Day 1

January 11th, 2010

Had my last smoke after giving a harmonica lesson that ended at 7:00pm.  Heard a rumour they sell single smokes at one of the variety stores downtown, but couldn’t find this mecca.  So I bought a filter tipped smoke and walked over to the library where I put it out somewhat prematurely.  It was a little disgusting.  Smoking in winter can be hard.  Makes me hiccup sometimes.

So I get home and start cleaning my apartment–which badly needs it–and as I was bopping along tidying things up, that thought hits me that I could just nip out and have a smoke.  And then I remembered.  I quit.  About two hours ago.

And then I decided to start this blog, but in the middle of writing the second paragraph, I went into the bathroom and rolled a cigarette out of the ashtray in there.  It was awful.  So when I returned to cleaning the apartment, I dumped the ashtray into the toilet.  I hope it won’t have any ill effects on the plumbing, but drastic measures were necessary.  Addiction, like insanity, is not a pretty thing.

admin Quitting Smoking

Running the Table

January 31st, 2009

They used to play “Hotel California”

every night in the pool hall

                   like a ritual of conditional memory

 

Dave Parker’s latest attempt to quit smoking

          consisted of keeping a cigarette

dangling from his mouth

Until somebody offered him a light

 

And that somebody wasn’t me, it turned out

          as I slid my matches back into my pocket

Or anybody else at the pool hall this evening

Presuming I wasn’t the first to ask

          why he had that unlit smoke in his mouth

 

I wonder if he had a movie playing in his mind

          of a future time when a stranger walked in

                    and handed him a silver torch you could light in hurricane

 

I wonder if he was even with us in the pool hall

          as he moved around the room

lining up his shots with an eye to the leave,

                    that endless guitar solo fading gradually away

 

When he finally dropped the black ball

          He stood at the head of the table

                   like the patriarch of a failed clan

And we all turned and looked out the door

          into the cool quiet spring night outside.

 

admin Poetry

Extremely Silly Album Covers, found at the Family Thrift Store in Downtown Guelph, with thanks to Proprietor Ray Mitchel

January 31st, 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

admin Larfs

Cafe on the Edge of Forever

January 31st, 2009

Excerpt From an Episode of Star Trek(TOS) as Performed in the Cornerstone Café in Downtown Guelph, and Featuring Emily Shapiro in the Role of Captain Kirk.

 

(We join the crew of the USS Enterprise at Table Four.  Waiter CAMERON approaches the table to take everybody’s order.)

 

CAMERON

 

          Coffee everybody?  (Everybody nods.)  Did everybody have a good time last night?  (More assent)  I couldn’t make it out last night.  I was too tired.  I just went to bed.  (Stunned silence)  Okay…well…I’ll be back with your coffee.  (He leaves the table.)

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

          Something’s wrong.  Cameron has never slept in his life.  He doesn’t even own a bed.  He serves at the Cornerstone all day and drinks all night with the Cornerstone staff.  Everybody knows that.  In fact, sleeping is a direct violation of Article 567, section 2, subsection ii of the City of Guelph Food Service Charter.  How deep does this go?

 

MCCOY

 

          Jim, you’re being paranoid.  You need rest.  You should listen to the ship’s doctor once in a while.  I could have you removed from duty.

 

SPOCK

 

          Captain, I took the liberty of making some scans and it would appear that the Doctor’s emotional outburst is once again completely unfounded.  That was not the real Cameron.  That was a robot–albeit a well-liked and popular robot.  Furthermore, I have reason to believe that robots have infiltrated the entire staff.

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

          How…how could they?  Amelia…Jeremy…Chloe…  Dara…Dayna… All the others… All of them…gone.  I served with them against the Shiny People.  And now they’re…no more…  We’ve got to do something…but what?

 

SPOCK

 

          We’re up against a formidable enemy, Captain.

 

MCCOY

 

          It sounds like you admire them, Spock, with your cold Vulcan Logic.

 

SPOCK

          I do not admire them, Doctor, I merely acknowledge their superior abilities.

 

MCCOY

 

          How can you say that, Spock!  They were your friends! 

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

          Gentlemen, now is not the time.  They must have a weakness, and I think I know what it is.  If they are logical beings as Mr. Spock says, then that is how we will bring them down.  (Robot CAMERON approaches the table again.)

 

CAMERON

 

          Ready to order gang?

 

MCCOY

 

          Migas.

 

SPOCK

 

          Migas.

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

          I see today’s omelette is a western.

 

CAMERON

 

          Yes…

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

          What does that consist of?

 

CAMERON

 

          Mushrooms and peppers.

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

          Does it have…cheese?

 

CAMERON

 

          Yes it does.

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

          Then I would like the western omelette…but without cheese.

 

CAMERON

 

          (Somewhat surprised)  Oh…well…okay…  I guess we can do that, if that’s what you want…

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

          It is.  (Cameron leaves the table.)

 

MCCOY

 

          If this is going where I think it is Jim, then it just might work.

 

SPOCK

 

          Indeed, the captain’s plan shows a great deal of potential.

 

MCKOY

 

          Spock, you’re a pointy-eared ass-kisser.

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

Gentlemen, be quiet.  (Cameron returns with the order and distributes the plates to the shocked officers and departs.)

 

MCKOY

 

That cuts it, Jim.  Something is definitely wrong here.

 

SPOCK

 

I’m sure you’re aware, Captain, that we can’t afford to see this plan fail.  Otherwise the entire downtown core will deteriorate into confusion when people suddenly realize they have no idea how to spend their mornings.

 

MCKOY

 

(Screaming)  That can’t be allowed to happen Jim!!

 

EMILY

 

Be calm, men.  You’re my two best officers, and I need you to keep control.  Quiet.  (Cameron approaches the table again)

 

CAMERON

 

How’s your food, people?

 

MCKOY

 

Oh…good.

 

SPOCK

 

Indeed, it is more than satisfactory.

 

CAMERON

 

(To Emily/Kirk)  Do you like your omelette?

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

I do.  It’s delicious.

 

CAMERON

 

Good!

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

There’s just one thing…

 

CAMERON

 

And what’s that? 

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

(Music swells with tension.)  What this omelette could really use is…cheese.

 

CAMERON

 

Cheese?  But you said you—I mean, you didn’t want—I mean it already—you shouldn’t have said you—(A red light flashes on Cameron’s necklace.)  Error!  Error!  Awaiting instructions!  Awaiting instructions!

 

SPOCK

 

If I may be so bold as to point out, the only logical course of the waitstaff is to report the customer’s complaint to the kitchen staff.

 

CAMERON

 

Must comply!  Must comply!  (He marches stiffly back to the kitchen.  The crew watches as he interfaces with the rest of the staff who have gathered around to listen.)

 

SPOCK

 

I believe they are interfacing with the primary control right now.

 

MARK

 

Does not compute!  Does not compute!  (Picks up chit holder and shoves it in his eye.  Chloebot’s head begins to smoke.  Dara starts taking clean dishes off the shelf and loading them into the dishwasher.  Eric starts babbling nonsensical scientific data to anybody who will listen.  General chaos.  Ragged customers stand around surveying the destruction in horror)

 

CUSTOMERS

 

What will we do?  How will we ever survive?

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

(Standing on the table.)  It will be hard at first.  But you’ll make it.  You’ll persevere.  You’ll pull yourself up and learn to live without the tyranny of robotic hospitality professionals.  You’ll build a new world.  And we’ll be back to see you again.

 

(Back on the ship.  SPOCK and MCKOY are standing around EMILY/KIRK in the captain’s chair.  Their conversation is accompanied by a whimsical oboe.)

 

MCKOY

 

Well Spock, it turns out you were wrong about everything once again.  You’re such an asshole.

 

SPOCK

 

On the contrary, Doctor, your obvious mental infirmities are an embarrassment to sentient beings everywhere.

 

EMILY/KIRK

 

(Smiling and shaking her head.)  You two.  Why don’t you just fuck and get it over with.

 

(SPOCK cocks an eyebrow inquiringly.  MCKOY averts his eyes.)

 

END.

admin Larfs

Essay After My First Fundraiser

January 31st, 2009

I ended up raising $258.25 for the Princess Margaret Hospital Ride to Conquer Cancer from the show my friend Patrick MccAuley put on at his house on November 22, 2008.  Before the show that day, I put a few finishing touches on an essay I wrote entitled “A Most Tripping Vindication of Altruism”, a piece of writing that had my usual hidden meanings and ostensibly disparate connections between ideas.  After Barak Obama became President Elect, I thought the fashion had returned to talking up to people instead of down, to having their higher faculties appealed to, as opposed to their basest motivations and fears.  I had also decided that I wanted tie my writing in with my training and fundraising for the Ride to Conquer Cancer.

          So I laid the essay out into a zeen composed of a legal sized paper folded once in the middle—which I’ve done many times in my existence as a self-publishing writer.  I despaired of figuring out how to instruct MSWord to feed the columns to conform to this format, so that the title page would be printed on the back of the flat paper with the body of the essay on top and the last page also on the back opposite the cover page.  So I printed it off and simply cut the four quarters and glued them to another legal sized page in proper position with reference to the final product.  Then I made dinner and watched an episode of Family Guy I had already seen, where Peter blames Meg for destroying the cable signal for the whole town.  It was from very early in the first season before Mila Kunis was brought in to be the voice of Meg.  Not the best episode, but at least it wasn’t the one where Lois learns karate, which, like the Beatles’ “Yesterday”, seems to always be playing somewhere in the world, and usually whenever I turn on the TV.  I don’t even have cable.

          Looking at the printout, I noticed an error in the title, “A Most Tripping Vindication or Altruism” which wouldn’t have been picked up by the spell check but surprising was not picked up by the grammar checker either.  Cursing, I printed off another copy of the front page.  Or tried to.  I had hoped that if I selected just the first page that it would only print the first page and thus I would save myself the ink.  Sadly this was not to be and it printed the entire article, from which I cut the front page and glued it in place of the erroneous one, which I threw out. 

          I packed a bag for myself with the template folded over and pressed between the pages of my notebook, which was just big enough to accommodate it.  I also threw in my copy of Schulz and Peanuts, which I was taking every opportunity to read in time for the review deadline for Off the Shelf.  I looked forward to reading the book on the bus ride to Staples, and then spending the bus ride back stapling the Sportchek Family and Friends coupons to the zeen, so that I would have something to give back to all those who showed up at the party to donate to my cause.  I made it about half a block away from my house before I stopped in my tracks with the realization that though I had reprinted the front page, I had not done so before correcting the error!  And crystal clarity of this realization was paradoxically characteristic of the absolute certainty I had of having made this mistake despite the apparent fog within which I had made it.

          I have an acquaintance I met through a summertime afternoon on the Cornerstone Patio who, if it can be believed, is at least as absent-minded as I am.  Every time we meet we each have some new tale to tell of our epic stupidity.  When theorizing as to the cause of it, I have suggested that it is owing to the fact that we are preoccupied with complex and abstract ideas.  James simply thinks it’s because we’re stupid, and I fear that he may be right.  We have half-seriously joked about starting a support group called AA, for Absent-minded Anonymous.  We would address each other by our first names and our last initials, in keeping with the difficulty we have remembering other people’s names—and even this is being optimistic.

          But usually these epiphanies hit me when I’m halfway across the Heffernan Bridge, and not before, so I counted myself lucky when I about-faced and headed back home to reprint the article with the correction included.  Fortunately, I hadn’t turned off the computer when I left, preferring instead to let it shut down on it’s own should just such a thing as this happened, in which I needed to restart the computer to account for some unpredicted but inevitable oversight.  This time I made the correction before printing off the sheet, and I made sure there was only one piece of paper in the printer so that I wouldn’t waste quite so much ink this time.  For the second time, I removed the previous cover page, threw it out, and taped the new corrected version to the template, and at last walked downtown to catch the bus.  It usually takes me more than one attempt to leave the house at any given time.

          It must have been just after six o’clock when I got off the bus at Scottsdale.  The plan was (hopefully) to get the zeen printed off in time to make it back for the next bus downtown, as I hoped to arrive at Patrick’s by seven, so I could help ready the house for the show.  As I made my way across Stone Rd., I was happy to see that there were very few cars in the parking lot at Staples, which of course meant that it wouldn’t be too crowded and I would be in an out fairly quickly.

          There was an employee at the door talking to a customer.  The customer walked away.

          “No.”  I said.  “Are you guys closed?”

          “Yes we are.  We’re waxing the floor.”

          “You’re not serious.”

          “Uh…yes.”

          “But…but…I have to make copies…”

          “I’m sorry.”

          “Is this something you usually do?

          “No.  But we’re always closed at six on Saturday night.”

          I made him get a manager, and pleaded my case to her, that this was for a charity, for cancer research.  They suggested the UPS store.

          I walked to the UPS store and wondered what I was going to do.  Would it matter?  Should I just let it go?  Was I not really just obsessing over getting my writing out to the world?  But it seemed like a good thing to do, and it was hardly fair to myself to give up on the piece I had created for this evening while there might still be hope to get it “published”.  I had done all this work already.

          I 411ed Futureshop, but instead of patching me directly through like they usually do, they gave me two numbers and patched me through to neither, for whatever reason.  This meant I would have walk over there to determine if the Futureshop, like Staples, had a copy centre. I was doubtful, but it was worth a try.

          At the very least, it was open.  I went in and asked at customer service.  They didn’t have a copy centre.

          “I can’t believe this.”  I said.  They seemed willing to listen to my tragic tale, so I told them of my travails with the Staples hours of operation.

          “I would have made the same mistake.”  A young woman said.  “I can feel your stress.” 

          I felt apologetic for irresponsibly throwing off that energy.  And older employee, probably my age, said, “Look, it’s for a charity…I don’t have any problem with using our photocopier.”

          “Do you have legal-size paper?”  I asked hopefully.

          The young woman brought back a ream of paper from off the shelves.  “This is all we have.”  She said.  It was letter sized. 

          My template, as you know, was legal sized.  Not having foreseen the troubles I was currently having, I didn’t have a digital version of the file on either my phone or my keychain thumb-drive, and as I was complaining about this, it dawned on me.

          “I should just take what I can get, right?”

          “Right.”  The manager said.

          They fetched a paper cutter for me.  Laying out the template, I saw there was a great deal of excess margin space.  Making sure that all the columns were aligned on their reverse sides, I made significant cuts to the template, always aware that I couldn’t make a mistake as this hard copy was all I had of the document.  I tried to maintain at least a marginal margin for the sake of readability, and the outside columns were right up the edge of the letter sized page I was using as a guide.  Then I separated the columns and taped them to both sides of the guide sheet in their proper positions so the young woman behind the counter would understand how it worked.

          Her first task was to shrink the template so it would fit, then she would have to join the to sides together in proper alignment for the fold to work properly, and in this fashion, the copier would be able to automatically create the double sided pages.  The problem was, we kept losing a column of characters down the outside margins, and I was too stubborn to allow such a loss as it would greatly effect the clarity of the writing.  And this was hardly silly unimportant stuff I was writing about.  The writing, while highly philosophical, was also commemorative, with respect to an acquaintance I had in high school who later succumbed to brain cancer, leaving behind a wife and two little children.  While we were expecting a younger crowd at the party, for whom some of this essay might conceivably be over their heads, it was also my hope that they might take the zeen home with them and leave it out where older eyes would see it and read it, and maybe follow the url at the end of the article.

          In the past, and well into the present, I’ve been accused of being elitist with regard to my precocity as a writer.  I’ve always thought this was unfair.  Whenever I contemplate such remarks, which I frankly find hurtful, I think of that scene in the Hustler when Paul Newman, with two broken arms, is having a picnic with Piper Laurie.  He holds forth on what it means to be great at something, and while I don`t recall the exact words Newman spoke, the gist, the lesson I have always taken from that famous scene is that I`m not trying to show what I can do.  I`m trying to show what can be done.  I`m not here to impress.  I`m here to inspire.

          This is why I was making such a pest of myself that night at Futureshop.  I still hold to this idealism that a page of mine, like a drifting leaf, will carry itself on the wind and find itself in the hands of somebody who can make good use of it.

          The young woman behind the counter could still feel my stress, with the clock ticking away to the start of the show.  It seemed that whenever she had the article lined up properly, it didn’t co-ordinate with the top feeder on the printer.  At one point, we allowed probably thirty pages go through before I realized that we were once again losing a column of characters.  To make matters worse, the line up of customers was growing.  This poor woman was going back and forth between the customers and this project.  She repeated that she could still feel my stress, and probably with a dash of own.  I wanted to tear myself away, go to the movie section and read the backs of DVDs for a while while this mess was sorted out without me.  But I couldn’t leave.

          Above all, I was becoming angered with the situation, and it was because I felt so impotent.  Here these people were bending over backwards to help me, and I was becoming testy with them.  My own words galloped back to me as I remembered telling my last girlfriend, that she hated people who helped her, and she was always needing help.

          Maybe I was projecting.  Projecting her projections.

          But buried among the failed sheets, I found two pieces that were properly shrunk that had somehow fallen by the wayside.  I taped them together and called the clerk’s attention to what I had done.  For some reason, they still didn’t line up laterally—the bottom margin was thick on one side while the top margin was thick on the other—but none of the characters were lost, nor any clarity from the shrinkage.  Lines were visible between the columns where they had been sliced by the paper cutter, but the document didn’t look that bad all things considered.  It was reminiscent of an artsy volume from a small press–a little “ghetto”, as the kids call it.

          I  called a cab while the printer was still knocking off copies.  Once again, it was a tense situation as my call may have been premature.  I think my greatest difficulties in life result from always being in a hurry.  Before leaving, I gave the two clerks and the manager coupons for Sportchek, also promising to make a post on my Princess Margaret blog, and to donate twenty dollars of my own money in Futureshop’s name.  They said it wasn’t necessary to donate the money, but insisted on it as I probably would have ended up spending more on the copy run had Staples been open. 

The cab arrived shortly.  The stress of the situation was now taking it’s toll.  I felt like weeping or screaming.  I told the story to the driver in an attempt at therapy, in the hope that I could divest myself of these negative feeling before arriving at the show.  We stopped at my house to get my harmonica case and equipment, as well as the beer.  Even the tiny inconvenience of having to re-enter my debit information had me stressed, and the driver laughed at me before taking his leave. 

Patrick hadn’t made it out to the beer store, but I was happy to share mine.  He already had the attic cleaned up, as well as the sound system set up that was kindly donated by Mark Rodford of the Cornerstone.  I felt slightly alien as I always do, and as in fact most people in general do when they find themselves in a situation with other people who are more relaxed than themselves.  I ranted for a few minutes, but choosing my words carefully as I was aware of my current status as an ambassador to this cause.

At this point we were waiting for the first band to arrive.  We had put them on the bill after the previous weekend when a friend of mine said she was thinking of getting her brother a gig for Christmas.  I jumped on it right away, without having heard the band at all, perhaps trusting in Jess’s taste in music.  As it turned out, Bleet did not disappoint.  The were a duet of drums and bass, and they brought the house down.  I was thoroughly impressed with their nuanced arrangements within the framework of hard rock (I’m a little bit of yesterday’s man when it comes to the sub-genres of heavy metal.  I could be doing Bleet a grave injustice in my categorization.  Such is not intended.)

As expected, the crowd was young.  I wish I could say that I didn’t regard them with the suspicion of an older man, but I did, and would be surprised with this crop.

One young man who in any other instance I would have not given the time day owing to my own old prejudices impressed and embarrassed the hell out of me with his praise for what he was doing, and his knowledge of cancer and the odds we all stand of contracting it.  This kid half my age took me to school.  Another young man recognized a quote from Vonnegut I made use of in the essay, and expressed to me at length the effect that it had on his own way of seeing the world.  He was also a jazz guitarist who was a fan of Ed Bickert.  On the basis of this alone, I would have to say that those who say the youth of today aren’t worth much aren’t worth much themselves.  Dragging the rest of us down, they are.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to perform with Patrick at the end of the show as we had planned.  Peace officers had arrived to issue a warning, in the course of which involving themselves in an argument with one of the attendees that resulted in the issuing of a ticket for a noise complaint.  Tensions were high.  Threats were made of the issuing of assault charges for disrespecting the uniform.  I had been forced in the past under worse circumstances to talk to the police while under the influence when others didn’t want to.  In that previous instance, I had drawn on my training as an actor to get through an unpleasant and potentially dangerous situation.  In this case, I drew on my experience as a security guard to empathise with the position of the peace officers who were expected to be authoritative in a dearth of respect.  By the time a police cruiser arrived, we more or less saw eye to eye, agreeing that no challenge would be made by the peace officers to our future attempt to overturn the ticket.  I also spoke with the young man who initially argued with the peace officer, advising him that in the future he treat authority figures as he would expect to be treated by them; as a blank slate. 

We were all hanging around in the kitchen sharing our parts of the story.  I was confident everything would turn out okay.  Whatever my failings, I’m still gifted in some respects.  I can talk to the police.  I can listen to the young.  I can ride my bike from Toronto to Niagara Falls, though I haven’t done that yet.  What I’ve learned ultimately these days are the joys of living my life as an artist.  I’m quitting drinking and devoting myself to life in general and the life of the artist in particular.  I am mending he schism of my mind between what I want and what I can do to achieve it, in the course of helping others.  I am living the life I always though I should be living.  I made that invisible passage in the form of a simple realization while bent over a paper cutter at Futureshop.

Everything I hoped to be, I am.       

 

admin The Princess Margaret Hospital Ride to Conquer Cancer

A Most Tripping Vindication of Altruism

January 31st, 2009

I sometimes think of an acquaintance from High School, Mike MacArthur.  I wasn’t close friends with him, only having one conversation wit him when we were taking the same bus together from Toronto back home to Acton.  I don’t even remember what we talked about.  I remember him nonetheless as a sober fellow with a complementary and possibly sly sense of humour.   

          I was very open in those days about my medical condition in the way one is when their very livelihood is not directly threatened by stigma.  At that time I lived in public housing a few doors from Mike. He was married to his high school sweetheart with whom he had two children—a real life in contrast to the dreams on which I subsisted of literary fame and polemical notoriety.  I still have those dreams, and they are still unfulfilled but no less grandiose.  I firmly believe that while those dreams haven’t completely come true, I feel sometimes that I am successful beyond my wildest dreams for all the wonderful inspirations I’ve experienced.

          I’m very lucky.  Luckier than I deserve, considering the abuses I’ve laid on myself.  I smoked cigarettes for half my life, drank to excess throughout my teens and twenties, imbibed in a variety of street drugs, survived one suicide attempt in the course of generally suicidal behaviour, and remained even after my recovery from the consequences of this lifestyle somewhat rootless and noncommittal, even if my idealism remained undimmed.  This is not to mention other failings I’ve harboured, such as impatience, selfishness, aloofness, et al.

          So for one who has spent much of his time preoccupied with the way things should be as opposed to the way things are, how can I make sense of Mike MacArthur’s death from a brain tumour leaving behind a wife and two little children while I lived my less than exemplary life?

          Where is the sense?

          This is the kind of question which cannot be flatly answered but rather circled around in hopes of catching a glimpse of the truth.   

          Back in my heady days of teenage binge reading, I devoured Kurt Vonnegut, remembering to this day a quote from his brother Bernard that served as a guiding principle for the autobiographical fantacist.

          “We’re all here to help each other get through it.”

 

          This leaves us with a dilemma that would amuse Louis Carroll.  To borrow directly from Kurt this time, “Live so you can say to God, I was a good man, even if I didn’t believe in you.”  The Vonneguts apparently revelled in these mind-bending Escher-esque mobius concepts.  Bernard Vonnegut seems to be implying, rather convincingly, that there is no sense in altruism, and that senselessness is rather the natural state of altruism.  This needs to be emphasised strongly.  The entire reason I’m writing this is because over the years people of “good sense” have sought to vindicate the philosophy of pragmatism, and to a further extent, selfishness, arguing that these philosophies are grounded in common sense.  But the problem with common sense, as I’m always found of quoting from Descartes, is that those who possess it never wish more of it for themselves.

          Woody Allan once famously remarked that life is better than the alternative.  This is simply a hyper-condensation of Hamlet’s more famous “To be or not to be…” soliloquy.  Hamlet was often said to be lackadaisical in nature, caught up in abstractions, and the people who insist on this are somewhat troublingly dismissive of the great lengths to which Hamlet went to determine the veracity of the claims made by the ghost of his father, as well as the state of his own mind.  Purpose-driven people, or for the sake of argument, “materialists” would argue that Hamlet should have knocked off Claudius when he first got the chance.  But to do so while the usurper was praying would have ensured his entry into heaven, which would also have completely defeated the purpose.  This lends itself to the theory I’ve long held, contrary to that pillar of the law, that justice need not always be seen to be done in order to be done. In fact, as Steven Truscott or Guy Paul Morin will tell you, any extraneous effort that is made to render justice visible to us almost always results in injustice.  Therefore justice, or in the case of this tract, “sense” is relative to one’s plane of existence.

          This would come as a surprise to Mike MacArthur’s family, for whom there is no sense in his passing at such a young age and with so much in his life that is meaningful.  But I argue the point; I write this essay, because there are many who believe that there is sense in death if it leaves more room on the earth for the rest of us.  So they render justice out of senselessness in order to attribute meaning to tragedy moreover to exempt themselves from sympathy, empathy, and conscience.  Therefore it isn’t only the Malancholy Dane who is lackadaisical. 

          Furthermore, while we are all willing to acknowledge that idealism taken to extremes can be dangerous and self-defeating, we need to also recognise the danger of pragmatism taken to similar lengths.  I believe this is the case in our current day, when in the name of pragmatism, we diminish the flatly unknown and unimagined potential of the human heart, mind, and body.  If idealism is silent against death (with which cancer is essentially inter-changeable) then what good is idealism at all?  What then is the purpose of pragmatism if it has no idealism to reign in?  Would pragmatism not instead be a rationale for complacency and apathy?  It seems to me that we must be bold against death while we are still here on earth—rather than accept it as a means of population control—as we have no idea what sicknesses await us in our future that could threaten our survival as a species, as well as the future Bill Hicks optimistically spoke of in which we feed the world and then explore space forever.  

          “Helping each other get through it” is an unsatisfactory answer to materialists, and life being better than the alternative is unsatisfactory to idealists.  Ultimately, I’m playing with ideas in the course of penetrating ideological orthodoxies, and I’m playing with other people’s ideas as well, whether they like it or not.  But what I can conclude from all this, with respect to Bernard Vonnegut and Woody Allan, is this:

 

          “We’re all here to help each other get through it because doing so is better than the alternative.”

 

          And that should make everybody happy.

 

admin The Princess Margaret Hospital Ride to Conquer Cancer

Hwy. 7, Summer, ‘08

January 31st, 2009

Heffernan Bridge, Winter, ‘09

January 31st, 2009

MacDonnell Bridge, Winter, ‘09

January 31st, 2009

Old Mill, Guelph

January 31st, 2009

 

 

 

 

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