Civilized Fog

Some people don't understand the value of silence. It bookends talk. Talk would have no meaning if it were not surrounded by silence. When I see the 'Silence is Golden' screen come up right before the movie starts, I smile from ear to ear and relax a little.

Where is that silence and peace when I need it?

Where are those friends and lovers when I'm afraid of how quiet it is?

I will always quest to have it both ways.

Make some new amends

Feeling sorry for yourself is so easy. It's a trap. Displacing responsibility for problems that are yours alone to solve offers false comfort. It's shirking, at its core. We must refuse to engage in it.

Just wait and see, cause the rest is yet to reveal itself to me

This was the year of independence.
Depend only on love and the ones who love me
This was the year of confidence.
The self is strong, believe it and see it
This was the year of Allan.

My task: conquer 2011

To you I'm a symbol or a monument

The pace is what frightens me.

Following people who knew half as much as they should, but twice as much as me at the time.

Acceleration is the best, when you're throwing extra fuel on the engines, and they're throwing the power right back at you, all ankles and thighs flashing, stick your tongue out as fast as you can go.

We went back there and I could remember everything, being nervous, being properly insane in youth, being entirely unready for anything; memories flashed at me through trees and down twisting paths to the river.

in love with love and lousy poetry

Opening Ceremony

Isn't it funny, what you notice?
Her hair falls around her face, short,
not too much cared for.
Skin, in this light, is scarred with blotchy teenage battle-wounds.

Eyes with a magic laugh in them,
that she does not bother to guard from view.
Doesn't shy from looking at you
Doesn't need anything from me, but wants my attention

Full of life,
full of knowing everything
You anticipate her presence in every moment:
She's there,
where she wasn't before

Something in the way of explanation, belated

A plowed field with little puddles in the furrows that overtop their banks, reminders of the deluge a week past. Like a memory of it but not the real thing. Sad in their way of reminding us of what's gone and can't come back.

An older man walking down a concrete path to his car in the company lot. Weathered blue jacket and work pants, he drives home to an empty house, falls asleep alone to wake tomorrow and go to work again.

The way the light falls on the train approaching sunset, slightly dulled yellow-orange, passes over it and makes shadows on the other side.

Empty streets in the dusk where no one goes. Open doors left open unattended and broken windows uncared for.

The open expanse of the harbor at Lynn, blue-black and soulless, looks like it goes on forever.

These things I saw from my window. They were sad, but didn't sadden me.

"50% deep, 50% bullshit"

Occurs to me now that my life is going great. Just fantastic. I could not, should not, ask for more. And yet it seems to be the default human condition to never be satisfied!

Want more, get more, find something that's better than what you have, because what you have can never be enough. I'm trying so hard to break free of this mentality and the constant inferiority that it entails, but it takes a lot of effort and conscious striving to realize that what you have is good. It's enough and it can be great if you would only take a moment to look at it and see it in front of you.

I think I could be happy this way. Without too much, but surely with enough. It's like the saying, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". That only works if you don't let yourself be overtaken by the thought of having two birds, and constantly longing to have them. You still have a bird in your hand, and that's dinner tonight!

a thought or two for the evening

There's not enough time in the world to do everything. There's not enough time to floss every day, read books, magazines, and the vast internet, work out, eat healthy, clean the house, visit with all your acquaintances regularly, and take day trips around New England.

There are a million different forces pulling us in all sorts of disparate directions every minute. The best I can do is to work hard and be myself. Some things I won't get to, and I have to make myself believe that that's all right, or I will explode from the worry that I forgot something, or that I'm missing some essential part of my life. It's OK! You can't be all things to all people all the time. It's enough to be yourself.

More sad than angry, really

The thoughts going through my head of a Sunday morning:

Why do people go looking for trouble so much? There must be something in you that knows that if you bring a knife out to a bar and you're going to be doing some drinking, the odds are pretty good that you might end up using it. And where does that get you? Where? There's something so base and idiotic about the enormous pride that humans have. So what, you protected your reputation? You're going to stab someone to prove how tough you are?

How can this ever leave anyone better off? Someone gets stabbed, and you keep your reputation for being tough. And where has that ever gotten you? Back in a bar, getting in a fight, and stabbing someone

To uphold your reputation.

Which meant nothing to begin with.

It destroys me, the lengths that people go to to prove how tough they are, how they're 'hard'. What's better, you back down and let it go, or you pull out your knife and stab someone? You're going to jail, they're going to the hospital at best, dead at worst. Where does that leave us? What did you gain? It burns me up to even think about this, because I can't understand the mentality of these people. And I have to live here, I have to try to mind my own business, I have to stay off my street when the bars are closing, I have to watch out so I don't get pulled into your fights, your trouble, your stupid pride. And yes, I chose to live here. I don't have to live on Harvard Ave, where there are 10 bars in a mile radius. But you don't have to bring a weapon to the bar with you. You don't have to pick a fight. You don't have to be here! If you're going to the Kells on a Saturday night, you're probably a certain type of person who knows that fight might break out, and welcomes that possibility. But goodness gracious, you don't have to stab someone to prove how tough you are. Leave my neighborhood alone, for the love of God.

And it burns me too, the pride that people take in this kind of thing. There were people last night, gathered at the police lines, hooping and hollering. As in, the people who got stabbed got what they deserved. As in, someone's going to the hospital, but we kept our rep! To me that's beyond the pale. People are celebrating that they've sacrificed a human life to their pride. What is wrong with us? I know this doesn't happen too often, I know that I live a safe and privileged life, but I cannot let this stand. If one person dies, in Boston, for the sake of pride, it's one too many. It's not fair to take a life for your reputation. Live and let live.

ditto

He gathered the strength
in his hulking legs
High-school athlete, Saturday star
all triceps and sinew
he prepared for the moment of glory

Muscles tensed, gaze fixed on his object,
He grasped the carton and slung it heavily into the delivery truck

goodness gracious

And leave Tiger alone, eh? There's no way this is anyone's business but his. Don't give me that TMZ bullshit.

What happened to people being discreet?

doublethink

The amount of information that google can and does collect about users of its services is staggering and frightening. I don't mean to scare you, o estimable reader, but through the magic of google Analytics I can find out what city you live in, what Internet browser and Operating system you use, and what language your computer is set to. Big Brother, anyone?

I'm not really making any comment, just putting it out there. I know far too much about who may be reading these very words. Spooky.

my eardrums for a moment of peace

The question, fellow Romans, is how we could possibly endure approximately three weeks of commercial radio Christmas tunes at the workplace, supposedly a sacred place? And how can a radio station possibly sell this tired trick of attempting to go all-Christmas 24 hours a day for nearly a month straight? It is a fool's-errand. Nobody, but nobody, needs 24-hour a day Christmas songs.

And the repeats. O, the awful repeats. Mariah Carey's frighteningly exuberant All I Want for Christmas is You, in which she sounds positively tickled to be desperately pining for her significant other at Christmas time. Paul McCartney doing an interminable, and very, very dated 80's-style (it came out in 1979) holiday song, of which every other line appears to be the dread refrain "Siii-imply haaa-aaving a wonderful Christmas time."

Elvis Presley with Blue Christmas, which is fine, but no one needs to hear it more than once a day (we had it twice in four hours already yesterday), even at Christmas time. And the real problem at the root of all this holiday-themed sonic evil: today was only Monday, November 30th. What will we do for 23 more days when today was already jam-packed with repeats, played within lit'rally 4 hours of each other as if there weren't offices which through no fault of their own had been listening all the live-long day.

And besides all this, have you ever actually listened to the words of these Christmas songs? They are intolerably bad. The only thing they do is rhyme, the only thing. They are nearly devoid of meaning. We desperately need new Christmas songs (By the way, I actually enjoy the more religious Christmas songs that deal with the nativity and all, but you don't really get those on commercial stations like WODS Boston, usually a much-loved oldies station for me, transformed into a hideous holiday monster of trite, oft-repeated, cookie-cutter (how appropriate!) Christmas sentiments).

Let's run down what the Christmas songs say. All of them seem to come back to these several themes:

-Christmas is the BEST time of year. No serious person may question this.

-Snow is fun, even though it may at times be 'frightful'. Those are the times when it's a good excuse to spend more time with your beloved.

-You are always surrounded by many loved ones at Christmas. Relations with these people are blissful, always.

-It's no fun to be away from your beloved at Christmas time. You should aspire to be with them, and write a song about it if you can't.

-Sleighs

If you have any other themes, let me know, but I think those are the major ones.

Christmas seems to be so much a sham right now. A sale masquerading as a cultural institution. People whip themselves into a frenzy with Christmas music and tear themselves up over what to get for their loved ones. Just enjoy the time off, don't get stressed out about stupid stuff, and spend time with your family. Because a man that doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man. Just take it easy. And lay off the 24-hour Christmas songs, they will drive you nuts.

A postscript: And today, Amanda's computer at work contracted a virus from a Christmas music website and had to be sent away to the help desk. It goes to show that the age-old maxim is true: If you play fast and loose with Christmas music, you're bound to get burned.

take 'er easy

First blog post from Canadian soil

First USA Thanksgiving spent on Canadian soil

Canadian soil never tasted so good, etc. etc.

Went to the supermarket today here and saw a can of Habitant 'Soupe aux Pois'

I must explore squash. There are great possibilities in squash

I won't leave without sampling poutine, which is not spelled phonetically

spackle

There are only two rackets in this town: the Canadian whiskey racket, the integrated information management business, and the illegal fur trade. I chose the latter, and I've been kicking myself ever since.

Amoto quaeramus seria ludo

It Just Is

I like seeing things for what they are, but also not trying to see in them what's not there. I read David Foster Wallace and find that there is rich humor throughout. Do I ask why? I do not. I would like to advance the notion, perhaps forgotten, that enlightened people can enjoy art, music, literature, food, or anything else, without knowing the minutiae of its underpinnings.

The chicken is free range from southern Alberta, raised on handpicked rye and winter wheat as well as organic tulip bulbs. It's marinated in a Sonoma Valley white made with 100% sustainable Chardonnay grapes pollinated by ladybugs, along with some basil I raised from seed and ginger from Sichuan province in China. Of course, I don't need to mention that, really, a civilized person wouldn't use anything but Sichuan ginger. Would anyone like some more pesticide-free fetal asparagus?

Thank you, I really didn't need to know that. If something tastes good, maybe that's all there is to it. That's why we say it tastes good, rather than saying, oh, it's made out of fresh local ingredients derived from sustainable farming techniques and I know every stinking detail down to the chicken was born on a freaking Wednesday. If you saw an attractive person, you wouldn't start guessing about which side of her family the Roman nose came from, or whether the steely gray eyes are a recessive trait. No, you would say, that is a suitably attractive person for me to mate with, or something less creepy-sounding along those lines. We seem to have an unhealthy obsession with analyzing things, so that we can't see the forest for the trees.

Just let it be.

How long, how long?

It's fall. That can't be denied anymore when you look outside. When your feet get cold just sitting around the house. When you have to put on a sweatshirt to spend any length of time outside. When the light changes. When you get that little bit of fear in the pit of your stomach, that the warm weather is gone, and who knows if it's ever coming back?

There's a smell of chill in the air, and you can foresee the real cold coming, fall can just be the forerunner of winter. The leaves will fall, the temperature will fall, and April's a long way off.

It frightens me.

The fast-food chain doth protest too much, methinks

"I like not fair terms and a villain's mind"

The idea that McDonald's is trying to tell me what a real New Englander is, and how such a person feels, disgusts me on a level that I cannot express in words.

And by the way, fools, a real New Englander would never say the phrase "real New Englander". You sicken me with your pathetic attempts to connect to people. Your so-called restaurants are dehumanizing assembly lines for disgusting, nearly inedible food, which people only eat because it is cheap, and likely addictive. It is clear to any impartial observer that our society would be much better off without the influence and presence of McDonald's. Begone!

(Obviously I'm on some kind of little Shakespeare run here)

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall

Can a man's worth be measured by the number of times, while suspended and gripping a bar, he can use the muscles in his arms to pull his body's weight upwards and raise his chin above the level of the bar he is gripping?

I certainly hope not.

musing

Hear cars swooping by on Harvard Ave. Feel tennis soreness in the right tricep from hitting wicked forehand winners yesterday. Perceive cool breeze of a Boston September night. Decompress and rest feet from standing all day.


Let it go.