoying. Where were all these diligent reporters and their unauthorized sources when the gossip capital of the free world on Wall Street were planning on gutting the global economy? This isn’t Julie Assange territory. This is just do-your-job-and-tell-us-what’s-going-on journalism.

There are two possibilities (among many, maybe)that spring to mind…one is dead simple and the other more complex. The simple version goes like this. A reporter is sitting in a bar frequented by police, politicians, bankers, lawyers, hookers and other reporters. Did I mention bureaucrats from all directions? no…well they’re never authorized to speak so they have to be included. These are all “sources” and our reporter listens carefully…maybe buys a few drinks and turns on the pocket recorder. Having secretly recorded the source they cannot now admit this illegal activity and they roll out the old “source not authorized etc.” Even simpler, as we’ve seen with some fairly high profile magazine stories, is the ghost source. No, it’s not a source who recently became departed. It’s no source at all. Actually I have a little sympathy for the reporters who do this shit. It’s hugely risky so it requires creativity and balls. Given that our media has become so fond of the profits from propaganda…I think these reporters, who may have done good research before they wrote a good fiction…deserve some credit. And if truth is stranger than fiction…maybe fiction is truer than truth…certainly more truthful than some of the “not authorized” crap we’re fed by government and corporate shills.

The more complicated situation requires more understanding of mass media and where the money goes. Or rather where the money comes from. Subscribers haven’t paid the whole bill since never. Advertisers pay the bills. When print media was much bigger, back in the day, a lot of advertising dollars flowed through the doors. This offered a number of advantages that were good for all of us. A wide variety of advertisers insured that no single group of interests could control or overly influence editorial policy…At least they were easier to resist. It also meant that there was more money to pay “hard” reporters to pursue tough stories. These were journalists who were loathe to use those weasel words…”not authorized to speak”, yet they still found ways to tell the story, verify facts and avoid exposing valuable sources. Now the corporate legal departments want that extra caveat…bogus as it may be. These days advertisers spread their money around, T.V. the internet, print media…and oh yes…”product placement” in movies. (You thought Omega got that watch on James Bond’s wrist for free?). That all means much less revenue for print media…and even for the new divisions of T.V. networks. And these corporate heavy weights have become organs of political and corporate propaganda…and editorial policy often follows a pretty obvious line at election time. Many big newspapers have abandoned investigative journalism altogether. It’s expensive, the stories take a lot of time and travel to cover…the issues are often big enough to be surrounded by lawyers and vested interests in powerful places. Now we have generations of “multi facetted” journalists fresh out of journalism school suffering their first tragic defeats at the hands of cynical, brutal, bitter and occasionally corrupted editors. Who are these people? They think we want to know about the Kardashians…about Bruce Jenner (From a jock to a thong…what could go wrong?) No wonder they can’t name a source…and every time we read that shit we should toss the paper into the sky because the whole story is unreliable.

So what? Well…so, whomever IS able to authorize should be the source. And if they won’t talk, name them and shame them…”Jim says we’re not supposed to know” . O.K. don’t publish the story…or make it clear that some totalitarian regimes, corporate or government prefer to operate in secret. Be up front…say “we can’t tell you the full story or somebody will get killed” They must be able to come up with some suitable buzz words to cover that concept. Oh wait…they already have…

“source not authorized to speak”

O.K. some days I wake up and my face feels older than my body. I have to be extra careful shaving and the mirror isn’t kind either. It leaves me miserable all day. But then I think…tomorrow…I’ll just skip the shaving altogether. This is the condensation of optimism.

As we enter 2016 I’m searching for the laughter. I can’t follow a cynicism that takes Donald Trump seriously…or imagines that Bashir Assad will suddenly have a change of heart. I don’t believe the Saudis are any worse than the NRA but they both belong on a small island with no running water. ISIS was an ancient goddess whose name is being taken in vain…and she will punish. Arms dealers are a blight upon our souls. Child soldiers are just retribution for ignorance, poverty and our past sins. Drive-by shootings are not misguided youthful indiscretions.

There is a new world war…it’s happening on our streets…we call it crime. It’s not…it’s poverty versus privilege. Privilege appears to be winning because the poor keep shooting the poor. China watches. The media bugs phones and hacks e-mails and sells advertising. It periodically lies on behalf of its sponsors. We accept self-censorship in the name of political correctness in the hope that our children will not be racists. Our determination to be fit begins at our feet and ends at our necks. Every day we pee in fresh water and flush it while millions around the world wash their hands with sand. We assume the luxury of  applause for the movie we call life. We shouldn’t. People think the “good old days” were better than this. They’re wrong. The same people think that things are going to get worse. They’re probably right.

The one fact that is rarely discussed about global warming…is that it’s almost always followed by an ice age. Remember those stories about woolly mammoths being found frozen solid with a mouth full of buttercups…let me say that again…frozen solid with a mouth full of buttercups!…O.K. one minute you’re munching wild-flowers with bees buzzing around your head and the next minute you’re a block of ice and you didn’t even have time to swallow the last bite. I live in a place where it was eight degrees and raining yesterday and minus fifteen this morning and I was scraping a quarter inch of ice off my windshield…I understand flash freezing…but I can’t imagine whatever it was that hit those mammoths.

When I was little I thought banks were places where you put your money to sleep and earn a little interest while we thought of using it for something stupid. My parents lived through the great depression. They knew better. One of my uncles learned that I lived outside the law sometimes…urged me to rob a bank. Any bank would do, he said. I didn’t…and still regret that I couldn’t do that for him.

Even in war zones people get up in the morning, kiss their kids and go off to work…sometimes dodging sniper lanes. They do mundane things…do the laundry, take the garbage out, look for groceries, talk to neighbours, laugh at jokes…hope tomorrow will be better, easier. People keep going. Make love, get sick, get well, grow old…get fed up with it all. There ought to be a day set aside every year when we can all look at each other, smile and hug and slap each other on the back. We should congratulate each other for putting up with it all. We could call it Humanity Day.

Our society is held together by trust, faith, hope and fear. The role of propaganda in this equation cannot be over estimated…because neither trust nor faith nor hope nor fear have anything to do with facts. Well you know…today’s fact is tomorrow’s “Maybe-not-so-much”. Hmm…culture is the collection of concepts that define our society…describes us…our music, our art, our dance, our architecture, our literature, our eduction, our food, our religions, our relationships…our guns, our knives, our armies, our enemies. Get it? Even if we don’t know who we are…others do.

So for me 2016 is a year to look for laughter, for absurdity…to find humour in the ridiculous. And tomorrow I’m going to skip the shaving…This is the condensation of optimism.

David Bowie died today. R.I.P.

It’s New Year’s day…snow flurries in a black and white world. Up early, I greeted the world with mixed enthusiasms. 2016, I’m happy to be be here…not so joyful about the state of the world.  My man Bob was out on his porch watching the flakes drifting out of the sky. A couple of years ago I wasn’t sure that Bob would see 2015 through. But there he was, a little shorter, a lot slower, and I think still grieving the loss of that part of himself that loved to smoke those horrid cigars. He takes it one day at a time now…warm days, he’s on his bench minding the street…might walk a block or two. And he’s as chatty as he ever was…which is to say that he never was and today I got a nod and a smile that cheered the frayed edges of my prosecco mini hangover. There’s a life lesson in Cigar Bob and it’s one that lives outside and away from him. Sometimes life beats on a person, as it did on Bob…and sometimes it seems to keep on beating on a person. For some that’s the end of the story. For others…one day the cloud lifts enough to let some sunshine in. Sometimes that’s enough to keep the story going. One day in the summer I asked Bob’s son…a fella who’s not looking too well himself…how Bob was doing. He just smiled and said,

“Bob’s O.K.”, and that was good enough for me.

Seeing him this morning I was going to ask what he thought of 2015. It doesn’t matter though. 2015 was yesterday. It will linger until 2016 looks a lot like a twin…but for now I don’t want to look over my shoulder.

For those of you who are young there’s this to know about older people. One year looks a lot like any other. That doesn’t mean that we don’t enjoy them…doesn’t even mean that there aren’t any differences. It’s matter of perspective. Personally, I count on young people to keep one year from BEING like any other. So far they’re doing a fine job…I do wish they’d hang up the fucking guns though.

01, 01, 16

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.