It's About Time

2010 is a nice, round number.

Trite, certainly, but true enough. The number, aesthetically, is not symmetrical, but lyrical; chiastic, but in the phenomenological and not the exegetical one. The binary elements are somehow completed by the “2”, leading the way, Its neck arched proudly; head aimed steadily at the coming year. All the same, it’s a number my eyes embrace for reasons other than its lopsided charm and scintillatingly evocative curves. I like 2010 because it is right now and right now feels good.

The past ten years have taken the world in a direction that has now been acknowledged, by most, to be the road to hell (good intentions, or otherwise). “That decade”, I shall forever call it. Never will I name the beast. Never will I summon it forth, it’s evil mug to see. Right now is better than then and tomorrow will be better than today, but right now, people are sitting on the edges of their seats, waiting to see what will happen next. I certainly am.

Our future (that of the world) cannot be discussed without including an analysis of the state of America, post the Decade-That-Shall-Not-be-Named. There are not just two sides to the United States’ political landscape, any longer. Those days are ending, right before our eyes. Ideological differences have fragmented the nascent “teaparty movement” as well as the Democratic Party and the movement around and to the left of it. From every point of the spectrum is heard great discontent. Some of this discontent is perfectly valid. Some of it is specious and petty. Some of it reveals an underbelly of American society that same society fights demonically to conceal. Some of it is simply the result of poorly auto-managed expectations. No one anointed a prophet, the last time I checked. Regardless of where you, or I, sit on the disgruntlement scale, or the political one, we are all traumatized. I mean all of us: everyone, all over the world. All have paid a heavy price for unbridled “free market capitalism”. For some, it has meant starvation and for others, astronomical wealth. For everyone, the world has changed and not for the common good, but for the particular and elite.

Right now, it seems, a busting apart is taking place in the United States. That popping sound is the bubble bursting, as the entitled and privileged West learns just how little security it has. It’s the horrible realization that the stranger from a foreign land is less of a threat than a middle-aged man in a suit and tie, strolling to work on Wall Street, Venti in his cloven hoof.

There was a series of incidents of domestic terrorism throughout 2009 of which, now, little is said. Quite a number of people, including police officers, having breakfast, and a man worshipping in church, have died. The would be Gontchie Bomber, though, is the one that captures the nation’s fearful attention: an African foreign national. Who could be more emblematic of the strange dynamics of the prevailing American political climate? The advent of the nation’s first Black President has been accompanied by a roiling undercurrent of cognitive dissonance from some Americans. They question his right to the Presidency. They accuse him of rigging the election. They say he was born in Kenya. They say he is an arrogant narcissist. He says the sky is blue and they say it’s pink. If you don’t agree that the sky is, in fact, pink, then you are a moron, an idiot, a whore and a Communist, Stalinist, Nazi sandwich-eater. It is a weird dynamic, indeed, to watch play out. Maybe that popping sound is that of a boil being popped. Everyone knows that satisfying splat on the mirror. The site of facial torment for so long, finally you can gaze upon the pus that has been making you suspect you’re growing another head. It’s gone, the bastard! Right now, it seems America has reached the “I’m going to pop this shit tonight, if it’s the last thing I do!” stage. Right now, there’s a big jet of pus about to go splat.
Right now, real things that really need the nation’s attention before it can truly move forward as one America are coming into the light. There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, because, right now, issues generally unwelcome as topics of conversation have gained some popularity. Some of that trend is productive and some, less so. Some is beneath contempt. The point is that the discussion is taking place and can no longer be ignored. Political fracturing has created an environment of parochialism of interest, but under the surface, where the rubber meets the road, there is not one America, socially or economically. A lot of Americans would like to pretend that’s not so, but a category five hurricane taught us otherwise. There can be no unity of purpose and no forward movement until what has been hidden from view is brought into the light of day and slain.

What many Americans prefer not to think about became abundantly clear to people all over the world, as water covered the City of New Orleans. The focus sharpened in the days that followed, as New Orleanians were left to fend for themselves, without food or water. Many died. Many lost their homes. Families were separated. As Barbara Bush walked through the shelter set up in the Houston Astrodome for the "refugees" (an odd thing to call Americans in their own country, struck by disaster), she noted "...(the Astrodome) was probably the best place these people have ever lived...". A former First Lady said this on television and was broadcast all around the world saying it. What would she know about that, though? She'd raised her kids in the sundown suburb of Highland Park, Texas, after all. It's not like she actually knew how "those people" actually lived, or even wanted to. It was a moment that turned my heart to ice, but that moment is just one of many and it's time to connect the dots.

2010 is a nice round number. It’s right now and that feels good. It’s time.

Bad, Bad Tiger Woods

When news of the Tiger Woods scandal began saturating media, I vowed I would look the other way. I would not eavesdrop on the personal life of a public figure. I would not trade in salacious gossip as small talk. Rather, I would roll my eyes at the sight of yet another wealthy male being unfaithful to his family, due to his overweening pride at his own cleverness. I would spit forth an oath in contempt, not only for this philanderer, but for the media that appeared to revel in the televised unravelling of yet another high profile family. Tiger’s sexual adventurism in the Land of the Barbiezons (apparently in the Vale of Silicone) was a traffic accident I wasn’t slowing down to rubberneck.

This thing isn’t just about Tiger and Elin and their families. This thing is uniquely American in more ways than one. In the United States, public figures found to be trotting out on their spouses are pilloried with a culturally-mandated zeal. The erotic behaviours of public figures in such a context provide the general public with a convenient proxy for their own secret guilts. All are merely dust and will to dust return. All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God. The mighty fall from their lofty, Olympian heights to the cold, hard reality most Americans live, to the delight of all. There is a satisfaction in knowing that money doesn’t immunize people from misfortune in every instance; especially attractive in the midst of a recession. In the case of Tiger Woods, his heroic status as the King of Golf Mountain provides the added cathartic glee of seeing one so admired, reduced to the status of Everyman. What man hasn’t dreamed of a harem of porn stars, clawing at him, lustfully? Gay, straight, or anything in between, men love nothing more than tales of bedroom conquerors, awash in flesh. It is at this bend in the road that the story becomes so much more complex.

Men have attacked the victim and Elin has become a target, due to their secret admiration for the sexual exploits of her husband. Men have also noted that Tiger’s choice of bed mates points to a certain “preference” in that regard, which seems almost pathological. At the same time, they’ve made it clear (to me at least), that they admire and perhaps, share his apparent fetish. A few have publicly renounced his behaviour towards his wife. Some, though, renounce him for other motivations, entirely.

Because this happened in America, the powerful symbol of sportive masculinity embodied in Tiger Woods intersects with other semiotics that are not as healthy. This Black man is married to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed White woman. Further, this towering public figure chose to do his philandering with a remarkably homogeneous chorus of women: All White and predominantly blonde-haired and blue-eyed. As sponsors back away from Tiger Woods, animosity builds, but this backlash is not due to his extravagant infidelities. Rather, this backlash is rooted in an ancient White, male American fear: that of the hypersexual and formidably endowed Black male, come to spirit away “his” women.

This is the thing no one is supposed to say. No one is supposed to talk about that dimension of Tiger Woods and his masculine wanderings. As admiring as male voices are of his sexual exertions, White males in America are still subject to an old, worn and tired folkloric singsong, ever playing in the background of their daily lives. They might not quite hear every note, or even remember what the song was called, but they remember the words and the imagery, because it’s been there for so long and hasn’t really gone anywhere. This is a soundtrack playing behind all the other noise in America, since Reconstruction. It has played throughout the many towns of America, from Washington State to the Ozarks, from Forsyth County to Tarzana, California. From violent expulsions, lost homes and lost lives, to St. Bernard Parish’s “blood relative ordinance”, from every suburb ever built, to the decaying schools of the inner cities of America. It has played for so long, no one can get it the hell out of their heads.

It plays on as the animus builds against a man who is now an icon of male concupiscence (once King of Golf Mountain). Down, down he goes into the abyss, followed by a chorus of plaintively wailing Barbiezons, their red talons flailing as they recede into the void with Bad, Bad Tiger Woods. The angry villagers raise their torches on high, triumphant. Once again, the demon has been beaten back into the wilderness, bearing with him all their sins; all their horrible fears. Once again, they can sleep in peace, next to “their” women, soft and inviolably in their places, in their sacred, marital beds.

That soundtrack will not stop playing, regardless of how many scapegoats America finds for its subterranean guilt. No matter how many times the ritual is repeated, the chant below the superfice of a reconciled America cannot be stilled. Barack Obama cannot still it, as fervently as he dreams it. It can only be stilled by hearing it play at full volume. It can’t be heard in snatches any longer, but must be played from start to finish; blasted into the heart of every American, until every one of them has remembered what the song is called. You can’t hope to master something when you can’t name it.

There will be dancing at this revolution

I visited New Orleans for the first time in April of 2008. Before I travel to a city I’ve never set foot in before, I like to know a bit about it. Mythical New Orleans was no exception. I’d dreamed of going there, most of my life, before I knew what Mardi Gras was. Visions of Louis Armstrong filled my childhood dreams, cheeks puffed out as he blew into that trumpet, setting it alight. Fuelled by my obsessive consumption of Anne Rice novels, my curiosity grew through the years, but was not to be satisfied until I was well into my forties. Having left North America for seven years and marrying upon my return, my dream of seeing one of the most unique cities on earth was delayed by circumstance; its wrought iron, French Quarter confections put on hold. Last year, though, I finally did what I’d been waiting to do all my life and planned that trip. As I prepared myself to go on this pilgrimage, I stumbled upon what is now a musical genre I can’t get enough of: New Orleans Street Brass. At one moment as far from Louis Armstrong as you can get, the next as near as the veins bulging in his head as he puffed out those famous cheeks.

I’ve always been a sucker for horns. I love Romani brass. I love anything loud and honking you can dance your ass off to. In New Orleans Street Brass, I found my holy grail. I was mesmerized by the sound, at first. Then my explorations led me to the inevitable discovery of New Orleans’ distinctive communal celebration: Second Line. With its roots in the 19th Century practice of the Jazz Funeral, wherein a brass band would accompany the casket of the dearly departed to the cemetery, to the mournful strains of a hymn, Second Line parades are part of the fabric of life in the Crescent City. Once the dearly departed was interred, the band would leave the grave site, mourners in tow, but to a different rhythm and vibe. Mournful strains would be transfigured to those of celebration, the mourners would dance and the streets would be filled with the sounds of jubilation. No longer was the dearly departed to be cried over. The new life of resurrection had begun and its advent was heralded by the sounds of rejoicing and the joyful movements of life.

The Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs of New Orleans grew up to fulfil a need in the African-American community of New Orleans: that the members of these clubs, having paid over years for their memberships, would leave this life on the crest of that last community party, the Jazz Funeral. Paraded through the streets of their neighbourhood, deceased members would be communally feted just one more time in those fabled streets.

Today the Second Line tradition has evolved. While traditional brass bands continue to share the sounds of earlier days; beginning in the 1980s, bands like the Rebirth Brass Band have moved the origins of the brass band in another direction, incorporating the beats and sounds of hip hop, be bop and funk into the beloved traditional framework. This is reflected in the accompanying dance. There is no formal “school” for this. It grows organically, among the people who live the tradition from about the end of August until Father’s Day of the following year, during New Orleans’ Second Line Season. On any given Sunday, a parade with some of the best and most artistically committed music one can hear, anywhere, takes place. Hundreds of people, some smoking blunts and/or drinking beer may be found moving through the city’s streets, led by a brass band and the Social Aid and Pleasure Club “steppers” or “buck jumpers”, as they’re variously known, in matching uniforms, usually in brilliant colours and accessorized with huge, feathered fans that are waved, wiggled and swayed in time to the music. When it’s time to break it down, these fans are laid in a pile on the tarmac and some very serious dancing is performed.

These parades generally “roll” for about four hours, with a police escort bringing up the rear on horseback. In between the steppers and the brass band at the front and cops at the back, people are dancing their hearts out, in the hundreds, sometimes resembling a totality. Young men climb up on billboards and rooftops to the delight of the crowd, performing for whoever happens to look up to catch their act. Gurgling babies in strollers are pushed along with bright ribbons in their hair, toddlers display their budding dance prowess to their families and neighbours, people in wheelchairs are pushed by friends in rhythmic circles and rocked to the heartbeat of the tuba. Young women pop their booties and shake their hips and seniors step to the new sound with moves they’ve been busting out since A. P. Tureaud practised law here. No one can resist. No one wants to. This is the living expression of communal identity that binds people in this city together in a way that can’t be broken, even by disaster.

There was a Jazz Funeral for Katrina, following her vicious attack on the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. In the midst of the rubble of ancestral homes in the Lower 9th Ward and the tragedy of a diaspora that, four years later, appears to be enduring, it was the Second Line that manifested the reality of the community’s endurance. As the wheels of reconstruction slowly lurched into torpid life, the people of New Orleans found their voices in this, the most compelling means of manifesting their continuing resistance to adversity. With 175,000 people pulled from their home city, New Orleans struggled back to life, with a brass band and dancers leading the way. Meanwhile, other forces were at work.

The reduction in the Black population of New Orleans and its impact on the political life of the city cannot be underemphasized. Today, New Orleans City Council is populated by people hostile to the city’s traditions; those born and raised by the very population that has been exiled. Attempts have been made to limit the Second Line tradition by withholding the support of the police force for the parades. Attempts have been made to limit desperately needed replacement housing stock for those who cannot afford to return to a city whose rental rates have skyrocketed, in the wake of the disaster. Housing projects have been levelled and are not being replaced in the required quantity. Instead, the Garden City movement of Ebenezer Howard is being promoted as the “cure” for this city’s perceived ills. New Urbanism , which draws on the work of this utopian, English town planner has made ominous inroads into the urban redevelopment process in New Orleans. Utopia, to some, is a disneyfied New Orleans, in which the landed gentry can live in its quiet, tree-lined suburbs, with as few working class, poor and above, all Black neighbours as possible. The effort to secure these thinly-veiled “sundown suburbs” as the new reality of New Orleans has been most radically pursued in St. Bernard Parish (one of the areas most affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina). This year alone, the Parish was cited twice for violations of the Fair Housing Act (enacted by Lyndon B. Johnson in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination). In an effort to maintain its majority white status, parish leadership went so far as to enact a “blood relative” ordinance, whereby homeowners were constrained to rent only to those to whom they were related by blood. Incidents of hostility against homeowners renting to Blacks include the burning down of a woman’s home, the burning of crosses on another’s lawn and the raising of a Confederate flag by a neighbour of someone else who wanted to do the same. All these actions have prevented developers from commencing work on much needed multi-family housing developments. Finally, Judge Ginger Berrigan has demanded that St. Bernard Parish either cease and desist, or be subject to heavy fines. It yet remains to be seen whether St. Bernard, home of the town of Chalmette (of David Duke fame) will maintain its truculence, or open itself to the reality that some of the people who live there are and will be, Black, Hispanic and/or poor.

Add to the diaspora (a fancy word for people who have been driven from homes their families have lived in since before there was a United States, separated from their families and friends and living in towns and cities all over the USA that definitely aren’t New Orleans, by any means) and the attempted re-segregation of New Orleans, the threat of local health care being diminished even further and you have a community under siege. Charity Hospital, prior to Katrina, was the only hospital in the entire State of Louisiana that served indigent (that’s a fancy word for poor) people. There is now a plan afoot for a private teaching hospital to take its place. This project would partially be funded by a FEMA disbursement, actually intended for the reconstruction of the community and not private profit. Not only would the community lose a vital health care resource, the State would lose its only not-for-profit hospital. This is where the Second Line comes in. On August 30th, the Rebirth and Hot 8 Brass Bands led a Second Line consisting of thousands of supporters in a Second Line to save this hospital. Recalling the role of music in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, this resistance effort is being led by music, its power to move people and the very people this sort of profiteering is levelled at.

In April of 2007, with the assistance of the ACLU, efforts by the NOPD to raise the cost of police support for Second Line parades was by squashed by the Second Line Task Force, consisting of the Social Aid and Pleasure clubs of New Orleans. Capitalizing on a shooting death that had occurred at a parade, the NOPD attempted to triple the fee charged by the police department for escorts. In a community still reeling from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina a scant 18 months earlier, this increase would have drastically inhibited the ability of the SAPCs to continue in a tradition that has defined New Orleans for generations.

While I came to the Second Line for the music, the dance and the party, I’m staying for the power. More than a tradition of celebration, Second Line has been a means of manifesting solidarity among the poor, the working class and Black New Orleanians in the face of a dominant culture often hostile to all such Community-generated phenomena. As New Orleans moves into the future, a great deal is at stake. I fear for that city more than I fear for my own. New Orleans is home to a confluence of cultures that does not exist anywhere else in the world: Cajun, Creole, Spanish, French, Caribbean, African, Italian, all these cultures make New Orleans what it is. For generations, New Orleans has been unique in the Americas, as home to people of a multiplicity of ethnicities and origins, all distinctive and yet linked in ways that may not be broken. For some, Katrina presented an opportunity to finally break that intricately woven tapestry of belonging and cultural identity. The New Urbanists have joined hands with the social engineers and the disneyfiers, hoping to construct the Emerald City in the ashes of this gem of the Americas. But there is something standing in their way. The people of New Orleans are still in the streets, with their feathered fans and smooth, tailored finery, their tubas, horns and bass drums and they are still dancing their hearts out. They have been there for a damn long time and they’re not going anywhere. There is dancing at this revolution and the best music in the universe (as far as I’m concerned). All the blood relative ordinances and real estate sharks and racists in the world cannot pass. This community is smaller now, but it’s stronger and it has the funk its enemies don’t know anything about. The Second Line of New Orleans is rolling in a whole new way, these days and Ebenezer Howard is rolling in his grave, for this is the life and the resurrection of New Orleans and it won’t be crushed.

Excavating the Silence

Usually, when a woman asks a man a question he doesn’t really want to answer, he’ll either change the subject, become inordinately “prickly”, or make a lame joke. All these responses are cues for the woman to stop...right there. Some line has been crossed. Some invisible boundary has been breached.

This one time, though, I asked a man a question he didn’t want to answer and he replied:

“Men are stupid”.

This was a new one on me. I’d had all the responses enumerated above, but never this one. This was something I had never heard. Not only that - this was something I had never expected to hear out of the mouth of a man. I was temporarily struck dumb; hauled up short. What could I say to that? There really is nothing to say at all, which is precisely what the man who said it knew before the words were out of his face.

“Men are stupid”. This statement is like a big, fat period at the end of a sentence (“And that’s all there is to it”.), but it’s also an exclamation point (“C’mon!”) and a question mark (“Are you fuckin’ kiddin’?”). I confess to having no memory of the question I’d posed to this man. The subject had been so decisively closed with these three words, the very question evaporated into the ether. Whatever corner of the man’s psyche I had, in that curious feminine manner, been poking around in, was now forever closed to me...at least where Mr. “Men are stupid” was concerned.

These words had caused me to halt in my excavations amidst the living rubble of Western Masculinity. Having sifted through as much of the loose shale of his studied and deceptively porous veneer as I was to be permitted, I was compelled to wrest my hands from the site of my curiosity. I no longer even desired to continue turning over the bristling, clicking stones, tumbling over one another, as I reached beneath them to the terra firma they concealed. I had come too near it and those three words had me brushing the dust off my hands, as I packed it in.
Western Masculinity is a silence. It is a code, like Enigma and there is no Turing of our age, or gender. Somewhere underneath what women perceive to be the icon of the “average guy”, there is someone else that we don’t know. We reach for this mysterious presence in every interaction we have with men, beginning with our fathers. Through the boy in first grade that made our hearts flutter for reasons as yet unfathomable, to the high school boyfriend, with his tentative kisses, to our first lay, to the man or men we marry, the best friend, the gay buddy, those we love, those we hate, the good, the bad and the ugly; until our dying day, we never seem to apprehend that hidden presence. It’s not ours, it seems, to meet this shadow, concealed beneath that apparently porous facade.

For a man to impugn his entire gender as a means of prohibiting entry into that same gender’s inner sanctum by a woman is surely an act of desperation. What is hiding in there, beneath the clicking shale, as we push it around with a manicured nail? What is it men do not want us to know about them? In a world awash with pornography and a 24 hour news cycle, it’s hard to hide the superficial traits associated with being a man, certainly. These are just the things we see, though. Men do little to mitigate the imagery of hypersexuality, perhaps embracing the caricature as some kind of perverse compliment. They do nothing to mitigate the violence with which they are associated: the murders, the rapes, the violation of the feminine in so many places, at the hands of so many of their brothers. It’s quite possible that many men are unmolested by the image of males as predatory monsters, subjugating women and children to their purposes wherever they are, in order that they might continue to enjoy their reign of terror. I know there are some men like that. I’ve met some men like that, as we all have.

These things are in the open, though. It is the hidden things I want to know about. It is what men don’t want me to know that I must know. How far beneath the bristling borderland that we see in the world, representing “Man” must Woman rummage before coming upon it and once having done so, what could possibly be so horrible that men feel compelled to conceal it at such cost? For a man to say that all his gender is afflicted with an inferior intellect sounds like a betrayal. I think I might even have laughed when he said it, as men see themselves creatures of honour and want to be seen in that light. You can imagine my nervous giggle. In retrospect, I rather think he threw himself on his own sword for the sake of his fellows. For his brothers, he clanged shut the door of the vault (in which the secret I must know resides), lest they all be left to the mercy of Woman; vulnerable and exposed.

I will not stop looking and I will not stop trying, but I fear that I will have become perilously elderly when the day finally comes that I succeed in my quest. I may die first. I can’t stop, though. I have a mission to fulfill that began long ago when I started to fathom why that little boy in first grade caused my guts to churn in a most uncomfortable way. I have to know if what I suspect is true. I have to see the soft centre; the terra firma. There’s a point of connection there, between this esoteric hinterland, so neglected, barren and hidden, the men who stand guard over it and women. Maybe men don’t even know where it is, anymore. It occurs to me they’d rather not. Measureless as the caves of Kublah Khan, I long to lay hands upon and know it and show it to them, just to see the looks on their faces.

Summer has passed, it's back to the cave...

Even though I live in the most temperate region of Canada (southwestern BC), we still get the lengendary Canadian winter. Last year we had what had to be the worst winter in recent memory. I remember a day last year when I could no longer support the ever falling snow. Still suffering from an injury sustained the previous summer, I was hobbling through several inches of the white shit from the sky, shopping bags in hand, when I simply snapped. I stood there on the icy sidewalk, weeping as it fell, incessantly. People noticed, but they did not stop to ask what the matter was. They didn't have to. They knew that I had succumbed to "cabin fever".

Cabin fever is a catch 22 situation. You stay indoors for long periods of time, looking out the window every so often in the vain hope that the great, yellow disc in the sky has returned. After awhile, you stop looking. You stop caring. You start sleeping until 10 am on the weekends and wondering what you can eat next. You cannot go outdoors, save to gather in more provisions and attend work (when not calling in sick from sheer despair). It is cold as fuck out there, so in you stay, in your fuzzy slippers and fleece jammies. When compelled to go forth, you do so only with great trepidation, many layers of clothing and an attitude that would shame the Wicked Witch of the West. "In" is so much better than "out", but whether you live alone, or with others, "in" can persist for so long a time, that you wonder if you will ever see the great, yellow disc again. You wonder if you will live to see it before you put your head in the toilet and flush until you drown, or possibly in the oven, if you are blessed with gas. You are damned if you stay in and damned if you go out. You Nanook it out as seldom as is humanly possible, yet your isolation compels you to seek out the others of your kind, all reduced to cave-dwelling, depressive grubs by the vagaries of Canadian winter. When finally you arrive at the warmth of the cave again, you wonder what ever possessed you to go "out there" and vow to limit such expeditions, in future. I have gone three days running without ever leaving my apartment, in winter, only to emerge wild-eyed and resembling the Michelin Man, in search of cigarettes and booze.

Public situations in the long, dark Canadian winter, when the sun sometimes goes down as early as 4 pm and comes up as late as 8 am (and then is only known to be present by way of the wan and feeble breaking of the darkness by a lighter shade of gunmetal), become almost unbearable. Everyone is in a bad, mad, nasty mood. No one more than myself, of course. The incessant rain and wind batter those brave enough to venture into it, destroying any semblance of a mood fit for human interactions. When the snow comes, as it did with a vengeance in the winter of 2008/09, southwestern BC grinds to a confused halt. It is not supposed to snow here like that. It is supposed to snow in the night. You are then to awaken with delight, at the sight of all the trees in their confectioner's sugar mantles. You are to clap your hands and squeal "I love snow!". I call bullshit. When I awake to snow, I stand at the window and cry and yell "FUCK!". In my universe, snow is the devil. It is the white shit that falls from the sky and brings chaos. It is the reason the bus is late (again). It is the reason cars smash into one another, as no one has thought to change their tires (because it never snows here, you see). It is the very bane of my already socially desolate winter, now rendered unlivable in a town where it is not supposed to do that.

So here I am, watching the leaves change colour and fall to the ground. Falling, falling, falling. Soon the trees will be denuded of their glory and as desolate as my winter-loathing heart. Only conifers will comfort me through the long, lonely, soul-crushing Canadian winter. My only hope for this winter resides in the rumour that it will not snow this year, because the Winter Olympics are in town. I live in this hope, not only for myself, so cruelly diminished by the evils of snow, but for our Premier, Gordo Campbell. For, if there is no snow, I will have something to smile about this winter, as the whole extravaganza goes in the crapper. It's the one shred of hope I cling to, as I prepare to confront my nemesis: the motherfucker known as Canadian winter.

The Ole Switcheroo

Due to the malfeasance of a facebook "friend", I have been compelled to re-establish my glorious blogging career (har hardy har) under another title.

"Friend", if you're reading this: I understand that I may have offended your delicate sensibilities and sent you running for your smelling salts. I also understand that my language, from time to time, is rather "blue". What YOU do not seem to understand is that we all live in a world of advanced communications, in which people like me (the little people) have been given a welcome opportunity for self-expression on a pretty grand scale. This implies that this world is full of people with whom we may not agree and with whose opinions we may take issue. That is certainly the truth for me. That said, I do not employ my spare time looking for ways and means to silence those who so offend my own sensibilities and well considered opinions. Rather, I look to answer them, whenever possible, in the hope that what I say might reach someone teetering between the polarities extant in whatever discussion I am interpolating myself into. I know there are a lot of big words here, but hopefully, you will get it.

In sum: I have the right to freedom of expression. You have the right to freedom of expression. Your rights end where mine begin and vice versa. Try and keep that in mind and please, if you are so deeply scandalized by what I write, read elsewhere. Soothe yourself with ideological conformity to your own worldview. Permit others the same comfort. Don't let the door his you on your pompous, self-righteous ass on the way out.