Notes from the Field

I decided to drop into a walk-in medical clinic this afternoon, and I came away with more astonishing anthropological anecdotes for the note book. I need to get it down before the details fade further into the farrago of my increasingly clouded consciousness.

I've had an ear problem of some sort since last Thursday. I decided that, rather than add time and physical distance to my already heavily compressed daily schedule, I would drop into a walk-in clinic downtown, and save me a drive out to my own doctor beyond the pale of the downtown core. One ear has been plugged intermittently, and the other seems to percussively "pop" every so often. A little potato of ear wax had gotten stuck, I presumed, and I simply needed a flush with a medical syringe.

In my immediate neighbourhood, there is a (putative) clinic that's only open one or two days a week. And last Friday wasn't one of them.

So, on Friday, I trekked about 15 blocks, against an unusually bitter November wind, to the hinterlands of the downtown core, only to be told to expect at least a four hour wait.

The waiting room was suffocating in the swell of sick humanity. Screw that, I says, and I went off to the gym as per usual on Friday afternoons. During that session, my ear got unplugged somehow, so I didn't worry anymore about it.

On Monday morning, it had returned. After getting a reasonable amount of work done, I decided to give the walk-in clinic another shot. The one nearest to me was open today, and I had other errands to do on the same street.

I got there around ten to 1, and a few people were lined up. I went and did a couple of other errands, and when I returned more people had lengthened the line. They all seemed rather anxious and hopeful at once, as if they were in line to buy a limited edition copy of "Halo" or "Call of Duty: Black Ops". I waited for another minute or so, and finally the line started to move quickly into the vacuum of the now open walk-in clinic, and I was pushed from behind into the swirling vortex as the crowd surged forward. I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of my decision, thinking that I should have just jumped into my car and made the pilgrimage outside the pale to my own practitioner. By then, however, it was too late.

I was herded into the waiting pen along with the rest, and once I was registered, there was no going back. An hour and a half wait. OK, I can do that, get my ear flushed, get over with it, and get out of here.

I pulled out my reading material, and settled into a seat. Not long after, an old white man and an older black woman who may or may not have known each other began to engage in a rather loud and public conversation. Eventually the conversation drifted into a discussion of race and ethnicity. "What are you?", the man asked rhetorically, as he had previously asked the receptionist behind the front desk. The woman, without a hint of Samuel Jacksonian irony or self-reflexity, replied, in her shout-speak, that she was a (offensive n-word deleted). For some reason or other, this otherwise mundane conversation continued and escalated to the point where she was repeating, matter of factly, she was a (offensive n-word deleted), and that was that. Stunningly, very few people in the waiting room seemed to bat an eye. There were a few black people in the waiting room, and one of them was getting noticeably and understandably agitated. Even the old man she was talking to was begging for her to shut up, but she inexplicably kept describing herself using that term. I couldn't help but peer up from my page -- almost everyone else was staring into space, seemingly oblivious. Even the receptionists went about their business as usual. It was exquisitely uncomfortable.

Finally, the young black guy told her to shut up, explaining how offensive she was being, and that she should be ashamed of herself. The verbal spat went on for several minutes in the waiting room, and all I could do was squirm in my chair. Then she stepped out for a few minutes, the two still shouting at each other through the window.

Things calmed down after that, even after the older woman returned, and then it became the usual exercise in ennui as all those before me were called in to see the "doctor" down the hall. I finished my TLS, wishing I had brought the following issue with me as well.

Eventually my name was called. I was ushered to a tiny examination room, and almost immediately she entered behind me. I had seen this woman earlier, floating around the front desk in a confused state, and I assumed she was a previous patient. A gnomish four-footer, she was wearing a blue jean jacket and sporting a cheap, bloody orange dye job. She looked to be in her mid-80s and going through a 2nd or 3rd postlife crisis. I expected Ashton Kutcher to pop out from under the examination table telling me I had been PUNK'D.

She demanded to know what was wrong with me. I told her about my ear, and I bent down to allow her to shine her light. In all of 15 seconds, she triumphantly declared "No Wax!" after a peek in each ear with her little light. She proceeded to start writing a scrip for a decongestant and to see her again in a week. I explained that I had my own GP and several other oncologists and endocrinologists, and I had simply expected the walk-in clinic doctor to instantly see what was in my ear and syringe it out. I tried to thank her and leave, but she held me for another five minutes as I dictated an abridged narrative of my health history the past 3 years to her. I had to tell her how to spell a few things, and I really began to wonder where the hell I was.

She handed me back the narrative I had dictated to her, put her stamp on it, and I walked dumbfoundedly outside to the street. 2 hours lighter, and 2 hours later.

Disorder

Its damn well time.

A weekend to get down to it. Get over on it. Be over with it.









Dancing through the detritus of the disruptions.

Declassifying the documents.

Discovering the bones of displacement and distractedness.

Dispersing the odour.

Dispatching the days of dolour.

Driving out the disinterestedness.

Destroying the details of depression.

Drilling through the decadic layers of deviancy and delinquency.

Dispelling the indolence of disillusionment.

Disinfecting the disorder.

Dressing up the new order.

Desecrating the dead flesh.

Drawing out the new flesh.

Dismembering old devices.

Misremembering old vices.

Reconstructing the reality.

Deconstructing the decrepitude.

Discharging all dissimulation.

Designing a new direction.

Developing strategies of decorum and decency.

Directing a new dramatis.

Debunking the dreams of fabulists.

Debating the dubiousness of discretion.

Deferring to the demands of the Dionysian.

Daring to defy ....

Explosions! .... in the sky

.... its natural to be afraid

O Brother Where Art Thou?

Damn! I'm in a tight spot!

My Brother HL2170 has abandoned me in a time of need. I can't print my documents.

I guess all I can do is stop working and watch the football game. G-Men vs. the Eagles.

Damn! We're in a tight spot!

In order to win our fantasy football matchup this week, Eli Manning has to outduel Michael Vick, and real bad at that. Bomber said we were gonna win the Bowl. We started 8-1, but this would be our second loss in a row, and our grip on a first round playoff bye would loosen. Hopefully Eli won't emulate his big brother, the Great Tactician, who earlier today threw a final seconds interception that cost his team the game.

Instead of listening to the annoying Chris Collinsworth, I've got the radio on a station where I can hear some old timey music. The G-Men just fumbled the football to the epic strains of "Tales of Brave Ulysses".

Looks like the G-Men are going to get the Gears given to them tonight. Eli just threw an interception, and the Eagles are again in the Red Zone.

At the half, Eli's fantasy point total is -1.

No matter, my keeper league hockey team is healthily in first place, thanks in part to the Macedonian miracle, the Pride of Markham who Waxes supreme amongst the scoring stars. May the Moirae not strike him down.

Will I win the Dominion Cup this year?

yes I said yes I will Yes.

Will I win the HoC Bowl? With this Manning, maybe not so much.

Thanks, brother.

Eli Eli lama sabachthani?

Jigsaw Man

Sometimes I really don't know what to do with this blog.

Sometimes I think I have to be clever. Sometimes I think that I have to be vulgar. Sometimes I think I have to be funny. Sometimes I think I have to be serious.

Sometimes I think that it should be cathartic. Other times I just get a kick out of writing something, and playing around with some ideas. With language. With expectations, including my own.

Sometimes I just like telling stories. From the past, from the present. Those archived in the remoteness of deep memory, or those that have been thrown before me in the ephemeral event of the day. What we think happens all in a day, though, may stroll through our consciousness for a lifetime.

But sometimes, I feel that the best use of this medium is to talk to myself. To write ... to myself. Things that probably wouldn't be set down otherwise.

The overwhelming majority of the sludge that sloshes around in my mind each day would, I strongly suspect, be too confessional and far too messy for even myself to ingest and make much sense of, let alone subject anyone else to. My levee will hold, buttressed as it now is by the pillars of Sobriety, Stoic self-command, and the Wisdom that inevitably accompanies experience.

This late afternoon, however, as an astringent breeze carries the sound of the late day traffic through my open desk window, I feel a need to set something down.

I am listening to music that never fails to move me, and is embedded with endless layers of memory. From my life and, I can only imagine, from those who composed and recorded it. Music has an ability to invoke that kind of sublimity. An ecstasy that cannot be entirely emulated. By ideas. By books. By cinema. Even by love, or what we each think that to be.

This late autumn afternoon, as a not so fiery sun sets over the city, I am thinking about my father. I have been able to see him more often since the Information was signed, sealed and delivered. But this provokes an emotional polarity in me. On one hand, it is wonderful to spend time with my father. But, during the course of an extended visit, seeing a man's mind slowly and invisibly disintegrate before you is a devastating experience that shatters me to the core each and every time.

Worse yet is knowing that my mother's heart breaks every day of her life, as if she had been consigned to hell and doomed to repeat each day after frustrating day. No woman deserves that. But especially not one who has an infinite capacity for love, loyalty, nurturance, and forgiveness. I do not know if my father truly earned that. Some of the things you see as a child you never really forget. I severely doubt that I have earned that loyalty, as her son. I only hope he is aware of that and still has the facility to understand the sacrifice, though he was never entirely capable of that acknowledgment. Perhaps none of us are.

I cannot pretend (to myself) and fabricate a father who I ever really knew, though I may have egotistically believed that I understood him. But he was, and is, my father, and I love him. He now embraces me, after a lifetime of firm handshakes. But I don't know if that signifies any fundamental change in him other than what he sees my mother do to any loved one she sees. I'd like to think that it does, though.

My father quit school after Grade Nine. He worked for a living from the age of 14, including extended periods in the far north of Ontario and Quebec. He took over my Grandfather's agricultural machinery business and, by sheer dint of a savant-like ability with numbers and business sense, work ethic and trustworthiness, built a business that allowed all of his children to have an opportunity to attend university.

But, like my Grandfather, my father was a hard man, and an immoderate man. If there is anything I can acknowledge that I inherited, it is that quality. I would probably still be immoderate if I could.

Such a salve, yet so destructive. I'd like to think, however, that I had put myself, most of the time, in a position where only myself could be damaged. Until the machina of the Interruptnum saved me from the deluge developing inside my levee. Saved me? Did I really write that? No, I don't think I did.

The genius of contingency! The unintended consequences will always catch up.

Dispensing with the traditions of primogeniture that were so entrenched, my father never expected me to be his successor. But he could not have understood what I appeared to want to do, or what it would all lead to. I asked that question of myself all the time, and never arrived at a satisfying conclusion. But he understood, even when he didn't.

Returning to the ancestral Glen as I am able to do from time to time, largely to help and provide companionship and understanding to my mother in the indifferent absence of my sisters, there are moments that I have been able to share with my father, maybe for the last time, that feel so familiar. Working together on the land. Driving around the countryside, roles reversed. Sharing the pleasure of a Leone western. Talking and listening and, sometimes, laughing. And, sometimes, crying. Hard Men never cry do they? Maybe when they don't know what is happening to them or how to make it stop?

Once upon a time, my father not only ran a successful business, but built things out of wood with his own hands. The pieces that adorn my home will always be cherished. It is so difficult to imagine him doing so now, and he doesn't seem to remember himself. But I do, and I always will.

The bulk of his retirement stolen from him, he can no longer work in his workshop. He feels that he cannot visit his old friends and colleagues. He has become reclusive. He goes outside and tinkers around with the yellow and green machines that are the last remnants of his once vast empire.

When I am home, I sit with him and watch westerns and hockey. I have learned to love almost everything Clint Eastwood because he does. He tells me he went to the movies all the time when he was a boy in the 40s and 50s. Too often, he looks into the flat distance, eyes wide open, neither asleep nor awake. And I wonder where he has gone.

Sometimes, I want to go with him.

Sometimes I bring home jigsaw puzzles for him to do. Though I have never attempted one myself, I have become somewhat of a connoisseur of jigsaw puzzles. I know the quality ones he likes. The number, size and tactility of the pieces. The sorts of images. He becomes obsessed by them, to the point where he has to be told to stop. I wish he would approach his life again with that kind of fervour.

Each of us fell ill at almost precisely the same moment.

But as the jigsaw of my life falls back into place, my father is floating further and further from me.

Sometimes, I wish I could go with him.

Walkabout

Played hooky Wednesday. Too beautiful a fall day.

I decided to do something I haven't done in a long time. In this age of Amazon and Alibris, I don't visit used bookshops very often anymore. Sadly, there are not that many left.

Like most people, I suppose, I now order most of my books online. You always know you'll find what you're looking for.

But on this beautiful fall day, I wanted to experience (once again) the pleasure of finding a buried artifact during one of those archaeological delves through the various strata of the used bookshelves.

On this beautiful fall day, the dig yielded a handful of useful relics, including an early 20th century edition of Johnson and Boswell's Tour throughout my Hebridean homeland, as well as an excellent edition of Ulysses. It replaces another copy of the same edition that I owned when I was in high school, and had to hock, along with many other brethren and a hefty chunk of my CD collection at the time, for survival cash during a lean period in Vancouver. I can't imagine ever doing something like that, which I had to do several times. But you can't eat (or drink) books, even though I've often wanted to (and may have tried to a few times when in an altered state).

Although, as an erstwhile biblophagist, I have to confess my unabashed love for books. The shape of books. The texture of the yellowed pages. And the smell of books. I think I've gotten high once or twice on bookbinding glue.

Did I tell you that I love books? Those that I want to own and read, that is. And I really love books that have been gathering dust in old bookshops for decades, if not centuries, and the ones that have accompanied me throughout my peripatetic movements all over North America. Like listening to the music you love, the act of reading books that are interesting or important to oneself is humane, calming and civilizing.

Perhaps most of all, I love my bookshelves. Like much of the inner architecture of my apartment, built from knotted white pine by my father in his workshop just over five years ago, though he no longer remembers doing so. Most everything else in my apartment is ephemeral, and while missed, can be replaced. But not those particular books, each of which has other stories to tell. In the marginalia. On the cover sheets. On pieces of paper lost within the pages. Nor those bookshelves and everything else my father made with his own hands. Still solid. Still stable. Forever priceless.

My beautiful fall day continued to unfold. I stepped into a pub that I once knew well very. After a couple, I stopped looking for any familiar signs. I recognized nothing and nobody. Though the bartender was a friendly sort.

And as I walked home, I remembered that it was three Halloweens ago that I first noticed some unfamiliar and unwelcome signs of my own. My old friend the X-Man and I met for a double bill of The Exorcist and The Shining. Shockingly, he had seen neither. For a few hours, I could be blithely unaware, sharing a couple of my favourite films with a good friend.

But paying no heed to the emergent signs of the Interruptnum would have been a much too vulgar display of the power of denial.

Happy Halloween, friends. May the Power of the Book compel you never to buy a Kindle reader.

Information Breakdown

I'm thankful for my country home. I needed to lose those bell rung blues. And finally forget about the Information.

I'm thankful that that old white line was a friend of mine, and that I had the opportunity to make a break from the city into the bucolic bosom of the ancestral Glen. The Glen at the apex of its autumnal allure. Something I missed so much during my occidental exile that seems so long away and far ago. A repatriation with the bounty of the harvest, the smells and textures of the season. The productive portion of the cycle, marked by a plenitude like no other. The reinvigorating chill, the fecundity of Nature, the cornucopia of abundance that Mother Earth thanklessly provides. The Glen, where I can try to make peace with the chthonic gods, and where the pages of my youth can be thumbed though once more. Working with my Dad "on the land", so very different now, but still so familiar. So calming. Like getting the malware out of the hard drive in your head. The family bond that may bend, but never breaks, and is so readily recoverable from the ruins of the past or the catastrophes of the present.

The World that We Have Lost, and the Days that Used to Be.

All of this, accompanied by the resumption of our cultural pastime, has dispersed the doom and gloom of a soul melting summer, dozens of diagnostic tests, bell rung bewilderment, and the multifarious demands of the Information. Though it may have strained the limits of body and mind and, at times, imagination and credulity, the Information (and its contexts) has finally, as a dear friend would say, been slain. And the Heat is off, for now anyway.

Upon return from my restorative retreat in the Glen, my apartment is littered with the detritus of the Information. Armed with a re-optimized mind, I know what I want to reconnect with. Family and friends. Books and beer. Music and film. And maybe a visit from Molly Maid.

But before that could happen, the Information needed to be slain. For me, for the Company, for the Mansion on the Hill, for the corporate consensus. All summer long, I was all too aware that the contents of my head were the property of the corporate client. And I needed to adhere to the expected protocols of corporate genre.

"What's it gonna be Fisheye, orphan, or dame?"

Like a good Company Man, I abandoned my ambition and delivered the deliverables. Damn good deliverables, I dare say. The corporate collective and the individual were as one this summer and early autumn.

But the Information, as all things, has a history, fabulist though it may seem. I do not look for a moral. For an exemplar. There are none. There is only One. One Crazy Summer of severely strained Stoic self-command, corporate incompetence, false starts, false finishes. One dog going one way and the other going the other way, and me in the middle saying, "waddaya want from me?"

There were good times. There were bad times. Exhilarating highs and humiliating lows. Why did I keep Fucking Up and having to do things Over and Over Again?

I knew it was going to be an unpleasant summer once it became obvious to me that I was expected to work two fulltime jobs at the same time. It didn't add up. But after the persuasive rhetoric, with its promises of wealth and riches beyond my most perversed of fantasies, had lured me into the spider's web of corporate consent, I had no way out. My colleague wriggled her way out by prematurely delivering a research product of her own.

And then it was all up to me. The weight of the corporate collective rested entirely on my shoulders. I couldn't fuck it up, even though I may have wanted to.

But having a few more steaks in the freezer wouldn't hurt. Having all those billable hours to myself -- I had visions of abundant car payments and 42" flatscreens in my multiply-concussed head.

It started as commedia dell'arte and hybridized into farce by the end. But I learned a lot of things. Such as the Borgesian paradox that our National Library is not a library of any sort.

But was it worth neglecting my friends, my family, my physical and mental health, and the Blog by subordinating all to the Final Cause of performing a one-man chorus to the strains of the Information?

Of course not, but you gotta be able to walk out on everything when you spot the Heat around the corner. And at least I was in complete control. I work best when its only my name on the bill. When I'm unencumbered by the concept of teamwork and breathing the corporate breath. When I'm on the edge, where I gotta be.

From late August to September I sequestered myself in my Grub Street garret and put in my 12 hour days, ate my Georgie's pizza, and moved ever closer to the End. When I wasn't working along to the innocuous sonic background of Galaxie's "Chill Lounge", the street noise below provided an alternative soundtrack of anthemic jackhammering and backup beeping. On the day of the long gun registry vote at the Mansion on the Hill, there were helicopters swirling around my head from morning to night. I felt like a paranoiac Ray Liotta as they hunted out any disgruntled lone long-gun-men. Another day, while enjoying an end of work day shower, the water was shockingly cut off due to a water pipe burst in my charming yet antiquated building. As always, I blamed the Information.

It also didn't help that throughout all this I was dealing with the Old Masters of the Vinci Park corporation. Every Monday morning, I had to make a pilgrimage down to Vinci HQ to void parking tickets that were administered by an employee # that they claimed to have no record of, although he had access to the corporate toolbox. When I was unexpectedly offered a parking spot at my building that I suspected didn't exist, I took it on trust and was able to get out of my Faustian deal with Vinci Park. On October 1, after an entire day of feeding the gaping maw of the streetside parking meter, I finally got the call. It wasn't encouraging when the first words over the receiver were asking how big my car was. Not parking a motorcycle, I was now shit out of a downtown parking spot. The upshot of it all is that I am now parking my car in the hinterlands of the downtown core, even farther away than my Vinci deal.

I could tell you many other stories, but you probably wouldn't believe them, and I couldn't blame you for that.

All that matters is that the Information has finally been slain. And while there have been many false endings, like twists in a bad horror film, the corpse seems to have stopped twitching. I have delivered the goods into the baseball mitt of the government litigator (literally, sadly). I've taken my bullet for the Company, and next time it will be a corporate comrade's turn.

Dancing Days are here again, and that means the Grand Productive Days are back.

You're home free, brother. Yeah, home free.