My treat-loving squirrel must be resting the last few days. I see no imaginary tiny hats on a furry head, no one scampers across the skinny neighbour’s garage roof. The tree is empty of more than just it’s leaves, with the resident beast not out or about, not resting on the big branches. His/her part of the parade past my window has changed, tilted slightly. M. Squirrel is… absent. There are no further daily mysteries to report upon. I have no dried out cookies or doughnuts at my doorstep today, none yesterday. I am concerned.
I would call the authorities, excepting that my understanding is they will not search for and I may not report one gone missing for at least 48 hours after the event.

It seems that %90 of missing squirrels return on their own within a 48 hour time period. According to the cops, It’s true of people as well. The men and women in blue (or red blazers and funny hats, depending)may have a point when they caution that creatures slip out of their habits occasionally. I had an uncle who disappeared for days, months at a time every little once in a while. He went to Chicago sometimes, to Florida once. Maybe M. Squirrel is in Chicago? That must be it. M. does not need to go to Florida, he hasn’t gone bankrupt and won’t be able to take advantage of the quite liberal property laws there. I read that in Florida, Jared and Ivanka may keep their primary residence safe from creditors. It doesn’t matter how lavish or pricey the primary residence is, the creditors may not seize it. M. Squirrel could have a primary residence there, too, if it were necessary. It is not. M. has no issue with the banks, being quite independant and frugal. He may act ‘squirrelly’ the way J. and I. do, but he is a much more careful manager. He stays off twitter and out of the newspapers.

I do worry about M. Squirrel and hope he hasn’t gone off to some sort of rendezvous with accident. Such alignments are our fate as living creatures (and I consider myself of that ilk). Accident abounds, waits in the bushes for us. Accident drives too fast down our little laneway and catches up with it’s title. (Bear that in mind, new renters! I see you Zooming by my window!) That is just part of it. Though we are each integral to the scheme and important in our own ways, accidents do happen. We go missing for 48hours, sometimes for more. Sometimes the missing part is permanent. There are folks who blame God when accidents happen but I don’t. God didn’t create accidents – read your bible. He created the heavens and the earth and all the walkers, crawlers, swimmers and birds of the air but there wasn’t a mention of accident. I don’t even think that Satan created accidents. Accidents are called accidents for a reason – they happen by accident. God may smite you or Satan may get you to sign a contract but it won’t be an accident. I have been smitten, I have signed contracts and I know.

Poor M. Squirrel. If something untoward has happened, I don’t know what I would do without him. He is a part of the story of my laneway neighbourhood. He is a part of the ‘fabric’ as they say. This entire ‘fabric’ is called Otton Lane but might as well be called ‘Sesame Street’. I say ‘Sesame Street’ because M. Squirrel used to leave a sesame seed bagel on my window sill every little once in a while. At first, I thought it was possibly a gift from the ‘Mayor’. A gift meant to erase hard feelings between us. A gift meant to say, “I apologize for doing a Google search and analysis of you and telling the other neighbours what to do”. It wasn’t. I discovered this recently. One day, I caught M. Squirrel banging a hardened sesame bagel on the brick to break off a piece for lunch. He was making more noise than the Mayor claimed I was. The sound made was a curious tapping, or rapping, somewhere near my front door and I went to check. It was M. I miss that irritating sound already and it hasn’t been more than 48 hours.

M. Squirrel is(was) one of many creature characters here. There are other similarities, like that, to the TV version of Sesame Street. For example, M. and some of the others here have fur, notably Skinny Shirtless Guy with his little beard, but none have blue fur. None have yellow feathers and stand six feet tall. None are green with webbed feet. As well, only M. Squirrel eats/ate cookies messily. There is no person or thing named Bert and none Ernie. I should say that with reservation because I haven’t learned the name of Skinny Shirtless Guy or Mysterious Sneaky Slouching Guy. Either of them could be a Bert or an Ernie. Lastly, there is me. Though I am not on the TV version of Sesame street, I am here. I direct things from my seat by the window. I make up little stories about the folks and beasts, their trials, tribulations, successes.

Here on ‘Sesame Street/Otton Lane’, I am the only resident celebrity. I am the famous writer who can’t get published and can’t get book tours anymore, so I live here. The people who watch ‘Otton Lane’ don’t know who I am though I am still famous. The producers say I lend an air of ‘respectability’ to the proceedings. There are times I invite another celebrity over to sing a couple songs about the letter Z…(that’s not true. I do have celebrities over but I can’t figure out how to get them to play or sing. I am working on that. I think they probably want to be paid.) When my celebrity friends are here, we tell stories to each other so the people watching can learn about M. Squirrel and M. Pussaycat. It eases the monotony of singing, “A – a deer a female deer. B – a drop of golden sun…” for them. Plus, we aren’t supposed to sing anymore.

If I think about it, I suppose M. Squirrel could have legitimate, unrelated to accident reasons for being absent. Under the latest Covid restrictions, M. might be in quarantine. That explains his absence. He/she must be watching Netflix and eating the bagel or cookies or doughnuts alone. Next time he is out and about, I bet he weighs more than I do. We will have a weighing-in contest. He will get on the scale, then I will. The first one of us to cause the scale to make a creaking noise wins. I can hardly wait for the 48 hours to be up so that I can report M. missing, if he still is.

This year is closing in on the next year. Days are shorter, most of the birds have gone on to their un-travel-restricted vacation homes. The squirrels are busy as heck, running around and packing the last few calories on before they start taking their intermittent breaks, the little siestas. Hard done by, lawnmowers are silent. Each breeze has hardened itself a bit, chills what it kisses or bruises what it punches. Everything is wrapping up, maybe with a bright little bow of expectation for a time that is assumed to return, maybe in plain brown. Maybe a hinted possibility of returning spring sifts into your memory, triggered by the last leaf from the year of 2020 drifting down. In the mean-time, this next shift must start. Having ground down to temporary halt, routine will hesitate for a while. Dressed for work in washed out non-colour grey/white and utter darkness, the quiet of an earth gone silent a spell is ready to begin it’s task.

It is at this point, we can let go. Approaching winter reminds that what can be done has been done, we are prepared or not. Nature will proceed in it’s own way, no sense belabouring anything more. It is now that a brief light of celebration will glow in the hearts of us – pagan or otherwise. Relax, what is, is. Perhaps best of all, this year is a turn of government down south. I am so ready, the rest of the world is so ready. Going to be a different sort of year coming up. One way or another, Trump will be fading out of the news cycle soon. I am grateful for that. He already has lost part of the front page to the other things and people that have been happening all along. There is, indeed, something beyond a narcissitic, pathetic small boy and his antics, tantrums, ruses.

It still astounds me that folks will follow Donny and others of his ilk, when they so obviously are the worst possible choices as leader. I think of the arrogance of Moamar Qaddafy, the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the unstable treachery and ruthlessness of Josef Stalin. None of that seems to be remembered long. After the perpetrators of evil are gone on to their inevitable rewards, a time comes that folks forget. It is as though the comfortable fat summer of any new tyrant’s illusory success lulls a tiny mind to complacence. Memory dims or doubts itself. Then, as ever, in a final gasp of glory, the Emperor parades in his new clothes one fine autumn day. In the current case of the United States of America, half the people see nothing of substance and have prepared for coming winter, half the people celebrate. Did Trump win a new suit of clothes or is he parading naked?

Hm. We are about to see a proof of what is, a change is beginning. There is nothing more to be worried over. Winter has settled. All that can be done is done. History shows that the Emperor’s clothing is in the eye of the beholder and that half of the beholders are going to be proven wrong. Half the beholders/witnesses are warmly dressed, half believe themselves to be but are not. Some will get chilly. The birds are gone, the squirrels busy, the grey/white and darkness is upon us. Chillax, if we freeze to death, nothing can be done anyway. Hm. Maybe, I should turn up my cheap-skate thermostat?

I am lately running later and later in the day to get started on work projects. Today is a further expansion of my time at idle. The Covid conditions are affecting me as well as all the rest of us. It will take a long while for folks to understand and recover from this sense of isolation. Even the folks who have eschewed mask-wearing and staying home are feeling the effects. You can see it in faces you pass, the eyes tell the story. Some are frustrated, angry, blaming government, wanting government to do less than governments are doing world-wide. Some are subdued, fearful, wanting governments to do more than they have done. It is often said that ‘you can’t have it both ways’.

Are governments doing the right thing? I don’t know. I don’t think any one knows. There isn’t a history, there isn’t a precedent other than 1918. The plague doesn’t count because at that time, there was far less knowledge of the human body and diseases it is susceptible of. The plague was bad, the flu pandemic of 1917-18 or so was awful, too. Millions died. During the plague, governments tried to intervene but had no idea what to do, what measures would help. In 1918, governments reacted almost identically to what is happening now. Schools went outdoors or closed and there were various degrees of other lockdown measures. Our case is little different in that respect. No, so far Covid and it’s forbears, ‘sars’ etcetera have not destroyed millions of lives. The likely reason for that is the sets of precautions governments have put in place. The anti-vax and anti-mask crowd haven’t thought about that.

So. Here we sit, champing at the bit of Covid-19. We are eager to get back but unaware there is no getting back. Times have changed, for good. For better, for worse? Who knows. The only thing we know is that times have changed. Predictably, some folks roll with the changes, some rebel against them. How many of us do which one is a crucial matter. Since Covid has been politicized, I have a good guess at our immediate future. Judging strictly on the vast number of people who voted for Donald Trump – we are going to have some rocky road for a while. I have a suspicion that those folks are the ones less willing to accept the changes our world is traveling through. Those changes are more than Covid restrictions.

We have taken capitalism to our breaking point. The future, if we are to survive, looks more to be in the hands of some sort of democratic socialism. That is where we have to go. That is where we will likely end up, no matter what. It was rampant capitalism that cut down all the hardwood trees in North America. Capitalism flooded the air, the rivers and lakes with poisons, continues to do so.Capitalism and imperialism enslaved the dark skinned folks, stripped them of their cultures and heritage, robbed them of anything they owned. Capitalism destabilized the world, creating a huge underclass and a tiny upper class. Capitalism impoverished generations of folks. Capitalism drives it’s shiny new car down broad throughfares, leaving the majority of folks in the dust. Those folks are grim-faced and ready to explode.

Innovation, ambition are not bad things. Rewarding them is not a bad thing. Essentially, the idea of capitalism is not a bad thing. Yes, for effort expended a person should be rewarded. I should be able to sustainably make of myself what I can, do what I wish, live as I wish. That would be a pure Capitalism, taking what I have and building something better out of it. We have seen that our capitalist forms are not pure. They don’t advance us as a group. We are susceptible of a horrific corruption, where greed and any number of other base human traits drive us apart, imprisoning some and freeing others. We are marching toward destruction. We are not working together. We are not building together. We are working for ourselves, disregarding the group.

Covid and the Donald brought out who we are for all to see. We are cold, we are not community. The small businesses suffer, the large ones with political clout have enriched themselves. The mask fools are spreading Covid as fast as they speak. Those in masks become targets. Vaccines will subdue some of this but the evidence is clear that we are self-absorbed, gone shallow. We have weak politicians who are bowing to the multi-nationals and leaving the less moneyed and therefore powerless on the sidelines. We believe in tyrants of all descriptions, far-left, far-right.

Of course, only half of us do believe and behave badly. Only half of us are pro-right wing. Only half of us pro-left wing. Only half of us promote an indiscriminate individualism. Only half of us promote a restrictive groupism. Only half of us are pulling against the other half. If we survive, a sense of duty to the group will combine with a duty to the self. It will have to balance into a sort of social democracy, where we take care of each other and the planet before we build towers and monuments.

Someone else will almost certainly say, “yesterday, December 7, 1941…etcetera”, today. I said it first thing in the morning, even though it won’t be effective until tomorrow morning. I got the jump on it. Actually, I didn’t ‘jump on it’ exactly. I did something more akin to sitting and typing on it. Since I had a nice cup of coffee before sitting and typing, I will be sitting on something else very soon. Sigh. Those who know me well will understand what I am talking about. My old friend and confidante, Mr. Coffee, has betrayed me in my later years. I have had incidents. Some of the incidents have been international, some more local. During the most heinous of my international incidents, a perfectly good pair of new underwear were abandoned in an airport toilet waste bin. It was amusing but I did feel a little exposed for the remainder of my trip home. The coffee that caused my episode was delicious, as this morning’s cup was. ‘scuse me for a moment.

I am back. That little distraction put me in mind of something else. A difficulty, as we age, that no one seems to discuss is: wiping up after a movement and it’s more cumbersome elements. Myself, I can’t bend and twist to reach around my expanding girth very well. Severe arthritis and bone spurs at C6 make such elaborate ballet nearly impossible. There are times I have had to ‘go between’ and that just doesn’t seem right. It’s unnatural. Because a bidet is completely unseemly, I have threatened friends that I may simply install a post. I shall call it ‘does a bear..question mark’ post. The post will, of course, have a foot pedal that, when depressed, will pull a new sheet of environmentally friendly material around the post after each use. The used material will be wound on a second roller and later washed, reused. I think it is a brilliant idea. For the sake of getting the idea out there and working, anyone may use it without fear of copyright or patent infringement.

Next time we meet, if you offer me coffee then later notice a noxious odour and can’t determine whence it rises, remember and note; I will most certainly be the one grinning facetiously and sidling out of the room at the time the mystery unfolds. If I suddenly reappear, wearing a new outfit? No, I am not being effette and ‘dressing for dinner’. I am being fastidious. I am not in the cast of Downton Abbey, I am just little ol’ ordinary me. Grin. The scene has played before. It happened recently. It happened before December 7.

In a dramatic understatement, my days of infamy have not been as extreme as that of the year 1941. While that particular December day of shit was an extraordinary day, mine have thus far been only moderately embarrassing days. My days have not been horrible. December 7 is an anniversary of horror. Sadly, not the only one. There are so many days of horror to mark in a year that it’s easy to lose count. It is easy to confuse horror with the mundane. It is easy to become blase. The aroma of horror fills our lives like a familiar, noxious cloud we can’t identify. The aroma of horror entices a little sniff, a wrinkled nose and a look away. We prefer not to acknowledge. We prefer not to really know. Somehow, we pretend the real is not real. We don’t want to engage with what is at it’s very least, embarrassing.

I wonder that I don’t finally quit coffee. I do try but almost always surrender to it’s delightful aroma. I get drawn in, wary or not. Our leaders prefer not to really quit encouraging horrible things, ordering horrible things done, then we get drawn in. The aroma of power wins out over good sense, wins out over considered, mutual, respectful engagement. Over and over and over and over. The same process, the same result. Tomorrow, yesterday, ad nauseum. Well, then.

Power, corruption, lies and coffee. Mmmmmmmm, irresistable. We are human, that is the way of it. Unfortunately, though it would be lovely to continue our ways, we are getting older. The body is changing and won’t accept the same things, the same poisons. There are more of us every hour. We can’t bend the way we used to and will have to build something fanciful we can rub up against and get clean. It’s our only choice if we don’t quit. We have been delighting in the odour of killing/warring/nationalism/righteousness. We have been drinking it all in, even though we know what will happen. There is plenty of history. Lots of abandoned underwear at the side of the human road. Some of it sticks up from under the surface of Pearl Harbour.

I am back to blogging from home. It is now grey-weather winter and the semi-lockdown has re-arrived. I can only attend Starbucks for a pick-up. Simon, Brandon, Jorge and the girls (Alex, Large Blonde – who impresses me with her brightness – and Brunette – who has my tea ready when she sees me across the parking lot) shout out to me in the drive -through as I whisk by, sad of eye. I feel pressed to move along against the “Please! sit-and-write.” of previous days. I am moderately addicted to the anti-depressants. I spend far too much time scrolling social media and drowning in the news. As a result, I have tried to find time for preparing my manuscript for publishing but can’t seem to find energy. I can’t go a day or two without a pill and not have a stress incident of some kind. Speaking of medication, the vaccine is on it’s way but likely won’t be here in the quantities needed until next September. Sigh.

In spite of all this, I am changing my style an almost imperceptible bit. I think I am healing but the truth remains to be certified. Maybe we need a larger sample group. But…lately, when an incident starts to swamp me…I laugh. It’s a small moment that readjusts the thinking. For example, I was in the kitchen (a very common place for me these days at 255 lbs?) and I was getting frustrated. I spilled water, dropped a cup then kept misplacing a tea towel… I stopped in mid-panic and smiled at the ludicrous situation. All things were going in the opposite of my desired direction. I paused. I grunted my appreciation of the humour. The stress lifted. I went on about my business.

When everything piles up, I am paused in my ‘frozen moment’. I can’t move, think, breathe a second or two from time to time but a snort of amusement thaws me. Is it this way – was it this way, always, during wars, famine, collapse? Did the romans snort a quick laugh as Vesuvius rained down on their vacation homes? Did General Custer say, “Ooops, my bad”, as the knife slid across his throat? I should do some research. I will have to look it up on-line since my parents are now gone and I can’t ask them. They got out while the getting was good. Ha. “Dr. Google? what the h is goin’ on?”

Oh, dear me. I have complicated my life in ways that are not the least bit necessary. That realization started with my website experiment. I tried to make it cheaper because it seems silly to have one in the first place. WhY? I am not selling my writing there, just parking it somewhere that folks can access and bypass Facebook. Y’see, Facebook has some wicked fine print on ownership of your posts…I haven’t got a lawyer and haven’t been able to figure the legalese out. I am not satisfied that what I post on Facebook remains my intellectual property. So…I decided to keep the website, change it to a free one and then carry on as before. Turns out that it is more convoluted to change things up than I thought. I re-decided to keep the website as a personal website and pay the lower rate. Now, my domain name points to the wrong page? See what I mean? I have complicated things unnecessarily. All of this has happened because I am bored at home in lockdown? Sorta.

I discover that a lot of what else I am doing in my living is complicating the process of born-live-die in frustrating ways. Writing and music are other examples that further complicate the personal website debacle. As to writing. I did do it. I did write that full length novel. I did finish an entire book of poetry. I also spend every day whipping out at least a thousand words that fly up into my blog or get parked in my journal. Well and good. That works ok, no expectations of coherence or depth from the journal or blog. I can just write and leave it. The trouble comes when I start looking at my other writing, the poetry, the novel and realize how much work I have to do making it ring true, tell a meaningful story, entertain, edify…Shiza.

The music? Well now, it is almost comically bad. I sit at the piano and disgust myself, I sing and that damned E4 eludes me every time. I hit it high, I hit it low. Sigh. I am certainly a regular Mrs. Miller or a Florence Foster Jenkins. Lots of work needs to be done in the Bright Tunes department if I am to produce a recording or a performance of any value beyond, “Hey, Aunt Liz is going to play a little something she has been working on for the last ten years.” These things are complications because I want music, writing and creative things to have value as more than a personal exercise in keeping myself busy. This here Velveteen rabbit wants to be real and real is way hard work. I don’t have the time left for the work, I procrastinated and spent a heck of a lifetime trying to be someone other than the person I am.

Sigh. Here I am, now… A potential novel ahead of me yet, as some 70,000 words sit there and await redrafting. A potential album of music is sitting there, uncompleted, unrehearsed. From while to while, I pick the things up and thrash away at them again, energized to complete something useful but each renewed vigour day is a day to realize how sad the work is, yet. It is difficult to accept, what with believing that I don’t have value if I don’t succeed in the endeavors I chose. At seventy, I still labour to accept myself just as he is. I am a man of ambition but I am also, a common man. I have built a series of lop-sided birdhouses that are the kinds of things simply overlooked. When staring at my reflection and asking ‘who is fairest’, I still see that bloody Snow White! She is showing me how little I have accomplished, how much remains to do, how I still put the hard work of changing into what I would wish to be away to the side.

Actually, it may not be possible to ‘be anything you want to be, go anywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do — if you try hard enough.’ There are limits. Was Sonny Bono a good songwriter? No, not really. Did he try hard enough? um…Yeah, yeah he did. Did he achieve something? Well, yes. He became Aunt Liz at the piano and a lucky Aunt Liz. What he did not become was greater than he was. We have ourselves in our own way. Ourselves are formidable obstacles. Ourselves are our limits.

I am not suggesting that we should not bother to try, to make attempts at something we consider more than, better than. No. We need to get up off the couch. The thing is this: Expecting ourselves to be more, to be better — criticizing ourselves when we don’t succeed… Those aren’t useful motivators. All they do is measure you downward and take the joy of doing away from you. I think I understand now that dropping a negative objective view is the best way to get your job done. Don’t listen to the little coach voice screaming at you, “You can do better! You must do better!” You can still be realistic but the thing is to drop the self-consciousness and just do what you want, be who you like without expectations. I don’t guess that a thing is pure if doing it to perfection is the only focus. Expectation of perfection is what complicates your life. Remembering that you have weaknesses is not a bad thing but allowing the weaknesses to take away your joy of living is the foolish part. Funny thing is, I have the feeling that those who just accept themselves as they are — also accept others more readily as being who and what they are. “Mmm-hmmm”, I can hear somebody’s mama say.

I opened the New York Times today. No pictures of a guy in a red baseball cap golfing, no re-broadcast tweets, no Eric, no Donald J. Jr. … no Giuliani. Mike Pompeo has disappeared! No raucous rally photos! No effigy Democrats being burned… Not a word about Qanon. Kayleigh McEnany, gone. Lindsey Graham, quiet. No pictures of slack-jowl Mitch. (sorry, I slipped into the mode of the last four years for a second…)

‘…Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the
sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and
somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and
somewhere children shout,
but there is no joy in MUDVILLE — mighty
Casey has struck out!’

(Earnest Lawrence Thayer–Casey At The Bat)

Our long dark hour has passed. Now, we can get down to the other tragic dramas that have been playing in the background. The colour has almost returned. Maybe, it will be ok?

I am here, parked in my spot, enjoying an Everything Bagel and a cup of tea. Simon is still as gorgeous as ever, the young women are still kind, the tea is still too hot for drinking. The surface looks normal but remained so during this whole affair. Things may not be all good. In fact, I fear things are quite bad. That life is easier to endure, easier to enjoy without the boorish ex-president’s endless chatter is well on it’s way to being proven. It only took a few weeks for him to give up. Now, with a little air left in the room, a little air that hasn’t been consumed by The Donald, we have the petty bickering of Canada’s would-be rulers to deal with. It promises to be a lot easier, though they do share certain ideas with the foolish ones to our south.

How and why conservatism became a desperate position from which to angle, cheat, lie your way into government is for those who know things to discuss. I have my opinion but it is just opinion, not knowledge. I really should keep my mouth shut. I am dismayed that leadership, doing the right thing for the many, has drifted to the side. I am become cynical, more cynical than I have been.

Fueled by the machinations of the press, who have enormous self-interest to assuage, I lost trust. Donald sold newspapers, no question. In publicizing his every tantrum, his every filthy statement, the editorial boards are almost unethical as the actions of the man himself. Most of the tweets that were twitted would never have been on endless repeat had it not been for the needs of 24hour a day news platforms, had it not been for the struggling ‘legitimate’ press, had it not been for the trainwreck fascination. We couldn’t take our eyes away and were used by all of them.

Now, the hangover. There isn’t enough raw egg and clam juice for this. Not enough alka-seltzer. It won’t be a total nightmare, we do have some peace to look forward to with the disappearance of D and co. That alone will make the sobering up a lot easier but we still have some serious nausea on the horizon. Covid is gone rampant in the U.S. and not far behind here in Canada. There is, bluntly, no plan and no hope for ever catching up with the virus in those fifty states. A vaccine can’t appear soon enough. Here, we are marching toward who knows what? At long last, Jason Kinney has seen the light. It is probably too late for Alberta. His room is still spinning and his hangover yet on the horizon.

That folks have had enough of being separated, locked down is well apparent. A fellow blatantly advertised that his restaurant in Peel region was going to remain open. Hordes of folks, maskless, muscled past the gathered press and crowded in. The police eventually came to their senses and locked the place down. That’s bad. People have had enough. We don’t have common goals, community anymore. We have desperate self-interest. We need leaders who can bring us together, make us understand that it is in all of our best interests to make the attempt to slow this thing down a while. Those potential leaders who own the podium seem to have only their political futures in mind. Someone has to take initiative, make the hard choices, do the right thing. It won’t be pleasant but it has to be done and done with integrity, with one eye on the future and the other on the rights of all. What is best for all must be on the plate. Sadly, I doubt we are going to see anything like that.

So, the Donald hangover fades into a migraine headache of epic proportion. This is pretty ordinary. That is the way life and living are. We come to the mountaintop and our first view is of a higher mountain in the distance. sigh. Can’t give up though. There is always something wonderful coming our way, too. Perhaps a bright, green and lush valley between here and there? Best of all, we don’t have the damned tweets to disrupt us for the moment. Makes me want to roll over and have another 45 winks of restful sleep. mmmmmm No, wait… perhaps I will get up and have some chocolate cake instead! Yessssss…cake!

The sweeping view
is of mixed greys,
dirty whites.
A smaller view
is warm red,
deep black.
Unremarkably,
earth turns a cold shoulder
back
toward buzzing summer,
silences the birds with
one, raised, hand.
All
is focused on a roulette,
and a bouncing,
clattering,
captured,
cold, steel ball.

Never was the world I know more peculiar than now. I am at the office (where else?). With the surrounding tall windows, I feel that I am in a small vacuum jar. The jar contains my thoughts, my loves, my breathing. The world has become very small and very large at once. I have the great outside, the wide world, the immense swarming and twinkling universe in full view beyond the glass but true, intimate contact is very sparse here, within the bell jar. The oblique contact I do have is most often electronics-based or delivered with a layer of isolation. A snack is brought to me by a person masked and gloved. The snack is contained within a disposable vessel, the idea being to keep our germy selves from polluting each other but the vessel is, itself, a threat to the existence of the planet, wild life and me. I learned all of that on Television. In this situation, I am askew as any other of us may be. What happens now? Where does this lead? When can I get channel 7 back again? How do I get rid of the extra weight? How are you doing?

Once was a time that it would not be imagined for a U.S. President to resist handing over the keys after an election. It was unimaginable for him (a white him, because none else could be president, of course) to use power more for disruption of government than for control of government. Once was a time. Once was a time I could walk freely amongst the wild folk and breathe their exhalations. I feared not the intubation. Once was a time I could rise easily from a sitting or kneeling position and not grunt or be unsteady a whit. Once was a time. And…once was a time I could stand in a large body of folk, singing my lungs out. Maybe I was on pitch, maybe not. Maybe I was on tempo, maybe not. Maybe, maybe, but I was alive. I was in the moment of the manufacture of soundscape. I was creating. I was nearly fully human.

All of the rest of the current noise was here, way back then. It was more parcelled out and pigeon-holed. There was room. My guess is that there was more defined time for a this, a time for a that. Pete Seeger was alive. The Beatles had become artists and not just pop stars, working the room. Now, The Beatles are half dead. Pete Seeger is dead, art is on hold and we are left to figure out if it can ever be made again.

Once was a day that people seemed kind, a little. They used art to reveal love and balance. They spoke beyond the flash of sex appeal, smoothness. They often spoke without weapons, excepting the legendary facist-killing banjos. People got nasty to each other but then set that aside for thanksgiving dinner. I could watch ‘It’s a Wonderful LIfe’ and ‘Auntie Mame’ at Christmas time and not feel used by Pepsi-cola or Coke. You could almost trust the news to be more altruistic than narcissitic. The talking heads were earning their keep, certainly but they dealt in a modicum of veracity. The corporations were perhaps a bit less mendacious. Entertainment dealt less with the bare chest, the bare behind, the spectacular auto crash, the blood, the violence. Lord, how I miss The Beverly Hillbillies! (well…wait a minute, y’all – Donna Douglas was pretty titty!) There was a time for political battle, a time for release. I could pick up the newspaper or turn on the TV without a complete dread filling my heart.

In the background, during those good? old days, a long history of deprivation, slavery, human fault. There were folks badly used and genocide aplenty if you looked hard enough. The garbage floated in the river along with the shit. When a late 17th century or early 18th cruise boat overturned on the Thames, many died not by drowning but by ingestion of the water, exposure to disease. Sigh. Bad crap has always been with us. Cheap diamonds, too. And, the morally poor have always been with us. We have always been our own worst enemy. Hitler fades into Stalin fades into Quaddafy, into Hugo Chavez, into a remembrance of Genghis Khan, of Ulysses Grant… It has always been so. If we had an honestly written history of the time, my bet is that Neanderthal wasn’t exactly a kind, moral being. Maybe they couldn’t get channel seven, either.

Sigh. Sigh, I say. The past, good and bad? Gone. Gone for a while? Gone for a quick coffee, then to return? No. No and no. The Beatles? Gone for good. Jesus? Gone for good. Forget it, Mom…he won’t bring back a little pleasant gift. No roses at the end of living’s rainbow I am afraid. Hitler? Wellll…don’t know about that one for certain. He might come back, he might be here now.

Here is the great difference between what has been, gone and returned and our day. What’s peculiar about our world of the present day is this: Sure, the cool stuff and the bad stuff is here, will be, will come back, will go away forever. We have something different. We have a thing (not atom bombs) that fundamentally changes all. Our newest deadly problem is the widespread emission of electromagnetic radiation and the information/misinformation that is wedged onto it.

Yep. Captain Sees All, knows all. The television screen has attached itself to the mobile telephone which attached itself to our right hand and goes everywhere with us. It goes to the bathroom, the bedroom, the boardroom. On the screen is a constant flow of vulnerable noise. We have a room with a view. We have wide-screen and high definition. It’s easy to change the view and difficult to understand the difference between what is and what Photoshop or Paintbrush has done. The colours overwhelm, the sound is a fever pitch scream. Every note is Coloratura without colour. We have video from all corners, none of it honest. None of it is true. All of it runs 24 hours each day.

The world has always been exploding. The big bang was the first of many and great excitement continues. It has always been that we are speeding through the universe at enormous pace invisibly. The sun burning at vaporizing temperature is not felt, here. The wars on the currently dark side of our planet are not seen through my bell-jar window. That is how our lives have been until this day. Widespread, you might say omnipresent digital communication/miscommunication is a new wrinkle to the exploding inevitable. We can now see beyond the peaceful neighbourhood where we rest. The place over there where somebody’s Mom and Dad are carving up more than a turkey and shouting loudly about it? That place rises up out of the screen and infects our own living room. You can’t hear blue sky and birds for the missles landing on Azerbijan. You can’t see the honest politician who graciously accepts a win or a defeat for the hair pulling orange puff-ball fight in Washington.

The extremes catch the eye. A back-lit blue lighted screen plays on, giving no peace. Our blue skies and clean water are pretty darn peaceful but compared to what’s happening on-line, get boring. Peace doesn’t make easy sense. Peace is complicated. Peace doesn’t pump up the volume much. Peace pumps down the volume. I turn away. It is much more adrenalin driving to watch folks fall and seem to drown in the flowing blood. My blood pumps hard watching George Floyd be murdered by a policeman. That is an easy or a cheap thrill. I watch that instead of a blue sky, lazy day. The blue sky is harder to understand than a cheap thrill. By ‘clueing’ in to the world, I think I am opening myself and absorbing what’s the truth but no. It is real, the things I watch but It isn’t exactly the truth. Watching the circus events in Washington, I am better informed about the nature of political life? Nah. I am only stressing myself. The more stressed I am, the less well I can live my life. I should spend some time understanding that a blue sky is right in front of me. It is right outside my window. It is there to collect my thoughts, to balance me. The blue sky needs to settle into my heart enough to allow contemplative space. The blue sky is available to all the world and you don’t need electronics to see it (unless you are blind, but that’s another story I can talk about later).

I am unable to think clearly with nothing but murder to be aware of. By gluing myself to the show I am not learning how I might best be prepared, how to approach morals or ethics. What I should do and how I should feel get lost. I am gut-reacting, I am learning the wrong lessons. The shit hits the fan and I spend more time trying to clean up than learning where the toilet paper is. I can’t sleep. I am overdriven. I get addicted. Adrenalin is addictive, blue skies are too. Blue sky is another kind of high that gets run over by Beyonce’s lastest video or That Man’s latest exploits with his sleazy lawyer.

The truth is that we have blue skies, Beyonce and sleazy lawyers. The least important of the parts is the lawyer part. We don’t always need to know what the lawyers are up to. The blue sky is not all we need. Beyonce isn’t the only type of artist. We need the adrenalin awareness but we need relief. Constant on electronics don’t mimic blue sky very well. The colour is off and it’s too damn loud anyway. The mobile phone’s tone is largely an unbalanced ringing. The 24hour glowing news channel deafens a night sky. The fires of Beyonce’s latest near-nude busyness dim the bluest skies.

I am grateful there is an ‘off’ switch. Now, the task is to move my finger toward it once in a while. Mmmm. Yeah, today I will make a pie. I will know in my background mind that this is a luxury. Some folks don’t have enough to eat. I will know in my background mind that the blue sky of this morning is fading away. I will know in my background mind that D-Trump is feverishly golfing away while his sleazy lawyers destroy faith, democracy and a few dozen bottles of Dom Perignon. I will know a lot, I guess. I will also know that I have successfully enjoyed the time I have and forgotten for a blissful moment that a dark side is rolling it’s way toward me. The dark side is always amongst us. Meh.

Whoa, there… I slept pretty late today. It is after the ninth hour! Quick! I will miss the bus of the day if I don’t hurry it up a bit. When I woke, it was to a groggy sensation of dreams being wisps that are vacuumed up by the switched on fan of a new day. You can see the little buggers and the memory of them being whisked away, one little misty puff and gone… What were they? I know they were around, I felt them, I lived in them, they were real. I know I had been dreaming intense because I was relieved and relaxed by waking up. What happened? What did I just barely escape?

This is my theory about death. When you die, no matter the method, those around you in this world will see your last breath. They will cry and carry on something awful. Some of them will say, “Gone…too soon!” Some of the folks will secretly say, “…and good riddance – what a pest!” Some will say, “Dammit! He owes me money!” Some of the people will be worker people and they will be charged with carrying your remains off for disposal or draining your essential fluids and cleaning everything up. You will be oblivious to the cold steel table and will appear to be quite comfortable with no pillow and with steel things being jabbed into you. You won’t even flinch.

You won’t know all of that is happening. It will be in your old world. You will come to in the next world. Your last world will be wisps of dreams, being vacuumed up by the fan of the new day. Your next world will be waiting and you will be ready, believing that you are just waking up. Yawn, stretch…”wow, honey..I had the strangest dream!” you will say. “It was pretty creepy. All I can remember is, I was lying on a cold steel table! Whoo-hoo, I get a chill just thinking about it but I feel rested.”

Perhaps waking into the next world will be as one wakes in a hospital, with the realization that your left leg has disappeared to the bone saw. “We couldn’t save it,” the doctor says. “The PT folks will be in to visit and explain how you will be getting along now. Things are going to be very different for you but you have been one lucky guy!” The fact will be that you were BASE jumping in the life before and had thwacked into something very immovable. You will only have wisped memories of that. The little wisps will float up and away. You will carry on the best you can with your missing leg, not knowing how lucky you truly have been.

That is living and dying. Nothing more than waking up, going about your business, falling asleep, waking up in another world again. So, it is nothing to be afraid of. It continues forever, there is no end and was no beginning. We are locked into it but it won’t hurt us. It is true that we will be hurt in our waking life, sometimes so badly that it will send us into our sleeping life in a big hurry. This will happen from time to time. It is called a ‘day-mare’. In our sleeping lives we will be suddenly thrust into the waking life, sweating and fearful. That is called a ‘night-mare’. The day and night mares only happen once in a while. Sometimes, you actually remember them. Sometimes, you can’t forget. When that happens, it is called a ‘sign’. Like from God. It’s ok. It is only God saying, “See how the whole thing works?” You can see it, briefly, then. Since this is too much news, God won’t let you see it all the time. As they say, “God won’t give you anything you cannot handle.” It’s true.

If a thing is pretty darn bad, you will wake up or fall asleep, just in time. If a thing is pretty darn good, the same process occurs. This goes on forever. That is the way of it. Science and God are just ideas to explain the whole bit. I have felt enough ‘signs’ to understand this now. So. It gives me an idea. I shall dive into living like a fully awake BASE jumper. You should do that, too. Feel the wind, feel the speed, relish it. The thwacks are always there and will catch up with you one day. It won’t hurt very long before you end up in the next world. It’s cool. There is always another day’s jump ahead of us. One jump ahead for each one behind. We will be off and jumping while the world of yesterday’s lifeless body gets carted over to the heap.

The folks who say, “It’s all good.” are quite correct. I would go one step further and say, “It’s perfect.” I say that each day when they hand me my tea and bagel at Starbucks. That’s where I am headed now. MMMM