Chagal4's Blog

My own true love is still in Italy enjoying the canals and side streets of Venice before it sinks and so…taking full advantage of her absence I took myself to the corner for a breakfast of carrot cake and cafe au lait…knowing that neither one was good for my unpredictable stomach. I rushed (not too fast) home and ate some yogurt and turned on some Dave Brubeck. While I was there I sat next to an older man who was going on and on and on about the good old days and how kids like the young lady he was sitting with never had it so good. She could have been a niece or grand-daughter or someone he knew…but I could see her eyes glazing over…and when he got up to refill his coffee and take a breath…she actually yawned. In that moment I felt sorry for both of them. Well, not “sorry” sorry but a little bit sad. He wasn’t that old…younger than me probably, but I recognized what was happening. I’ve been there and done that and afterward wondered why I did. So I wrote the previous blog post. It seems to me that young people and older people have a lot more in common than than they do with people in the middle age…Young people are trying to climb into a society that doesn’t understand them and older people are falling out of society that concentrates credibility and authority on forty year olds. Both young and old are disenfranchised and both could support each other.

He actually said ” When I was your age we only got a new pair of shoes every couple of years.”

And I thought…”so you didn’t wait until the old ones wore out then”

Luxury!

The battle with nostalgia must be constant. I don’t mean that we should abandon history but we should view even history with a critical eye. Nobody says that historians can’t be political or nationalistic, irrational, or crazy or just plain liars.

Romanticizing the past is a tempting affliction for us older people…Who wouldn’t rather remember when we could run for miles or make love all night or look in the mirror without sighing…instead of thinking twice about being able to jog across the street or waking up to the singing alarm of arthritis? Never mind that we rarely ever ran for miles or made love ALL night…(Please!) .And if the mirror scares us…we don’t have to look.

I catch myself all the time saying “when I was young…blah blah blah” . It bores the crap out of younger people and it bores the crap out of me. Bread didn’t taste better back in the day…I might have been more able to taste it then, before my taste buds got old along with the rest of me. Cars weren’t better, The T.V. shows weren’t better…(well there are more now and some of them are pretty lousy…and would have been thirty years ago.) Movies weren’t better although some of the classics are still worth watching. People, morals, politics, weren’t always better either.

And for those who say that young people were better behaved back in the day…go back and read a few newspapers from the summers of 1956,57, 58. Some people think that gangs were invented in the nineties…nope…there have always been gangs.

Young people can’t live in the fantasy past of our nostalgia. It’s like an indulgence old folks have…we can go either way…We can say “Awww! you think you’ve got it bad…things were much worse in my day…” Well maybe. Or we can say ” Ohh there’s so much violence. Things were so much better in my day…” Sorry…bullshit! Younger people live in a world completely different than the one I lived in…they have to find solutions to problems I never confronted. But they also have to live with problems that are pretty damn similar to some of the ones I confronted along with my peers. And we did learn some tricks that could be useful today. We could be a valuable resource…but to do it we need to cut the crap, lose the nostalgia and be honest about history.

Yes, these days there are more guns and drugs and knives on the street, in the schools…but that doesn’t mean there were none of those back in the day. We found ways to get hurt, get killed, in cars, drunk, in fights, with drugs, and just plain stupidity.

I think we need to stop “reaching out” to young people with our lectures and lessons and the stories true or false, about our younger, braver, stronger, wiser, better dressed, better behaved, selves. And maybe if we do that for a while…we’ll stop being boring old farts…and become more trustworthy…and they’ll reach out to us.

Of course we can still tell our bullshit stories to each other…makes us all feel young again.

Today I tried on three hats. None of them fit. Where do they find heads for these hats? One was like a bucket…a pail…swung around my ears like a hula hoop. Another was sitting on top of my head like one of those old time clown hats…You know, at the circus these clowns would drive a little car into the place and ten guys would climb out…little hats on their beans.

That’s O.K. I got a lot of hats already…This is Canada..in the winter people take off their boots but sleep in their hats.

But this is about drawings that have no apparent meaning…until they do.

Today I feel no need to explain.

We all have people in our lives that leave a mark. Sometimes the mark is a scar that we’d like to forget but can’t. Others change your mind…change your direction…move you on. You may not know the road but they help you find your feet. I’ve met many of those people in my life and while my road has never been very straight…those people left me with the certainty that there were more people to be met and more changes to be made. I can only thank them all and never enough.

Middleditch was a teacher when I was in school. Big, jovial, ex-navy, with a passion for history that was neither pedantic nor boring. It may be thanks to him that I never stopped reading. In 1956 this guy in a little high-school in southern Ontario knew about the world…predicted the rise of China and the demise of the Soviet Union…knew there would be more war in Southeast Asia (Vietnam) and knew it was the French being silly and the Americans being…well, American. I had just reached the age when school felt like a glove full of thumb tacks. He never paid any special attention to me…just made each class a little better. He would put down the text book and lean back on his desk and just talk…maybe about something he saw in the paper…maybe something he heard on the radio. Kids in the class could ask questions, not raising hands formal but like in an interesting conversation. We didn’t even know how unusual this was but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one that learned more in those classes than almost all of the others. He lived down the road from town…in a stone house with a white porch and a flag-pole with the old flag of Canada on it. My uncle told me that Middleditch had a hard war in the navy. So did my uncle.

I forgot about Middleditch for years. Until one day in London on the way home from Tunisia I did a little drawing for a friend…When it was done I suddenly thought…”that’s Middleditch”. I hope she still has it. Later I did this drawing and there he was again. He didn’t commit suicide…at least I don’t think he did.

I wanted this drawing to be gritty and textured…so I over sprayed it. I still have it…framed but not hanging. I visit it once in a while and think of Middleditch, wonder where that name came from…and oh yeah…his name wasn’t Arthur.

Nothing to be said

That’s not been said.

What to be done

With a kid with a gun?

Shoot him down?

How’s that sound?

How’s that sound?

Wrong.

I know, I know…it’s too early for all of this. It was three degrees here last night. Even the dogs stopped barking. There will be a warm up before the real cold gets here but every year we get a dress rehearsal and start looking in the closet for a jacket or sweater and the shorts sit forlorn and hopeful on a chair in the corner…It’s always a feeling of apprehension for me. I do love the fall colours and the smell of the leaves…There are clear, crisp, days when you can see the other side of everything. Most of all…this is the time when  that cautionary thought slips into your mind…

“Get ready” it says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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