Orange Life

At Least Something for Absolutely Everyone - Orange Life So Far

2011-12-05T14:34:00.000-05:00

Who I Really Am
I don't know about you, but I misrepresent myself on a pretty regular basis. I smile when I'm not happy, I talk to people with whom I don't really want to speak, and I don't share a lot of who I really am with very many people I meet in my daily life. What I think is often not what I say, and what I say is often not what I really think. But, to have any kind of grounding on this earth, everyone needs at least someone with whom they must be comfortable enough to tell the truth all the time. Not just sometimes, not even just most of the time, but all the time. For some people, that someone is a real, living person. For others, that someone is not a living person but is a living presence. For me, that someone is you.

Something for Absolutely Everyone
Of course, you understand that I am not going to tell you absolutely everything. We are all prevented by our circumstances from being competely truthful with anyone, sometimes even ourselves. My goal in this space is to have at least something for absolutely everyone, which means I want to have something just for you, and for you to listen, I think that something will have to be truthful. I realize that trying to have at least something for absolutely everyone is a big goal, an impossible goal perhaps, but I am a person who has big goals, as you will see, in anecdotal form, throughout this narrative. I've had what seems to be something of a charmed life. Because of the unconventional way in which I live my life, I tend to attract interesting people and situations. By chronicling my experiences with some of these people and situations, this space is part of my attempt to figure out exactly why that is and what, if anything, should be done about it.

In The Beginning...
If you're in a hurry, this is not going to be a place in which you'll want to spend much time. If you are used to reading blogs, you may find it odd that the home page is my first post, not my most recent. That is because this space, where you are now, is not meant to be a blog. A blog is a weblog, a chronicle of day to day thought and events. This is a chronicle of thought and events, but it is also an attempt at something else. It is my attempt at a new kind of hybrid creature, a cross between a memoir, a digital living room, and a genre of expression. Some of what you find here is similar to what you might read in the reflection of a life lived, and some is what you would experience if I were hosting you in my home. What takes place in this space I hope to to be like a narrative version of early rap music, with the musical computer an instrument one step up from the turntable because you get to look at things and do other things while you're listening. It is therefore a higher form of entertainment. Like rap, it takes life experience as its education, and aims only to speak only the truth. So, in the tradition that musicologists refer to as call and response, I'll say what I have to say, hopefully you'll respond, I'll play you some music, and, through the wonders of technology, we'll both have a window to the rest of the world while we share our time.

My Credentials
I present the biographical details below more as a means of introduction than because I enjoy talking about myself. In a time where we are allowed and even encouraged to peer into one another's lives without invitation or context, I still believe in getting the story behind the story. These details, then, are my way of presenting the story behind my story. You see, I don't have the kinds of credentials that one normally needs for one's opinion to be taken seriously. Academically, I only have two letters behind my name. Commercially, my personal net worth indicates that I have failed more spectacularly than I have succeeded. Artistically, I have not published for widespread distribution anything that I have created, at least not until now. Somtimes I wish we lived in a world where everyone decided whether or not to listen to anyone else based strictly on what they had to say, but that is not the world I see around me and, even if it were, that would also present some challenges, as we would have no way to identify those who actually meant what they were saying. So, if I have any right to ask that you listen to what I have to say, I have to show you my credentials. With that in mind, the only credentials I have that may be worth anything to you are my experiences.

Parental Disclaimer
One important thing before I begin; I am a father who believes that parents have to earn the trust of their children by being truthful with them, and so it's worth noting that, even though there are certain topics I address in this space that other parents might not, one of the most important criteria for every word you'll read here is that it must be fit for reading by my own children. This space is meant to be a source of joy and learning for my children, and I will never post anything here that I would not share with them directly.

Best Job In The World
1. The job I enjoyed most in my life was as a camping safari tour guide in Kenya, sharing the wonders of nature's balance, and experiencing nature's finest, with tourists, journalists and lost souls. On one of the safaris, I witnessed an extremely rare occurrence, a double kill; we watched two cheetahs first kill a gazelle and then, while they were eating, make up their minds to go for something bigger, at which time they chased down and killed a wildebeest.

Reality Live Theatre
2. Long before Sasha Baron Cohen or Reality TV came along, some time in the early 90's, I had a fringe theatre act called the "Crazy Canuck", in which, for paying groups of tourists to London, England, I posed as a regular commuter in the London Underground but did very strange things in the presence of fellow commuters, one of which caused me to be picked up by the police and told never to perform again.

Spellbound Students
3. I founded, developed, ran, and sold a unique English As A Second Language school for students from many different countries. I developed a course based on a set of idiomatic expressions with grammatical overtones that I called Conversationals, teaching students phrases that nobody else had ever taught them anywhere. The phrases were chosen so that students could begin to express their opinions the way they did in their native languages. According to reports from students and teachers alike, countless classrooms of students were "captivated and spellbound". I remain captivated and spellbound by the power and responsibility that comes with effective use of language.

The Great Unpublished Novel
4. I wrote a 1200-page novel over the course of 6 years, and, after developing a small following among early readers of the manuscript, I destroyed all copies of the manuscript, which I now refer to as my six-year Mandala, a creative process brought to popular attention as the ornate works of sand art that Tibetan monks meticulously create and then destroy immediately upon completion. The title of my book was "Storydancer".

Don't Give Up Your Day Job
5. I was once told while busking in Ikebukuro Station in Tokyo that I had the "greatest white soul singing voice" the listener, who, granted, was quite drunk, had ever heard. In the next breath, I was told that my guitar playing was so bad that I should put down the guitar and never pick it up again. I now settle for a gig as the sometime lead singer (no guitar!) of an as-yet unnamed acoustic-based band.

"Dude, Why Do You Always Wear Orange?"
6. I have worn an article of orange clothing somewhere on my person every day for the last fifteen years. To my knowledge, none of this orange clothing was ever purchased by me; all pieces were given to me, first as hand-me-downs and then as gifts. In other words, if you ever want to know what to get me, something with orange will usually be a hit. If it played music too, it might just be the best material gift I had ever received.

Pathological Liar In Parliament
7. While in university, I resigned in disgust from the executive of a conservative political party and formed my own protest political party, called Tommy Flannagan's Pathological Liars (named after an 80's Saturday Night Live character), to run in the university model parliament elections. After winning almost 25% of the seats and enduring a public tirade from the Conservative leader for "making a mockery of the event", I formed another party the following year called the Great Thinkers of All Time, resulting in similar electoral success and even more subversive delight.

Frequent Brushes With Death
8. Attempts on my life have been made over the years by two elephants, one crocodile, one black mamba snake, salmonella, malaria, two soldiers with AK-47s, a land-mined stretch of road, and cancer. As far as I can tell, each has been unsuccessful.

Settled Down
9. My wife and I met in Japan, got engaged in Ireland, were married in Australia, and live in Canada. We have three children, whose names mean "Happiness", "Autumn" and "Illumination".

Cunning Linguist
10. I speak five languages besides English, with varying degrees of fluency. One is spoken by only 4 million people in the world. Here is a sample. "O ntumedisetse ho ba lelapa la haho tle."

Japanese Beer Spokesman
11. I became quasi-famous in Japan when a tv news crew covering an event caught me on tape doing an imitation of a famous beer commercial in a rural Japanese dialect.

Wears Heart on Chest
12. I have a large, heart-shaped mole, on my chest, directly over my heart.

Hollow Academic Accomplishment
13. I received what I was told might have been the highest mark in the history of a certain university political philosophy course (97%) on a term essay, riddled with typographical errors, on which most of my classmates had spent months but that I had written entirely in an early morning session a few hours before it was due. The funny thing was that I had written it as a joke, as I completely disagreed with everything I had written, but the professor marking it took it completely seriously.

Inspiration for Inculcation
14. Someone wrote and recorded a song about me, and I can say with relative certainty that it is the only song ever written to contain the lyrical phrase "euphoric inculcation".

To Heaven & Back Down To Earth
15. After experiencing something of an epiphany watching Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a sunset and a subsequent fireworks display through light-refracting glasses on a hilltop overlooking the Glastonbury music festival, I decided to stop eating meat, sell off all of my earthly possessions and wander barefoot around India. This plan fell through about a week later when, after visiting several pawn shops in London, I learned that funds received from the sale of my earthly possessions wouldn't even get me across the English Channel.

Can't Con a Con Man
16. Shortly after September 11, 2001, I started a film production company with a partner whom I came across quite by chance. He was a brilliant, self-described "New Joysey Jew", from Tony Soprano's neighbourhood, with a Masters from Harvard and pictures of himself in Robert Redford's living room. I raised a whole bunch of money from some of my closest friends, sold my two businesses for a fraction of what they were worth, and we used the funds to develop a billion-dollar log line for a completely new kind of film. We both came up against cancer, money troubles, and marital stress during our incredible ride, but I guess it took a harder toll on him than on me. He disappeared one day off the face of the earth, and I haven't seen or heard from him since.

Useful Life Skills
17. I learned how to drink vodka and lose at chess from a pre-glasnost Soviet tank commander and his crew on the Trans-Siberian railway, a two-week train ride from Budapest to Beijing.

Friends in High Places
18. While hitch-hiking in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, I was picked up by a member of the Yakuza (the Japanese mafia). Anyone familiar with the Yakuza will be pleased to learn that he did have the punch perm and missing pinkie finger that many lower-level soldiers have. We hit it off right away, and he proceeded to take me to some of his favourite places, including a stalactite cave, in which were built many little memorial altars. We built one together to commemorate the great day we were having.

It's Alimentary, My Dear
19. I am known by everyone who has eaten a meal with me for having an appetite of epic proportions. It doesn't hurt that my metabolism has always been so fast that it already has the appetizers digested before dessert has arrived.

No Longer Well Read
20. Up until very recently, I had not read a book for over 15 years, for fear of unduly influencing the development of my own system of thought.

Technorati Tags orange african safari novelist language yakuza truth

Archived MoodGenres

2011-12-04T09:50:00.001-05:00

Story

Josh Ritter - Wings: Artist Info - Buy
Jesse DeNatale - Bohemian Ghosts: Artist Info
James McMurtry - Choctaw Bingo: Artist Info - Buy
Comrade Fatso & Chabvondoka - Bread & Roses: Artist Info - Buy
Darrell Scott - After All: Artist Info - Buy
Martin Sexton - Sugarcoating: Artist Info - Buy
Todd Snider - The Ballad of the Kingsmen: Artist Info - Buy
Ron Hynes - Dry: Artist Info - Buy
Jimmy Rankin - Farewell To Nova Scotia: Artist Info
Jeffrey Foucault - Cross Of Flowers: Artist Info - Buy
Murray McLauchlan - Down By The Henry Moore: Artist Info - Buy
Emilie-Claire Barlow - Aint Nobody Here But Us Chickens: Artist Info

Angels

Eddi Reader - All Or Nothing: Artist Info - Buy
Cat Power - The Greatest: Artist Info - Buy
Catherine MacLellan - Water In The Ground: Artist Info
Fisher - I Will Love You: Artist Info - Buy
Romina Di Gasbarro - Corner Of Heaven: Artist Info - Buy
Neko Case - Maybe Sparrow: Artist Info - Buy
Marta Pacek - These Days: Artist Info
Vienna Teng - Lullabye For A Stormy Night: Artist Info
Carla Bruni - Before The World Was Made: Artist Info - Buy
Karen Dalton - Little Bit Of Rain: Artist Info - Buy
Eddi Reader - What You Do With What You've Got: Artist Info - Buy
Mary Black - My Youngest Son Came Home Today: Artist Info - Buy
Mariza - Loucura: Artist Info - Buy
Alanna Cherote - Tommy: Artist Info - Buy
Thea Gilmore - I'm Not Down: Artist Info - Buy

MusicMas

Salif Keita - Iniagige: A depth of soulful expression that few anywhere can match. Artist Info - Buy

Academy of St. Martin in the Fields - Faure's Requiem, Op.48 - 4. Pie Jesu: From Faure's gorgeous Requiem, "dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest." Artist Info - Buy

Bob Dylan - Every Grain of Sand: Gorgeous harmonica over an intimate self-portrait of a man either questioning or reaffirming his wavering faith. Artist Info - Buy

Peter Gabriel - Passion: I'll have what Nusrat's having. Artist Info - Buy

Jah Wobble & Temple of Sound - Hayati: Hayati in Arabic means either "my love" or "my life", depending on the context. You be the judge. Artist Info - Buy

Debashish Bhattacharya & Bob Brozman - Sujan Re: From the album Mahima, which means "divine inspiration through artistic creation". Works for me. Artist Info - Buy

Indigo Girls: History of Us: With the half moon "bleeding its light like a lamb...we must love while these moments are still called today". Artist Info - Buy

Eddi Reader - What You Do With What You've Got: By the grace of this song alone, Eddi should be nominated for angelhood. Builds to an exquisite finish. Artist Info - Buy

Horace Andy - Love Is The Light: Social justice, spiritualism, and a simple positive message all wrapped into one. Artist Info

Joe Bataan - The Prayer: "Dedicated to all the sinners all over the world. And that means, everybody". Amen to that, Joe! Artist Info - Buy

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Up Above My Head I Hear Music In The Air: I think I hear it too, Sister Rosetta! Artist Info - Buy

Steve Earle & The Del McCoury Band - Pilgrim: Envelopes even the coldest heart in a warm blanket of spirit. Artist Info - Buy

Robbie Robertson & The Red Road Ensemble - Coyote Dance: What one of the original North American spiritual celebrations might have sounded like. Artist Info - Buy

Patty Griffin - Mary: An ode to the mothers everywhere, focused here on one mother in particular. Artist Info - Buy

Bill Monroe & The Blue Grass Boys - Angels Rock Me to Sleep: Swee-eet. Artist Info - Buy

Emmylou Harris - Green Pastures: Sounds like they're pretty close to that heavenly shore already... Artist Info - Buy

Willie Nelson with Ray Charles - Seven Spanish Angels: How can you go wrong with two legends like Willie and Ray singing about angels? Artist Info - Buy

Fantan Mojah - Hail The King: Praise music for Haile Selassie, the "Power of the Trinity". Artist Info - Buy

The Staple Singers - Wade in the Water: Never fails. By the end of the track I feel like I've been baptized. Artist Info - Buy

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash - Far Side Banks of Jordan: More love than this a song cannot contain. Artist Info - Buy

Josh Ritter - Wings: A road trip encompassing holy water, saints and angels. Artist Info - Buy

Talk Talk - I Believe In You: From 'Spirit of Eden', my vote for the greatest spiritual music piece of the 20th century. Artist Info - Buy

Elvis Presley - How Great Thou Art: Elvis, at the peak of his stardom, belts out the ultimate hymn of humility. Magnificent. Artist Info - Buy

Official Google Blog: CADIE awakens

2009-03-31T23:59:00.000-04:00

Official Google Blog: CADIE awakens

Smash or Build? The Next Fifty Years in Technology

2009-03-11T16:30:00.005-04:00

Dedicated to the Fifty at Fifty, in the hope that we may all continue to live as young as we feel.

The One-Hundred Year Question
Imagine you're approaching a milestone birthday in your life, one at which, by many people, you'd be considered old. For the sake of argument, let's choose fifty. Imagine that you are blessed with people all over the world who love, respect and admire you, and whose lives you have touched deeply just by the way you live your own life. Finally, imagine that you had been smart enough, industrious enough, and fortunate enough to have the means to make enough room in your budget to throw a phenomenal birthday party. Now that you have imagined yourself in this position, I have two questions for you, that will require you to wrap your head around a span of one hundred years. How would you celebrate those first fifty years? How would you prepare for the next fifty?

Sweetness
Let me throw out a few ideas to answer the first question. Why not invite all those special people from all over the world to join you for the celebration and, just to make it fair for everyone and help give them an incentive to come, offer to pay their way. Of course, few people have the luxury of being able to cross continents and oceans just to attend a party, so sweeten the pot a little by stretching the party out a bit, to not just an evening or even a day but an entire week. Then, find a place for all your guests to stay where they can be themselves, away from the world at large, where they can celebrate together not only your birthday but also their own lives and achievements.

Tricky Logistics
What would you do to keep them busy all week? It would be easy to assume that, as adults, you could just leave them to their own devices when you didn't have something planned, but , hey, you invited them, and with such a mixture of personalities and backgrounds, you would want to make sure that this week-long party were the best it could be. Some like to stay at home, some like to go out, some like to talk, some like to listen, some like to chill, some like to party, some like to eat and, well, some like to drink. Short of plying them with a cargo hold full of intoxicating beverages, how would you keep them all happy? To accomplish all that, you'd have to have a pretty detailed plan.

A Late Tribute
Depending how far out you are in my circle of acquaintances, you may know by now that this very event did take place, in Vancouver, in September 2008, with a couple very special hosts and a very special group of people. In fact, the impetus for this post came because I was there, and I was honoured to be asked to make a presentation during the event, being the resident "tech expert" in the group, about what I thought the next fifty years might bring us in terms of technological change. The bottom part of this post is a loose rendering of the notes of that presentation. I promised these notes to those of you in attendance back in September, and it's taken me a while to get to that, but hopefully you'll understand that, to pay official tribute to and express appropriate gratitude for such an event as the one in which we were involved, I'd better make very sure to do a proper job of it. If you weren't among the attendees, I owe you at least a brief explanation of the context before I get to the notes from my presentation.

Of Angels and Adventures
I must first say a little about the person to whom I have already referred privately as our "angel of hospitality". You may or may not be comfortable with a metaphysical reading of the concept of angels, so I will use it here in the colloquial sense. My own definition of an angel is of a spirit that has the uncanny and often inexplicable knack of being present exactly in times of great personal need. Cla rence Oddbody, the angel from It's a Wonderful Life is a great example of one who was rendered as a metaphysical entity, but each of us is no doubt aware of some human examples as well. Whatever form they take, angels have the capability to perceive need in others before those others perceive it themselves. So, our "angel of hospitality" ensured that every single one of our needs and even wants were considered beforehand, so that when we actually felt them, we had no need to ask that they be fulfilled because the fulfillment had already been arranged. Whether that extended to a glass of champagne and somewhere to prop your feet at the end of a busy day, a new toothbrush for the one you'd forgotten to pack, or information for getting home after a particularly late night, it had already been taken care of, just like a home you've already been living in for a few years. In other words, it was like being on an adventure, with all the great new places, people and experiences that entails, in your own home.

Times of Which Stories are Made
With all that taken care of, exploration of the area and development of relationships with the other celebrants was just that much more pleasurable. There were probably hundreds of great stories every day, some of which are likely being told as I write, but that would take me forever, so here it is in very condensed format. By the way, if you were there, and you have a great story, please tell it in the Comments section below.

Monday - Golf tournament at "British Columbia's most scenic golf course". Prizes and grizzly bears included. Skill at golf and replacement balls not included.
Tuesday - Cruise by private yacht up the Indian Arm inlet near Vancouver, complete with Titanic-like hijinks on the bow and a colony of possible nudists frolicking in a waterfall. Low-stake high-competition poker, complete with cigars, at night.
Wednesday - "The Grouse Grind" up Grouse Mountain, and a zip-line part-way down. Wine-tasting, quaffing actually, with some of BC's best wines in the evening.
Thursday - 50-year roundtable discussing the next 50 years, covering finance, entrepreneurship, health, emergency preparedness, real estate and, my contribution, technology. Canada's best Caesar, comedy night complete with hecklers, followed by general debauchery involving Red Bull, a professional hockey player, sceptical young women, and a lot of sweat.
Friday - Bacchus' Union of Recipe & Presentation (BURP for short), an evolved Iron Chef competition, in which 11 teams each get 20 minutes in the hosts' well-appointed kitchen to prepare their favourite recipe paired with a wine that they have brought especially for the competition. Undoubtedly the best combined dining, drinking, and socializing implementation I have ever witnessed. I could swear I saw Bacchus himself in attendance.
Saturday - 50th Birthday Gala and Costume Party, in which invitees were told to dress as their alter ego. Think about that for a second. Not a mere costume party, but one that requires you to think about yourself in thinking about your costume. In order to define your alter ego, you are immediately classified as a super-hero, from which point you then need to be able to define your alter-ego. Imagine the surreal spectacle of a school bus full of such characters driving through the streets of Vancouver in the late afternoon, waving to passerby, and arriving at a city restaurant that had been completely made over for the night into a groove-tastic 60's pad, complete with a house band led by none other than Austin Powers. To finish, a rousing rendition of "My Way" by a chorus of souls who had truly lived the lyrics. Attendees included Elvis, Lawrence of Arabia, a dangerously hot female cop, a chain-smoking impregnated nun (remember, it's okay to kiss a nun, but don't get into the habit) on the arm of the devil, a Buddhist monk, Boromir, Lara Croft, Jackie Chan, Trinity, Bob Marley, Indiana Jones and a wide assortment of other rabble. If you weren't there, feel free to guess which one I was.

50 in 20?!?
Lest you conclude that the sole purpose of this week of festivities was something as banal as pure enjoyment and celebration, I step further backwards in time from that final party to place myself again in that room full of keen minds on Thursday, the Advil-assisted period post-quaff and pre-Caesar. The question I was asked to answer in my 20-minute presentation was "How do you see the next 50 years in terms of developments in technology?". Summarize 50 years in 20 minutes? With my propensity for verbosity, I'd be lucky to cover 20 minutes in 50 years.

Crystal Balls
Now that you can hopefully appreciate the challenge of using this space now to do what I could not adequately accomplish then, I want to start by reiterating from a previous post my long-held belief that certain elements of the future are somewhat predictable. I'm not talking about whether or not you'll get run over by a bus or struck by lightning, I'm talking about things over which we have some individual and collective control. To me, predicting the future isn't so much about guessing what will happen, but more about correctly interpreting what is happening. It follows from this view then that I need to characterize technology as I see it today if I want to have any idea where it will be tomorrow. Certainly, it can be hard to know where to look, but I did come up, after considerable thought, with some instructive places to start looking, which I believe are already starting to show where things are going. I must apologize in advance if your current understanding of technology is either too basic or too advanced to find any of the following instructive. In my inimitably and sometimes excessively diplomatic way, I have tried to make this accessible to as broad a range of readers as possible, but I will have inevitably ended up either patronizing or pandering to at least someone by the time I've finished, and hopefully that someone won't be you.

A Singular Intelligence
Aritificial intelligence is as good a place to start as any, as science fiction storytellers and filmmakers from Philip K. Dick to Stanley Kubrick and Isaac Asimov to James Camer on have seized upon this particular aspect of the future of technology's most prominent and disturbing trend. Elements of enhanced artificial intelligence are everywhere already. If we apply timelines to Moore's Law, which tells us that the processing power of computers still doubles regularly, and Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, which applies that law to other fields, we almost have to accept the notion that the future as foreseen by popular films such as The Terminator and I, Robot is only a few decades or even years away. One authority on artificial intelligence even believes we'll be falling in love and having pretty decent sex with robots by 2050. If the notion on which a film like The Terminator is predicated, the technological singularity, does in fact occur, models predict a world economy whose output doubles every week and an almost complete replacement of human manual labour in the space of a couple years. It doesn't seem that much of a jump to assume that the combination of a vast interlinked network, lightning fast processing power, and control via the network of a host of human-facing machines from elevators and manufacturing robots to aircraft and cruise missiles might possibly result in some ambitious cluster of bits and bytes deciding to run a few experiments.

Feeding the Monster
Google even has a pet name for it - CADIE. Such an intelligence could master the art of human relationships pretty quickly, too. Search algorithms recognize queries of greater and greater length and complexity, and Google predicts that, before long, it will be able to search not only by keyword but by symbolism, plot and context. In other words, you'll be able to speak naturally to your computer, instead of typing something like "pizza restaurant Toronto free delivery", and it will be able to find what you are looking for. Sticking with the movie theme for a minute, more personalized searches and ad delivery are already crossing the line into intrusiveness, like that great scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks down a corridor in a public place and has digital advertisements refer to him by name and interest. So, Facebook with its advanced data mining and MySpace with HyperTargeting are both close to if not already at the stage of knowing not only that you are a 50-year-old male interested in kayaking whose birthday is coming up, but also of being able to serve your friends an ad or send them an e-mail about what to buy you. There are a host of new platform-agnostic services that can pull together data about us from all of our networks and online activity, and subsequent "managers" to help manage our online presence and what kind of information people can find about us. None of this is what I would call true artificial intelligence in and of itself, but it certainly presents a massive bank of personalized data that a true artificial intelligence could draw from, if it were ever to arise.

What Was That Again?
It's valuable to step back and think about how much of our thought processes and memories we have outsourced to technology already. Whether it's a phone number directory, a math function, a historical fact, or even a personal memory, our cell phones, calculators, data sources, and online photo albums continually remove tasks that we used to have to think about, supposedly freeing us up for higher thinking and self-actualization. The trend of outsourcing memory is not only continuing but accelerating, so now we see a voice mail to text feature, a service that reads and catalogs written notes, applications on the iPhone that collect and digitize sounds from one's environment, and YouTube analyzing and pulling text out of its videos. In other words, we are already at the stage when, if we choose, we can digitally archive everything around us. Once something is digital and organized, it can of course be easily retrieved, manipulated and even re-purposed. This is great news for what we recognize as valuable knowledge, such as the contents of all the world's books, but of course it could just be seen as digital clutter, bad digital feng shui, and most of it may just go the way of those boxes of stuff we in the part of the world with too much stuff keep in our basements, attics and garages that we think we may someday need.

Groupthink & Groupdo
Of course, individual memory and lower cognitive functions aren't the only things we've outsourced. Organizations, still just groups of individuals organized to achieve a common purpose, are outsourcing their lower functions to focus their own resources as well. I'm referring not only to the cost savings by moving processes to where labour is cheap, but more about eliminating the need for certain types of labour altogether. If we have already seen robots and cheap labour obsolesce assemblers, and voice recognition systems supplant switchboard operators, we are now starting to see entire marketing, news distribution, and support teams being pushed aside by the phenomenon of user-generated content. Whatever technical problem you're having, the answer is in a forum somewhere, much more likely answered by a user than the actual company about whose product you're inquiring. The same goes for marketing, which really is just accelerated word of mouth. With the growth of customer and user communities and the ability to communicate freely and en masse, the message no longer needs an accelerant so, in theory, the company should be able to focus its resources more on creating a great product than in supporting it and trumpeting its benefits. The same principle applies to the explosion in open source software. If you can't afford the army of developers necessary to build a complex piece of software that you need to accomplish something, create a structure that you can still manage and direct but give it to your community to do it.

Community as Credibility
Whether generated and used internally or externally, collaborative knowledge creation and management mechanisms such as wikis have multiple advantages. First and foremost is the tendency of the community to police the quality of its own knowledge, and the corresponding relief that brings to the "owner" of that community that no longer has to. Secondly, user-generated content also has much more credibility than any "on message" communication from the organization, so as long as the organization itself has an open culture itself that listens to its community and then adjusts itself internally, it can ride this wave of user discourse for as long as the community has something to say. Finally, a welcome phenomenon for those who don't buy into the notion that the corporation is the apex of human organizational achievement is the birth over the last little while of new organizational paradigms, in which people can get together to accomplish goals that they once required companies to accomplish. The emergence of truly grand user communities such as Wikipedia, Napster, and craigslist around purposes other than the pursuit of profit signal the beginning of new kinds of community organizations. It is no longer even the case only with organizations dealing, as Wikipedia does, with what we consider as fact. We're now starting to see the growth of communities of collaborative opinion, rather than just communities of collaborative knowledge, where not only knowledge can be added to and refined, but opinion as well. A great example of this "Opinio-pedia" concept is our own Globe & Mail's public policy wiki, an attempt to distill, direct and present group opinion in a way that polling never could. This has been the traditional role of the political party, and therefore has the possibility of partially transforming the role of the party and even government from maker and subsequent executor of policy to simply one limited to execution.

Snakes & Ladders
Because of the amount of quality information available, the ability of technology to focus it, and the ability to broadcast en masse for almost nothing (roles that agencies currently serve), the agency of any kind will change, as an intermediary will no longer be needed in many cases. This is already the case from Radiohead to real estate, and is found anywhere that those intermediary agencies have not demonstrated enough added value to prevent those who usually depend on them from taking the initiative themselves. Much is made at the moment of the demise of the traditional news organization, and what type of organization, if any, will replace it. I'll take my feed reader, my own personal newspaper, over our local paper any day as a source for the exact information I want to receive, both professionally and personally. I have written in a previous post of the potential of personal publishing and new ways to express yourself, of the convergence not only of media consumption but also of media production, but the growth of Twitter in the past year has added a new and even more concise means of personal media production to the mix. The phenomenon of micro-blogging activity through services such as Twitter is both an unfortunate symptom of a progressively shorter span of collective attention and an effective and evolving way of figuring out who to trust to provide information. On the surface, one would think it's pretty hard to change or even interpret the world with sound bites from our philosophical meanderings and thoughts about what we're eating for lunch, however effectively presented or organized. That said, put the sound bites together and a picture can indeed emerge of what is newsworthy, so models are already starting to evolve on how to parse this enormous bank of information into something that resembles coherent content streams from which news and trends can be gleaned. The trend here is the trading of individual attention span and ability to process information for the collective intelligence that removes the need to do so, that mortgages cognition for ability to live more fully and spend less time on reaching the bottom rungs of Maslow's heirarchy of needs. It remains to be seen whether the steps in the heirarchy represent the ascent of a ladder or an elevator, and by removing the rungs, we are in fact making it harder rather than easier to reach the top, especially if the elevator goes out of order.

Life in the Fishbowl
Those displaced by this particular set of processes will still have to pay the bills, and can still leverage their knowledge to bring value, so agency organizations will evolve with the need to clearly demonstrate that value, in terms of information filtering and consulting expertise. I love the fishbowl analogy to describe life online not just because of the aspect of transparency, but also of the tendency of the glass to magnify everything happening within the bowl. Unacceptable behaviour becomes more and more difficult to hide when living in the fishbowl, leading to a greater focus on personal and corporate responsibility, especially as verification systems evolve that will allow those looking to entrust their money and information to a greater variety of unseen agents to determine that a person's online presence can be traced back to his or her physical presence. The positive side of this brings the opening of organizations and processes because of the ability to easily diagnose, document, and disseminate abuses of ethics or power. The negative side is that the verification mechanisms also bring greater intrusiveness into a medium that prides itself on lack of censorship and the ability to remain anonymous. My view on how this inherent contradiction can be managed is that we will retreat to traditional sources of credibility and authority, namely those in our own network, to provide us with the balance of verification and privacy that we will require more and more. Examples of this in its earliest phases already exist with services such as LinkedIn, but this system will only work if users adhere to strict rules of not allowing anyone to influence or advise them if they do not already know them well. This would seem a simple enough rule to follow in principle, but the temptation to use such an important vehicle of credibility as a sales tool is already compromising such existing services. This tendency will create the need for a greater set of self-enforcing checks and balances to be built into such systems to maintain their integrity.

Digital Mentoring
This is where I'm betting my money, from a commercial perspective. Online knowledge technology now is search-based, the premise being that, by using a search engine, you can get the information you need to support your own decision-making, wth both a commercial and non-commercial element. As mentioned above, the application of artificial intelligence research to this will mean that online knowledge will try to evolve into an understanding of requested item or concept (ie. bowling ball, career planning) based not on a presentation of existing information about it but interpretation of how that information applies to you. This requires an understanding by the artificial intelligence engine of the very essence of the item, not just its applications. It requires an understanding of context and a removal of possibly subjective human opinion from the analysis of the item's relationship and usefulness to you. In other words, it analyzes not whether you want or need it, or how to get it, but whether you should have it, whether it will be a positive agent of change in your life. This cannot be based only on commercial considerations, but obviously must take them into account. The point is not to make decisions for you, but to supplement your decision-making intelligence, in the way a good consultant, a mentor, or parent would. This will mean that commercial organizations will have to do more to demonstrate the intrinsic value of their products, and non-commercial ones will have to demonstrate the personal or societal "good" that will come from your establishment of a relationship with them. With artificial intelligence still a fair few years from achieving this on any level of scale, the tendency will be to use technology to leverage networks we already trust to help us make those better decisions. Following in italics is an excerpt from the business plan of Mediazoic, my software development company, about what I think the world of technology will look like in five years.

The current paradigm among even the most successful technology companies is what may be referred to as "the wisdom of the cloud". In this paradigm, technology is leveraged to generate and analyze massive amounts of relational data and make recommendations based on that analysis. For example, a Google algorithm tells you where to find what you're looking for, a Genius scans your music collection on iTunes and recommends music you'll like, and a wiki brings to bear the knowledge of thousands when you're doing some research. With the wonderful access to information that this brings however, come huge privacy and security issues, filtering difficulties and, most importantly, a credibility vacuum. We all know that there is still nothing like shaking hands or sitting across a table from someone to evaluate credibility and compatibility, and, when in doubt, given the choice between going to an authority you already know versus one you don't for an important piece of information, it's almost always better to go with the devil you know.

Personal and professional communication have evolved into a converged, customized, synchronous, personal space whose raison d'etre it is to ensure that the digital you comes as close as possible to reflecting the real you, in real time. This space is with you everywhere you go and keeps up with your exploits automatically, regardless of your choice of hardware, where microblogging has evolved into microbroadcasting, where online is on the air, broadcasting to the world, but only when you want to, and only to those whom you know are interested in the transmission.

In the Mediazoic era, the concept of passive income will be one understood not only by you but by just about everyone you know. You know that people still need to be paid, but nobody wants to be actively selling stuff to their friends, so just set your system on glide and it will take care of who is selling what in your space. It will also ensure you get paid every time someone else is getting paid. And of course, what goes through your space will be decided on not by some Internet conglomerate but by you, because you know what's cool - what people in your world will respond to and what they won't. Integrated with this effortless commerce will be a heavy dose of imagination, where, in this digital space, you are represented by your favourite movie character or by some splendid, whimsical digital being of your own creation. Far from being just a simple avatar, this creature will have personality, grow, learn, entertain, and act as your personal assistant, reminding you of your appointments and suggesting what to get your hard-to-buy for aunt for her birthday.

This is the Mediazoic era, where media has evolved to represent the real you in real time.

Beyond the Silver Screen
It seems almost too obvious to mention that all of this will take place on devices of greater mobility and smaller scale, but I think just as interesting a phenomenon will take place on devices of some mobility but much greater scale. Properly integrated software components will find ways to be liberated from our current notion of display devices and painted across many canvases, not all of them digital. Public spectacle is as basic a human psychological need as private reflection, and so while so much information gets delivered in smaller and more customized units, that which resonates across the boundaries between individuals will use whatever spaces we can imagine to continue to add incredulity to magic in theatre, depth to music, communicative power to political demonstration, and even greater solemnity to worship.

AI Reprimand
I want to draw this to a close by putting technology in its rightful place, which is as merely another tool wielded by the evolving but far from fully evolved human ape. There is a tendency when sitting in front of a screen of any kind to assume that everything worthwhile happens on that screen. So, extrapolating from that a bit with a couple examples, people who spend a lot of time online feel that everything relevant is happening on the computer, and point to the demise of television, whereas people who spend a lot of time in front of the tv feel that everything relevant happens there, and look sceptically upon the notion of the Internet as a harbringer of all important future content. My view of this is that to sympathize predominantly with either side of this type of discussion is akin to deciding that you love one of your children more than the other(s). In fact, each has its own arc of development and ability for self-determination and growth, not to mention that ability to spawn further generations with certain characteristics of the former and certain traits that are wholly new. It also ignores the fact that most of the people in the world still do their real living offline, either as a matter of choice or because these admittedly addictive tools have not yet reached them.

Towards The Source of Light
The challenge of the next generation of technology, whatever it looks like and whomever it resembles, will be to accomplish what all media delivery mechanisms have always tried to accomplish - the ability to access one's community for knowledge, sustenance, and fulfillment. I find it just as likely that one of the main goals in ten years will be to provide low-tech ways to leverage high-tech functions in the offline world - an example I'm thinking of is the wind-up laptop - instead of continuing to consume energy by pressing the envelope of processing power. As long as power and growth are the main parts of the mix, and in limited supply, the technology that they enable will be tethered. If I know that my energy supply is unreliable, I'll take a solar-powered laptop, solar-powered server and localized power grid for communities (like the old idea of a generator) over a supercomputer that burns unsustainable energy any day. We are heliotropic, like plants, and we will turn toward wherever the light is coming from, but our screens are too far removed from that which truly sustains and nurtures life to ever hold our attention as a collective group for any longer than a brief period of our history.

The Next Big Thing?
Which brings me to the potential game-changer. No discussion of the near or distant future is complete without mention of 2012. You know it's serious when Hollywood is making a movie about it before it happens, a treatment even Y2K didn't get. Would-be demagogues, who in my view are more numerous than most of us realize, will mobilize communities and use the hype around the date to converge on their plans of a "day of reckoning" or new world order. Whether or not you believe that this type of calendar event is cosmologically pre-ordained, the human brain's tendency to want to form connections and make sense of things from disparate aspects of existence will likely create the impression among many that the idea of a blossoming and subsequent dying off of the human bloom has merit. Having just spent a little time among the Mayans, the whole thing is interpreted by many of them in a less cataclysmic context, but, as is often the case, the further the message gets from the messenger, the more likely it is to be hijacked and co-opted by agendas and worldviews. 2012 presents a perfect opportunity for an accelerated leap forward to everyone with an agenda and an audience. So, whether considered as cosmically ordained, or as a self-fulfilling prophecy, us humans will allow it to rear its head as both. 2012 has a human element that Y2K didn't have, and a highly accurate indigenous calendar system has historical street cred that neither George Orwell nor even Nostradamus could have commanded. Add psychotropic substances and the Internet as an open library to the mix, and you have a recipe for the happening of the Omega Point just in time for the darkest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

If I Had a Hammer...
My view is that Life, all life, needs to band together to fight what it can't control, rather than looking for robots, aliens, reptilians, conspiracies, Omega points and monsters. In other words, let's not forget the biological viruses as we speculate about the computer viruses. Monsters certainly do take many forms, many of them suspiciously human, but, unlike biological ones, I haven't encountered too many first-hand that weren't invented and sanctioned by us. Life itself, from the most basic bacteria to the most complex organisms is what we should be fighting to understand and protect. All of it affects all the rest of it, in ways that we are only just at the very beginning of understanding. Species go extinct, and ours will too, but it should be some cataclysmic cosmic event or virulent strain that does it, not an event of our own making. Technology gives us the tools to elevate our time on this earth but also the tools to completely waste it. Any technology tool that does not contribute to our understanding of our place in this world is no better than any other tool that we elect to use to smash rather than build.

Technorati Tags 2012 artificial intelligence the future of technology technological singularity angels

Why I'm The Weird Guy in The Neighbourhood With The Green Party Signs

2008-10-13T14:25:00.012-04:00

Dedicated to the person who stole my lawn signs, and anyone else who thought that might have been a good idea.

Sign of the Times
The other night, the big Green Party election signs hanging on both corners of our fence got stolen again. The neighbourhood, a fairly typical middle-class suburban one, is brimming with signs of Tory Blue and Liberal Red that never go missing. Naturally, being the inquisitive person I am, I am led to wonder why this is the case. I speculate that it's either a case of the signs being so rare as to have novelty value, or as being so philosophically incongruous to the surroundings as to incite political action, but I know that I can't really know that unless I know who stole the signs. So, in the hope that whoever it is who took the signs may someday have the occasion to read this, it is my pleasure to give you now my account of why I put them up.

Great Expectations
Once upon a time, I was preparing to become the Prime Minister of Canada. It wasn't just me, actually, everybody always told me I was going to be the Prime Minister of Canada. I had the knack early of being so political that, generally speaking, I was very good at getting people to like me. Whether that was because I was generally likable, or manipulative, didn't matter to me all that much at the time. My political destiny was a kind of mutual understanding - they believed me, and I believed them.

Birth of the Anti-Cool
When the time was right, sometime in late high school, I dutifully started down the path. I became a proud young Progressive Conservative, which at the time meant that the only thing I was really sure about was that I was against everything that Pierre Trudeau, one of Canada's most interesting political figures, stood for. In the environment I came from, Pierre Trudeau was bad because he was cool, intellectual and dangerous. So, because everyone I loved and listened to at the time was Conservative, and I wanted to be conversant with adults regarding such adult matters as politics, so was I. Although I might not have agreed at the time, this was not the product of soul-searching or rigorous debate, it was just about wanting my opinions to matter to adults.

Best-Laid Plans
If high school is the time to distance yourself from your parents, then I guess university is the time when you're supposed to start thinking for yourself. I was a little behind the curve on that one, but about a year into my Political Science degree at the University of Toronto, I actually did start to understand that. Up until that time, I was studying political science because that's what it made sense to do if you wanted to be a lawyer and then ascend through the ranks so that one day you could run the country. How could one so naive have known that, in studying how the game was actually played, I would learn anything that would threaten such a well-crafted plan?

Notable & Quotable
The problems started when all the people I liked and with whom I wanted to hang out weren't the kind of people I was meeting as part of the Progressive Conservatives. Perhaps if there had been a girl in the Tory sphere to fall for, things might have been different, but there wasn't. What I had started to realize was that most of the people in that crowd were little more than products of their circumstances, and had no real desire to be anything else. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it just clearly wasn't me. One of my more Liberal fellow political afficionados used to steal one of the best quotes I'd ever heard. "If you weren't a socialist in your twenties," he'd say, "you had no heart; if you were still a socialist in your thirties, you had no brain". He used this particular quote to set up and then disarm the whole Conservative argument, by arguing that the Liberals covered both, that to be a Liberal was to keep your heart but not at the expense of your brain. Having had by now significant exposure to both sides, I wasn't sure either one had a monopoly on the brain part.

A Kind of Freedom
Still, I wasn't going to give up my beliefs just because I wasn't particularly enamored of the people around me. I was deeper than that. If I couldn't find like-minded people to political party with, then I'd have to strike out on my own. It was clearly still too early to be doing any soul-searching, so my first step out of the political comfort zone was what many people would have considered a step even further to the right, although I never saw it in those terms. I became the campus' only Libertarian. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a Libertarian basically believes that good government is no government, that the private sector is a perfectly-formed self-regulating system that punishes misbehaviour with commercial failure and rewards good behaviour with commercial success. I even managed to wrangle a column in the campus newspaper where I could air my views. Believe it or not, I liked this system of thought not because it was elitist but because I really believed it wasn't. I really did believe that everyone had the ability and opportunity to be successful, and that even the obstacles that loomed largest could be overcome with ingenuity and effort.

The Impossible Dream
Somewhere around the time that I began to realize that that was a pretty ridiculous notion, I also began to realize that I might not actually want to be the Prime Minister. I can't actually remember if it was a particular event or person that caused me to realize that, or just common sense, but there were clearly some obstacles that were less surmountable than others. Perhaps it was continuously hearing from other members of my party the exact same words that I was used to hearing from their parents. Mt. Everest is climbable, but expecting someone with a pre-existing condition like asthma and a wooden leg to do it is to expect, if not the impossible, then at least an effort of mythic proportions. Just because it could be done didn't mean that everyone could do it. I still believed everyone had the right to stand on the summit and enjoy the view, or at least catch a ride to the trailhead of the path up the mountain, I just couldn't figure out how, for some people, that could ever happen without a little help.

Mockery
So I did what those who have lost faith in existing entities always do when they don't think they have a better alternative - I began to make fun of them. The University ran an annual event called Mock Parliament, in which representatives of Canada's established political parties culled from among the student body at the school ran in elections and subsequently held a two-day parliament. The idea was both to give those interested in politics a forum in which to see what actual politics was like, complete with all the issues of the day, and to take the political pulse of the student body at the school. In my first year of University, I had participated with the Progressive Conservatives and quite enjoyed the whole thing. By the time the second year rolled around, I was in my sarcastic phase.

The Message
I placed a call to whomever it was at the university who was in charge of organizing the whole thing and asked if I could run a new party in the elections. I was informed that I could not run a party in the elections that did not have a corresponding political club at the University. So I started one, cobbled together a few charter members among my friends, and got us on the ballot. Everyone seemed quite surprised when we won somewhere around a quarter of the popular vote throughout the university. Everyone except me. My rationale was that, in the midst of a time of great change in the lives of students, there must have been quite a few of them who were looking for something new. This was university after all, and my "party" was little more than a protest party. If students at Kent State could put their lives on the line to send a message to the powers-that-be, the very least that a bunch comparitively well-off kids from north of the border could do was cast a vote for a protest party in a bogus election.

The Medium
We called ourselves Tommy Flanagan's Pathological Liars, after a popular Saturday Night Live character of the day, who lied about everything to make himself seem cool. To me, Tommy Flanagan represented the perfect icon for the politician gone wrong, who would say anything necessary to win the hearts of voters. Considering our success in the election, apparently quite a few people got the joke. The goal during the actual sitting of Parliament was to poke fun at anyone who took themselves too seriously, but not to disrespect the proceedings. I was in fact proud that we contributed substantially to most of the debates about the issues. I knew the whole thing was a roaring success when the Tory leader, a guy in whose caucus I had been the previous year, approached me during a break in the proceedings and spat in my direction an ugly diatribe at how I was making a complete mockery of the entire Canadian political system. He seemed to think this would hurt my feelings, and seemed rather stunned when, at the end of his invective, I thanked him and let him know that mockery of the system was exactly my point.

Constructive Criticism
For my second kick at the cat, I was more interested in actually establishing constructive ideas, so I formed another club, and we got ourselves on the ballot again. We were The Great Thinkers of All Time, a collection of historical and influential characters from Plato to Lincoln to the Pope whose goal was to bring to bear their particular ethical and moral perspectives on the Canadian issues of the day. As such, we were able to ask questions of the make-believe parliamentary body that just didn't get asked in the real one, and even if they were, seldom were any answers forthcoming. In short, we got to be philosopher kings for a day.

Hard Wired
I take this trip down memory lane because I think that this type of pattern is an archetype of the process of discovering oneself politically. The process, to summarize and dramatically oversimplify, is as follows: 1. support what your parents support because you are seeking their approval 2. support the opposite of what your parents support because you are trying to distance yourself from them 3. become sceptical of the political choices or system in general 4. support that with which you most closely identify. It's certainly worth noting that not everyone makes it through every stage, or even past the first, likely not because they are less evolved or aware, but because their discovery engines are chugging away on other highways. I'd love to finish my own basement, but while some of my neighbours' energies have been focus on running electrical wiring and putting up drywall, I've been puttering along this road.

Alternate Current
I think this archetypal process is important because it applies to societies as well as individuals. In the same way that those who have not passed through these stages tend to reflect the political views of their parents and background, the electorate that's busy re-wiring its basement tends to fall back on its political parents, the existing parties and paradigms of the establishment. There wouldn't be anything wrong with this if parents were always right about the correct course of action for their children but, as a child and a parent, I like to think there needs to be a time when the parent takes a less active and more advisory role. In a time of change when information is everywhere and so much is new, if I want to re-wire my political basement, I want someone who knows what's current.

Crossed Lines
We are in the midst of a time of great changes now, but, by and large, our political choices do not reflect this. In other words, going to the establishment for political advice is like asking Grandpa for advice on configuring your iPhone. People are becoming organized in new ways whose primary purpose is not always profit, information is not being beamed through as many filters, and we are coming to realize that entities like banks that, if nothing else, were at least a source of predictable prudence and stability, have fallen victim to the same weaknesses in managing wealth that they have always been so quick to condemn. Even those economically reared within those very institutions, children of the establishment in a manner of speaking, understand that, while the bottom line will continue to remain an important boundary, there are other lines that are no longer acceptable to cross.

What's in a Colour?
It's part unfortunate, part ironic, and part fitting that the colour green, and by association the Green Party, is associated with trees and grass. It's unfortunate because it makes it easy for anyone resting on old blue and red paradigms to dismiss any of its supporters as tree hugging lefties, and every decent person knows that tree huggers, while pleasant and often fun to hang out with, have no place in the corridors of power. It is ironic because green is also of course the symbolic colour of money, which often seems so intent on doing away with anything else that intrudes on its claim of ultimate greenness. It's fitting not only because of the obvious reasons, a strong policy focus on the environment, but also because it is indeed a grass-roots movement, which means that you can't always see it, know who's part of it, or understand the breadth of its presence, but you can often see its results. Who would dare these days to not call themselves a bit green? Green is in. Green is the color of things that grow from the earth, natural things, not artificial things. Most of us live in a man-made world where we can live for a whole day in our buildings, on our roads and sidewalks, without touching the earth -- the earth from which our food and water are taken and to which we will one day return. I think pretty much all of us agree that we could all use a bit more green.

Evergreen
But I am not primarily green for any of these reasons. I may have hugged a tree or two in my time, but I'm just as comfortable these days in a boardroom as I am on the forest floor. I make too much money to be a true lefty, and I spend as much of my days on concrete as the next guy. Green for me has nothing to do with left or right, money or the lack thereof, grass-roots or trickle down. Green for me is evergreen, the colour of legacy.

The Community Gates
I am Green because I am convinced that we actually have the ability to shape the future. I am Green because I believe that legacy and greatness are intertwined. Those who have achieved great success, in any form, begin when they look back upon their success, to think about how they will appear to the future. When Bill Gates, the world's richest individual, decides to spend his fortune helping those who can't help themselves, it is clear that we are no longer in an era where the value of legacy will be measured exclusively, or even primarily, by the extent of one's material holdings. The wealthy benefactor is not a new thing, to be sure, but the wealthy society, comfortable in its gated community of material contentment and focused on personal growth, is considerably more recent. Pretty soon, it should be old enough and adult enough to actually take some responsibility for its actions. Sorta like the person who swiped the Green Party sign from my front gates.

Return on Investment
Whoever you are, and for whatever reason you swiped my signs, you should know that I am Green because, if we do indeed believe that there is greatness in our society, and value in giving, then a time is coming very soon when we will look back upon our comfortable life and see that we must begin to act as if the future were watching us, as if our legacy as a community were at stake. If we don't, we risk having lived without purpose and leaving to those who follow a legacy that is defined by a great deal spent but little actually invested.

Brush With Death II – The Gun Run

2008-06-18T16:04:00.017-04:00

This is the second in my Brush With Death series. It is dedicated to those proud Mozambican people who, against considerable odds, have managed to give birth to a strong, new country on more or less their own terms.

Read Into It
Depending on what you want it to be, this is a story about what the rich will do for their luxuries, what the poor will do for survival money, or what the enslaved will do for even a few moments of real freedom.

The Gun Run
It took place on what was then known as “The Gun Run”, through the infamous Tete Corridor through Mozambique, the scene of a holocaust of devastation during its long-running civil war. The corridor itself is a tarred 263-kilometre road running from Nyamapanda on the Zimbabwean border through the Mozambican city of Tete to Zobue on the Malawi border. The Zimbabwean army (and the Malawian army coming the other way) would take a convoy of trucks through what at the time was one of the most active war zones in the world. The convoy went through once a day, carrying anything that couldn’t get between Malawi and Zimbabwe by other means, which meant anything too big to fit in a small plane. It was pretty much accepted wisdom that everyone who took the trip was either desperate, nuts, or uninformed. What had once been a road was now an obstacle course of blown-up trucks and swimming-pool sized potholes. It was a pretty good bet that the only decent stretches of road left were where the land mines were planted.

Fine Way to Start a Morning
I emerged from my own little haven of filth, among a small strip of equally dingy rooms, to learn that this morning’s Gun Run was going to be particularly on edge, and particularly full, because the one on the previous day had been unsuccessful, and the convoy had been hijacked by RENAMO rebels. A lot of equipment had been destroyed and a lot of people had been killed. As usual, reports that I could make out revealed that half of the rebels had been heavily-armed children, with no direction, no restraint, and very ugly mentors, no less determined but substantially less trained than your typical army in the hands of a government run by its friends.

Ripe For the Picking
On this particular day, we had expensive cargo, a series of brand spanking new Toyota Land Cruisers directly off the boat from Japan via Durban, South Africa, on their way to a few of the few people in Malawi who could actually afford them. This made our particular convoy an excellent candidate for hijacking, so they had added several more army trucks for extra protection.

Marketable Skills
There was actually a small cottage industry that had developed solely around the Gun Run, like insects converging from the night around a single source of light. Except it was daylight that brought this particular swarm. In the three hours or so between the crack of dawn and the scheduled departure of the convoy, the hot, dusty, and virtually barren landscape practically burped up an instant marketplace of goods and services. Food sellers, travelling bartenders, money changers, knick-knack pushers, message carriers, prostitutes, and medical workers appeared, circulated and disappeared all in less time than it took me to find a decent place to take a dump.

Takes Three to Tango
If you wanted a ride to Malawi, which I did, you needed to speak to a self-appointed "agent" to arrange your passage. Everyone was corruptible and looking to get ahead, so I got fleeced by not one, not two, but three separate “agents”, who may or may not have been working together as their own small but effective criminal syndicate. Of course, the agent of demand is not completely without moral responsibility in any economic transaction, criminal or otherwise, so I rationalized that as long as it was within my means, which clearly exceeded theirs, it was a fair bargain.

Countdown to Launch
I learned from the third spirit in this unholy trinity that I was to be placed in one of the Land Cruisers and was told to meet my driver near the vehicle a half hour or so before the scheduled departure time of the convoy. I was assured that the driver would have been informed of the presence of a passenger and the journey would pass without incident. With the world rushing by in all directions, I took my place as close to the earmarked vehicle as the guard would allow at the time that I had been given. I began to get nervous as the convoy’s preparations progressed, the trucks were all started, and the soldiers assembled casually to climb into the backs of the trucks. With all systems seemingly go, my driver was still nowhere to be seen.

Supply & Demands
When my driver finally showed up, as soldiers shouted orders and the first trucks in the convoy started to move, it became immediately clear that he had not been informed he was to have a passenger, but that he would do as the others had done and try his entrepreneurial skills. He staggered up to me and fixed me with two very bloodshot eyes, the smell of moonshine so powerful on his breath that I swooned as he spoke.

“You want ride. I want money!” he bellowed. “Give me money!”

House Rules
I looked around for sympathy or support, perhaps from the soldier who had been guarding the vehicle, but he was now on his way to joining the others in the nearest truck. I don’t know why I even bothered; with chaos the rule and precious little room for exception, it was clearly every man for himself. Seen in those terms, this guy was just following the rules.

Done Deal
I hastily negotiated a rate with him, half of which was contingent upon my actually reaching my destination, and even offered to drive in his stead, given his condition. He was insulted enough to give me a very dirty look but not enough to ask for more money, so it was under a cloud of deep mutual suspicion but not quite loathing that we finally climbed into the vehicle and prepared to hit the road.

Bottleneck Beast
The drivers of the private vehicles were under instructions to fall in behind the first three army trucks. It wasn’t much of a surprise when my driver immediately took it upon himself to do everything in his power to be the first non-army vehicle in the convoy. Engines roared and mechanical bodies swerved as several like-minded would-be rally drivers funneled into the two-lane wake of the army trucks. As the road was only one lane each way, I wondered for a moment what would happen if we encountered traffic coming the other way, but then realized that was impossible. This convoy was the only traffic on the entire 263-km stretch of road. So, like a python that had just swallowed a cheetah, the convoy, bulging at the middle with cars and trucks jockeying for position and given a head and tail by two sets of three army trucks, slithered awkwardly onto the Gun Run, with me nervously ensconced in the belly of the beast.

Living the Dream
But a cheetah was born to run, and so apparently was my driver. As soon as we crossed the border into Mozambique, his destiny as a Formula One star apparently took over completely from any sensibility he might have once possessed, and he began passing by any means possible the few vehicles that had managed to slide between us and the trucks leading the convoy. Our heads hit the truck’s roof at least twice and I was violently slammed into the passenger door several times again, as we crashed through potholes and careened through the branches of roadside trees. I can only imagine what his eyes were seeing, but pretty soon, he had achieved something equivalent to pole position in his dream world, and, in the world I was seeing, we had assumed position right behind the army trucks.

Clowning Around
When he began to zigzag side to side in plain view of the soldiers seated in the army truck directly ahead of us, I assumed he was just clowning for their benefit. They clearly thought the same thing, as they began to point and laugh as we swayed back and forth and he pretended to be trying to overtake them. They were almost certainly as amused by the smile of nervous terror pasted on my face as by the look of maniacal abandon on his.

The Pass
It was then that I was not only witness to but unwilling participant in what I then considered one of the stupidest acts that I have ever witnessed from another human being. Whooping like a male baboon showing his dominance in the troop, my driver kicked the gas pedal to the floor and swerved hard left in the beginning of an attempt to overtake all three army trucks. In other words, he decided that we were the ones who should be leading the convoy and clearing the road of mines and all the other potentially fatal obstacles that it was known to contain.

Losing It
All my previous attempts at civility and cultural tolerance instantly vanished, and I began to yell at the top of my lungs at him to stop immediately. At the same time, I began to calculate as quickly as I could how to render the idiot inert and commandeer the vehicle’s controls.

Bump In the Road
As I screamed and schemed, he tightened his grip on the wheel and shot us clean past the three trucks and out into the front of the convoy. I saw a shadow of panic cross his face as a couch-sized concrete barrier loomed suddenly before us, but he was so locked into the moment that he instinctively yanked the wheel and our front right wheel just grazed the barrier in passing. The fact that someone was waiting for this truck in mint condition at our destination was now no more than a distant memory, as my driver’s concentration focused anew on a fresh stretch of chewed-up quasi-pavement.

Good News, Bad News
As I considered whether the wiser course of action was to knock this guy over the head or try somehow to reason with him to halt the vehicle, I looked wildly back and saw two of the army trucks hurtling along side by side. They swerved apart to avoid the barrier, but then converged again and began to gain rapidly on us. Catching us was probably what was best for our own security, but I became suddenly less certain of that when I saw the soldier on the passenger’s side in one of the trucks leaning partly out the window and pointing a handgun in our direction, clearly prepared to fire.

Assault on the Senses
I instinctively ducked my head as low down as it would go, simultaneously and involuntarily glancing sideways so as not to miss the unholy spectacle of my driver potentially meeting his fate against a blood-spattered windshield. When his head was still there after a few seconds, and we were clearly still hurtling forward, I heard the roar of a truck’s engine pass not more than an arm’s length from the outside of my passenger door, and I heard the driver of the army truck screaming at my driver, quite audible even through my closed passenger window. I'm guessing that the only reason my driver still had brain matter in his skull was that, in the eyes of Zimbabwean army, the vehicle he was driving was worth more than he was, and the final customer might have had some issues with permanently blood-stained upholstery.

Dem de Brakes
It was then that my driver seemed finally to realize, at least momentarily, how seriously he was endangering his own life, not to mention mine. He looked over at me, really seeing me perhaps for the first time, wearing the type of expression that you might expect from a close friend with whom you had just made a narrow escape. He gave a sort of shrug, then slammed on the brakes, sending me forward into the dashboard. Our truck came scraping to a halt in a cloud of ochre Mozambican road dust.

Laughing Matters
As we sat in the middle of our dust cloud and waited for the soldiers to descend on our now-battered Land Cruiser, my driver did an odd thing. He began to laugh as if he had just been given the best news of his life, apparently having once again regained his obliviousness to my presence. He had come perilously close to being terminated by either land mines, a high-speed impact, or soldiers, but he seemed then to have found the whole thing wildly amusing. Quite against my own will, I started to laugh with him. You might wonder why. I know I certainly did. Clearly, an impulse of which I was not fully in control visited me as I chortled along with him in those elongated moments

Cry Freedom
I was probably laughing mostly because I was alive, but I think I did so at least partly for another reason, which had everything to do with my driver. I think I realized that, in a life that had clearly seen its share of hardship and injustice, there must have been precious few opportunities for him to memorialize his frustration at all of it in any but the crudest fashion. What he had just done was to craft a work of art with personal revolution as the theme and that perilous Mozambican road as a canvas. In one fell swoop, he had thumbed his nose at all of his commercial masters (the owners of the vehicle), a heavy-handed segment of his fellow Africans (the soldiers), his imperialist colonizers (me), and, most importantly of all, the hopeless economic and social determinism of his own existence. One part of me hated him for what he had just put me through, but there was clearly another part of me that recognized that, during those few minutes, hurtling in real life through the silhouetted void of the unforeseen, he had been completely free.

And you can hardly fault a guy for wanting that.

Technorati Tags mozambique The Gun Run interesting story brush with death travel story

Watching Children Play, One of Them in the Mirror

2008-03-21T08:45:00.032-04:00

Dedicated to those who get the joke.

Knowing Jack
We all know that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But how much play is too much? As an adult, how much of each day should be devoted to play? Is it really possible to have a job where your work is your play, or is that just a bit too much to hope for?

Standing at the Crossroads
Perhaps I've been hanging out with my kids too much, but sometimes I wish the two weren't so separate, and I try to bring them together. For example my last post was both work and play for me. You could say it the was a roadmap for my efforts to reconcile the two. Maybe that doesn't make me too smart, but I'm pretty sure I'm not dull.

Punch Lines
In any case, now that I've freaked out everyone in my world with that last post, which I am going to refer to hereafter as that post due to its presumed ability to make people roll their eyes, it is time to start getting back to the play side. In other words, I can get back to communicating just for the sake of it, rather than for an actual purpose as banal as personal gain or notoriety. If you're already in my world, and you're back after that last post, congratulations, and thank you! You'd be surprised how much effort it takes to go from showing everyone how smart you are to showing everyone how stupid you are. Of course, if you know me, you know that my promise of the dual millions of readers and users with a public tattooing as collateral was my idea of something somewhere between a joke, a publicity stunt, and one of my many utterly mad proclamations; I'm pretty sure most of you got the joke, but there are always bound to be some who don't. If you're back here, I'm assuming you did, and we are obviously on the same wavelength. As it happens, no media outlets picked up the press release, at least not as far as I know, so it looks as though not everyone is affected by the way I organize my thoughts and my words as I am. Imagine that. In any event, it looks like I can toil away in safe obscurity for another little while at least, which is fine because obscurity is actually a condition I would prefer, if it paid better.

Hiding in Plain Sight
My challenge was, is, actually a kind of logic trap for anyone who seriously considers taking me up on it. To get me to tattoo myself, the person would have to read every single word of my blog, a feat which alone is an accomplishment in itself. Anyone who managed to get through that would then have to marshall the intellectual bandwidth to produce an argument against me about my life about something that could happen in the future. For anyone so ambitious as to get even that far, they would realize long before completion that the post to which they have spent so long replying contains a very strong and very thought-out argument about how to accomplish the goals I set, which would make the whole effort rather a waste of time. And finally, if I have managed to convince even one person to go to such lengths, that person would know me an awful lot better and would have either been won over to my argument or just think I was a complete idiot worthy of no more of their time. Either way, it appears from the lack of response that this trap may have been too visible, and so people just stepped around it. Besides, who has that kind of time these days?

Much Obliged
With all that about the media and the masses, I do not mean at all to suggest that your attention, my dearly beloved early reader, is anything to sneeze at. I view this space the way musicologists view The Velvet Underground. The official line on them is that very few people bought their records, but many of those who did went on to do wonderful things. Navigating this space with any level of direction requires your full attention, but I am pleased to report that those who currently manage that are already wonderful people doing wonderful things. I have always felt that the full attention of any one person for any length of time longer than a few seconds is, in fact, a wondrous thing. Noone who has had the privilege of being truly listened to by even one person is ever obscure. It can take an enormous amount of effort just to listen to one person properly, and certainly there are those in your life who deserve your attention, indeed who need your attention, so much more than I do. This applies in my own life as well; I asked my lovely wife the other day why she doesn't read my blog, and her reply was perfectly appropriate and absolutely relevant to the point at hand. "Because I know you", she said, "and I'd end up spending whole days going through it on the computer and not getting anything done." Wise words indeed, which serve to make me more deeply grateful that you have somehow found the time to lend me your ear.

Up All Night
Indeed, the one consistent question to have arisen from my peers around this whole online endeavor of mine is about where I actually find the time to make a living, shovel the snow, spend a whole lot of meaningful time with my family, try to contribute something to the community, sing for a band, develop the "next big thing", and still have room left to spin "long and tiresome" prose. I must either be an insomniac workaholic prone to momentous exaggeration, or just have inordinately good time management skills. Aside from the fact that this sentence is being typed at 4:09am, I'm not actually sure if it's either of those. All I really know for sure is that life is too short not to attempt to look deeply at everyone I meet and throw myself wildly into everything I do.

The Source
People where I make my living know that I am an idea person, not a logistics person, and it seems that, at least occasionally, my ideas have enough merit that I am asked where I get them. The same question is also extended to me sometimes about writing this journal, although the term used for "serious writers", which some people seem to want me to be, is usually not ideas but inspiration. Of course, like any idea person, I get inspiration from just about everything around me, but I would attribute most of the force pushing out my fountain (trickle?) of ideas to a source that might surprise the uninitiated. Many of my best ideas come from my kids.

Father Knows Best
There's a commonly held view, especially among parents, that children would do well to listen to their parents. Having three kids of my own, I dare not dispute the wisdom of that here, especially given that my kids will read this, but I think that parents would do well to consume a kernel of corresponding wisdom as they consider their own authority -- parents would do well to listen to their children. Of course, parents do listen to their children regarding anything that is taken to benefit the welfare of the child; they listen to them cry when they are hurt, they listen to them talk about their school day, and they nod sympathetically at being on the wrong end of the latest episode of sibling rivalry. This is not the kind of listening I mean. The kind of listening to which I refer is not the kind that is concerned with the child's welfare, it is the kind concerned with the parent's.

Good Listeners
You can tell a lot about someone by knowing who they listen to. Children are no exception, which is quite interesting because children will listen to everyone who has anything interesting to say. That can be bad, because some very bad people have very interesting things to say, but if the one doing the talking is one who loves them, someone to whom they should be listening, it can be very good. Whatever their age, from infant to teenager, who they listen to directs their play, and play is the most important time of all to a child. If you have children, and you want to know who your children listen to, try watching them play. If you don't recognize any of yourself in there, and their play is influenced exclusively by others, you may have reason to be concerned.

No 'We' in Wii?
It can certainly be difficult for a parent to be more interesting than some of the competition. For example, I watched my son progress the other day through the levels of his Super Mario Galaxy video game, and I saw nothing less than the virtual landscape of a child's imagination. A giant half-cute half-scary flower creature with a dragon's tail and an eggshell covering its head, a planet with a clear shell through which you could see what was happening inside, and, in Mario, a character with which any imagination could identify, who starts as a simple man but gains the ability to spring-leap, spin, skate, go through solid objects, turn into fire, and fly. What's great about video games, of course, is that they allow you to do so much more than you could ever do in your own body or your own life. You get to put yourself into another body and make decisions just like any hero or superhuman would make. Who wouldn't want to be invincible, with the ability to take any form, have unlimited intellectual and physical weaponry, and be drop-dead gorgeous to boot? I don't know if that's what your life is like, but mine ain't.

No 'Us' in Newspaper?
Even as I battle Super Mario with my rapier-like wit and my stories of great adventures, I have my middle child whose idea of a good time on a weekend morning is to spend a few hours reading the newspaper. As a result, my wife and I will be in the middle of a suitably adult discussion and our news junkie will interject with an insight so penetrating that we are virtually forced into dumfounded silence.

No 'End' in Edge?
And then there is my Harry Potter-loving pre-teen, for whom nothing but fantasy will do. The other night, we read together a passage from The Edge Chronicles, dripping with such creativity and storytelling prowess that it made me shiver. We jumped together into an imagination so vast that it would be not only conceivable but perhaps even desirable never to emerge on the other end. Certainly, after a minimum of five reads through each of the Harry Potter books, my daughter hasn't yet emerged from the imagination of the divine Ms. Rowling.

No 'Kid' in Kinz?
I think the grand champion at the moment though, has to be Webkinz. For those who don't know about Webkinz, which I would think is practically noone among those with a child between six and twelve, Webkinz is a virtual world web site for children that is tied into stuffed toys that are now sold practically everywhere. The child receives the very cute toy and then must officially go into the virtual world and adopt and then raise it as one would a child. In no particular order, children and their 'kinz' in this virtual world can then earn a sandwich table that you can choose to use or eat, be a bartender or chef and make drinks and food for your animal, make movies of your animals with silly dialogue, find a job for them at the employment office, get them a medical check-up when they are sick, and conduct an online auction for their stuff in the W Shop. I mean, how cool is that? Not surprising that just about any kid that my kids know has at least one Webkinz. Depending on how you look at it, the legions of children on Webkinz are either learning valuable life skills, or are being lured into a gigantic trap whose prize when the jaws snap shut is their time, which means less time with their parents or others responsible for their welfare.

Okay, I'll Stop Forcing the Subtitles
Of course, I'm sure you realize by now that I wouldn't be telling you all this if I thought it applied only to children. I can't speak for you, but I know that all of my best ideas come from my play time. When I am at play, I am doing just what I want to do, and I am therefore closest to my natural self. So I want to be careful who influences my play time. In fact, if I were not me, I would not want someone like me influencing my play time. When I said in that post that I wanted to do precisely what I wanted, I was just saying in another way that I just wanted to be left alone to play. And what you're reading right now, for me this is play. Like any kid, I just wish I could do it all the time.

Measurable Value
I suppose that makes me a little irresponsible, but what if I can manage to do it in such a way that it will serve to make me happy, help those I love, and even contribute something to the community at large? To that end, some of you who actually read through the whole of that post have asked me (though not in my Comments section, where I would have liked a bit more feedback!) exactly what it is that this fancy new "billion-dollar" tool does. What is it about this plaything that makes me think I'm going to be a multi-godzillionaire and spend the rest of my days at play? I will answer that question in due time -- I can't now or I'd have to kill you -- but let me get something straight. I don't care about being a multi-godzillionaire; it means as little to me as what I'm going to have for lunch tomorrow. In fact, it means even less because, unlike tomorrow's lunch, it actually has no measurable value to my well-being. There are only six things I can think of that have significant positive value to me; to be able to take care of my loved ones, to be financially obligated to nobody, to go where I want to go, to do what I want to do, to give to the world more than I take, and for you to feel that what you find in my creative space is interesting enough and good enough to recommend to someone else. Anything else is completely worthless to me. Well, everything except tomorrow's lunch, but only because I have already assigned it worth.

Venting Frustration
So, tool or no tool, the next step in this awfully enjoyable game I'm playing, which I hope is not too excrutiating for you if you have chosen to play it with me, is to integrate my music collection, assembled over thirty years of physical, experiential and cerebral globetrotting, more fully with the contents of this space. The thing is, I really want this space to be a place where it's easy and hopefully even enjoyable to spend time, like a really cool living room. To that end, I'll be playing you the music I'd play you if you came over to my house and sat in my living room. Put another way, in the next little while, I'll be getting into audio broadasting on this blog, my own radio program if you will, to exercise (exorcise?) the frustrated DJ in myself. And you, my play friend, are invited to join me.

Mood Genre
Each show will have a musical theme. My collection of music may be good partly because it has been accumulated over many years from many different people from many different backgrounds from many different countries, or because I have a great system for organizing it, but I think it is primarily good because of how intently I listen. I suspect lots of people do as I do and organize by mood/theme/impression/feeling rather than genre, especially in a time when all genres are slowly disappearing, and I also do it in a particularly fastidious manner and have been doing so for quite some time, but I can say with some degree of certainty that the genre of a piece of music means absolutely nothing to me. I don't even hear a genre when I hear a piece of music, at least I try not to. So my music has been classified and categorized using an index that I have not seen used. The index is how it makes me feel.

Just A Little Taste
In fact, I have been quite content for periods over the last thirty years to let other important aspects of my life fall away into a disarray resembling leaves on the ground surrounding an autumn maple, but one thing I have never let slip in my lifelong love affair with Euterpe is a devotion to the sound arrangement of sounds. For just a small sampling, you can use the blue MediaMaster button in the left column of this blog to play a stream of selected music from my collection. I recommend that you let it play for a while (you don't have to be on my blog once the stream has started -- it will just keep playing until you stop it) to get a reasonable idea of the variety. You can also get a sampling of my "moodgenres" on my Radio Orange page.

Where Did They Find That?
You know those songs on tv commercials that you hear and think are so good and you wonder where they got them? Or the ones that seep into your conversations at your favourite coffee shop, or soundtrack the best scenes in your favourite movies or programs? I have a whole collection full of those songs, music that, in many cases, nobody knows, but that, in all cases, everybody should know. It is the kind of music that deserves to be the soundtrack for a life well lived, whether yours or mine, paying particular attention to the ups and downs but filling the spaces in between with an invigorating blend of discovery and familiarity. I'm not saying you'll like all of it -- the themes are such that you can skip what you won't like -- but I will go so far as to say that all of it will be good, because the care that I will put into every music selection on my radio shows will be the same care that I put into every word on this blog. If you've been reading, you'll know that that is quite a lot.

What's In a Name?
If I can figure out the technical part, I hope that most shows will also have a guest. The idea is to have a guest who more or less fits the musical theme. So, for example, I have a musical theme called Story, so I would want a guest for that show who could tell us all some really great stories. Certainly, I wouldn't mind getting some known "names" as guests for my broadcasts (if you are one, you know one, or can suggest one, I'm all ears), but I'm not actually looking at only the "stars", or even mostly at them. I learned in my greatest failed business venture that, from the purely utilitarian point of view that I understand but disdain, people with widely recognized names are valuable to various enterprises primarily because they attract attention, as surely as flesh attracts eyes and dung attracts flies. And I'm sure you know by now, being the great listener that you are, that attention is something in which I am quite interested.

Putting the Ordinary in Extraordinary
But if I am unable to draw any widely recognizable figures for my first few shows, I will choose to see that as a blessing in disguise, a message from the universe that my actual intention is worth more than any attempt to promote it. You see, the essence of my whole mission with this is to show that 'ordinary folk' are just as interesting, if not more, and that celebrity worship, in any form other than that which elevates the celebrities in our own lives, has much too big a place in the lives of most of us. The way I see it, everyone in my life is a celebrity. The people in my world deserve the spotlight as much as anyone in People Magazine or IMDB. It's all about asking the right questions, and I just can't seem to shake the crazy notion that I know what some of those questions are. So, to that end, if you feel that you are both ordinary and in any conceivable way extraordinary, just let me know, and you may well be one of my guests.

What's That Sucking Sound?
Technical issues aside, I'm also trying to pin down a regularly scheduled block in this already busy life that will work both for me and for any potential listeners, so I'm not fully in control of when the inaugural show will be hitting the webwaves. It may even be quite a long time. What I can promise is that I will let you know when I have the date of the first show confirmed, and I hope you will tune in. In case you can't, all archived shows will be available as podcasts for your mp3 player or car stereo. I'll also be making all the posts on this blog available as podcasts, read by me with a selection of theme-appropriate background music. Yes, that's what I said, more of me sucking away your valuable time in another medium. Just what you need, right?

Non Sequitur
Wrong -- entirely, completely wrong. So, for the sake of someone or something important in your life, stop reading, turn your computer off, and go play with someone else.

Whoever it is will surely be glad you did.

Technorati Tags celebrity children quality time parenting life lessons music

Bigger Than Oprah, Better Than Facebook…

2008-02-14T15:03:00.036-05:00

Dedicated to Lawrence and Lori Ann, successful according to any definition, for loving the world's children as their own, and for listening to so many of them at once while still managing to hear so much from each one.

Imagine All The People
Imagine, if you can, an individual with the personability of Oprah Winfrey, the depth of insight of John Lennon, and the clarity of purpose of J.K. Rowling, as the creator of and chief evangelist for a consumer product as addictive and ubiquitous as Facebook and as well conceived as the iPod. Such a person would either be very interesting, very dangerous, or a mixture of both. My aim with you today is to convince you by the end of this post that I am that person.

Screw Loose?
If you know me, you will likely recognize that this is the kind of statement I make on a fairly regular basis. It is fair to assume that the type of person that makes this type of statement on a regular basis is either a shameless, and rather clueless, self promoter, or he is the type of person who actually believes he speaks the truth. I can assure you that I am the latter. If you accept that, then the choices that remain in interpreting this type of statement are that the person who makes it is either completely right, partly right, or fully delusional.

Sign Your Name Across My Head
I can't see you from here, but I’m guessing that the odds are pretty good that you would lean towards the latter conclusion. If that is true, I would like to offer you a challenge. Read this entire blog, from the first post right up to the present post, in chronological order, and post a comment below that both proves you have read the entire blog and contains one single point that you believe qualifies my stated plan as delusional, or even as an act of clueless self-promotion. If you prove to be correct, and I fail to accomplish the goals that I detail in the rest of this post, I will, in one year’s time, post a video of myself shaving what hair remains on my hitherto unblemished head and getting a tattoo, a permanent signature if you will, of the name of each person who has posted such a comment.

For All of 15 Minutes
You would be right to question my motives for doing, or even promising to do, such a thing. You might speculate that such an act by a grown man is only slightly more sophisticated than a group of teens videotaping a beating and uploading it to YouTube, or dressing up for the American Idol judges. You might speculate that, in psychological terms, I am little more than a child jumping up and down for attention, or an infant alone in his crib crying to be embraced, all the more irresponsible because I do have actual children that require just that kind of attention.

Destination: Destiny
Well, as for the attention part, I can assure you that everyone in my life gets my full attention when we spend time together, and I get plenty of attention myself, as much as I want in fact. Well, almost. The fact of the matter is that I have spent much of my life striving to avoid getting more attention, because I know about all the bad stuff it can bring. If you are of the more skeptical variety, you will certainly doubt this, however if you are familiar, intimately familiar, with the concept of destiny, you may actually believe me. Destiny is held by some as something you either believe in or you don’t, as if it had something to do with the future. Destiny is not like that at all. Destiny is not about what you will do, or even what will happen to you; it is about who you are.

Future Proof
I believe in the concept of destiny, because I have always been able to predict my own future. Not to the last detail of course, not where I was going to be or what I was going to do, but certainly who I was going to be. Once the mold is cast, at some point on the road to adulthood, I think everybody has the ability to do that, anybody who knows who they are. I don't mean you can predict if you're going to get hit by a car or struck by lightning, but I think you can predict, based on your own tendencies if you really know them, who you are going to be. It shouldn't surprise you at all to consider that you are in control of who you are going to be. You control how other people are going to affect you, and even how every event except your own death will affect you. What made the names of the great, all the wonderful and horrible, Alexander the Great and William Shakespeare , Mahatma Gandhi and Adolph Hitler , Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King is not about where they were born or what they did, it is about who they were. The shape and direction of their own particular arcs through their eras may have been shaped by their circumstances, but these people happened to history, not the other way around. Those so blessed or cursed know who they are and, even if they had no choice in the matter, they understand what makes them different and what will happen to them when that difference is shown to the world.

By What Yardstick?
It may sound pretentious to you that I talk about greatness as if I knew what it were about, as if I can be so presumptuous as to assume that I myself belong in the company of any so far mentioned, however good or evil. You may even take it to mean that I think I am better or greater than you are. In a culture that has grown used to measuring success by the size of one’s bank account, the number of people in one’s congregation, or the number of awards and certificates one has achieved, it is easy to assume that those who are recognized in such a way have greater roles to play than most. First of all, I have never believed this, and hope I never will. Their roles are certainly different, but the magnitude of recognition has nothing whatsoever to do with the usefulness of the role. Is there not more greatness in the simple act of taking without shame a face disfigured by burns or disease onto a busy city sidewalk than in leading legions of people to a bunch of conclusions that they would have come to anyway? Second, I believe that every single living creature exudes greatness in at least one measurable way, and therefore the difference between the "greatness" of those mentioned above and the type exhibited by any other person is simply that one has been recognized and the other has not. Yet.

Swimming in Sludge?
Even if you were willing to grant me that attention or fame are not my primary motives, you might instead think of what you are about to read as some kind of sophisticated sales pitch. You wonder when the ads will start appearing in the sidebar, or when I’ll put up my phone number as a speaker at someone’s corporate event, or when I’ll start hawking the latest and greatest in the unending stream of billion-dollar schemes that ooze through the Internet like sludge through a sewer pipe. Well, I do have to plead partly guilty to that one, I do have the next billion-dollar scheme, but that isn’t the explanation for why I’m making this crazy proclamation.

True Confessions
The bold statement that begins this post, and its accompanying challenge, have a much simpler, more personal explanation. I’ve finally found what I want to do, and I just can’t wait any longer to do it, so I’m willing to do pretty much whatever it takes to start doing it. I have finally managed to reconcile two parts of myself, by managing to marry the person I am with what I actually do to fill my days. After 41 years, I actually know what I want to do with my life. This may not be particularly important to you, but is something that has long alluded me, so it's pretty important to me. I am not the kind of person who could ever lead a whole life without ever having tried to do exactly what I wanted.

Here's The Story
I have tried other ways; I’ve actually been trying to tell you all this for a while, but either you haven’t really been listening, or I haven’t been saying it properly. I think it’s the latter; I think I’ve been too subtle. Certainly, subtlety is a skill with which anyone who has a compelling message to convey should be familiar. A story is perhaps the oldest form of subtly conveying a message of profound import that is too painful, powerful, or complex to be conveyed directly. Our dramatists are doing it all the time, telling the story of their own live -- their relationships, their dreams, their perversions, and their secrets -- but they are encoding the information with stories. When you want to make a point about something, have you not ever attributed something you believed to someone else by telling a story, in order to give it more credibility? For example, you're having a debate with a co-worker, and you're losing, and you need a quick fact to back up your argument, so you invent the fact and attribute it to something you read. In other words, you tell a story. Or to test something that may offend, you say that a friend believes it, so you can disown yourself from it if the repercussions vibrate the strings a bit too much. If these to you are not stories but lies, then I regret to inform you that the world is filled with liars.

Blunt Force Trauma
The attention and accolades that we heap on all our storytellers from Stephen King to Steven Spielberg should be all the evidence you need of the value of subtlety in delivery. I thought that by choosing my own life as the story, I was removing a layer of subtlety, and therefore giving more direct access to the message. I chose my life as the subject of this journal because it’s completely unique, and I think it’s about as interesting as any of the other stories floating around out there. After all, all these stories that I am bombarded with are interesting and compelling, but they are not mine. If I am interested enough in a book or a movie, someone else’s story, to give it hours or even days of my time, you would think that I would be interested enough in my own story to give it the same attention. All those books and movies are simply stories of what their creators want to happen, and some truly great things happen in the stories that they create. But they happen to other people. For me, that has never been acceptable. So now I’m hitting you over the head with my story, and I hope it hurts.

So What?
Why should you care? What makes me think that my story is newsworthy, or even worth writing about? Why should what I do for a living or the contents of my philosophical noodling in private moments excite any interest in you whatsoever? Certainly, on the job side, I have done many – those for which I’ve been paid include mesquite cook, bartender, construction worker, consultant, safari guide, teacher, janitor, salesman, actor, musician, principal, film producer, mover, foreman, freight forwarder, motivational speaker, landscaper, painter, writer, business manager, greenskeeper, mergers and acquisitions broker, gift wrapper and the Easter Bunny – why should this particular one be of enough interest to you to deserve even as much of your time as I have already taken?

The Secret To Success
The answer is simple. Because with all my noodlings, my roamings and ramblings, what I have found is the very secret to success. I’m not talking about just having lots of money, though certainly financial success can be an important part of, and sometimes even comes inevitably with, personal success. Success though, really has nothing to do with money. It’s more of a cliché than ever that there are plenty of people who are personally successful without having much financial success at all, and anyway, if tomorrow we woke up to a world without the concept of money, most of the most successful people I know would be among the first to sing its praises.

Not Green, Orange
No, I’m talking about the secret to a different kind of success. The kind of success that resides in the sense of accomplishment that everyone recognizes after a sentence well phrased, a job well done, a personal encounter well joined, or a day well spent, enough of which, strung together, might even form the basis of a life well lived. I’m talking about a secret to success that someone like Tony Robbins or Oprah's current favourite Eckhart Tolle, might charge you money for (or at least make money from). And I'm pretty convinced this will work not only for me but also for you and for everyone else.

If You Want to Make God Laugh, Tell Him Your Plans
So, want to hear the secret, the master plan, my blueprint for accomplishing everything I wrote in the first paragraph of this post? Here it is, here’s my great idea, my 15-second elevator pitch, that is worth all those many billions, and will help me and everyone else finally pay off all those earthly debts and make us all as free as lottery winners. Lean close to your screen so you can hear it and don’t miss it.

$$$This is Worth Billions$$$
I’m going to get paid for just being myself and doing as I please, for doing just what I am doing right now. Imagine waking up every day and doing whatever you wanted to do, and not have to worry about getting paid for it. That is what I want to do.

That's It?
How’s that for a business idea? Brilliant, don’t you think? After 41 years of incredible experiences and deep thought in the midst of the most wonderful people, that is what I have come up with. If right now you are wondering why you have read this far down the page for that, you are most certainly not alone. You may grant that there are people out there getting paid for being themselves, but I'm quite sure you won't allow me to then infer that everyone can do it. Besides, even among those who could, how many are billionaires? Well, maybe Oprah, but I ain’t Oprah, so…

The Story of O
Well, it’s true, I’m not Oprah, but, if you’re an Oprah fan, you’ll find me every bit as interesting. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean to limit her achievements any more than I want to celebrate mine. Everything she has accomplished has been about her sharing herself so that people could get to know her. Her success itself is amplified by how well she shares everything about it with everyone. She meets who she wants to meet, and asks those people the questions she wants to ask. She uses those opportunities as much to understand herself as she does to understand her world, and she then shares that understanding with her viewers. She doesn’t make you wonder what it must have been like to know Bill Gates in high school, or to grow up with Steven Spielberg. All such people do share of themselves certainly, that’s why they are where they are, but Oprah shares more. She really gives you the opportunity to know her. My goal is not that different. I want to give you the opportunity to know me and my world, and the relationship between the two.

Yardstick #1
But for this plan to work, your attention will be required, so the first yardstick against which to measure my tattoo challenge is the magnitude of your attention. The first part of my plan states that, in one year’s time, this journal will have 1,000,000 readers (it currently has fewer than a hundred).

Games With Toys
If you’re not an Oprah fan, if you are not a person who can be hypnotized by words, or if you are simply immune to my particular charms, I will endeavor instead to ensnare you with a product, with something that can actually be bought and sold. I intend to accomplish this the same way that a successful company leads you to cherish and even become addicted to your favourite power tool, your trusty late-night snack, your video game console, your car, or your brand-name handbag. I say this because I know what it takes to do this, and I aim to prove it to you not just by waxing egghead philosophical but by playing the game that everyone now seems to want to play, the one whose object is get all the coolest toys.

What a Tool!
I have a partner, and we have spent the past year or so developing just such an addictive little thing, more addictive even, in its finished form, than Facebook. It’s for bloggers, it’s for readers, it’s for music lovers, it’s for travelers, it’s for couch potatoes, it’s for everyone who ever wanted to be on television or on the radio; in short, it’s for everyone. Like any tool truly well-designed, this particular tool is also for my own use and pleasure, so not only will tons of toys be mine for the choosing because of it, but I’ll get to play with it myself, like Bill explores with Windows and Steve shuffles along on his iPod.

Yardstick #2
The second part of my plan, then, the second yardstick, is for the proliferation of this toy/tool such that, in one year’s time, at least 1,000,000 people will be using it regularly (it currently has only 2 users, me and my developer partner).

Painful & Permanent Consequences
If these two yardsticks, 1,000,000 readers and 1,000,000 users, have not been passed one year from the date of this post, I’m in for a painful and permanent experience. I would like to remind you that this is quite a reach; not only am I not a tattoo freak (I have but one, on my chest), but, to get into the millions of viewers and users, it took the Oprahs and Facebooks of the world considerably longer than a year.

How Do You Top That?
I also feel compelled to share with you the next part of the plan, assuming the first parts succeed. When I have you just where I want you, and I’m in a perfect position to take advantage of you, I want to break the spell that I have cast, and show you how important it is to be free of me and any salesmen of words and dreams like me. I am, you see, one of the naïve souls who chooses to believe that addictions can be broken, or at least well managed, and it never really does anyone any good to be addicted to anything.

Broadcast News
So, this goes out to everyone in my world, everyone listening to this radio show full of more confessions than would fill an endless succession of hurtin’ country songs, balls-out rock-and-roll and sung-to-the-rafters opera. It is being issued as a press release, to anyone who might listen – family, friends, former classmates, influences, business associates, people in my community, television, radio and Internet media outets. It is being sent as a press release because it is meant to be newsworthy. Yes, I admit it, I want to be in the news. I want someone else to start helping me tell my own story. Because if this isn’t news, I honestly don’t know what is. I don’t really care which news it is; weird science news, new age spirituality news, the 6’oclock news, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, or Enterainment Tonight. I just want to be news.

All Joking Aside...
Because at the end of the day, and the end of this post, after all the jokes have been made about me and my motives, the reason I want to be news is because I want the soapbox, not to collect followers or dollars, but to share a simple message that I think is critically important, and that (sniff) I think can actually help some people. It has been said before and will be said again, but I obviously believe that my way of saying it is unique. It is simply this.

To understand oneself is to understand one’s world.

Listen to What Confucius Say

I don’t express this as one of those profound pieces of fortune-cookie wisdom that have become so common, uttered as they are by sages in flowing robes and the blissfully ignorant alike, that they have lost all proximity to meaning. I say it because I know what I’m talking about. I say it because I understand myself, in a way that few people do. This may not mean anything to you at first glance, it may indeed sound hopelessly self-centred, and it may even make you turn away and stop reading, but I can assure you that, over the next few years especially, it is going to be quite important.

The Medium is the Product
It is going be important because it will define success. Our media, the channels that bring us not just our news but all the stuff for our minds and our hands and our lives, have given us an ability that we will no longer be able to overlook; the ability to reach, in so many ways, so many people, so successfully. As these media mature, as the ways in which we can speak to each other become more numerous, more and more people are becoming capable of reaching out en masse. Messages are marketable, and products are just tangible messages, so, whatever your measure of success, with the right message, there is an opportunity for success now such as has never existed previously.

Lots in Common
Even with common wisdom suggesting that, to be successful, you either have to be really smart, really lucky, or just know the right people, all that stuff about who you know is really just about whose language you speak. Certainly, if you were educated with someone, or grew up in the same neighbourhood, or are in any other way similar to someone you think can help you, you will have a better chance of being able to speak his or her language. But this is now a lesson, not a barrier. The great influencers, by communicating, create connections with those who believe they are like them, or share something with them, and the more potential points of commonality with the more people, the wider that person’s influence will be. We give them our time and our attention because, with whatever they have created, they have managed to put into words or form what we were already thinking.

Mind Meld
They know that speaking to many and actually having all those people listen isn’t about using fancy words or even about being smarter. They know that it has a lot more to do with pre-supposing and then removing objections and obstacles, often times unintentionally. Put someone who is possessed of this skill in a room with ten people, a hundred people, and a thousand people, and the message will change with the size of the audience, because the person either consciously or instinctively realizes that the delivery must be massaged accordingly. I know about this because I am one of those people; I have a meter on the acceptance and attentiveness level of anyone in any size of audience at any time. If you are reading this, then I have your attention, and I have therefore crafted a message that you and anyone else reading this will have accepted on some level, because it is something you have already thought.

Wire Tap
And you only need go as far as your computer, your next charitable donation, or a political demonstration, to see that even more of the most interesting and educational conversations are those that take place with things, actions, and the events those actions produce. We are taught that we are supposed to listen only to certain conversations; from our parents, from our teachers, but we often forget that authority is given not by those speaking but by those listening. The more things you do, the more people and actions you are involved with, the more conversations you are involved in at any one time. Successful companies are those carrying out the most conversations simultaneously, and great communicators are the ones who can simultaneously carry on conversations with the most people. They are talking to each other, through their work, through their scale, and through their understanding. Eavesdropping on them and really understanding them feels like sitting in a room full of people listening to someone speak and being the only one clued in enough to get an inside joke made by the speaker.

Method to the Madness
Of course, it’s very hard to hear these conversations if you don’t know how to listen to even the conversations taking place within your own head. Just as it's easier to be a comedian if you think your own jokes are funny, it’s a small step, with understanding of one's own internal conversations, to realize that to understand one’s world is to empower oneself to change one’s relationship to it, but without it, no other conversation will ever make much sense. Whether the method to attain such understanding is science, religion, just plain intuition, or just to ignore those voices, it doesn’t take a degree in sociology to see that the bottom line of listening to ourselves think is to come to some type of understanding of where we fit in, and how we can make the best of that fit. My point in framing this as a media conversation is simply that there is no longer any excuse, as a group if not individually, for the absence of that understanding.

"Pleaaasse, Make The Voices Stop!"
If you don’t know what I mean, imagine easing your head slowly upward through layers and layers of tiny increments of space, and at each layer, each time you inch your head up, you hear something else, in a different language, and all of it makes sense. That is not only Orange Life but it is becoming the life of everyone, snippets of conversations that resound like familiar tunes on a whole spectrum of cosmic radio stations.

Wavemakers & Puddlejumpers
The conversations themselves, and the voices that have them, aren’t cosmic at all. They’re the voices of everyone in our world, from the biggest wavemakers to the smallest puddle-jumpers. My secret, if you accept that I have one, is to listen on one level, to eavesdrop as it were, interpret what I have heard, and then give it back to the world in the fashion that will reach the most people. You may not be very interested in the secret to success if you are already successful, if you already hear these conversations, but if you are one of those whom circumstance has bypassed, there’s a good chance that you really, really want to understand it. My mission, my calling, my passion is to try to decipher that conversation and help you understand it. Because I think that everyone, absolutely everyone, has the right to be successful.

And, if you still doubt me, what better way to prove it than to show you.

So, let the games begin!

Technorati Tags breaking news Oprah Winfrey Facebook greatness success music

Happy Birthday, and Merry Christmas!

2007-12-24T01:39:00.008-05:00

Dedicated to you, Mom and Dad, because a light lit and kept with love burns brighter than any other.

I hope you’re celebrating your birthday tomorrow.

Whether or not December 25 is your actual date of birth, and certainly the chances are pretty good that it isn’t, I hope you’ll at least take a few minutes, and hopefully longer, to consider the miracle that is you.

Because, when you were born, a light was born. The string of lights on your Christmas tree or your house, the defiant, eternal Shamash candle in your menorah, the first glint of sunrise after Laylat al-Qadr; each of these lights signals the beginning of something very important, something at once temporal and eternal. That something is your life.

I remember wondering once, given the paucity of written records at the time of Jesus Christ, how it came to be that the early founders of Christianity came to choose December 25 as the date to celebrate what was clearly the most important birth in their own lives. And I remember nodding in understanding when I learned the answer, from the venerable Joseph Campbell. The date, he explained, coincided with the winter solstice, the time of the year with the most hours of darkness in a single day. The solstice, of course, marks the precise moment at which the darkness stops growing longer and starts getting shorter. In other words, it marks the birth of the light.

Whoever said that Christmas was all about the children was right on every count. Our commercialization of Christmas has led us to interpret the most accessible meaning of this, that the meaning of Christmas is reflected in the way children’s eyes light up when they open their presents. This may be partly true, and I confess that I look forward to that very thing tomorrow morning, but children play a far more integral role in Christmas than this interpretation allows. Christmas is about the children, one child in particular, because there is nothing more worthy of celebrating than the continuation of life through another generation. Birth banishes death as surely as light banishes darkness, and therefore the birth of a child, in every imaginable way, deserves the biggest celebration of all.

If you look around you, you’ll see the Christmas story happening all around you, wherever and whenever someone is being born. If you know anyone who has recently given birth, or if you are someone who has, you’ll recognize the long and difficult journey through a wilderness of night (also known as labour) before finally arriving at a place of comfort. You’ll also know that, like the three wise men, those from near and far travel to see the newborn, bearing gifts and praising the child, their way illuminated not by a single star but by all the hope that that new life contains. From whatever nascent bed, be it a manger of straw or a receiving blanket of linen, the beginning of an entire life is an event worthy of a heavenly host of angels.

And those singing angels are all over the place, too, present in all those who stand up in front of a crowd and sing what they really mean. Whether they are singing to God, singing to Jesus, singing to each other, or singing to you, they are raising their voices in song to celebrate the life we all share, your life and mine. Whether they are singing about the life started at their own births, or about the lives that followed from the births of others, they are carolers out to praise the most important birth in their lives. If you can’t hear them singing, if you don’t think that they are singing to you, or about you, it is not because they are not singing, it’s because you aren’t listening.

It’s because you have not yet discovered what they know; that if you’re going to sing, then really sing; in a choir, in a church, in a group, in the shower if you have to, but don’t mumble, and don’t worry about what you sound like to your neighbour, or how embarrassing it is to be heard when everybody else around you is quiet. If the words mean nothing to you, then don’t sing along. If you have addressed a crowd, or even a group, you likely understand how much power there is in saying something, clearly and with confidence, out loud in front of a group of people. Imagine, then, how empowering it must be to sing with joy for those same people. And then imagine how it must feel if you what you are singing is what you really mean, what you really love, and you believe it so strongly that you are burning to sing it so that everyone else knows it.

If you do nothing else this Christmas, if the spirit of the season strikes you as nothing more than veneer brushed over the surface of another inanimate object without any value other than commercial, I ask only that, after reading this, you take just a few moments to identify something about your life that is worth singing about in this way. On the other hand, if Christmas for you is about Jesus, and singing to Christ is empowering, then sign your heart out. Even if Christmas for you is about getting together with your friends and playing Guitar Hero until your arms fall off, then, by all means, let it all out and howl for your life, because your life is something to howl about. Not always the current circumstances of your life perhaps, not the sometimes painful past and the always uncertain future, but the fact of your life, the fact that you are alive. Christmas is a celebration of birth and of life, and the story of the birth of Jesus, the story that moves some to the most powerful song, is the story of your birth.

I leave you with what I consider a beautiful piece of Christmas music, though it has nothing to do with jingling bells or a large man in a red suit. I leave you with The King, Elvis Presley, cultural icon, fountain of charisma, a gigantic commercial success, at the top of his game in 1967, but never all that far away from his own manger of poverty and circumstance. I leave you with him throwing himself in praise before his God for having been given life, in order to appreciate its wonder, and singing a couple carefully chosen verses from the hymn How Great Thou Art. Whether you believe that he is singing into a divine pair of ears, or into a great nothingness, you will have to agree that he means what he says, and that the world is richer for the singing. Click play below, turn up the volume, close your eyes, sing along if you know it, and follow him to where he takes it.

However dim the light may seem at times, however buffeted by wind and surrounded by darkness, however shrouded by disease or disfigurement, the flickering, glowing flame that is life, the opportunity to behold this world of light for even an instant, is the greatest gift of all.

And, as far as I can tell from here, you are alive, and tomorrow is Christmas. So celebrate!

Technorati Tags Christmas Elvis Presley God Jesus Joseph Campbell music

Embroidery As A Social Tapestry – Girl Power in Action

2007-12-14T15:25:00.003-05:00

This is written for those in my life who are involved in some way with machine embroidery, which is currently a lot, because a good deal of the work I do these days to earn my living is in the embroidery industry.

Screwing In a Light Bulb
Have you heard the newest version of the old light bulb joke, the one about how many people it takes to screw one in? It goes like this. How many people does it take to embroider a single garment? If you are a machine embroiderer, your first instinct might be to answer “Just one, all it takes is an embroidery machine, an embroidery design, some thread, some stabilizer, and the garment.” To some extent, this answer would be correct, like the answer to the light bulb joke. But to say it takes one person to screw in a light bulb is to really miss the point of the joke, and to say it takes one person to embroider a garment misses a whole series of points, each of which I think is hugely important.

Everywhere & Nowhere
Let me give you some background before I tell you why. One of the things that fascinates me about embroidery is that it is both invisible and everywhere. Perhaps I’m just the type not to notice such things, but, in my experience, embroidery is the type of thing that you didn’t really think about at all as any kind of viable economic or creative force until you actually do embroidery or work in the embroidery business. Then, you take a careful look around and you realize that embroidery is everywhere; on jeans, on hats, on shirts, on towels, on handbags. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that just about everyone with a certain amount of material possessions has something with embroidery on it. Many industries are like that, of course, but, because I’m immersed in it, I’m going to pinpoint the machine embroidery industry, specifically the part that caters to those who do embroidery as a hobby and not as a business.

Brilliant Designs
What ordinary people are currently doing with these tools that the embroidery business is giving them is remarkable. If you own an embroidery machine, or know someone who does, you already know what is possible. People, regular people who you might not have ever thought of as talented or creative, are able to take everyday items -- from jeans, shirts, tablecloths and towels to umbrellas, Christmas ornaments, handbags, and iPod covers -- and create designs on them limited only by their imagination. Designs can be abstract or can assume forms like animals, letters, Disney characters, flowers, cars, and anything else under, beyond, or including the sun. You might think that to make such creations would require a great deal of training and commitment, but even beginners, with the right equipment, can do it with relative ease.

The Usual Trade-Off
In other words, the barrier to entering this secret world of the sew creative is not expertise. The main obstacle to joining this particular society is usually money. Machines that do embroidery can come as cheap as a couple hundred dollars, but ones with full functionality can run as high as several thousand. It might not therefore surprise anyone that a personal pursuit that requires an investment of both time and money caters to an older clientele. For those with the means and the time, though, the investment is generally a small price to pay for the feeling of accomplishment that accompanies a project well done, or even done at all.

The Usual Result
It is also interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that it is an industry run mostly by men, even though the overwhelming majority of both those who use the tools, and even those who use what the tools produce, are women. So, put simply, the men make the stuff and the women buy it and use it. That is not to say that there is not a significant constituency of women in the industry; it is only to say that the place the buck stops is usually a wallet, not a purse. Depending on how you look at it, this either means that the men have the power, or the women have the power, in this relationship.

Women Drivers?
At first blush, it would seem quite obvious that, if the spoils of victory be measured in the currency to which we seem to assign the most value, namely money, that the men have, once again, come out on top. This would not be the only industry in which men sell to, even exploit, the whims of women for their own gain. Fashion, cosmetics, jewelry, weight loss; all industries in which the vehicle is provided by women but driven by men.

The Eastern Battlefront
My response to that would be to wonder whether the right currency is being used to measure influence. To illustrate my point, I refer to another industry in which I was involved that was also top-heavy (sorry!) with women. Living and working as an English teacher in Japan, and later opening my own ESL school here at home, gave me a different perspective on the battle of the sexes.

The Simple Housewives
Most instructive is one particular instance, where I was assigned by my employer in Japan a class of “housewives”, which many other teachers had turned down as being below their eminent qualifications. Fortunately for me, I accepted the assignment, and this turned out to be an amazing and insightful group. First of all, there is no such thing as a "simple housewife"; each person harbours a complex intellectual life regardless of who she is or what she does. Even by those standards, however, this was no ordinary group. Included among the “housewives” were a lawyer, a scientist, several successful businesswomen, and even a Buddhist monk. They were all ostensibly there for the English, but most of them just wanted to communicate, in any way possible, and to really know where they stood in relation to my culture.

An Entirely Different Latitude
It is commonly held that Japan is a male-dominated culture; the men have all the best jobs, make up the majority of politicians, and have certain actions tolerated that many of their male counterparts in the West might envy. For example, we had during this class a very informative discussion one day about the propensity among Japanese men in a certain age range to cheat on their wives.

Can't Be Helped
With my own cultural sensibilities, I was surprised, one might even say shocked, at the comments from many of the ladies as to how they viewed their husbands’ behaviour. Rather than wrath or scorn, which I thought I was justified in expecting, the pervading attitude was one of disinterested resignation, and often even amusement. In other words, rather than condemning the trait, most of these women saw the compulsion to philander as an inevitable part of being a man of a certain age and at a certain stage in life. They used the Japanese expression, "Sho ga nai", which, translated, means something along the lines of "That's life" or "It can't be helped", and it used to refer to situations that one shouldn't worry too much about because of their inevitability. When I tried to imagine having anything remotely resembling this conversation in a room full of Western women, I found it virtually impossible.

Balance of Power
I naturally thought prudent to ask them how they could possibly turn a blind eye to something that, at least in my eyes, is as fundamental to a relationship as infidelity. Many of them responded in similar fashion. Their message to me: We Have The Power. The more we know about and willingly allow, the more control we have in our relationships. You can cry about something that may very well happen anyway, or you can use it to get what you want.

Shrinking Violets?
On occasions when I have relayed this story to female friends of mine who share my cultural background, the first reaction has been to dismiss this group of housewives as deluded and probably unhappy, perhaps having resorted to justification as a defense mechanism against a sense of being deeply hurt. In the four hours per week that I spent with them over the course of eight months or so, however, this was not the impression that I got. On the contrary, these were very strong and self-assured women, who enjoyed their lives, loved their families, appreciated their marriages, and wanted the best not only for their loved ones but also for themselves. The message that I take away from this is not that I can now cheat on my wife and feel justified in doing so. Rather, it showed me how important perspective is to power.

Who's The Boss?
So, in an industry run by men but enjoyed primarily by women, who would you rather be, the producer or the consumer? Who has the power, or does it even matter? On the producer side, people who run their own businesses hear all the time how wonderful it must be not to work for anyone. My response to that when running my own businesses was always that, while the person saying that might have a single boss, or a couple, I had all my customers, and the chances were pretty good that they were much tougher and more demanding than that person’s boss. I always felt that my customers had more power than I did.

Commercial Charisma
On the consumer side, all of the Internet marketing gurus telling companies how to attract eyeballs and sell stuff and make money now preach the power of speaking to the customer on her terms, because she is so very important. What I find funny about this is that they make it sound like this is a new idea. In fact, it is only new in that it applies to a relatively new medium. Commercial success has always been about the ability to communicate through one’s product, service or message on the most individual level possible, in the same way that personal charisma, the elixir of social success, is about connecting en masse but individually (ask Bill Clinton) with people. Even artistic success is about not much more than attracting anywhere between a small group and a multitude of viewers but reaching each in a personal and fundamental way. It has never been about speaking to the masses, it has always been about speaking to the person. Mass media and the distribution of mass goods just mean there are more persons to whom can be spoken.

Going Places
At the end of the day, I have found arguments about power to be circular, and therefore unwinnable. Some find their own unique threads in life by figuring things out, by tinkering with things and producing things for profit. Others seem to have their paths laid out before them by figuring that, no matter how much they try to figure out, they're only going to get so far, and so, beyond that, they might as well just accept, and enjoy, whatever comes their way. That the currency of our culture rewards the former over the latter, does not necessarily mean that it is better. A consideration of the complexity of it all, and learning how to manipulate your understanding of that complexity into professional gain, will certainly get you places, but the real question remains whether or not those are places you really want to be.

Behind the Needle
Here is where I come back to my variation on the light bulb joke. How many people does it take to embroider a garment? Being in the industry has made me realize that one is the wrong answer, because of how much cooperation it takes to bring us even simple things, let alone complex things. People work full time on providing ways to put stitches together, how much space to tell the machine to put between them, how to limit the number of times the needle must strike the fabric, and then on software that will let the computer tell the machine how to turn that information into an actual piece of embroidery. And then you have the operating system and the computer on which those tasks are performed, the inventor of the craft of using a needle and thread to fasten and all manufacturers since then who have taken raw materials and made them into needles and thread. And then there is the machine to which the computer speaks, and the makers of all the components and intelligence that go into that machine, the transportation companies that moved the components, those who made the vehicles and all the composite parts of the vehicles that transported them, the makers of the dye that coloured the thread, the growers of the plants from which the dye was extracted, everyone involved in isolating and processing the chemicals that make up the rayon or polyester in the thread, the people who cut down the trees for the wood that the spool is made of, the mill that made that wood into lumber, the makers of the tools that fashioned all these parts into the shapes they end up in, the workers that mined the minerals and metals, the engineers that found those deposits, not to mention all the people at all the companies that supply these companies, with buildings, with furniture, with heat or air conditioning, with paper, with coffee, with carpets. Look around you, where you are right now, and think about it for a moment. Millions upon millions of people have collaborated to put you exactly where you are, on the floor where you or your chair is standing, in the clothes you’re wearing, in front of the screen you’re reading.

Common Threads
In some measure, each of these people forms a part of your life. No matter how much we may individually lose or give up the ability to properly consider complexity, and how much work goes into even the simplest function we take for granted, we know when we reflect that it is still all about cooperation. Whether the common thread of which I speak starts from those who figure out and prosper, those who work for them and help them execute what they have figured out, or those who just enjoy the results, that thread runs long and in very complex patterns.

Circular Distances
There are great economic distances between people, to be sure, but when a tool, like an embroidery machine, is built by some to allow and indeed empower others to create something in their own right, then the whole thing comes full circle. You can be sure that the one who built that machine, a creator of some sort in that part of his/her life, is a consumer in most other parts of things that others have created. If you stop to think about it, there is simply no getting around the fact that we are all cooperating with each other to make each other’s lives easier.

Bright Idea
Of course, easier does not necessarily mean better, but it certainly can. Having made each other’s lives so much easier, our task is to figure out how to go ahead and make each of those lives better. I’m pretty sure that an important part of that is learning to better recognize everyone else’s contribution. That starts by realizing that it not only takes a community to raise a child, but even to screw in a light bulb.

Atomic Bombshell
One great passage in a book I love speaks of the durability and ubiquitous nature of atoms. For example, in the acts of living and dying, each of us contains or comes in contact with an immeasurable number of atoms, so it has been calculated that every single living human contains atoms that once belonged to every other living human being who lived more than 60 years ago. In other words, on an atomic level, each of us contains pieces of every major and minor historical, religious, royal, or commercial figure there has ever been, prior to about 1950. This is interesting on any number of levels, and I love what it means, but I don’t think it’s true only of atoms, which are so very difficult to imagine on any meaningful level, and I don’t think you have to be a scientist to apply the lesson. I think it also applies to tangible, measurable things that our minds and our hands have created.

Untangling the Web We Weave
If something as simple as embellishing a towel with embroidery requires millions of people, imagine how many such actions each one of us performs in a day, and how many people had to cooperate to make each of those actions possible. Whether putting on clothes, taking a shower, eating breakfast, going to work, or watching a movie, almost everything we do we are able to do as a result of a receiving blanket woven from an immense matrix of intersecting threads of cooperation. If with our own creations we can reproduce even a pale imitation of the tapestry created by the threads of our cooperation, we will have created something of great and eternal beauty.

Technorati Tags housewives machine embroidery women japan travel stories light bulb joke

The Crazy Canuck - Adventures with Perfect Strangers

2007-11-22T20:07:00.002-05:00

This post is dedicated to you, Sarah, because I do take requests, and yours was a good one.

Times Have Changed
It all seems a bit tame now, compared to what Sasha Baron Cohen has done lately with Ali G and Borat, but it sure felt pretty cutting-edge at the time. I'll never forget how validated I felt about it all when I got a call from a producer at BBC Two, wanting to include me and my show in his weekly television series. Perhaps if I had taken him up on it then, I might be in a different place now. But, when I got the call, I had already made up my mind to leave England, on what at the time I clearly felt to be a greater mission.

One In The Oven
I think I first thought of the idea out of little more than simple frustration. I was living in London, working some evenings as a barman in an Irish pub in Tottenham, and spending most of the rest of my time trying to give birth to a novel. I use the birth metaphor in a fondly nostalgic way; one of the regular punters in the drinking establishment where I tended bar was a former writer himself, or at least fancied himself as such, and he used to jest, in his mischevious rural Irish brogue, that I was looking a bit piqued, being, as I was, pregnant with a novel. He was the same kind soul who had advised me, correctly as it turned out, that the only conceivable way to get a tip out of an Irishman in London, was to learn the little trick o' the wrist that would produce, in one pour, a shamrock in a head of Guinness. From then on we'd had an understanding; he'd help me get better tips, and I'd occasionally forget to ring in his drink order.

Sing For Your Breakfast

In any event, my weekly barman's wages were barely enough to pay for the occasional full English breakfast indulgence I favoured at the local cafe, so I was attempting to supplement these wages with another, very newly learned, talent. Had I not been so fortunate to be lodging in a place where the rent and bills had already been paid, I would never have even been able to afford to explore this potential talent, though it is probably unfair to my then host and still dear friend John to condemn him to infamy for having allowed me enough latitude to pollute the world with that talent. Talent probably wasn't the word for it; it was more like willingness, or gumption. You see, to raise my station, I had resolved to begin a shadow career as a busker.

A Star Is Born
Ever since I had first stepped off a train platform and into the rich, warm world of a subway tunnel filled completely with the sweet breath of a tenor sax, I had held the busker as one of my most envied icons. I had never had any training or experience as a singer, not before or since I had stood on stage in a grade school production and sung what may have been a perfect, unaccompanied solo before a room full of awestruck parents, but I was pretty sure that I could sing, and completely sure that I wanted to. The fact that I couldn't play more than three chords, badly, on an old acoustic guitar, with a broken golf tee holding in one of the strings, was not an impediment in the least. It was a phase in my life where everything new and exciting was worthy of pursuit, though, in saying that, I suppose that some who know me would contend that that is a phase from which I have yet to fully emerge.

The Perfect Complement

My busking companion, Dave, had the opposite problem. He was, by all accounts including mine, hopelessly talented, and could with his guitar and accompanying voice hold the spotlight like the most seasoned performer, at least among a small circle of friends. Anyone lucky enough to hear him had been telling him for years that he could make more than enough busking in the tunnels of London's Underground to support any number of his many vices. Nobody seemed to know for sure what had always prevented him from taking that advice, but, until I arrived on the scene, prevent himself he had, but would no longer. Perhaps he saw in my appearance an opportunity for the perfect experiment; my guitar playing was so bad that it could only highlight the quality of his own, and my voice was loud enough that, if an attack of nerves did strike his own vocal chords, it likely wouldn't be noticed among my high-pitched squawking.

Tunnel of Love

Most London buskers knew that there was only one place to be if you wanted to serenade The Tube's commuters in style, and that was smack dab in the middle of the long tunnel running from Green Park station. There was something almost mythical about the acoustics in this particular tunnel; it added fullness and richness on the low end, and clarity to the high end of the sonic spectrum. We happened also to be blissfully ignorant at the time that there was a code among buskers as to who could pitch up in that tunnel and when, so we resolved to set ourselves up there every chance we could. Whether it was our lack of harmony, my early lack of showmanship, or just a general lack of interest, we ended up making very little money. Still, we had a great time doing it, regardless of whether or not anyone was actually paying attention.

Pretty Vacant

It was the paying attention part, in fact, that I found most interesting, and subsequently inspiring. Anyone who has boarded public transit pretty much anywhere in the world, with some glorious exceptions, knows the wooden stare worn by most passengers as relates to their fellow travellers. It was with some surprise however, and a little chagrin, that I learned while busking that this extended well beyond the train and its platform. It was one thing, I thought, to avoid the eyes of the guy sitting across from you by pretending to read the same advertisement for chewing gum over and over, over his head. It was quite another to pour out one's soul through music or banter and receive an almost identical reaction. My problem with this while busking was not that I came to resent this type of reaction. Rather, it was that, apart from a few examples, I was sure I saw, underneath the veneer of disinterest, a yearning among many people who passed to participate in some fashion, but confusion of how to do so for fear of embarrassing themselves by doing something even the least bit out of the ordinary.

A Different World

I was almost certainly spoiled. Having experienced not that long before the colourful social extravanga of riding a bus in, say, Kenya, I had come to expect that the natural state of a human being in such a situation was not to close oneself off but to open oneself up. Countless hours in crowded buses throughout Africa, though often uncomfortable, had produced the most incredible array of social bonding opportunities, from singalongs among strangers and games of pass-around-the-cute-baby to live chicken fights and impromptu mini-picnics. I had to believe that, even here in less tropical climes, with all the layers of clothing and headphones and packages that separated people from one another, there had to be the same simple attraction somewhere under there that pulled them together. My revelation, as I searched often vainly for real responses from those to whom I was singing, was that, if I didn't have the talent to strengthen that pull musically, there had to be something I could to show these people how much fun a Kenyan bus could be, or at least how completely ridiculous it was to be all alone in the midst of a whole bunch of interesting people.

Birth of an Idea

As it happened, this notion coincided well with my lack of financial success as a musician, which meant that those breakfasts I cherished were fast becoming unattainable. So, necessity as mother and insight as father begat invention, a little being that believed it could rise above it all by taking me, its willing sibling, deeper underground. I wondered what would happen if, rather than a couple guys playing guitars and singing, those streams of living organisms that passed incessantly through the Tube were given something to really startle them. How would they react? What would it take to break through those barriers and touch the people behind all those blank expressions?

All Downhill From Here

So, with hardly any idea as to what I was going to do, but knowing that it was going to be some kind of show, I created an act and named it after a great Canadian ski-racing team, renowned in the previous decade, and managed to get "Crazy Canuck Tube Theatre" listed for free in the Fringe Theatre section of Time Out magazine. All that was left to do while I waited for the phone to ring was to figure out how, when, where, and with whom I would carry out my shenanigans. To my delight and subsequent trepidation, I did not have to wait long at all for the first phone call. I hadn't considered that paying customers might actually have questions before they purchased, so it isn't surprising in the least that I scared away at least the first three or four prospective customers who called, owing to my utter cluelessness as to the details of what I proposed to do to justify the 10-pound ticket price.

Reconnaissence Mission

On the plus side, the calls I was getting at least told me that there might actually be people out there who might pay for this type of thing, so I wrote out a list of prospective antics, bought a day pass, and spent seven or eight hours in the subway system scouting stations, platforms, and a possible route that would allow me to accomplish what I wanted to in a time span brief enough to hold the attention of my audience but long enough to let them feel they had gotten enough value for their money to recommend the show to their friends. It would turn out that I was woefully unprepared for the logistical manoeverings that it would take to execute such a show, but, if nothing else, my tour gave me enough information to be able to answer enough questions to convince others that this particular form of entertainment was worthwhile. I also managed to convince myself it was do-able.

On With The Show!

My pitch proved sufficiently refined that I managed within a couple days and only a few more calls to cobble together a group of eight audience members, which I thought would be the perfect number for my inaugural show. After taking down some availability information from each member of the group, I gave everyone a time and place to meet, let them know how they'd be able to recognize me, and insisted on only one hard and fast rule that they would have to follow in order to guarantee a successful show. In order for the show to work, it was imperative that nobody in the vicinity of where the show was taking place could suspect that it was in fact a show; my audience had to pretend they were regular commuters. That meant they couldn't give any signs that they were together, and they definitely couldn't reveal that they had any connection whatsoever to me. Even in our initial meeting place, they would know me by what I was wearing but they could not acknowledge the beginning of our show. Each swore, often while chuckling, to uphold this cardinal rule, breach of which would mean immediate banishment from the show.

The Fool Rushes In
And so it came to pass that, on a chilly afternoon in November on which rain soaked the streets above, I donned my disguise in where else but Green Park station, and made myself conspicuous in our pre-arranged location. My audience found me sitting cross-legged with my eyes closed, dressed only in a makeshift loin cloth, on a common space just inside the turnstiles, chanting a particularly fashionable Buddhist mantra. I was freezing, pathologically nervous, and completely unsure of what was going to happen next. It was extraordinarily exhilarating.

Quick Change
When I was sure that my audience was among the hundred or so people gathered around me, I opened my eyes, calmly got to my feet, reached down into my bag, pulled out some track pants and a University of Toronto sweatshirt, got dressed, and headed toward the escalator. When I reached the train platform, I put my hands together, smiled, and bowed Namaste to anyone who insisted on staring at me. When the train came, I stayed on the platform without boarding, deducing, correctly as it turned out, that those who remained on the platform with me would be my audience. Quickly and quietly, before others started arriving on the platform, I collected the ticket price from each member of my already captive audience, reminded them to spread out and eventually rejoin me so as not to acknowledge that they were with me, and made a couple further wardrobe changes. By the time the platform started filling with people, I was ready for my next scene with a fresh set of onlookers.

Put Your Head On My Shoulder
When we got through the doors of the train, I looked around immediately for the toughest-looking young man that I thought would stop just short of beating the crap out of me for what I was about to put him through, and took a seat next to him, hoping that he'd be on for at least the next two stops. I don't remember much about that particular guy, but I remember enough to know that he was not someone of whom my parents would have approved. As soon as the train started moving, I began to pretend to nod off, letting my chin drop slowly to my chest and then pulling my head up abruptly, as though resisting the urge to doze completely. As I was doing so, I also began to lean slowly toward my surly target, and he began to shift in his seat a little uncomfortably. On one of my chin droops, I slumped further to the right and let my head fall more quickly until I felt it hit his shoulder. Almost instantly, he shrugged abruptly to dislodge my head, and I sleepily motioned an apology that I had disturbed him. I'm sure it didn't help either that several of my audience were giggling audibly, although, as he likely frowned disapprovingly at having his personal space so invaded, they were also shaking their heads in feigned sympathy with him, doing their part to keep up the ruse. In fact, seeing the couple across from me on the verge of wetting themselves as they struggled with repressed laughter, it was all I could do to keep my concentration and not join them.

Falling, Asleep
I then resumed my dozing sequence until the train came to the next stop, hoping that my neighbour wasn't getting off, and leaning away from him to make sure that he wasn't so perturbed that he'd change his seat. When we lurched into motion again, I let my head fall back and began to snore loudly. I believe even my victim found this funny, as I heard him chuckle, which was good because I was about to really test the limits of his tolerance. After a few more loud, rasping snores, I dropped my chin back down toward my chest, took a sidelong peek out my right eye to determine my position in relation to my prey, steeled my fraying nerves, and fell over until my torso was horizontal and my head was resting in his lap.

Car Crash
I can only imagine what the look on his face must have been, but I can attest factually to his physical reaction. The first thing he did was to raise both his hands into plain view, likely to let everyone in the train car know that this was not an action that he had solicited or welcomed in the least. This was a mistake on his part, for it gave me an opportunity to execute the second part of my plan, which was to reach as if in a dream for his left arm, pull it towards me as I murmured happily, and start snuggling it the way a sleeping child does with a teddy bear. This was, of course, too much for the poor fellow to take, so he stood up hastily and forcefully and I fell to the floor with a thud.

Mind The Gap
Either my planning had been very good or I had been very lucky, because the timing ended up being almost perfect for the purposes of continuing the show. We were less than a minute from the next scheduled station in my tour, so I used the subway pole to pull myself to my feet, apologized profusely, and skulked sheepishly over to the door. It was important to the reality element of the show that I look as anxious as possible to leave the whole incident behind, but I'm sure it won't surprise you to know that wearing the appropriate expression wasn't much of a stretch. The train car stopped, and I scampered out, followed by my audience and a few other random passengers.

Indecent Descent
The next step was to transition into my next stunt, which didn't actually require any change of clothes or even the removal of witnesses to my previous antics from the audience. I had planned a transfer to another subway line, which was a long escalator ride down from the level to which we had exited from the train. Walking in the midst of the members of my little entourage, I stepped onto the escalator, and, as it carried us down, I began to exhibit signs first of anxiety and then of outright panic. About half way down, I gripped tightly onto the moving handrail and began yelling that I did not want to go down any further because I was extremely concerned about what kind of creature was living in the subway's deepest depths. At about two-thirds of the way down, as my audience continued to the bottom, I mounted the handrail and climbed onto the steep median between the up and down escalators, still shouting, and took hold with both hands of one of the knobs that populates such medians, so that I was left hanging on the median like a man clinging to a cliff face, in a state of extreme stress and discomfort.

Unlikely Angel
Reactions to this spectacle, as one might expect, were mixed. As I half expected, the majority of people did their utmost to seem completely oblivious and pretend to notice nothing, clearly not wanting to get involved in any way with such a raving lunatic. Others shook their heads and muttered to themselves about how people like me could be allowed to roam London's public places or, for that matter, even afford a subway ticket. However, as always, the reactions of a select few helped to restore my faith that, somewhere in that crowd of onlookers, there were traces of genuine humanity. One person in particular sticks in my mind from that first show, a portly middle-aged man, clearly working class, who, without fear of being embarrassed or injured, rode the escalator down to where I was and, once there, made it a point to keep stepping in place up the down escalator next to where I was hanging. I didn't know who he was or what he was about to do, but he completely caught me off guard when he craned his neck to make eye contact with me and then started offering me kind words of encouragement to coax me off the median. In spite of being in full adrenaline-fueled show mode, my eyes almost filled with tears when he put his hand gently on my back, and uttered the following words:

"Mate, I don't know what's down there either, but I'll go down with you and whatever it is, we'll give it a right old go."

The Real Performer
I think for a moment I actually forgot that I was acting, as I climbed back on to the escalator and, with his arm around my shoulder, we rode the moving stairs down into the abyss. A small crowd had gathered at the bottom, and as we stepped together off the escalator, several people began to applaud. I wasn't sure what to do next, as I was genuinely affected by the man's grace and I couldn't bear to string him along further in my charade. Spontaneously, I threw my arms around him, gave him a big hug, expressed my profound appreciation, and told him that I was feeling much better. After numerous reassurances to convince him and everyone else that I was going to be fine, he and everyone else left me sitting on a bench at the bottom of the escalator, surrounded only by the members of my audience, shaking their heads at what they had just witnessed.

To Be Continued
I am going to end my account of that day's events there. In total, I ended up doing only three shows, the final one ending with my being taken into custody by the police during my escalator routine. Explaining to London's finest exactly what I was doing and why I had done it while trying to prove that I was neither inebriated nor insane is a story in itself, but I won't relay it here.

The End
I end it here, because, in almost every way, with that one individual, I found what I had been unable to find in the moment the whole bizarre notion first visited me. Yes, I did it partly for the money, and it certainly bought me some breakfasts, and yes, perhaps I did it partly for the attention, for who would do such things, or even conceive of them, without craving some significant sort of attention in some significant manner? The soul of the matter though, resides in the instant it first struck me, while singing to passerby at Green Park station, that, even in the midst of a buzzing swarm of people, so many individuals could seem so utterly unattached. Whether those faceless strangers reached out and touched me, or just somehow reached out to each other, I was really just looking for signs of life. And in that portly, middle-aged man with kind eyes who gave an important piece of himself to me in the London Underground on a chilly November afternoon, that is exactly what I found.

Technorati Tags crazy canuck busking borat guinness travel stories london underground

Lest We Forget - An Open Letter to the Unknown Soldier

2007-11-11T23:25:00.001-05:00

Dedicated to those who have lost their lives in the service of others.

To You Who Is Forever in My Thoughts,

As your mother, I will always remember you the way you were when we were closest, when I could feel your head rising and falling against my chest. When you told me with glowing eyes of your accomplishments, and when you could not contain how much you hurt and the tears that welled up in those eyes spoke most of your need for me to soothe your pain. I cannot stand to think of the terrible things that have befallen you since the last time you were close to me; what you have seen and what you have felt would almost certainly break my heart, so I tell myself that, in those times when you were all alone and afraid, you could feel my closeness. I was there with you, and I still am. I would still give anything to feel that closeness with you just one more time, but my dreams still allow me, from time to time, to feel the warmth of your presence so intensely I'm sure I can feel your breath and smell your hair. Those are the moments that I cherish.

As your father, I remember the pride I felt when you began to think for yourself, and started to become the person you did, even as I knew that it would, in some way, begin to take you away from me. The day you left was almost unbearably difficult, with my wanting to tell you everything I'd never had the chance to, but knowing that to do so would be to risk telling you that I was giving up hope of ever seeing you return. I've tried since you've been away not to make it about myself, to avoid dwelling on the all the joy that I've been robbed of by not being able to watch you grow. There was so much I wanted for you that you never got to experience, and so much you've experience that I never wanted you to. All I can hope for now is that, before you left our lives, you got what you wanted.

As your sister, I feel this huge sense of responsibility to fix something that I know I never can. Not having you here has changed us all completely. Whenever we sit down all together for a family dinner, or gather in smaller groups any other time, there's this awkward compulsion that we have to acknowledge your absence, as we always do, but the more earnestly we do so, the more painful it becomes, so we probably don't acknowledge you like we should. I keep hearing that that's just the way things are, until one day it all just becomes another thing we do, like an oft-repeated prayer whose words no longer mean anything. But I won't let that happen to you, even if I have to keep open wounds from becoming scars. Your absence is a wound I won't let time heal.

As your brother, I wish I could have done something to protect you, to take you back to our days when every battle had as its counterpart a scar to be worn like a badge, and every wound had as its companion a good story that we'd look back on someday and laugh about. I know everyone says this, but, in so many ways, I wish I could trade places with you; I wish it would have been me. You seem so much better now than I ever was. All I can seem to remember now is those times I wished you ill, when I treated you badly just because I could. I sure hope that's not how you remembered me, because it would kill me to know that empty frame of guilt was a part of your last moments. I tell myself instead that you thought of the times we laughed so hard it made everyone around us laugh too. For your sake, and mine I supposed, I hope I'm right.

As your love, I remember how your presence filled the space we were in, the way a body fills a bed or a smile fills a face. I can still feel you touching me, not just with your hands and your lips and your skin but with your eyes and your spirit. Now it seems I have to force myself to feel things, to put effort and will into squeezing something tangible out of any attempt to reach me. I remember when you hurt me, and when I hurt you, when we said and did things to each other that made us so mad at the time, but I know now that the hurt that comes from your absence is so much deeper, and lasts so long. It's the one thing that can reach through and touch me when everything else is numb. Sometimes I think that if I reach back, blindly through that space that your presence no longer fills, my hands might find yours, and we'll draw together in an embrace.

As your best friend, it doesn't seem fair that I'm the one sitting here reminiscing. Remember how easy it was not to take anything seriously, and to leave all that bad stuff behind and just have a good time? What happened to those effortless days? It used to be that all we had to do to make the world go away for a while was to get together, and anything was possible. It's not like that now; you're never there when I turn around, reminding me sometimes that, for some things, there is no second chance. There's no chance to even talk about all those things we wanted to do together, let alone actually do them. Sometimes I wish you'd leave me alone, sometimes I even say it out loud, but then there are the other times, when I realize that you are with me, following me around like some shadow I can't see, and maybe it's not so bad having you with me, because you remind me to do my best with every moment because everything may change in the next one.

As your daughter, I miss being able to count on you when I needed to be loved and accepted without question, whatever I had or hadn't done. Whoever took you away from me couldn't have known how good you were to me, how you took care of me. People tell me I'm strong, and independent, and everything that a woman these days is supposed to be, and I suppose they're right to some extent, but they don't see what you saw. For you, I never had to perform, even though I always loved doing so. For you, I never had to prove anything, I just wanted to. I know there are people in my life that understand that, and really try to give me that, but you never had to try. That's just who you were. I guess if whoever took you had known that, that's who you'd still be.

As your son, I wanted to know you so much better. I wanted to hear about all the things you could never tell me because you knew I'd have never been interested. I wish there was some way that I could tell you that I'm interested now; I'm interested not just in hearing but in understanding what it was that made you the person you were. Most of all, I wanted you to see me grow into the person you always knew I could become, and see the pride you felt watching me put into the practice the best of yourself that you gave to me. I hear all the time how much of you there is in me, not just in how I appear but in how I do the things I do. Those who knew you well even say that, at times, the way I move through the world helps show them that you are not really gone at all. That's a nice thought to hold on to sometimes, but I wish I could hold onto it for longer, because when it fades, I'm left missing you that much more.

As your victim, I think this whole thing is completely unfair. Neither of us should have been there, doing what we were doing. Why did circumstances have to put us together like that, at that precise moment in time in that exact place? If you'd been from where I was from, we could have been family, friends, neighbours, or even just strangers. Either way, we both wouldn't have had to lose everything that we've lost, and to cause so much hurt to so many others. Maybe I'm supposed to hate you, but I don't hate you; how could I, I don't even know you. What I hate is whatever brought us together under those circumstances. I don't care whose fault it was, or who was right and who was wrong. I just hate that it had to happen at all.

As the one responsible for your fate, I know that you're not all that different from me, but, as you more than anyone can understand, it was something I just had to do. You know as well as I do how complicated it is, the frame of mind you're put in by the preparation you go through with those like you, and the comraderie you feel with them, and the need to step outside yourself into some heightened state of awareness. You know what it is to become someone other than yourself. You have to, or you'd never last even for a day. Of course I feel bad about all of it, I think about it all the time, but I'd never last a day either if I thought about it too much. If you didn't understand that as well, I'd probably feel much worse, but I know you do. We can't be that different.

When all is said and done, it hardly matters why you were taken from us, or what you were doing when you were. It's about what you meant to us when you were with us, and what you continue to mean to us now. The talk around this time of year is of valour, and service to a higher good. That must be important, but it is not uniforms and trumpets that, for us, embody your particular sacrifice. Neither is it the tangible sadness, nor the unfillable emptiness that memorializes your affect on us all. Rather, it is the ghost of your presence, refracted into manifestations everywhere by some barely discernable strand of light, that winds through and around us when we speak, when we act, while we live and love, and joins together our whole experience of you like the first ray of sunshine that parts the clouds, illuminates the earth with all its inhabitants beneath, and heralds the rainbow.

Yours eternally,

Those Whose Lives You've Touched

Technorati Tags remembrance day war memorial unknown soldier poppy veteran lest we forget

The Blog - An Instrument of Truth & World Peace?

2007-10-21T16:09:00.000-04:00

Dedicated to the misunderstood.

Where It's At
I want you to listen to what I'm saying. This blog, this medium, this computer, allows you to do that if you want, and it allows me to talk to you if I want. When we stop to think about it, that is truly an incredible thing. That someone as far away as you are from me, in distance, in background, in personality, in economic circumstance perhaps, can actually sit down and share thoughts, ideas, opinions, and stories. Forget e-mail, that we can only send to those whose addresses we know. Forget instant messaging, where communication in real time doesn't give us a chance sometimes to collect our thoughts, or take back what we've said. The blog is where it's at.

Move Over, Kings
When else in our history could you sit down comfortably, in an environment of your own choosing, and talk to your whole world? There have been people in the public eye -- queens, kings, and priests through to politicians, artists, athletes and champions of industry -- who have been able to command large and captive audiences, if they knew how to and had jobs that allowed them to. Some of them have even been great. But now, with a computer and an Internet connection, everyone can do it. Now that we have this incredible tool to speak to each other directly, what will become of those people, this open cabal of illuminati, whom we once needed to show us all that life could be, to interpret its elusive pulse as a rhythm that we could understand and, if not follow, at least dream of following? Could this capacity to speak to the masses that each of us now has available mean we can all be great now, that we the loyal subjects can step in front of those used to owning the platform and enjoy our day in the sun? Among those of us for whom communication is the key to life, isn't that the ultimate aspiration, to live like those golden children whose work, whose day job, is to simply live their lives communicating through their chosen medium? To blog as a calling, to play as a living, to sit comfortably on your choice of throne and write basically what you want, is just about as good as it gets. As more and more people figure that out, and figure out how to do it, there are going to be a lot of changes in those of us doing it and those of us reading it. With the amount of people this implies, that means changes in the world.

Wisdom of Crowds

A hundred ten million people can't be all wrong any more than they can be all right, but they must be on to something. There are blogs about everything from daily instances of unnecessary quotation marks to blogs not only about but by cats. There are blogs about blogging, even blogs about blogs about blogging. Bloggers complain regularly that they forego important life pursuits, such as family, work, exercise, and even sex, as they hunch over their keyboards broadcasting their own unique take on things to the world at large. But if, in fact, the medium is the message, and it is the existence of blogging itself that is worthy of consideration, what message is it that we can glean from the birth and subsequently explosive growth of the weblog? Have we stepped back to wonder about what the messsage the existence of the blog as an entity can teach us? Even if the medium isn't the most important message, and what we say is as important as how we say it, it's a safe assumption that just about anything that anyone has to say about anything in the world right now has probably been said, or is about to be said, on a blog. That, in itself, is pretty important.

The Envy of Plato
As a living work of expression and personal discovery, the blog has no equal. At its best, the blog is an open-ended narrative that can help you work through and perhaps even validate everything you know and believe. It can allow you to explore, discuss, hear criticism of, and then refine your ideas on a scale that Plato would have envied. Even at its worst, when it is used for pursuits we would rather not even think about, let alone read about, it is a window into worlds that our paternal cultural guardians, so concerned about our brittle sensibilities, never allowed us to see. Anything anywhere that we want to know and is currently known by people is now reachable in the space of a few coordinated hand movements, so that we have everything we need to teach ourselves enough to support, and improve upon, any of our opinions. This doesn't mean that we do know everything, but it does mean that we sure can try.

Meet Me in the 'Sphere
If you are new to blogs, you will be both encouraged and discouraged to learn that the blog allows a person with little or no technical knowledge to build a personal or professional showcase that, only a few years ago, would have cost a month's wages, invested either in a computer science diploma or a web designer's services. If you are a veteran of blogs or social networking, you know that a well-aimed feed reader makes you ten times more informed about just about everything than even the most committed newspaper junkie. Both communities, those for whom a computer is an instrument of enslavement and those for whom it is an instrument of discovery, have developed blissfully separate from, and sometimes even superior to, each other, but they are coming together. That meeting point is the blogosphere.

Sources in Check
Among those who have not yet fallen victim to its charms, one criticism of the blogosphere is that there are no fact checkers, and that looking for information of readable quality is like searching through the proverbial haystack for that needle of truth. Even once you've found the information you're interested in, the blogger's expertise is often questioned. For the polemically inclined however, who choose what to believe based as much on the quality of the argument as on the authority of its source, dubious at the best of times, the blog leaves no excuse for a weak argument, or at least for a lack of supporting criteria. Bibliographic sources that are a drive to the library away when a book is the medium, or definitions of words that were once the realm of academics, are a click away on the Internet.

True Craftsmanship
For those who see creating as a craft, as something to be practiced and perfected, a blog is a learning organism unlike any other. Unlike a novel or film script, with its beginnings, structure, and endings, the blog does not stop learning the moment its final print run is complete. Show me a writer who would not change at least some parts of even his or her most cherished work. Books may get editions, and movies may get a director's cut on DVD, but the blog post has the luxury of always being the best it can be, at least if its creator is more interested in fixing the argument than holding the opinion that created it. If you are accustomed to listening as much as talking, and recognize that, given equal weight, the two together will balance out towards understanding, the opportunity is there to create something not only truly current and truly wonderful, but also currently and wonderfully true.

Content with Filters
The argument against this medium as a vehicle for a new kind of message says that the finished product that is put away for good once it is complete is a good thing, in that such a product, whether it be a book or a movie or any other creation, must then be taken to such perfect form that the creators only get one chance, and it is a perfect snapshot of a moment in time. Further, the more arduous creative process that goes into building something as complex as a film acts as its own content filter. If something isn't good enough, a whole bunch of people aren't going to spend a whole bunch of money to try to realize a flawed dream. Both points are certainly true, and I'm a huge fan of many of these completed works, as is almost everyone else. I agree and admit to the fact that, even from a point of view of getting to real truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, whatever that is, there are many instances where what is popular and what is true overlap.

The Distorted Lens
But, it's also important, I would say vital, to remember that, in order to create that snapshot, many agents were involved. To publish a novel requires researchers, proofreaders, editors, printers, typesetters, artists, and of course (gulp) lawyers. For a film, look at the credits that roll at the end of even a B-movie for a pretty good indicator of how many people it takes to bring together a production of even the most modest scale. Even documentary books, movies, and television, with no commercial ties whatsoever, that aim nobly at truth, are, with a few notably refreshing exceptions, filtered through a cultural lens, which comes further out of focus the more individuals are peering through the lens. In other words, even these valiant stabs at truth start from one step further back of the stance assumed by first-person account of the blog, which is itself only one step back from where we stand with the spontaneous generation of speech from our thoughts that we wield, sometimes like swords, on a daily basis.

Of Dogs & Wolves
Not that the blog itself is immune from this potential distortion of truth. A blog that is written for the purposes of making money is similar to literature or music or art whose main purpose is commercial. This does not mean that it cannot be very good, both in readability and education, but it does mean that, regardless of how good it is or how many people read it, it is to some extent bound by ropes that keep it tethered to the ground where it is obliged to reside, saved for its own good from running off into the wilderness of thought . That isn't a problem if the creature in question is content to be someone's pet, and live the comfortable life that that entails, but it is if the creature is a wolf.

Objects of Love

Then again, everyone has to make a living, right? Everyday life is a balance between truth and economics; isn't it understood that even the truest message may come with an ulterior motive? Though there are always enough stories of brilliant marketing ploys that required little or no investment to keep the content creators from complete despondency, the fact of the matter is that it's pretty hard to get noticed without either compromising at least some of your integrity or parting with even more of your money. As always, those who know how to attract eyes are usually more interested in the pockets into which reach the hands that are corporeally attached to those eyes, whereas those just interested in the eyes are staring into them so intently that they have fallen in love and forgotten all about paying the rent.

Paradigm Shift

What I find amusing, on days when it isn’t driving me nuts, is how much credence is given to someone’s point of view just because someone else has seen fit to publish their work. Don’t get me wrong; I am not taking issue with all published work; there is some fine work indeed out there, more than can ever be measured. It's just that I believe that anything on which anyone has worked hard to communicate is worthy of an audience. I think everything should be published, that everyone should have access to everything. What amuses me then, is how much status and attention we assign to those who have merely accomplished a task like any other, and have been rewarded for it by attention and remuneration. For example, every new author knows and dreads the question “Are you published yet?” To me, this question belongs to an old paradigm, one that was used before everyone could publish and which is no longer particularly valid. With the incredible opportunities now available for developing and distributing ideas, the current version of this question, both more accurate and less likely to provoke dread, should be “How do you publish?”

Freaks in the Shadows

Isn't the real question about blogs or books or movies, or any form of content which aims for truth but has money behind its development, whether the fact that this content feeds someone's kids makes it a barrier to the true pursuit of knowledge, whatever that may be. It's not new news that everything is censored to some extent, some for good reason, some simply because it is unpalatable to one influential pair of eyes and ears somewhere along the long line of production that it takes to bring content to the eyes and ears of a potential audience. What harm is there in that as long as the message doesn't get so commercial that it interferes with our enjoyment or understanding? After all, when you take away the money, all you get is a bunch of kooks and weirdos who have nothing important to say in the first place, right? How can censorship be bad if it keeps those freaks in the shadows where they belong?

Numbers Game

What the blog attempts to do as an institution is to settle the censorship debate once and for all, allowing direct access where before there was just a numbers game, whose organizers were so adept at stacking the odds against us finding something that might truly disturb us, lest we wake from our peaceful slumber. The numbers themselves haven't changed; for every pedophile harming a child, or thinking about it, there are a thousand people disgusted by him and one child advocate or law enforcement officer, hopefully more, working to save that same child. The difference now is that there has been born a direct forum for the pedophile to be understood, other than through his actions. The power and influence of the medium will be decided by whether or not he takes that opportunity and, if he does, what happens to the rest of us when he does.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

I am not saying that, in order to achieve enlightenment, we should all go out and immerse ourselves in all that is distasteful to our personal sensibilities, that we should revel in all the human suffering that is everywhere in this world, or that we should encourage those who are responsible for some of that suffering to start sharing in droves their sordid fantasies. This is not about what should happen at all, it is about what is happening, and will continue to happen whether we want it to or not. And, as it happens, it pays to remember the old saying about the devil you know. What the blog does is to present us with an opportunity to get to know that devil, to explore society's demons, as mirrors of our own, with less interpretative bias than we've ever had before. The uncomfortable truth we may find is that, in the depths of depravity and tragedy, can be found great humanity. It is the humanity in the monster that enables him to understand his victims deeply enough to draw them in, and it is a very profound humanity that makes him follow his compulsions with complete disregard for the condemnation by society and even self that following them will inevitably bring. The question we face when we look that deeply, is whether the violence in our own souls that allows us to judge him with equal wrath is different in its fundamental nature from the seed of his own, and whether it was simply a trick of circumstance that pointed ours in a direction less destructive. With no illuminati to frame the discussion and guide us in the direction they would have us follow, we might even find some light in the darkness of even the most tortured soul.

Same Old Same Old

As the blog evolves, that is certainly the future of those who control the apparatus through which our ideas flow. They are already starting to learn, as the governments of the world did long ago, that the possession of certain information is as much a burden as it is a vehicle for influencing behaviour. Too light a touch means anarchy, too heavy a hand means a tyranny, and history tells us that either structure is doomed to collapse. The question of which side to take in the witch hunt, that of the mob or of the witch, will become more and more difficult to answer as the medium explodes. For every argument that expression of unorthodox views and fantasies provides a more acceptable outlet than criminal activity and is therefore benign, there is the argument that those easily led will find a shape and a direction for unexpressed urges that might never have taken form.

The Faceless Foe

I'm on neither side, and both, but I know that, as long as we allow those who bear a faceless similarity to those who may have wronged us to incite our wrath, we will never be able to properly prevent them from deeply affecting us. It is one thing for the parent of the child who has been victimized to want to tear out the heart of the perpetrator, or even to go ahead and actually do so; it is quite another for a listener hearing of such an offense to apply that sense of being deeply wronged to anyone whom he might choose to associate with the perpetrator. Being a parent, I am disgusted at what is done to children, but, if I want to be of any use in the prevention of future atrocities, possibly on my own children, my only hope is to understand why they happen, and therefore understand the people who make them happen. This will equip me much better to prevent this from touching my own life and, even in the event of the unthinkable, to better cope with it if it does.

The Rubberneckers' Parade

When we do not like what we see through one of these windows into other worlds, should we turn away in fear, or should we watch and learn? The answer, once again, is not a question of what should be done. Like motorists at a passing accident, we are compelled to peek at the carnage. If this involuntary urge to wallow makes us dirty, even filthy, to the extent that it even haunts our dreams and channels our emotions, it will also make us wiser, if we let it. We point fingers at our governments, our corporations, and our moral enemies, even as we possess the tools that make hiding the act of doing harm to another person increasingly difficult, especially if the victim can be given the same tools to broadcast to the world. The muck is already washing right off and leaving us with a new understanding of those less nice or those less fortunate.

The Ideal Tools...

What are we doing with that understanding? Well, I know what Jimmy Wales is doing, envisioning an ideal world in which almost all of the traditional barriers to knowledge have been removed. I know what a lot of bloggers are doing, too. Each, in his or her way, is trying to change the world. Our current technological abilities, a previously unimaginable mosaic of podcasts, satellite transmitters, and $100-dollar laptops could, properly wielded, banish such obstacles as illiteracy, remoteness, and immobility. How long ago was the elimination of these barriers conceived as setting up the conditions for an ideal world? With all this capability, do we now live in a world that is ideal?

For An Ideal World

I do not have the authority to answer that question, and I do not have the discipline or memory required to look at this scientifically, as I am inclined to work backward from insight rather than work forward from evidence, but I'm pretty sure that we've never had in our hands this powerful a tool to make it more ideal. The human tendency to reveal oneself and seek to be reached means that we back into self discovery through the blog, sometimes using anonymity to plumb considerable depths, but craving at the same time the personal affirmation that will come from acceptance of our message. The more people discovering themselves and the more people accepting the results of those discoveries, the fewer people there are wandering around with blood in their eyes and guns in their hands. With the sheer numbers both producing and consuming content through the same medium, there is not only a removal of the distinction between the writer and the reader, but also of the victim and the predator. If you used to just watch the news, and now you can report it or even be part of the story itself, your relationship to the entire community has changed.

Tabula Rasa
For those who do choose to be a part of the story, there is a tendency to pour out thoughts about themselves and their worlds that they would never do anywhere else or with anyone else. The uninitiated may wonder how anyone could ever feel comfortable airing such intimate views, even under an anonymous moniker, in this medium, with who knows whose eyes upon you. In fact, this should not be surprising at all. The human animal still has extremely powerful physical instincts, and certain types of human contact and communication are as difficult now as they have ever been, if not more. On the other hand, a screen doesn't talk back, won't judge you, and lets you re-consider how you've expressed yourself, until you have your message just the way you want it.

Personal=Human=Universal

Those unfamiliar with the medium may also wonder whether there is even an audience for people talking intimately about themselves and sharing their thoughts almost unfiltered with total strangers? Of course there is. You're reading this now, aren't you? At the heart of the matter, what is most personal is most human, and what is most human is most universal. In other words, the most deeply personal messages should have the most universal appeal. If I do not have something in common with what I am reading, or viewing, or hearing, then I will not be drawn to engage with it.

What's At Stake?
All that said, the tragedy of the blogger is that, if you build it, there is certainly no guarantee that they will come. Those of us who invest our time in the pursuit of truth in this medium hold out hope that it is the quality of the content that will carry the message to those who need to hear it, even as we see that the blogosphere is being taken over already by the same forces that captured other forms of media before it. The tsunami of money, sex, and mediocrity, at least two-thirds of which courses through my own veins with some intensity on an alarmingly regular basis, advances daily on the medium and may even seem to some to be drowning it, but the blogger-as-believer does not believe that, for the most part, this wave represents the best that we can achieve. This noble surfer holds out hope that the wave is not yet beyond a well-executed ride and graceful kick out, that the weirdos and witches might yet find a way to mount the steep hill and make themselves heard. Either that, or he is just foolish enough to believe, knowing what we all know and seeing what we all have seen, that the witches, with everything at stake, will finally have their time to stand proudly in the flickering torchlight and address the mob.

Go Tell It In The Village

Perhaps that is not such a foolish impression. Perhaps the speed at which our media creep closer and closer to their initial purpose, attempting to address all members of a community, is beginning to overtake the speed at which our communities are growing. The much-discussed global village, let's remember, is actually a very simple concept of community. If you live in a village, a real village, where everyone knows who you really are, and there are no secrets, you know that, in the village, everyone is a part of everyone else's life. There is little that you can do or say, especially if it is out of the ordinary, that will escape the notice of your community. But what you could once communicate verbally to your community when it was the size of a village, you can now communicate digitally to your larger community, which in essence is your world. With the ability of this medium to translate, reference, and access multiple delivery mechanisms, perhaps we have indeed reached a stage where a message resonant with humanity at large can be communicated globally.

Pipe Dreams

Of course, it is one thing to address the global community in theory, another thing to get enough distribution through any particular medium to actually do it. 1.24 billion people may be Internet users, and a whole bunch of them may read blogs, but I'm pretty sure, with 1.6 million blog posts going up every day, they aren't all reading my blog, or won't ever. Nevertheless, I hold fast to the pipe dream, common among content creators, that the quality of the message will eventually ensure mass viewership. Even if this is only true for those with a lifespan of 312 years, or for those whose luck is as good as their content, I choose to take my stand with those noble artistic souls, even as I know that the delusion brought to life by the pipe's contents usually wears off long before any of us can actually afford to replenish the stash.

Two Kinds Of People

There are two kinds of sentences that start with "There are two kinds of people...". There is the kind that manages to be completely true in a specific sense, when followed by a clause containing a clearly defined group and another clause that is not that defined group, as with "There are two kinds of people, those who have been to Timbuktu, and those who haven't." The other kind manages to be completely false, because it is used in a general sense, when there are no clauses to define the groups, as in "There are two kinds of people". When it gets tricky is when you try to define, in the first clause, a group that cannot be clearly defined, as in "There are two kinds of people, people who are cool and people who are not cool."

Grey Area

What makes the blog a potential instrument of both truth and positive social change can be encapsulated in the following version of that ambiguous sentence structure:

There are two kinds of people; those in your community, and those not in your community.

More than ever before, with the reader as writer, the subject as monarch, the viewer as reporter, and the mob member as witch, these are one and the same.

Technorati Tags blogging censorship global village mcluhan truth witch hunt

Radio Orange

2007-10-10T16:21:00.010-04:00

Radio Orange is my labour of love, the reason I got into the music business, and the inspiration for Mediazoic. It is my tribute to great music curators who have guided me, such as Allan Jones of UNCUT magazine and Ken Stowar of CIUT, and, even more importantly, many of my music-obsessed friends, from whom I've sponged, borrowed and even pillaged (sorry Lleb!) to feed my addiction to great music. If your circumstances allow it, I hope you'll play it loud!

This MoodGenre, called Head, is all about the headphones, about that space between your ears when your eyes are closed and you are focused completely on the music. Use the Mediazoic tuner at the left and your favourite pair of headphones to access a part of your mind that you may not have visited for a while. See below for more information on a particular artist or to purchase the song (from iTunes Canada, where available).

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Jedi Mind Tricks - Blood In Blood Out: Artist Info - Buy
James Bell & The Turner Brothers - The Funky Buzzard: Artist Info - Buy
Grupo Vocal Desandann - Maroulé: Artist Info - Buy
Debashish Bhattacharya - Aanandam: Artist Info - Buy
Citay - Seasons Don't Fear The Year: Artist Info - Buy
Balafon Marimba Ensemble - Nhamo: Artist Info - Buy
Amadu Bansang Jobarteh - Tabara: Artist Info - Buy
Brian Eno & John Cale - Lay My Love: Artist Info
Elaine Lachica - Tumbleweed: Artist Info - Buy
World Saxophone Quartet - Night Train: Artist Info - Buy
John Fahey - Sunflower River Blues: Artist Info - Buy

Archived MoodGenres

Brush With Death I - The Bird of Devastation & The Angel of the Orient

2007-09-28T22:11:00.002-04:00

This is the first in a series of accounts of occasions on which I have been forced to confront my own mortality, sometimes at an uncomfortably close distance. It is dedicated to you, if you have ever been there at the precise moment that someone really needed you.

The Path To Adventure
I strain to recall now what it was that brought me specifically to Beni Mellal, a Moroccan city known as a centre of agricultural trade, but if it was another unforgettable travel experience that I was seeking, then, in that respect at least, that is very much what I got. I know I was in the general area because I had resolved to go off the beaten path, as usual, and take one of the colorful local bus services to get from Marrakech to my next destination, the great Islamic jewel of Fez.

The Path To Sanity
The only way to enjoy travel in Morocco was, at least back then, to endeavor to exercise endless patience with people and maintain quite a bit of physical endurance for good measure. Without the physical element of endurance, patience is nigh on impossible, as any parent of a tired child will attest. Even with the fitness element solved, being set upon at every turn and being followed from everywhere any transportation stopped by a mob of young, multi-lingual, silver-tongued men could either drive you to act out, or at least make detailed plans to act out, some of your most violent fantasies, or it could invite you to define the spirit of true adventure, where choosing a path meant surrendering your time and likely your money to someone who you hoped you could trust but knew you probably couldn't. To that end, I do remember the bus pulling into the centre of Beni Mellal sometime during the late afternoon, and being surprised at the lack of willing "guides" that usually waited like mosquitoes in the squares of most of the major Moroccan towns through which I had passed.

The Path To Salvation?
The other must-have for travel in Morocco was a companion. I was the ultimate lone wolf, with the view that I always got into much more interesting situations when there was noone around to tell me how stupid I was, but, as unexplained forces would have it, I was to have another lost soul to accompany me on this particular adventure. His English name was Eric, he was from Hong Kong, and he spoke almost no English, and absolutely no French. From a purely utilitarian point of view, my value to him was obvious; I could get by in French. When I met him, I could have had no idea that his acquaintance would turn out to be infinitely more valuable to me.

Babel
The moment we stepped off the bus, it became apparent that I was probably the only pale-faced foreigner in town and Eric was certainly the only Asian, as our trailing, intently curious, and continually growing entourage proved. My guide book devoted only a single sentence to the area, listing a single hotel, and my French was adequate enough to learn within minutes after my arrival that that had long since closed down. We were thereby placed in a situation that even a mildly adventurous traveller knows well; needing to retreat into our own physical and mental space in order to make a decision, while a crowd of people shouted suggestions, advice, and orders in a dialect of a language I could only partially understand in the first place. In such situations, you want to tell everyone around you to just shut up and let you think, and in weaker moments you actually do start shouting that very thing, but you know that, in most cases, if you do, you will have an even smaller chance of getting the help you know you really could use, but are too proud to ask for.

Shelter From the Storm
Figuring we could think better if we weren't starving, I suggested to Eric that we ruminate on the dilemma over some vittels, and we made a quick dash across the square towards the place that most looked like it might be an eating establishment. At least in this notion, my hunch proved correct, and we charged our way through the door, past the counter, and collapsed with backpacks still half-attached into a couple of chairs around a table right in the back, where we knew, based on the physics of small spaces, that only a small portion of local well-wishers could follow. Inevitably, a few of them made their way in and took places at neighbouring tables, but, as planned, most of the mob lost interest and went on their merry ways. Our steaming mint tea arrived and, for the moment at least, we found some measure of the respite we had sought.

The Art of the Deal
I'm asked often these days what makes me a strong negotiator, as I'm pretty well known for getting good prices on purchases and favourable outcomes from discussions. My reply almost always references the skills that I picked up in Morocco, where even a bottle of Coke has anything but a fixed price for a tourist. When you are forced to negotiate for everything, right down to the essentials of life (sustenance, shelter), you'd be foolish not to draw some positive lessons from the experience. This one particular time, however, I wish I had paid more attention to the science of microbiology than the art of the deal. It turned out that this restaurant could also accommodate guests in an adjacent inn, so I was so pleased at myself for managing to haggle a two-for-one deal on our meals to go with accommodation in a shared room that I neglected to really take into proper consideration the conditions of hygiene in the establishment. If gravity of consequences is the way to measure the quality of a decision, then that one would have easily ranked among the worst I've made in my entire life.

When in Rome...
I'm not sure what ended up being worse, the restaurant or the accommodation, but the choice of both ended up being truly regrettable. The meal itself, my meal at least, actually tasted quite good, roasted chicken and fries, and even prompted me to boast to Eric that, in being a little more adventurous with food choice, I had deftly avoided subjecting myself, for the first time in nine or ten days, to his ho-hum selection, the ubiquitous Moroccan cumin-covered kebab. But, of course, if food were just about taste, our mothers wouldn't always be telling us to eat our greens and our bodies would never pass their own judgement in all the weird and woeful ways they do.

All Clear
It was dark by the time we finished our meal, so we followed the toothless old fellow who we took to be our host through a couple doors in the back of the restaurant to our temporary home away from home. The room itself had two beds and a table and seemed generally acceptable, notwithstanding the dozen or so small spatterings of blood and squashed mosquitoes on the walls near the beds, so we paid the man for the room and board and waited for him to leave. Immediately after he did so, we busily began the then-customary practice of pulling off the mattresses and checking the bed frames for bedbugs. We satisfied ourselves that, if less than clean, the room was at least bedbug-free, and so we spread out a map and bus timetable and set about planning our route to Fez the following day.

Reconnaissance Mission
Shortly after finalizing those plans, I realized that it would likely be prudent to locate the washroom, as it was clearly not ensuite and experience had taught me not to wait until the moment of truth to begin such a search. Not seeing it in the hallway through which we had passed coming from the restaurant, I popped my head back into the restaurant and asked in French where I might find the facilities. The old man who had ushered us in was gone, and there were just a few men left in the restaurant, sitting around one table drinking mint tea, smoking cigarettes, and laughing. Seeing me, one of the young men got up, looking slightly annoyed, and headed through another door out the back, this one opening into an outside alley. On the other side of the alley was a door, which he rapped on harshly and, finding no reply, pulled open the door to reveal the washroom.

Welcome to the Dungeon
I smiled weakly in thanks for his effort, very weakly I imagine, given the state of the little room, and tried not to gag as the wave of sharp, sickening stench from inside worked its way through my senses. The room was the size of a large shower stall, and in the dim light, it took me a few seconds to realize that that was exactly what it was. Except that it was also a toilet, apparently for public use. After almost two weeks of squat toilets, I had actually grown used to exercising my legs to do my business, but never had I seen nor imagined anything like this. This was a squat toilet with a small sink in front of it but, to conserve space or water or both, the only way to flush it was to turn on the shower above. In fact, it wasn't really a flush toilet at all, it was a pit toilet with a pile of sewage that was getting dangerously close to the drop hole. I deduced that the opposite must have held true if you wanted to take a shower; you would have to perch precariously on the footrests while showering, praying to all that was holy that you didn't lose your footing. The worst part was that, considering I had asked about using the washroom, the young man who had escorted me was clearly waiting for me to step inside. Calculating that I could hold my breath until he vanished, I gingerly stepped in, balanced myself on the footrests, and pulled the door closed gently behind me. I could only stand being in there for perhaps twenty seconds, at which time I pushed out on the door with my backside, stepped backwards out of the toilet/shower/closet, exhaled, and re-entered the restaurant/inn, vowing all the while to do whatever business I had to do somewhere else.

What A Relief

I shared the incident with Eric and we thanked our lucky stars that, barring a sudden onset of travellers' diarrhoea, our status as men would preclude us from ever having to use that particular facility, seeing that a wall in that same alley would be more than adequate for most of our needs. After a final cursory check through the room for creatures and critters, and possible entrance points for such, we cut the lights and flopped down on our beds for the night.

A Rude Awakening
The next thing I remember is bolting awake in the middle of the night with an excruciating pain searing through my gut and an imperative impulse to immediately empty my body of waste through any means or orifice available. I leapt out of bed and realized I had no choice in the world but to race to the toilet out in the alley. When I reached my destination, for at least a very brief moment, the relief I felt in the subsequent crouch and drop was equal to and perhaps greater than the complete aversion each of my physical senses had to the place. But only for a moment. That moment was followed by a revulsion of mythological proportions, as the nausea I had brought with me to this putrid little crevice in Hell's deepest chasm coalesced with the distress I now felt squatting in agonizing pain over a pit of human excrement into a succession of much longer moments that really felt like forever.

Second-Hand Smoke
But angels come in strange places, in surprising forms, and at the most opportune of times, and one certainly came to me then. As I choked and spewed and my senses pleaded for deliverance, I vaguely discerned the draft of the opening door and looked up to see my travelling companion Eric holding the most unlikely, most welcome instrument of salvation of which I could have then conceived. All hail the burning cigarette! I did not smoke at the time, but Eric seemed to know it was exactly what I needed. Taking care to avert his eyes from my squatting form, or perhaps just cringing from the stench, he handed me a lit cigarette, which I immediately and instinctively knew to hold under my nose. The hazards of second-hand smoke are by now well documented, but, in my time of need, I saw only the benefits, first and foremost of which was to replace the acrid smell of waste with a much more pleasingly acrid aroma of burning leaves.

It's Gonna Blow!
I spent most of the rest of the night in that wretched little patch of property, being fed a steady diet of burning cigarettes through a crack in the door. We also recognized the need shortly after the introduction of combustion to the equation to aerate the space regularly, as there was likely enough methane gas stewing in the air to blow us clear into the next town if it got any more concentrated, so, every couple minutes, Eric would swing the door open and closed to keep the air circulating. By the time the morning came, my legs were as badly cramped as my gut, and I was a mere shell of person, emptied of nutrition and hydration to the point of hallucination.

Greener Pastures
I therefore received quite a significant shock when I returned from one of my extended visits to the place of ceaseless torment to find that Eric was not there. I was too exhausted either to panic or to notice the note he had left for me on the table, and I feel into a kind of sleep of partial awareness, knowing that it would only be a matter of minutes before I would be on the move again. However long or short it was, the next thing I knew, I was being gently shaken by Eric and persuaded to do my best to get back to my feet and steel myself for a longer journey than the one to the toilet. Eric had packed my backpack and, as he pulled me from the bed and supported most of my weight as I took the first few steps, took up my pack on his other shoulder. Where, I mumbled, could we possibly be going? I managed to decipher, through his very broken English and my very broken consciousness, that he had spent the past few early morning hours wandering through the streets of Beni Mellal, quite unable to communicate with the locals, searching for medical attention for me or, at the very least, an improvement in accommodations. He had found the latter, and he informed me that that's where we were going.

Easy To Please

Fortunately, the journey was only one of about fifteen minutes, and I remember nothing about it other than my one object of concentration, which was to avoid an orifice explosion by any means possible. I managed to do so and, thanks to what I now considered the heroic actions of my friend, we ended up in a guest house that was still far from paradise, but was in every way an oasis in this dirty, dusty part of town. That the accommodation was in a six-bed dorm room was not, upon my arrival, of the least concern to me, although my moaning would certainly prove an annoyance to the room's other inhabitants. All I cared about was whether or not the toilet flushed, and it did.

The Numbers

I lost 25 pounds over the course of the next three days, from a frame that was already very low on body fat. For two of the three days, my system had so completely shut down all its processing functions that I could drink a glass of water and have it come out the other end, undiluted and still clear, five minutes later. After 72 hours with no food intake and negligible absorption of liquid, and without even the energy to make the 5-metre walk to the toilet without assistance, I had quite understandably given up the will to live. Had it not been for Eric sourcing a package of rehydration tablets, forcing me to consume bottles of water and clear juice, warding off the guest house's owner when he complained that none of his other guests wanted to stay in the room, and hardly leaving the room during the entire time, my parents would likely have had to go through the logistical nightmare of arranging their son's body to be shipped home in a box.

The Plan

Saint Eric made one other procurement that would prove invaluable, Immodium. At the first respite in the bacterial onslaught, I regained some measure of awareness, and as soon as I did, Eric insisted that I pop a few pills and get on a bus to Tangiers, from whence ran the ferry that would take us out of Morocco. I clearly needed medical help, and both of us had completely lost faith in the ability to get what I needed in Morocco, even though I can see now with the benefit of hindsight that, had we resolved to do so, we could likely have found a hospital somewhere in which I could be treated. The fact was that my illness had beaten the cultural tolerance right out of us and we just wanted to get out.

Exodus

In a more lucid state, I'd have likely thought to ask exactly how long a trip we were looking at, and I'd have been quite disturbed to learn that Tangiers was a 10-hour bus ride. Wanting to put the host city of my own Olympiad of Affliction behind me was a very powerful motivator, however, and I was shovelled into a seat for the long and very bumpy ride north. It was far from pleasant, and attended by much moaning, but it was without significant event that we rolled into Tangiers just after dark. Apart from deliverance from the source of my suffering, the ride did provide at least one other potential benefit; two gorgeous, very blonde German nurses, who boarded the bus in some non-descript town along the way and subsequently took enough pity on Eric and his moaning burden to volunteer to assume some responsibility for my care and comfort.

The Weakest Link

Unfortunately, as with nearly everything that formed part of this whole string of ill-fated occurrences, the company of the nurses turned out also to be as much a curse as a blessing. We learned upon arrival in Tangiers that the ferry for Spain didn't leave until the following morning, so we immediately began a search for lodging, four very conspicuous and clearly disoriented foreigners wandering, after dark, through what the guidebook described as "the most dangerous city for tourists in Morocco." And so, inevitably, like the weak caribou in the herd that the wolf pack so expertly identifies, we soon attracted some very unwelcome attention from a throng of very unpleasant local delinquents.

Worse Comes to Worst

As we walked through a small, dark square, we were surrounded suddenly by a group of about a dozen young Moroccan men, who formed a half circle around us and backed us toward a wall. The two German girls had taken great pains when we set out from the bus station to cover their flowing blonde locks in makeshift hijabs, but it became immediately clear as the small mob converged around us that the covering hadn't left quite enough to the imagination of these shadow figures. One of them lunged in, grabbed in his fist a clump of fabric from the hijab of one of the nurses, and yanked it in one motion from her head, releasing a cascade of combed tresses that almost seemed to light up the night. The group of thugs gasped and then smiled greedily, no doubt each imagining that he would be the one man enough to handle this Aryan princess. They began to hiss and chortle amongst themselves, and, in a mixture of Arabic and French (when they wanted to be understood), they began to boast to each other of their plans for the rest of evening with these two beautiful ladies in tow.

The Presence of Greatness

Suddenly, Eric cut through their jibes with a sound of focused inner fury and leapt forward to land in a fighting stance between the girls and the closest members of the street gang. As he did so, I realized in my own state of frailty and fear that the only possible way for us to prevent a very bad outcome was to somehow take control of the situation. At almost the instant Eric landed in a stance right out of a martial arts movie, I addressed the semi-circle of miscreants, in better French than I knew I had.

"Do you know who this is?" I shouted.

There were a few guffaws and bemused glances my way.

"You don't recognize him?" I continued. "Don't you watch television?"

The men looked at each other, as though looking for confirmation.

"In Marrakech, everyone wanted to meet him, but you don't know who he is?"

One of the smiled and made a mock kung-fu move.

"Bruce Lee?", he quipped. "Bruce Lee, kung fu!"

I pretended that I had taken his response seriously, and started nodding my head vigourously in acknowledgement.

"The son of Bruce Lee!" I said excitedly. "Yes, you do know him. You've seen him on television."

A Glimmer of Hope

Eric was frozen in his fighting stance, calmly but angrily surveying the group, waiting for someone to move against him. The men looked at each other sceptically. Before their doubt could settle, I looked directly at the man who had removed the scarf from the German nurse.

"And that is his girlfriend and her sister." I pointed at the girls, and continued as best I could in French. "If you say you're sorry, he may have tea with you and your friends, and tell you some stories."

Peace Offering

I knew our ruse had worked when I detected in the group's leader the scent of the sensibly proud male, where defeat cannot be acknowledged but an analysis of the situation necessitates some kind of compromise. He thoughtfully pulled two cigarettes from his pocket, put one between his lips, and then reached across a couple of his friends to offer the cigarette to Eric. Eric held his glare long enough to provide a few anxious moments of doubt, then took the offered cigarette and a light from the guy closest to him.

The Promise Land

We ended up skipping the tea, but, after Eric signed various personal artefacts of theirs with his "autograph", the group did help us in finding acceptable accommodation for the night close to where the ferry went out the following morning. By afternoon the next day, I was sitting in a hospital in Seville with a diagnosis of salmonella, an IV drip, and a prescription for Bactrim.

Pinholes or Stars?

As I look back now, Eric's face above me on my sick bed took many forms as the last swells of energy ebbed from my body during those three fateful days. Throughout these manifestations, having visited me then and since, I have come to realize that we may choose to view people who come into our lives in a couple ways. Their coming and going may indeed be entirely without any greater significance than we ourselves assign to them. Their presence at "the right time" may be explained as mere mathematical inevitability; lines will eventually intersect if there are enough lines going in enough directions. Our choice is whether to view these points of intersection like pinholes in the dark blanket of random chaos that backdrops most of our actions, or like stars that illuminate that darkness. Those people and events to whom we choose to assign such significance become a permanent part of who we are, because people will be more dear to us and events will be cherished more when sprinkled with the magical stardust of meaning. The more open we are to these interactions, the more stars we pull from the darkness to examine like sparkling gems in the light of day and drop back into the waters that fill us, the more likely it is that the interactions will start to intersect each other, like ripples from separate splashes that overlap in a lake, until they eventually form a pattern. This pattern can be seen as a random milieu of half-completed circles, or it can be seen as a work of art, fashioned with spirit but without design and possessed of great intricacy and beauty.

The Gift of Understanding

That these patterns do not reveal themselves to everyone who deserves to see them is often cruel, for they can make even the worst of life's moments better. Even if they are merely a psychological coping mechanism, they are an extremely effective one, and they certainly beg the question of where the brain's ability to organize them into such a wondrous array goes when the moments have passed. Those who have not been close might dismiss the deathbed conversion of a scoundrel or the feeling of all-encompassing well-being that accompanies the final hand squeeze given in the last moments from a stranger on some battlefield, as an impulsive, last-ditch attempt to prepare for the unknown. Perhaps in some cases it is; I cannot speak for all who have passed within a few breaths of the other side. But my impression, my experience, is that the understanding of the process is more powerful than fear of the outcome. What I saw in hindsight after I passed through those moments was not that Eric had saved my life, it was simply that, by miracle or pure chance, he had been there exactly when I needed him to be.

And for that, I now christen him the Angel of the Orient.

Technorati Tags angels morocco interesting story salmonella travel story

The God Conclusion - Was It a Stupid Question?

2007-09-16T10:33:00.005-04:00

This post is dedicated to you, Tiska, for always, always asking the right questions.

From Fact to Conclusion
All knowledge that is accepted as fact and not opinion invites you to draw a conclusion. Every time you read a fact in a newspaper or in a book, or watch a documentary on TV, or get your news from the Internet, every time you hear something you accept to be true, you are being invited to draw a conclusion, have an opinion, and take a stand. Even if you had a book about everything we as human beings know to be true, and you understood and believed every last word of it, you would still feel not just invited but compelled to draw a conclusion based on that information. A non-factual conclusion.

Which are You?
Have you drawn a conclusion about God? For some, opening a bible, praying at a mosque, or just looking up God on Wikipedia may well produce enough information about God to draw a conclusion. For others, experiences like these are not nearly enough. God would only be a product of a rational argument, whose existence must be proven by logic beyond any shadow of a doubt.

God's Invitation
My view is that, wherever your beliefs lie, if your antennae are set to the right frequency, you will be able to discern an unmistakable signal, coming clear through the static of all the information you've ever received, as the broadcast of a simple invitation. And what, you may reasonably ask, is the nature of this invitation, especially if I don't even believe there is a God? Well, just like with any stream of information, you are being invited to draw a conclusion.

If You Believe...
If you have drawn a conclusion in favour of God, whether through others' interpretations or your own, you likely know, or think you know, that communication from God is possible. You know that God exists, and you may even know God quite well.

If You Don't...
If God does not communicate to you, you have no logical reason to believe in God or to believe that God exists. You know that, in spite of all the arguments made for and against the existence of God, there is and will never be a universally-accepted way to prove beyond a doubt that God does or does not exist. So, if God does not communicate to you, then for you, there is no God. That is your conclusion.

Communications Protocol
With that in mind, I want to tell you about how I think God communicates to all of us, in the hope that, if you do not know God and you might someday wish to, you will recognize something in that communication protocol that might someday apply to you, and you may be able to use that protocol, if you don't already, to receive similar communications. If you already know God, or even if you just think you do but aren't sure, it may interest you to know whether there is any overlap in the method of these communications. If you do not know God and do not wish to ever again entertain the prospect of doing so, you may now choose to leave this page and assume that, in so doing, you will be subject to my condemnation of your soul-less, amoral, empty, existence. Either that, or you may read on and discover why I think any such condemnation is completely ridiculous.

The God Signal
Depending who you are, I may be no more acquainted with God than you are. In fact, I may very well be less acquainted with God than you are. But it is both my blessing and my curse that I do seem to have been built with or molded into a very finely attuned receiver for certain types of signals. You can debate, as I certainly have for a very long time, whether or not these signals should actually be interpreted as "God signals", but I can now say with some level of confidence, along with a healthy fear of rebuke, that God communicates with me more or less directly, not altogether without an intermediary, but more with a single signal beamed through a multitude of intermediaries. The message I get from that signal, is that whether God also communicates to you on a very high level, or on a very basic level, God does speak to all of us.

Spirit Exercise
Whoever you are, and whatever you believe, and whether you even care or not, what that signal essentially says is that you really should care; that you really should make a commitment to exploring and exercising your spirit the way you know that you are supposed to do with your body and your mind. There is a need to feed the spirit the way we feed our bodies, to express our spirituality the way we express our emotions, and exercise our "God muscles" the way we exercise each of the important muscles in our bodies. Only in this way can the spirit be allowed to perform at peak efficiency and give us the best lives that we can achieve.

Why Did I Win the Jackpot?
This can sometimes be a little tricky, because, for the most part, God does not communicate in answers. God primarily communicates in questions, which makes charting out an exercise regimen a little more work. One of the first questions generally asked about God when deciding whether or not to establish such a regimen is whether or not God exists. It is an important question, to be sure, but this is a question about God, not from God. Wondering about whether God exists, rather than wondering about the nature of God, is a little like winning the jackpot from a slot machine and wondering whether you deserved it or not. Maybe you deserved it, maybe you didn't, you have the money now and you must decide now what to do with it. In other words, it is more instructive and beneficial to contemplate the true nature of God not as a source of the universe, but as a property of it.

God The Phenomenon
If you must look deeply into the question of existence, you will likely agree that, at the very least, God is a definition of a phenomenon. In this sense, God exists in the same way that Love or Fairness, or even Evil, exists. Ask ten people to define any of these things, or to describe their experience of them, and you will of course get ten different answers. There will be little agreement and a whole series of factors that influence how they are experienced. That these are things that we feel deeply when presented with in a particular set of circumstances, however, there can be no doubt. If we can feel them and speak about them, then they do exist in some measure.

Does True Love Exist?
Anyone who has ever been in love knows that an attempt to deconstruct the whole concept is inevitably doomed to failure. Why do I love this person, and why does this person love me? Depending on who you ask, true love may or not exist; it may merely be about acceptance, coincidence, common background, or even the elusively defined chemistry. Whatever it comes down to on a molecular level, love is a phenomenon that, it is generally acknowledged, is better to have in your life than absent from it. This may not prove the existence of the concept of true love, it may indeed just be about two mammals that share common traits, but it certainly seems that it would be a concept you'd want to embrace if it were going to make your life better.

Intuition is Not Science
A reasonable response to this might be that knowing something by intuition is not knowing that thing at all, that only that which can be quantifiably measured, precisely defined, independently verified, and scientifically proven can be said to exist, and only things that we know to exist are worthy of contemplation. According to this argument, what separates science from conjecture is that a scientific fact that began as someone's intuition (think of gravity) then underwent this process until enough evidence was gathered and arguments made that a consensus was reached to consider it true. This is indeed a worthy standard for knowledge, but I believe it also serves as a double standard when turned against the argument for God. For a very long time, a basic argument pertaining to God has been advanced through myths and religions all over the world, and, consistently throughout the ages, the amount of adherents, intelligent adherents, to the basic principle of God, stripped of all interpretive manifestations, would seem to satisfy all but the most exacting standards of scientific confirmation. Above the fray of the most basic scientific facts, I know of no all-encompassing theories in science that enjoy this level of independent verification.

Can't Fool Me
A reason for the existence of this double standard may be that there is, among the competitively intelligent in this time of keen scientific insight, a deep aversion to being duped, and the aversion becomes even deeper when the argument that they are being asked to accept is coming from a source whose intelligence level is sometimes perceived to be inferior, and often actually is. It is my suspicion that some of this tendency enters the discussion of God. Faith in God has nothing to do with intelligence, and therefore, to a person of intelligence who inherently questions the validity of faith or the existence of God and recognizes the complexity in such considerations, there may be a tendency to reason that, because faith is sometimes practiced by people whom the competitively intelligent person perceives as less intelligent, it must therefore be the case that the argument for faith is an inferior one. If this describes you, you just haven't met enough of us heretics.

Do Unto Others
Of course, that sword cuts both ways. If, in the certainty of your faith, you believe that all sceptics and perhaps even all scepticism is an inevitable path to cyncism and eternal hoplessness, you need to get a grip. Being cautious about something so fundamental to human life as faith is not only smart, but pretty wise, too. It may be true that, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything, but it is equally true that, by standing for something, you may have already fallen for it. I personally don't believe that there is anyone who cannot be converted to at least some type of faith, but if someone does not share your faith and cannot comprehend the joy with which you deliver your gospel, that does not mean that that person cannot comprehend or experience similar joy.

God The Delusion
As part of this question of existence, God is often portrayed, in this time of the great flowering of human knowledge, as a delusion, a hazily considered and popularly accepted end point, at which the answers stop and the questions become unanswered or unanswerable, and beyond which the individual intellectual powers of one person, or even groups of people, cannot venture. Consider this for a moment. What is a delusion but a dream applied to the world of the logically awake, an inability to understand the boundary between the world of the dream and the world through which our physical bodies move? There are many ideas on why our bodies insist on dreaming, but whether a dream is a way of organizing our thoughts, or is the product of antennae picking up signals that we can't access while awake, can we really claim that there is no value in listening to what our dreams tell us? Have you never awoken from a dream with a crystal clear solution to a problem you needed to solve in reality? Can we stop dreaming? Is the way to understand our dreams to force ourselves to stop? Certainly we can try to figure out why we dream, and how, but, seeing that we do dream and aren't likely to stop doing so any time soon, shouldn't we look also at the benefits of dreaming, and how we can apply those benefits, even as we continue to try to unravel the mysteries of the dream?

God The Dream
What if we chose to see that lucid dream clearly structured in the same way that we hear music beautifully realized, existing in some space both within and apart from the physical instrument on which it was produced? Would we find the greatest value in standing with arms crossed in the shadows descontructing the notes, or would we want to start dancing, singing, or playing along? It is the music produced, the image of the dream, that resonates most deeply with most of us, but there is, for those whose compulsion it is to understand what creates what we see and hear, a beauty, complexity and depth in the notes themselves; their frequency, their pitch, the vibrations that enable us to hear them. But even at the core of their essence, resides an unidentifiable noise, a hum, elemental and close to basic principles perhaps, but really just another kind of music, radiating nonetheless behind all the words, numbers, and ideas we use to label all its components. We have to call it something, so the sounds we call music, and the dream, the delusion, we call God.

Stupid Question
The whole thing was summed up rather neatly for me the other day when I was having a conversation with a very good friend of mine about a previous post. She made one of those comments people make sometimes that resonate because they put words to something you have yourself thought many times, but have never converted to language. "I hate when you're talking about this type of thing and people ask if I believe that God exists", she said, "That's such a stupid question."

A Better Question
Stupid question, indeed. If we can all agree that there is no way to logically prove or disprove the existence of God, isn't the better question "Is my life better with a God or without a God?". This is a question that all of us can at least answer with some degree of personal certainty.

Who Is This Guy?
It's worth mentioning that I speak not here of God the parent, God the designer, or God the granter of wishes. The God whose signal I hear does not have a gender, or kids, or a chosen person or people, except insofar as stories told about God, or stories told about anything, must have characters, concepts and settings that we recognize and identify with in order for us to be able to consider them. The God whose footprints I see does not require devotion or sacrifice of life, or any particular course of action on your part or mine to show our understanding and appreciation. This God does not personally reward or punish behaviour by sending good luck or bad luck our way. Any reward comes intrinsically from knowing God, and the only punishment, if it can even be called that, is the absence of that relationship. Either way, neither this relationship nor its absence makes it any more or less likely that any of us is going to get struck by lightning or hit by a bus.

Us And Them
Whatever has been done in the name of God by people and groups of people throughout our history, this God's nature is truly worthy of consideration and wonder. The point is not that any particular set of stories, myths or religions have gotten it right or got it wrong; this is not about the believers versus the infidels, or armies of the faithful vanquishing once and for all the legions of the doubtful. The lives of the people in these stories and the ideas these people pursued are indeed worthy of contemplation, our contemplation. In every way, however old or new these myths are, wherever they come from, they are all merely reflections in pool of our own shared lives, sometimes vivid and clear, sometimes pale and murky, but always and unmistakably in our own image.

Many Messengers, One Message
The point, rather, is that no one messenger is any more valuable than any other; s/he just speaks a different language, uses a different set of symbols, or broadcasts on a different frequency. That some may frame their ideas in a way that is easier to hear and easier to understand for a certain audience, shows only that people with different backgrounds and different realities respond to different signals. God communicates with us all the time, through everyone and everything around us. The more of these languages we learn, and the more channels into which we are tuned, the more we open ourselves to communication from God. From the most gigantic of stars and the furthest reaches of space, through us, and all the way down through the most elemental particles and the unimaginably minute systems they themselves seem to contain, anywhere that thought is made into something that can be measured, God communicates.

Manic Street Preacher?
I can imagine what you might be thinking; this guy who claims to get messages from God, this all sounds a bit off to me. How much bad stuff has happened when a person thinks he is God's Chosen One and manages to persuade a whole bunch of people that's true?

Or Regular Guy?
Well, don't worry, if you are one of those who knows me, you know that I'm not one of those guys. And if you don't know me, let me help to put your doubts at rest. I am not God's Chosen One any more than you are, or any less than you are. I'm a son, a father, a brother, a husband, a friend, a colleague, a coach, and a poor singer, among rather many other things, most of which would be considered even by a normal person as being completely normal. I am a guy with a family that I love and cherish, many very close friends whom I adore and appreciate, and a bunch of stuff I can't really afford. I don't have any special powers, I can't heal with my hands, I can't walk on water, and I won't ascend to heaven carried by a heavenly host of angels, at least not in any literal sense. I am fallible, impatient, sometimes vain, and often ruled by desire. I have no interest in hanging on a cross, poisoning all my followers, or going down in a hail of bullets as they storm my compound. I wouldn't mind getting on Oprah, though.

Take Me To The River
The one thing I cannot change, is that I am absolutely compelled to bring you this message. If I close my mouth, my hands find paper or a keyboard; if my hands cannot find paper or keyboard, my actions find a way to communicate on my behalf. When the river of thought comes, it must somehow manifest itself in something tangible. I don't know why this is true and I often wish it weren't, but it is. But I'm no guru, in fact I reject the whole concept of gurus, and I have no interest in leading you to the Promised Land. For that you need either God or a really good travel agent.

Adjust Your Antennae
And, though it may seem like it sometimes, God is not hiding. Go to church, go to your temple, or mosque, or wherever else it is where you think you'll have the best chance at bumping into God, but don't take that to mean that involvement in religion automatically reveals God. Go to your encyclopedia, your science books, your novels, your music collection, your workplace, set up your antennae anywhere within the panoply of thoughts and tasks and actions that make up everyday life for everyone, and listen for the signal. But don't take this to mean that the signal will be easy to find, or that everyone everywhere is always in tune with God.

The God Channel
For we know in our hearts, as we run from appointment to appointment, flip from channel to channel, and surf from site to site, that we have, in many ways, trained ourselves away from picking up the God Channel on our wireless antennae. The entire history of the heavens and the earth rushes through every protein in every cell within us and every atom we bump up against and contain, and yet even as we evolve toward what we are convinced is deeper understanding, we evolve away from our essential selves. This deeply personal, secret, spiritual, intellectual, emotional life within each one of us, most of which is hidden from the world and part of which we keep hidden even from ourselves, is the manifestation of the essence of being into living thought. This inner life is the channel through which God communicates, and this is the life that should be given every opportunity to manifest itself in our lives at large.

The Noise That Jams The Signal
But, in drawing our conclusions that will affect this inner life, we must be wary, recognizing that all of the other channels, the scientific, the religious, the artistic, the commercial, already contain some interpretations; the interpretations of certain facts made by their own creator or creators. We must adjust our antennae so that we can discern where knowledge ends and interpretation begins, for, in the same way that all knowledge of fact invites us to draw a conclusion, so all interpretations of fact made by others discourage us from reaching interpretations and drawing conclusions that are truly our own. We must resist the temptation to let others draw our conclusions. Our real souls are not influenced or affected by the interpretations, opinions and theories of others. Our real souls, the eternal ones, are on God's frequency. Cut through all the noise, and the signals are everywhere.

All that is left for us is to learn to tune in.

Technorati Tags god religion atheist church

The Hunter, The Hero & The Witch Doctor - Samati & The Lion

2007-09-05T16:49:00.000-04:00

Dedicated to those victimized by their own courage.

Unspoiled Africa
I had the glorious opportunity to live and work for three months in the Okavango Delta area of Botswana, helping to construct lodgings and renovate existing structures in a tourist camp on a lagoon called Xakanaxa (this is a Bushman name, with each 'x' pronounced as a click) within the Moremi Game Reserve. I met, lived with, and worked with some extraordinary people there, who taught me much about everything that makes Africa both great and troubled, but the most interesting person by far was a fellow named Samati.

The Chick Magnet
I first came across Samati while taking part in a village celebration that I had been invited to attend. I don't recall the occasion of the celebration, but I do recall (through a bit of a haze) that we dined on roasted buffalo and drank home-made beer. What I remember most, however, is a big commotion and a subsequent hero's welcome being accorded to a solitary figure walking into one corner of the village from a bush trail. Someone shouted the word "Samati!!" and all the young women in the village immediately left whatever they were doing and ran to greet the approaching man. I'm not sure what I expected, but, when he got close enough, I realized that he certainly didn't look like a rock star, so I couldn't help but wonder just why he was being treated like the Beatles arriving for the first time in America. He was clearly uncomfortable with all the attention, and had a wild look to him, accentuated by a face, neck, and torso liberally adorned with substantial scar tissue.

Humility Personified
What with the festivities and all, I never got a chance to properly investigate the matter, but, as it happened, less than a week later, Samati turned up to join my small construction crew at the camp. He was quiet and extremely humble, with very little familiarity with English, and seemed quite fearful of me. As I was only in the beginning stages of learning his language, and he clearly didn't want anything to do with me, any communication with him had to be done through a third party. I soon learned, after asking about him numerous times, that he was extremely uncomfortable talking about himself in any language. If I wanted to understand the mystery of his extreme popularity, I needed to start with accounts of others.

A Nice Twist
In a nice twist of fate that I appreciate keenly in the midst of our somewhat more cosmetic culture, it turned out that his disfigurement and his popularity with the ladies were intricately related, but in a way that I could never have expected. The story was told to me by several people, with little variation between versions, as follows.

Trophy Hunting
Several years previously, Samati had been employed as guide for big game hunting parties. One nice irony throughout many parts of Africa populated by protected wildlife is that hunting within the rules is not forbidden but actually encouraged. It won't surprise many to know that people of means in the affluent parts of the world will pay a lot of money to go to Africa and hunt for animals that they could never find at home. The fees charged by the governments that allow this are astronomical, with trophy fees up to $10,000, depending on the animal. Whatever one's view on the hunting and killing of animals, there is a huge upside to this practice; these funds are then put directly back into conservation efforts, with the concept that, as hunting is something that people will find a way to do regardless, the sacrifice of one animal for sport enables the survival of considerably more of its kind.

An Unwise Decision
One day, Samati, armed with only a sheath knife, was the lead guide for an American hunting party looking for buffalo. They were tracking a particular buffalo through some fairly dense brush when one of the hunters spotted a large male lion at the edge of a clearing ahead and to the left of the hunting party. According to the story as relayed to me, the hunter was heard to mutter something along the lines of "Screw the buffalo, I'm going to bag me a lion", even though the party was not actually licensed to hunt lion and would have been in violation of national law for doing so. The hunter levelled his gun at the lion, and fired. He missed.

Hell In A Lion's Jaws
We can only imagine what the lion was thinking as the shot rang out and a bullet whizzed by him, but it's safe to say he wasn't pleased. The lion roared, likely in a mixture of anger and fear, and bolted for the first living thing he saw, which happened to be Samati. The lion reached Samati in practically an instant, leaped on top of him before he'd even had a chance to turn fully around, and started tearing him apart. According to accounts, Samati was pinned by the lion and his left arm was fully inside the lion's jaws and throat, while the lion bit down and tried to tear the limb off.

The Miracle
Samati's reaction to this horrifying situation can only be described as miraculous. With a 200-kg lion crushing his legs and ripping his left arm from its socket, he managed to reach down with his right hand to his belt, unhook the clasp of his knife sheath, and extract his knife. He then ran his fingers up along the lion's rib cage feeling for where its heart should be, and, in one powerful thrust, plunged his knife through a thick layer of muscle between two of the ribs. The lion shuddered for a few moments, then slumped in a heap on top of Samati.

The End?
I wish I could end the story there, with Samati's difficult one-year recovery from his wounds and his subsequent rise to local legend. I wish I could say that the worst injustice in the whole affair was that, in disturbingly typical African fashion, the rich white guy who had almost facilitated Samati's death got off with a token fine and a slap on the wrist. Unfortunately, the cruelest irony, at least from my perspective, was yet to come.

Always An Achilles Heel
Samati was not a complicated man, and though he must have certainly become more complicated after spitting in the face of violent death, it was said by those who knew him that his trademark humility had remained completely intact, and even deepened, in spite of the adoration he now received from everyone in his environment. Unfortunately for Samati's continued well-being, this simplicity, mistaken by the truly stupid as stupidity, was accompanied by a very tangible naïveté.

The Hero Gets a Visit
One day as we were working, a young man came into camp and asked to speak to Samati. As soon as Samati saw him, he became edgy and clearly uncomfortable, even though, judging by the respect this young man received from the others, he was a person of some standing in the community. He and Samati headed off for a half hour or so. Samati returned alone, visibly shaken and muttering under his breath. I asked what was bothering him but he wouldn't speak to me. I urged him to take the rest of the day off, but he wouldn't have it. I did notice that he spoke to a few of his co-workers, often in animated tones, several times during the day, so, when the day's work was done, I asked the guy with the best English, one of Samati's friends, what was bothering the village hero. Was the young guy a doctor? Had someone in his family died? Was he sick? What could have disturbed him so?

Doctor in The House
Well, according to his friend, he was sick, in a way. As this was right at the beginning of the AIDS scourge in Africa, I immediately feared that Samati had received that dreaded diagnosis. His friend replied, fortunately, that that wasn't it, though the young man who had paid a visit, a simple safari driver by day, was a kind of doctor.

The Curse
In fact, or at least in perception, he was a witch doctor, and he had come to tell Samati that he had been cursed. As a result, he was compelled by whatever laws governed such curses to become what amounted to a servant of the witch doctor for a specified period of time, so that the curse might be removed. I was frankly incredulous, first that Samati would allow himself to be manipulated in such a way, and secondly that his clearly rational and intelligent friends wouldn't see this charade for what it was; an obvious attempt by the "witch doctor" to bring the local hero under his control, in order to better control others. I was further shocked to learn that this was not the first time Samati had been informed of his cursed status, but the third time. How could this happen? All these guys went to church, and often spoke in glowing terms about Jesus and the Bible. Couldn't they see what was happening here? Well, being the outsider, it became obvious to me in no time at all that my argument was culturally insensitive and lacking proper perspective, so I respectfully requested a meeting with the witch doctor, with the hope that I could convince him to remove "the curse".

The Doctor's Qualifications
I was granted a meeting, and was surprised to learn that the witch doctor spoke better English than anyone in the area, owing to the fact that he had spent the most time in school and had travelled to a number of places. Here we had a comparitively well-educated, well-travelled guy dispensing curses whose only cure was to demonstrate service to him, the conduit to all the dark forces behind the curse. Hmm.

Truth Hurts, Don't It?
The meeting was civil enough, but I wasn't able to get the curse removed. He listened to me, nodded a lot, and then told me I couldn't understand because I didn't come from his culture and that, in any situation anywhere, human beings took superiority over other human beings wherever they could get it. If you were brave and strong, you used your body; if you were physically weak but smart, you used your mind. People would use whatever attribute they had to take any advantage they could get. With that much, I had to grudgingly agree, and we ended our meeting with at least some level of understanding. I suppose I should at least feel thankful that he didn't put a curse on me.

Same Old Story
Now, I'm not saying here that I don't believe in curses, or witch doctors, or at least in the power of the unseen to influence human lives. I have seen, and will write about, some things that come a lot closer than this to the supernatural. I'm virtually certain, though, that this guy was not just a fake, but a clever, malicious control freak, who well understood the political value of having a great, respected man running around like his hunting dog, sniffing for other vulnerable souls to tear out and stomp on. This was a perfect example of a phenomenon I had seen before and have recognized many times since; an intelligent person, schooled in human behaviour, supported by the trust of a community, exploiting that trust and the gaps in understanding existing in that community, for the purpose of personal empowerment. In spite of having some level of understanding of the witch doctor, the whole situation still made me about as angry as anything ever has.

Lesson Learned
So now and then I go hunting, looking for witch doctors wherever I can find them. When I get one in my sights, I do sometimes pull the trigger, but I always use rubber bullets. For, while chances are good that they've already cursed their share of heroes, chances are even better that, given the opportunity and the tools, I might have done the same.

Technorati Tags interesting story travel story botswana witch doctor curse hero

Beware of Friends Bearing Messages - The Jesus Principle

2007-09-01T11:11:00.005-04:00

This post is dedicated to you, Greg, for proving to me beyond a reasonable doubt that faith, wisdom, and intelligence can share the same mind.

Let's Hang Out
What would be really good is if we could spend some face time together. If I already know you, I'd love to see you again. If I don't, I'd like to meet you, and get to know you, and hang out with you, because, if you're here in the first place, we're obviously on the same wavelength. Unfortunately, modern life being what it is, chances are pretty good that, whoever you are, unless you live close by, we'll have to just settle for spending time here. Not that that's a bad thing. The greatest power of the Internet -- the personal, digital printing press, telephone, and living room all rolled into one -- is that it allows us as individuals to spend time with more people at one time and in one life than our ancestors, or even our parents, would have ever believed was possible.

You're On My Friends List
I promise you won't be disappointed if you do allow me to share your time. I think you'll be glad you did. You may even enjoy hearing my stories almost as much as my kids do. You'll enjoy learning about the world as I see it, even if you see it in a completely different way, because, if you let me, I will make you think. If you don't already know me, you're going to get to know me pretty well, even if you don't know what I look like. If you already know me, you're going to get to know me a little better. If you read this and you can see the real me, then chances are that I've also seen some of the real you. If you're reading this, I already consider you as my friend.

Tough Choice Re-Visited
I made a choice a number of years ago whose consequences I've been living with ever since. It was a tough choice, a very tough choice, and anyone who has had to make it will understand that, whichever path you choose, it will affect and it can and probably will ruin many parts of your life. In other words, the very existence of the choice is somehow destructive. I made the choice I made then because the parts of my life that would be ruined were all to do with the people I loved, and the benefits of the path I did not choose would fall mostly to me. I'm faced with the same choice again, though it now feels more like a compulsion, but this time I think I can manage the consequences better, being older if not wiser. Either that, or I'm so afraid of being snuffed out like a candle that feel I better take my shot while I still have something to shoot with.

So You Wanna Be Famous?
The choice of which I speak did have something to do with becoming a person of some renown. I wrote a book that I was pretty sure would make me very famous, and infamous with many. There is an inherent assumption these days that fame is good, that it is a recognition of accomplishment of qualities that people find noteworthy, but the thing that strikes me about fame, at least from the outside, is that it seems to have been designed as a very clever practical joke, played on those who should have known better but were trusting enough to have bought the basic premise. Many without it covet it like nothing else, as it seems to represent something that every human being craves; to be accepted, on a truly grand scale. Those familiar with it, those who talk so that so many can hear, often have lives as tragic as they are successful, because, though they are heard by so many, often times the ones who they would most like to reach may not be listening, and part of the reason they are so good at talking to so many is that they are so used to being not listened to, that they have developed remarkable communication tricks, which is what so many others hear.

Snake In The Grass
For such as them, such social standing is actually a penalty, a balancer, for living their lives by doing what they were really put on this earth to do, for better or worse. It is like a serpent slithering though leaves on the forest floor of Paradise, reminding you that if you want to use this world as your personal playground, as your own earthly kingdom, where riches flow to you simply because you are who you are and you do just what you want to do, then you had better learn to step a little more lightly. You just cannot have it all, and Fame, along with a few other vile but inevitable creatures like Tragedy and Disease, is there to make sure you remember that. The final poke, what you realize as you feel the poignant prick of its fangs pierce your skin, is that what you really wanted was not just to be accepted but to be understood, and the number of people that actually understand you is no more now than before you were famous.

Mask of Normalcy
So, anyway, as a result of the choice I made, I went into a kind of hiding, at least from the public, as any living organism might when perceiving a threat to its security, or even survival. I built a Trojan Horse of normalcy around myself, wondering at times if I would ride it all the way to the horizon, never stopping to emerge within any castle along the way to show its inhabitants what I had in that horse with me. After all, when faced with the dilemma of whether to show your true self and thereby change the shape of your life and many of those in it forever, or to voluntarily sacrifice the yearnings of that inner self for the sake of sheltering yourself and those you love from risk, ridicule, and possible harm, isn't it pretty clear which is the moral choice?

The Selfish Choice
This was essentially what my book was about, though I had no idea as I wrote it that the choice of which I wrote fictionally was one that I would face myself upon completion. The problem was that my book was about that same choice as faced by an allegorical Jesus, and my contention was that he made the immoral choice, the selfish choice, the wrong choice. My argument went that, if we accepted that Jesus was special from a very young age to everyone who knew him, as anyone must be possessed of such wisdom, or even if we took a historical approach that he was special from the time his words became worthy of record and quotation, we must also have realized that all those whose lives he touched, all those who surely loved him and were concerned for his welfare, would have been deeply affected by any important decision he made regarding the direction of his life.

What Killed Jesus?
I could not see how anyone could doubt that it was Fame that killed him, the fame that came naturally, inevitably, from people being captivated by his words, and his deeds. It had to be assumed that he knew his own fate, if not by some divine gift of precognition then at least in the way that a person of intelligence knows that to challenge the powers-that-be with certain ideas is to invite certain disaster. My reasoning was that, if he did know his own fate, and continued to pursue it, what did that say about his sense of responsibility to those who loved, nurtured, and followed him? Wouldn't he have been worth more to them alive, teaching them further how to live, or simply sharing more of his time?

The Question of Sacrifice
The educated Christian response to that, of course, would be that he had the sins of mankind to die for, for eternity, which would have outweighed any humanistic, earthly considerations of the time, and that his primary responsibility was to God, not his circle of loved ones. When I wrote my book, I had two problems with this argument. First of all, this did not make any sense to me based on the ways of people. Think of the people in our lives that really make us mad. The guy who blames everyone else for his mistakes, the woman who won't give in even though it's obvious she's wrong, the kid who whines about everything he doesn't have when he should be thankful for everything he has. These people bother us because they will not make sacrifice, and will not accept responsibility. Both personal sacrifice, the ability to accept that you can want but don't need everything, and personal responsibility, the understanding that what you do need has to come from you, are critical for personal growth. Sacrifice brings humility and perspective, two profoundly beneficial qualities for society at large. So why would anyone concerned with the spiritual well-being of humankind make that sacrifice for them? Out of love for them? In my softer moments as a parent, I would certainly prefer to protect my children from ever having to make significant personal sacrifices, but I know in the end that, for them to grow, and learn to accept responsibility for their actions, they must learn not only to make sacrifices but to willingly accept them.

The Ultimate Epitaph
Secondly, I wondered how we could ever know whether this stated mission, of one person's sacrifice for the good of all humankind, was just a good cover for wanting to become great. Those interested in their legacies and concerned with their own mortality could do worse for an epitaph than "He Saved Everyone For All Eternity." Those possessed with the power of words, the power to persuade, have a huge responsibility to live with, in that they are capable of doing great good, but also great evil. To strive for and achieve worldly greatness is to walk a very fine line between those two extremes. Even notions of great altruism and charity can be double-edged; is the self-fulfillment in noble philanthropy related only to the simple joy of helping another person, or is there some part that craves the adoration and respect that "selflessness" will likely invite? Can anyone really know for certain what truly motivates another individual? If you love someone, set them free; isn't that how it's supposed to go? Who would doubt that a charismatic individual can choose to use his words, her power, to manipulate people into doing what s/he wants? You must know such a person, probably you know many. But what do we make of a person who uses such a power to control the people s/he loves? Could this have possibly been what Jesus was doing, consciously or not?

That Dammed Stream
Or perhaps Jesus had never even had a choice. The strength of the compulsion of which I have spoken, the compulsion to represent who you really are, made me wonder if an attempt to consciously divert a human being's nature was like trying to stop a stream by putting your foot across it. It may flow in another direction, it may change shape or form, but flow it will, to wherever downstream it is bound to go. Everything from Scripture to Holy Communion makes clear that God gave Jesus to the world as a sacrificial lamb, so, in this rendering at least, regarding his ability to shape his own destiny, he may have had little more choice than does a farmed sheep from becoming mutton, fated to bleed out into a stream running as red as wine and be feasted upon by the grateful and ungrateful alike.

Cost Benefit Analysis
Those were the things I was thinking about at the stage of my life at which I wrote the book, and it was the certain repercussions that would have come with airing these ideas that led me to eventually destroy everything I had written. These ideas may not seem all that inflammatory now, but, as I look back, I recall that that period was not all that far removed in time from the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses. It may seem ridiculous to some to expect a similar reaction among Christians to a work that was perceived to be blasphemous to Jesus, but, besides the fact that all but the most careful reading of my work might have offended even members of my own family, this was also a time in North America when anyone involved with the provision of abortions ran the real risk of being murdered by those with strong religious beliefs against the practice.

The Love That Passes All Understanding
Though I have foresaken my first choice of a full-time job, I have continued to ponder these questions part-time, and I have since come to realize, being 20 years older and hopefully a little bit wiser, that the object of worship and love for so many was not strictly defined by the man himself but by the ideal of the love that he was said to profess. The person who loves everyone as he loves the most cherished person in his life is the cleanest, most perfect, happiest person any of us could ever imagine. For that person, it is indeed possible to sacrifice out of love without absolving of personal responsibility those for whom you are making the sacrifice. Love and forgiveness can be used to burn away even the most heinous instances of betrayal, defiance, and disappointment, but such a possibility is not the product of any ordinary love. One might hear an exquisitely rare story of a mother who eventually finds enough love in her heart to forgive the man who murdered her husband and children. Imagine this kind of love then magnified to include all human iniquity througout the ages. This is a love so great as to be not only beyond human capacity, but beyond human comprehension. Whether divinity is a living entity or just a concept for organizing complexity is a subject of some debate, but, either way, it is no wonder that such a love as this would be described as the love of God.

Question Arising
It necessarily follows therefore that, for our small minds to even begin to be able to conceive such a concept as this love, it would need to be demonstrated in a way that humanity could understand. I suppose it is from this need that may come the Christian conclusion that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son. Consideration of such love, with Jesus or anyone else as a medium, is a wise and worthy pursuit, giving us an ideal towards which we can aspire, to enrich and improve our lives. Where the question arises, is as to whether this awe-inspiring ideal can only arise in consideration of Jesus, or whether it can be considered of its own accord, or perhaps again through reflection on a selection of equally compelling life stories, including our own.

By All Accounts
I don't know about you but, even an hour or so after the most important conversations of my life, I cannot remember word for word everything that I heard, or recall with exact precision what I have seen. We now possess the most amazing communications tools, and still there are as many accounts of facts and events as there are people to write them. Accounts of the words and deeds of Jesus were passed through many sets of ears and eyes over the course of years and even centuries before ever being recorded. The message I take from this is that what makes his life worthy of contemplation would be terribly limited if restricted simply to the things he said and did. What is infinitely more instructive is the shape of ideas that has emerged from discussion of his life. If we can never know what he thought, what he really said and did, or even whether or not he existed, we can at least know and discuss the ideals to which this history of discourse refers.

Across The Spectrum
There have been plenty of messiahs for humankind, some overtly self-styled, and doomed to obscurity, some still widely followed, and I have always believed that there are as well at least a thousand people alive at any one time who believe it is their destiny to fulfill that role. I believe with enthusiasm and without hesitation in the ideals to which believers in these perceived redeemers are drawn for inspiration. I believe as well that the discussion of these ideas, that takes place across the spectrum of religious faiths, brings anyone open-heartedly involved in the discussion closer to their own true selves and therefore closer to each other.

Qualm & Question
My qualm is with the very concept of an actual person whose motives I can never know, addressing on my behalf such elemental principles of life as sacrifice, responsbility, and love. Whether the people who claim or have claimed to address these principles on my behalf have a choice in the matter, or whether they just do what they do and are somehow destined to do so, is not, to me, the most interesting question. Far more interesting to me is this. Does the fact that they can captivate, guide, and even free people from their burdens by tapping into a message that is deeper than the ocean of humanity's consciousness and grander than the universe in which our imagination roams mean that we should ascribe predominance and grant dominion over our thoughts to the messenger?

The Messenger Is Not The Message
My answer to this question is the title of this post, and it is a warning that is even more resonant in the age of the Internet. What makes the Internet and all of our other tools of mass communication so wonderful, providing as they do the ability to reach and even spend time with so many people all at once, also makes them very, very dangerous. These threads of insight transmitted to us though waves and wires allow both the responsible and the irresponsible, the noble and the self-serving, access to our coveted attention. Can you tell them apart? I'm not sure I can. What can set you free can also enslave you, that is no secret, but even the message most liberated from everything we may have known before, hides the secrets of the messenger.

Even if that messenger is famous. Even if that messenger is revered. Even if that messenger is your friend.

Trust me. Unlike everyone else, I have only the best intentions.

Technorati Tags jesus fame messiah sacrifice responsibility christianity

Do Children Need Church? Depends What You Mean By Church

2007-07-09T15:47:00.005-04:00

Dedicated to those who sometimes find themselves mouthing the words without really considering their meaning.

Church For the Family
There's no question that, for kids brought up in today's information-saturated, multicultural, media-deluged environment, there's plenty to consider out there about all the differing views on God, from all those different viewpoints. It's equally true that, for parents striving for a moral upbringing that makes kids into good adults, organized religion carries a powerful attraction, even for those parents that don't intellectually or spiritually embrace everything the particular religion chosen may entail. Those to whom I refer, more numerous in my view than is widely assumed, have never had that awakening of faith that true membership in a religious community might seem to require, but involve themselves in a religious community precisely for the perceived benefits that such membership will bring to the family.

The Pressure To Belong
Kids have a natural curiosity for everything, and when you combine that with the natural attraction to structured and simplified information that all kids have, you are left with an inquiring young mind that wonders how to process all of the religious information coming in through different cultural channels. Whether it be to answer questions as simple as what the Muslim kids do in the school's prayer room at recess, or as complex as why Jesus managed to come back from the dead but Grandma couldn't, there's a kind of instrinsic pressure on kids to fill the vacuum left by these questions and look for some kind of religious commitment. Add that to pressure consciously applied by those who feel, or are told to feel, the impulse to shine the Light at those dark shadows cast by the unconverted, and you have something almost impossible to resist. The penalty for a lack of commitment is a child's worst nightmare; not belonging.

Trusting the Messenger

There is also the consideration that presenting a child, or an adult for that matter, with the option not to believe something of a religious nature that s/he has been taught by someone close, is dangerously akin to asking that person not to trust the messenger. Multiply that by the number of people in the child's community, and it becomes foolish for the child not to believe what s/he is told. "What, you're trying to tell me that all of these central figures in my life are lying to me?!?" Our society of interdependent knowledge is based on believing in the knowledge given to us by authority. We can't so much as toast a piece of bread in the toaster without depending on all the knowledge of energy, electronics, thermodynamics and every other area of expertise that went into producing that item. What would happen if everyone started questioning every source of authority, let alone those closest at hand?

No Harm Done

Every parent knows that being trusted by your children as the most valuable source of information means that they will believe what you tell them, to an almost ridiculous extreme. But what if the message to be imparted may be at odds with your child's community, setting up either you or the community as a source of erroneous information? Neither outcome is particularly desirable, so what's the harm in couching your message in the language of the community? With all these paternal Gods to choose from, telling everyone what to do and how to live, there must surely be something that everyone else knows but I don't. Isn't it just a lot easier on everyone involved to just join a community that has already thought through all these things?

The Stuff of Life

Certainly, belonging in a church can be associated with belonging in a community, and important cultural events, which have incredible positive value to communities, families, and children, are often closely tied with religion. Religion is tied in many cultural communities to celebrations and rituals that give entire groups of people a perspective on all of the most important stuff of life. Examples are mirrored in almost all of the world's major religions and cultures, of prescribed points of reflection on birth, adulthood, marriage, and death. An example for my purposes here that illustrates this intermingling of the religious, the cultural, the traditional, and the moral, is the powerful combination of gravity, responsibility and sense of passage inherent in Bar Mitzvah, ceremonially inseparable from the Jewish religious tradition. It is hard to imagine a more positive, life-affirming set of principles than those which rest on faith, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility. If my religious culture has these types of ceremonies, wouldn't it be irresponsible not hitch myself to that wagon, even if there isn't one with which I completely identify?

* * * * * * * *

Pop Songs As Hymns
I'm passionate about music, and I always found it fascinating that the two most poetically and intellectually musical but searingly cynical minds of the Sixties each turned to establishment Gods further on down the Path. Bob Dylan & Van Morrison. (Want to start a war with a true child of the Sixties -- say out loud that John Lennon would have been next). Was it resignation, or revelation, that brought these gigantic spirits to bow down to accepted religious metaphors? Whatever it was, I'm pretty sure it was something distinctly positive. I regularly get chills when I hear Dylan sing the final line of "Every Grain of Sand", his soul-searching glare deep into the heart of sprituality and religion, and the soul-baring piece of harmonica that follows. Click on the player below to hear it.

"I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man, like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand."

Being Thankful
Alas, some important and deeply human sentiments are exercised through religious language and imagery. Perhaps none is more noteworthy here than than the sentiment of Gratitude; not that of the simple thanks, but of the deeply humble variety. Gratitude, specifically, for the blessing of avoidance of disease, hunger, violence, intimidation, and all the things that make life for many solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Gratitude is a powerful force, that when channeled appropriately can create or relieve obligation, express profound sincerity, and even determine whether you are the type of person who people like or don't like. The official line, the story we have a need to believe, and the real truth for the truly humble, is that it helps us appreciate what we have and avoid taking it all for granted. Of course that's true, and critically important, but that's a tough one to hold on to, even though we we never doubt its truth. It's so hard to hold on to, in fact, that it bears regular reminding if we want it to be a guiding principle in our lives. With all the things in our lives that could be better, we seem to need constant reminders of all that could be worse. I think that this is one key to power of prayer; a disciplined, ritual way to remind ourselves that what we already have will always be greater than anything we could ever want.

The Challenge To Believe
My suspicion is that this noble sentiment is evenly matched by its irrational, evil twin, Existential Guilt. This guilt is only distantly related to the more poignant guilt that comes from having wronged another human being. This guilt is the irritating, creeping feeling of superstition that accompanies living well, and sometimes even living at all. It's the voice inside us anytime we are abruptly and unsympathetically reminded there is more pain and suffering on this earth than we could ever imagine. It is whispered in the eyes of the panhandler, and practically screams from the limbs of the crippled child. Its blank, unyielding gaze challenges us to meet it for more than a few moments, knowing that most of us do not possess the resolve and can only look away. And by showing us how much worse things really could be, it challenges us as well to believe that things could never be so bad for us. This challenge to believe can grow so strong as to become a command, which we follow by doing whatever we can in our power to find something to believe in that will stack the odds in our favour.

Why Not?
From the earnest to the downright ridiculous, our need to be on the correct side of that important eternal wager leads us to think up all kinds of ways to connect the dots into a picture of something that will actually protect us. What if crossing my fingers really does improve my luck? Why wouldn't I make the sign of the cross, or look to the heavens, before stepping outside my door? Is it really that foolish to try these things and believe they work? Don't I have more to lose by tempting Fate than I do if I just try a bunch of things and they don't somehow help me? Whether finger crossing and entreaties to the divine are about just hope, or they really are faith, and whether they are prayer or simply wishing, hardly seems to matter. Just as long as I don't lose what I have.

The Warm Blanket of Faith
A true understanding of the comfort that this type of faith could provide came to me one cold and snowy winter night some years ago. I was at the cottage of a friend, and we were out snowshoeing late at night, through a dense forest, in almost complete darkness. Only after we had gone a long way and were far from anywhere did my friend inform me that we had mistakenly wandered into the property of someone who was considered by the locals as extremely dangerous, anitsocial, and almost certainly armed. I shuddered with a fear deeper than the cold, that we were out in the middle of the night in such close proximity to someone so heinous who, my friend also confessed, was occasionally in the habit of exploring his property at unusual hours. Sensing my extensive discomfort, my friend did what I thought was a remarkable thing. In a loud voice, in the dead of night, he bellowed:

"Yay, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me."

I could tell immediately by looking at him that, in the wake of having uttered those words, he was not the least bit afraid.

If Not Church, Then What?
So, for a family that doesn't go to church, at least not in the traditional sense, does that mean missing out on the opportunity and enrichment that being part of a church community, of any creed, can offer? What can be done to substitute those important cultural, communal, or spiritual rituals and milestones if we do not find ourselves brought up in one of those cultures? Do all these unquestionably positive sentiments and experiences, like feeling thankful for what we have, sharing a sense of belonging with a close community, and feeling protected, really need to be religious in nature? Is it possible to experience them poignantly and embrace them willingly outside the religious establishment? In an attempt to answer that, I feel that I need to put my views on religion in context.

* * * * * * * *

Morality Over Religion
My early rearing was passively religious, but highly moral. In other words, church was something you did on special occasions like Easter and Christmas, but ethics was something you did every day, or at least tried to. There was no strong connection made between being religious and living a moral life. Children, of course, are effortlessly religious, with all that wonder and all those unanswerable questions, so this lightly religious morality was certainly sufficient for me up until I hit adolescence, at which point something that I still cannot define with any certainty compelled me, for a time, to become deeply religious.

Faith Confirmed
The first step was my confirmation in the Anglican church, which I undertook willingly and with great enthusiasm. I was an ambitious young disciple, and I did everthing I could to get to the stage where I would carry the cross to lead in the faithful, an activity which made me at the same time immensely proud (in the eyes of the obviously approving congregation) and a little awkward, always hoping as I did that, as we headed outside for the front doors of the church, none of my school friends were watching, lest they think me uncool.

Conversion Motivation
My second major religious step of adolescence was motivated by equally paradoxical impulses. With a real sense of commitment, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal saviour and was re-baptised in an evangelical church, called Brethren in Christ. I did this both because I felt terribly guilty for my many sins, whatever they could have been for a fourteen-year-old, generally well-behaved suburban kid, and because I thought one of the girls in the church group was really hot.

No Longer Seeing The Light
By nineteen, having intellectually and spiritually examined what exactly it was that connected me to Jesus Christ and His teachings, and having also become significantly less well-behaved, I was cynical, at least about religion, and happily agnostic.

Following My Bliss
Then, some years later, after some inspired globetrotting, the Fates brought me Joseph Campbell, and everything changed. Something inside me had always known that God was about limitless wonder, mystery, and potential, but all of the religious training I had ever received, and any of the thoughts I had formed as a result of that training, had been more concerned with sin, guilt, and redemption. Listening to Joseph Campbell talk in The Power of Myth about the many manifestations of divinity across history and culture, and watching Bill Moyers' eyes light up in time with mine, sparked by the realizations that Campbell's words elicited, became my new favourite church experience, ever. I dove immediately into everything Campbell had written and wanted to talk about it with everyone I knew.

A Pagan Place
No wonder then, that it seemed fateful that I was sharing almost every step of this journey with a group of people unlike any I had ever known, in a strange and wonderful place called Lothlorien, so named after the haven for travellers in Lord of The Rings, for its mission to act as a place of refuge and refreshment for wandering souls. An entire post, indeed an entire site, is needed to explain the experience that was Lothlorien, but it was there, in a row house in one of London's worst neighbourhoods, where I started to refine my idea of what it meant to be in church.

The Circle As Church
For what is a church but a community of people gathering to think about and discuss important things that they have little opportunity to address elsewhere in their lives? Greek origins are generally ascribed to the word church, meaning of the Lord, but there is some evidence that it may have actually derived from Celtic dialects that preceded the Greeks. In this reading, the word church comes from circle, owing to the fact that places of worship in Germanic and Celtic early cultures were always circular. This is the definition I prefer, for it implies that anywhere or anytime people gather for the purpose of discussion of certain matters of the spirit can be considered a church.

More Pop Songs As Hymns
It's no secret that the profusion of this type of gathering, under whatever auspices, tells us that there is a deep need for whatever it is that the circle brings. Why would we feel this need? Well, it can be quite uncomfortable to speak about whom you have wronged, or bad habits you can't break, or unconditional love, within one's own family or community. The issue, of course, is that those you have wronged, or those affected by your bad habits, or those for whom you feel but cannot always properly express love, are usually within that family or community. So, whether it's forgiveness you're looking for, the understanding that precedes and allows forgiveness, or just a way to measure by comparison with others that you're not so bad after all, that objective third party, whether human or divine, is often the one who knows what you need. To quote another great singer-songwriter who can swing in a couplet from cynical to spiritual, Graham Parker sums this up nicely in It Shook Me:

"Some believe in a Heaven up above, with a God that forgives all with his great love,

Well, I'll forgive you if you forgive me, hey, and who needs a third party anyway?"

A Stripped-Down God?
So if there is any truth in this, and God doesn't have to be about gratitude, or guilt, or paternity, then just what is God about? And if God isn't about morality and forgiveness and protection and understanding, and above all Love, then what instills the heartbeat of our existence with its rhythm, and how can that rhythm run through our lives to ensure all the best for those most dear to us?

God Lives Here

God, of course, is about all these things and much more. But to know God is to know that the Sabbath isn't about Sunday, but rather about the time to consider all that our pragmatic lives prevent us from considering, within a group of people for whom those matters are of life-affirming importance. To be on the path to understanding, and to being understood, is to make a conscious effort to take time to address these questions whenever they arise, both for ourselves and for those around us. To impart gratitude is to act in ways that will remind those in our own gathered circles of the joy of simply being alive, actions which have more resonance than any whispered reminder repeated out of duty or habit. And to love and be loved, the most serene blanket of peace, protection and comfort in which we can ever be enfolded, is to leave oneself unashamedly open to the most mundane of circumstances, safe in the knowledge that some, but not all, will bring the most personal of shared moments.

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The Truth About Illegal Substances - How Easy Is It To Just Say No?

2007-07-02T03:21:00.008-04:00

This is dedicated to those of you damaged by a reality that you did not deserve.

Should I or Shouldn't I?
Anyone who has had any kind of an experimental life has wrestled with the question of what to tell your kids when they ask about all those experimental things and whether or not you did them. There's no question that you don't want your kids to make certain mistakes you made in your life, but a little reflection reveals that you're not sure that some of those experiments were even mistakes. Are some truths against their best interests, or should you be held to the same high standard of truth that you demand from them?

The Official Line
One's familiarity with altered states is a particularly tricky one. The official line is a pretty simple one to toe; not only is the use of many associated substances actually illegal but it also has left a trail of well-documented, discarded lives across our popular culture. This is an important argument, and it's a good thing that it is regularly and consisently presented to children in school and in the media, but it is not the whole story. It leaves out one very important fact, that is avoided by nearly every parent and educator hesitant to leave choices to those who will be most affected by them. That fact? Substance use can make people feel very good, and it can help them go remarkable places and do remarkable things.

Stoner TV
The example that comes foremost to mind is what I call Stoner TV, one of the best nights of storytelling through television that is currently available to the more heliotropic organisms that inhabit the media consumption spectrum. Anyone who has explored any kind of altered state of consciousness can squint easily through the numerous barely veiled references to the finer side of substance use. Stoner TV is clearly a set of productions strongly influenced by innumerable illegalities, but, in the current march of popular culture toward all that was once taboo to the masses, it is a trip that is now out there for everyone to scrutinize. Perhaps our first clue from HBO should have been Tony Soprano taking peyote in the Vegas desert in the run-up to the extraordinary finale, but if The Sopranos was the ultimate study of our visceral earthly relationships, the trio of John From Cincinnati, Entourage on the road in Colombia, and Flight of the Conchords must be the inevitable metaphysical extension.

Testing Positive
Depending on your history, this may or may not be news to you, but, for the uninitiated, let's look at some of the elements of just the season premieres of these shows for a moment. We have, in no particular order, Pablo Escobar, surfing, levitation, a child resurrected from brain death, a healing bird, an idiot savant, getting to plan a bunch of explosions, an argument against why the girl our boy scored at a party didn't get it on with our boy knowing his best friend and her ex was in the room, the world's most annoying, loyal, and yet strangely magnetic music groupie, reflections on celebrity, and, my personal favourite, the sights, smells, sounds, and social norms around the taking of dumps.

To Hell In a Handbasket
Decent people of the world, there is bad news in the wind. You know all those bad substances around and all those bad people who ingest them? Well, I hate to tell you this but, since pretty much the beginning of your time, you've been giving them an awful lot of your attention, letting them make your toys and put songs on your lips. Now, you are even giving them your hard-earned money by letting them pretty much dictate the flow of much of your leisure time, and, in the ultimate no-no for decent folks, you're letting them influence your children. The world, surely, has gone to pot. And the kicker, that has always protected one of the biggest little secrets of history? If you haven't been there, you'll never get it, and therefore, if knowledge really is power, you'll never be able to defeat it.

The User's Dilemma
Because these substances, for some, are the ultimate forbidden fruit, offered coyly but seductively by an almost irresistibly attractive Muse, who invites the perpetually smitten into herself for pleasures so memorable that they would consider giving up all of life's responsibilities just to experience, or even remember with any degree of accuracy, the sweetness and intensity of sensation wrought by those pleasures. Even if your physical life is being destroyed on one hand, when the high produces the most profound, impacted moments of creativity and clarity, and the most direct, visceral experience of all that makes up this world, what a dilemma it must be if, like some of our artists, troubadours, and storytellers, the effective communication of those points of insight enables you to live life in a way that only very few will ever know? What if, further, the quality of the lives of thousands or more, as dependents and employees, depend on your being able to taste that fruit, not only to bite into that original apple of temptation but to share its sweetness with those you want to reach?

Tempted By The Muse
Certainly, the bitten Apple we share with the Muse is, in many respects, the enemy of what we are taught to think is serious work, as we are led by the hand around a path that leads all the way back to our natural primitive selves, whose preferred state is to do just as we please. Imagine a world with everyone running around doing what they pleased! Could we have ever built the things we now enjoy so much we can hardly live without?

Timing is Everything
The happy accident of these individuals so smitten, and everyone with the potential to become like such individuals, against all the odds that govern the laws of probability and physics, is that, in this time of our collective development, the pool of inspiration runs bountifully deep. The ease of manufacturing and distributing psychotropic substances means more access than ever to the most captivating invitations of the Muse. Add to that tools wielded by idle hands but active minds, all the wonderful new gadgets and props that allow us to tell stories of where we have been taken and what we have been allowed to see, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that something very interesting is happening on our screens, speakers, and stages.

The John Conspiracy
John From Cincinnati is just an example, but it is a good one. For the initiated, each scene, each word spoken, each note played, practically drips with narcotics. The score alone (calling it a soundtrack would be like calling wisdom intelligence), is music university. Add to that storytelling that looks without flinching deep into the eyes of the human creature, and you have proof positive that the creators of this show understand something at once truly wonderful and very, very dangerous; how to spellbind, and therefore how to receive and then re-transmit the song of the Muse and instill into anyone lucky or unlucky enough to be really listening that precious feeling of being understood. John, the goofy, brilliant, childlike, idiot savant messiah of the show, is Jesus, the one who can see straight through the secrets and all the layers into the soul of the person and the heart of the matter. He is also the Muse, the one who can allow others to see the same things. What John sees there, what he allows us to see there, is The Truth. While The Truth may well set us free, those who bring it to us, who really let us understand it, who bring to us a program with such messages, can also use it to enslave us, whether they actually intend to or not. How's that for mind control, all you decent folks? What if John or one of his ilk ever took over from Jesus? Imagine all the decent folks now hot on Jesus' trail running after some bunch of stoners. A scary thought indeed.

The Magic Medicine
There is actually a reasonably good argument to be made that most illicit drugs are just an alternative form of medicine. The conspiracy theorists might even have us believe that it is because the drug is so good that those who understand the power of the medicine have made that it more difficult to get by making it illegal, thereby protecting the status who use it to excel. Like any conspiracy theory though, this line of thought assumes that someone else can actually control my mortal soul, just by controlling what I consume. I don't know about you, but I like to think that I control my own mortal soul.

Mind the Dosage
That said, I do agree that we have to be cognizant about who we let medicate us. If there really were an omnipotent illuminati bent on controlling our minds and destinies, running a major pharmaceutical conglomerate would be a pretty good place to start. Medication affects our judgement, makes us feel not only better but differently. But, on some level, we are all medicated, by what is in what we eat, what we drink, what we breathe, the sounds that penetrate us, the light whose full spectrum our senses glimpse, and the countless sub-atomic particles that crash through us without any awareness on our part. With all this medication that is beyond our control, as individuals if not as a species, it's quite a natural tendency to want to focus on a kind we can control. If you have been sick and believe that medication helps, you also know that there is a right way and a wrong way to take it. If we accept that good medication, be it herbal, spiritual, or pharmaceutical, can positively affect our health, and we accept that a prescription is nothing more than an informed opinion on the dosage, are we not compelled to accept also that the power to heal is not within the exclusive realm of the medical profession?

Winning The Love of the Muse
The good news, from one who knows, is that no matter how powerful the substance, the most one can ever hope to accomplish under its influence is to ignite a spark of creativity. It takes much more to actually sustain the flame. To invite a girl out on a date bears no guarantee whatsoever that she will give you her heart. That takes work, time, and real understanding, and, even though your success may be partially measured in moments, it is not only the sparkling moments of chemistry that will determine the quality of the relationship. The same is true with using illegal means to court the Muse. You may be able to get her to appear, agree to take you places, and perhaps even sleep with you, but she won't stay with you if you've turned into a beast by morning.

Fundamental Change
Equally, the use of such substances cannot change the fundamental person, although they can certainly change the way the affected person appears to others. The person may behave differently, perhaps even foolishly, and may seem focused on a different set of goals, but the chances are pretty good that what might be affecting them is that they have no way to meet those goals, and all the drugs have done was to help them realize that. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, often times, these substances don't make you less of yourself, they make you more of yourself. Every time you take drugs, your world changes because your perspective changes, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Standard wisdom says that a change is as good as a rest, and I suspect that for this is true for many recreational drug users. Whether it goes beyond recreation may very well depend on how well adapted the person is to change.

Recognizing the Matrix
I'm no doctor, but in my view, this is important to remember in trying to help those lost souls who have ventured so far that their lives have changed for the worse. To find the real person, the most stripped down, original version of the person, inside the damaged shell, is to see the real problem, which almost certainly has nothing to do with the drugs. Only then can one truly put oneself in a position to help. As it stands now, the common conception among people who don't or have never used drugs of people who have or who do, is that the whole enterprise is undertaken in order to escape from reality. In fact, like a scene from The Matrix, I'd venture to say that many people who have dabbled might actually see themselves more as the movie's children of Zion, grinning knowingly from their own actual reality at all those who live in The Matrix but don't know it. If that reality is one that has harmed the damaged, then it is that reality in which they must be healed.

Altered States, Natural World
All this then to say that, for some, just saying no is not going to be quite as simple as memorizing by rote a personal three-word mantra. There are some very provocative ideas, interesting places, and powerful subjects that altered states allow people to explore. I've heard the odd stoner say that the great thing about being a kid is that you are stoned all that time, you just don't know it, and you don't need chemicals for it. What any stoner wouldn't give to feel like s/he did when s/he was stoned all the time and not know anything about it or need anything to bring it on! That elusive high is really just about feeling things deeply, feeling the world deeply. If our children, and the weaker among us, are not encouraged to explore with feeling and enthusiam every corner of this unmedicated reality, this wonderful land of the make-believe, the deliciously bizarre, and the impossibly mysterious that already exists within our daily reality, and encouraged further to bring to bear their natural, playful curiosity and creativity -- which preclude the need for and even the want of artificially altered states -- then won't they be at least somewhat justified in doing what they can to find secret peepholes into that other world, just to see what it's like? I think that world through the peephole, outside The Matrix, is a lot like the world in which our children live, a world the same as the one we live in but altered by perception. Instead of using altered states to understand a natural world, the point really is to use a natural state of understanding to alter our world.

After all, it's quite a world.

Technorati Tags drugs entourage john from cincinnati marijuana flight of the conchords apple

Diving Into Nirvana - The Happiness Quotient

2007-06-16T13:32:00.006-04:00

Dedicated to my three beautiful children, because thinking of you in your absence fills me with as much joy as time spent in your presence.

Happy Monks

Anyone who has tried to hold down a job, raise a family, be a decent person, and actually snatch away some time to enjoy it all, all in the same week, might not be surprised to learn that monks are happier than the majority of us. If the happiness quotient of monks really higher than that achieved by the rest of us, is it because they simply have more time than we do to contemplate what makes life worth living, or do they actually know something we don't? Is it possible for those of us rushing through the bloodstream of the body of modern capitalism to have at least a little taste of some of that happiness elixir if we can just get a little more time, or should we be looking for the source of that elixir in some ancient pool of arcane knowledge?

Food for Thought

Perhaps it's all that meditation that does it, the opportunity to listen to and interpret oneself all at once. Perhaps where the monks have us is that, in those many moments every day when all of us are alone with ourselves and our thoughts, everyone listens to herself or himself, but the monks actually use the opportunity to intpret themselves. Perhaps we fail to realize that those moments are critical moments, and, in our busy lives, we often let them pass as if they were nothing, or do nothing to try to make more of them.

Meditation for the Nation

My position is that that is what meditation is. To meditate is to focus intently on a process, any process. It is not some far-out tripped-out thing that only freaky Buddhists, lost souls, and hippies do. It is merely taking a few moments to stop, listen to one's internal processes, and interpret them. In that definition, I am in fact meditating right now, and you are part of my meditation. For that matter, I would go so far as to say that many of the people you see who capture our interest so much that we accord them great acclaim and material reward meditate too, that everything that they have created was done as a result of meditation. I'm sure many successful people whose job was in no way related to athletics would admit that their morning run is where they get their best ideas, or that CEOs have their most blinding flashes of insight outside of the boardroom. Why? Because a nice but overlooked benefit of meditation is the process on which you focus, whether it's silencing your mind or fixing the shed, will be improved.

Living the Dream

Perhaps that is even the reason that so many great ideas come out of sleep - dreams may be just another way of interpreting processes within and without us when we are finally alone with ourselves. A lot of us probably think that being a movie star is the pinnacle of success, but my suspicion is that the actors and any others who are paid, handsomely, to meditate deeply and exclusively on others, the characters they portray, including their own public personnas, must make those souls quite susceptible to losing the ability to define themselves. Would it surprise us to learn that the truly successful ones are the ones who know how to stop an take the time to interpret themselves in equal or greater measure than they meditate on others? I doubt it's a coincidence that Oprah loves to curl up with a good book.

Lama Grin
Whether it's isolation, meditation, or something else, I take the monks’ apparent contentment as something of a challenge. Most of us don't really need to be told that those moments that we have with ourselves should be seized, dissected, studied, and understood, but who has time? I know that the results of my own meditations are, or at least should be, more important to me than those of tv producers, economists, and scientific experts, but half the time I'm just too busy or too tired to fight it, and I'm quite content to just sit back and let it entertain me. I admit that all my livelong days are not packed to the rim with bliss, especially on those days, and weeks, when the kids are cranky, I have a headache, my wife is mad at me, a big dental bill comes in, and I can’t do anything right professionally. I’d love to see the Dalai Lama pull his trademark grin out of that one. But even with all that, I still feel that there must be a way that we can wear the lama grin, not one pasted on but one that spreads naturally across the face and comes from a sense of profound well-being.

Into The Burning Flame

A common form of meditation is called visualization, where the pensive soul fixes itself upon contemplation of a single object, trying, as it were, to form an exact picture of that thing in the mind's eye. Rumour has it that if you are able to perfectly re-create in vivid detail an image of that thing, say a burning candle, then all things outside of that contemplation will fall away and you will be left with a heightened awareness of and relation to the universe. I don't disagree that such an attainment is both desirable and spiritually healthy. In fact, my approach is to take visualization one step further, although its proponents might call it a step backward, away from the light and retreating toward darkness. If you can focus on one thing and by exception of all else reach some kind of spiritual realization both personal and universal, then imagine how many things there are in the world that you could use to reach a similar kinds of realization via many different paths.

Rising to the Challenge

So here's what I do to manage the lama grin, as often as possible, and hopefully more often than the worried frown. What follows is an example of some of the processes on which I meditate, the icons that help me reach my own place of spiritual discovery. I figure that when I'm able to do a pretty decent job balancing off those moments of challenge with even longer periods when I do find the flow, my positive bliss indicator has to come pretty close. I’ll put the pleasure of a job well done, the laugh of abandonment of a happy child, or a wild ride with the missus up against humming along with the spheres of the universe any day of the week.

Picture This...

For example, I challenge anyone with an orange robe and sandals to have a day better than today, filled as it was with the simple pleasure of doing simple things in a safe space filled with love. Setting is, of course, important to energize the space in which simple pleasures can occur, and so it doesn't hurt that it was in my backyard, and it was hot, sunny, and spent by the pool with my three kids. If that sounds too entitled, I've done some hard time, I've earned it. If it sounds mundane, read below and answer me this question; are these the most trivial things less worthy than the spheres of spiritual contemplation, or can be they take the place of the burning candle as even clearer reflections of the spheres themselves?

These are the things I did today:

Becoming Aquaman

1. Got my 6-year-old son, who is as scared of water as I was when I was a kid, into the deep end, without his "security blanket" floating ring. Watching his glowing response to the fanatical applause of all onlookers, even from those who had teased him about the ring minutes before, was the parental equivalent of a kid at Christmas about to open a big, wrapped present.

Natural Curiosity

2. Figured out together with my 9-year-old younger daughter what she was really, really good at doing, and then came to the mutual realization which career might possibly let her do what she loves and what she's best at. We were talking while pool frolicking how to important it was to do something with your life that makes you happy, and shortly after, I brought out the laptop on which I write this for some wireless fun at poolside. Before reading through this page, I asked her to explain the meaning of the word 'coincidence' to my six-year-old son, as he didn't know what it meant. She gave him an example; here is what she said. "Suppose that you move into a new house in a new neigbourhood, and you find out that the people living next door have the same last name, and they've named their son the exact same first name and middle name, and therefore have the exact same name as you." Anyone familiar with the successful imparting of any type of knowledge knows that there is no better way to teach than by example, so, of course, he got it, and we proceeded to go through every coincidence on the page in detail. I was even proud of their conclusion; that most of these things didn't really happen, but if they did, in the unlikely event that they aren't made up, then there is a higher mind messing with us, perhaps the reptilians (see item #7). Imagine how proud I was when my daughter even found some holes in the stories, including the one about the reptilians, or at least she came up with some unanswered questions that I would have certainly liked to know. Journalistic note: it's amazing what having a smart nine-year-old read your stories can do for your writing.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things

3. As part of this Internet surfing safari, I answered questions from my two younger kids about, among other things 1. what happens in the precise moment of and in the moments after a human embryo is created 2. whether this guy (item #5) really had a chance at succeeding where Jesus, Mohammed, etc. had failed (ie. an earthly kingdom) 3. what gross things my oldest daughter might have to do in movies if she ever became the actress she wants to be, and, last but not least 4. whether or not I'd eat someone if I were stuck in a lifeboat with a few other people and, if so, who I'd eat.

Cannonball!

4. Helped my 12-year-old older daughter invent a new pool game, the simultaneous triple cannonball, wherein the three of us, upon a count of three, leapt into the air and tried to hit the water at the same time with cannonball dives, also making sure that we sunk right to the bottom still balled up, like true cannonballs would.

Pause for Refreshment

5. Had the equivalent of a snowball fight in June with my son, using ice cubes that hadn't yet melted from the cooler used to house last night's party drinks.

What, No Cartoons?

So, whoever said reading with your kids had to include cartoon characters, cute furry animals, and intellectual pablum, or that spending time with them had to always involve acting like an adult?

Swimming in Still Waters
And whoever said there were more important things to do in the world than putting the racing mind to rest, finding a spot not to hide from the world but to dive into it, and spending simple time? I'm sure the monks would agree that when you can take pleasure in working on your free throws into the swimming pool basketball hoop, when you can sort out all the knots and roll up the extension cord and actually have fun with it, or you can take enough time to appreciate how well your tomatoes are growing, you have something close to peace of mind, the pool that holds those still mental waters of nirvana?

So, the question becomes, how to take that one step further. Children are not always happy, to be sure, but few would argue that those kids who are fortunate enough to be nurtured in a safe and loving environment, are at least experts in being at peace in the moment. To learn to take that succession of moments that make up the days by life's swimming pool and multiply them such that they outnumber significantly those in which we are preoccupied by the future and the past, is to learn how to take the monastic life out into the world.

The Happiness Quotient

My suspicion, as I try to keep my happiness quotient up there with the monks, is that it is human relationships that act as the multiplier and afford the greatest opportunity for a favourably balanced equation. So, where H is happiness, R is relationship with visible and invisible creatures, Q is quality, O is openness to new relationships, and L is luck, here is my version of the equation.

H = (R^Q* O)/L

Do The Math

So, whenever I start to fall behind the monks, whenever the waters become turbulent and the complexity of randomly-generated numbers fills the moment, I try to step back and do the math.

Unless I have a headache. Then I need a calculator.

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