serendipity lives in places

This neighbourhood we live in is teeming with interesting stories. I've no idea why. What started this morning as an off-hand remark to another parent dropping off a child at school turned into an intensive discussion of gender, violence, Buddhism, peace, art, West Africa, India, south-east Asia, Brazil, Istanbul, architecture, giving, freedom, heaven and hell as creations of the mind. By the time we had finished walking together, I was exhausted, elated, dripping with sweat from the sheer mental effort of keeping up, and totally in love with a stranger. By the time I'd walked another half hour to the office, I was just in love with the very idea of living in a world filled with the possibility of making such instant and deep connections with people. It's wonderful to remember that on those rare occasions when we can get beneath one another's skin, we realize how much alike we are, how we love, hate, want and fear such similar things. This kind of chance encounter is what I always used to hope would happen to me, but it never did. As a teenager, I remember reading a line in Henry Miller in which he decried the fact that the only reason he ever had anything to write about was because he was 'the kind of person that things happened to.' I really wanted to be that kind of person, but I knew I never would be.
It never occurred to me that an important ingredient in all of this is not so much what, but where. Hence, perhaps, the huge fuss over spatialized data. I'm getting it. I don't understand what 'it' is, but I seem to be converging on its location.

hiding out in the cellar

I always think it's a bad sign when I feel guilt about not making entries here. I watch the hits go down, and when I start to notice that even the most loyal readers are checking in less often, I know that I've gone into stealth mode. Then I wonder all over again why I do this. When I go back through some of my older entries, I notice that I've got some good writing here from time to time (and also some utter crap), so I suppose it's that more than anything else. I like to see myself write the way others like to hear themselves talk. I talk not so good. I write ok. I think the concept still tickles me as well, even as the rest of the wired world migrates off in different directions to use MUDDs, MMORPGs, and SLOODLES. I struggle to keep up with blogjects, understand their relationship with RFIDs, and now there are these Kirkam (Kircam? ( can't remember)) things. I get the occasional clever idea and then discover that somebody had much the same idea in 1993 -- so long ago that it's now forgotten and ready to be reborn. Are we really going anywhere new with this social networking stuff? Am I wasting my time?

Today, I'm spending a beautiful sunny day, a February rarity, holed up in my basement, hiding from day job responsibilities to get far enough ahead on the book to avoid the quickening panic that is starting to wake me up at 3 am. I'm also dreaming a lot. This, too, is rare. And drinking less (even rarer). I've got practical, real worldly things to get done -- I've got to go to the bank, empty out a big storage locker, chip ice from the sidewalk. Yet all I seem to be able to do is to chip away at a chapter, look up from it occasionally to do a little surf through the news sites, notice how tired I feel, and wonder what is in the back of the fridge that I might eat. The sun may be out, but there's no doubt what month it is.

A new favourite google hit

"song yay yay yay make challenge in the sky"

I'm still getting lots of hits for "how to hug properly." There's a good business there for somebody.

Heart day

Valentine's day sucks. 'Nuf said.

just plain funny

Today, David Suzuki was on campus on a part of his "If you were prime minister" tour . Now don't get me wrong. I love David Suzuki. He's a national treasure. Plus, he looks better at 70 than I looked when I was 35. Plus, I've heard that his family of four puts out one small bag of trash every four weeks. So I probably shouldn't even write this, but here we go. As I puffed up the last hill on the way to my office this morning, I saw a gigantic bus parked outside the building beside mine, idling in the cold, smoke billowing right into the front door of the building. I had to dodge around the bus to get to my own stop but my scowling and coughing turned quickly to laughter when I saw the giant Suzuki head emblazoned on the bus -- his tour bus. To his credit, the driver shut the bus down a few seconds later. I'm not sure if he saw me, or if it was just a coincidence. I have deep suspicions, though. Poor bus driver had to sit out there and freeze for an hour and a half.

I'm already discounted

I was amused (and somewhat frightened, I'll admit) to see that my book is available for pre-order on the Amazon Canada website. And already discounted by 37%. Think I'll go write a review: "Nice book. Couldn't find Chapter 2. Or 3. Or 4. etc."

latent spirituality or, er, laziness

A few of the people who read this know that I sometimes think of myself as something of a Buddhist. Not that I'm a particularly religious person, but I am nagged from time to time by the feeling that there is some element of my life that is not quite captured by anything I could document in any set of simple sentences. I definitely don't think there's something 'up' there, but I think there's something 'in' there and there have been one or two moments in my life when I feel as though I might have been pretty close to it, if only for the briefest of instants.

All this long exegesis (which could be much longer, but maybe some other day) to get to the point -- one that astonishes me. I've been back in Ontario now for about 7.5 months, and today, I confess with some slight amount of wonder, was the first day that I've sat and meditated in this house. I mean, I've meditated in the every day sense of the word quite a lot. And I've engaged in a few of those very short, Tibetan style intensive mind-blanking exercises, but mostly I've just put my spiritual life on the back burner over the ridiculous crazy business that has engulfed me since moving here. And now that I think of it, I didn't sit very often in Nova Scotia either, but there my life was so slow and perfect that I was never that far from a meditative state and could easily put myself in touch with everything I felt I needed with a few minutes of sitting on a rock beside the ocean.

Today I sat for 15 minutes (very short, yes), listening to ragged breath, following my heart rate all over the place, being amazed by the sounds and stresses in my body (encouraging at least that I could pick them up that quickly). In that short period of time (when I should have been thinking of nothing) the thought that occurred to me was that I spend a great deal of my time ruing the fact that I'm spending so much of my time at home engaging in three word conversations with words no more than 4 letters long with a couple of insane 3 year olds when I'd rather be wrestling with the big problems of life and the universe. What's funny about that is that the gulf between those 'big' thoughts and what's really lying out there waiting for me -- all of us -- is at least as big as the gulf between my toddler talk and my big science act. Sobering. Therapeutic.

I think what set all of this in motion might have been a brief instant on Friday morning. I was making my usual upwind slog through the icy channels of the local park to my job. I was hung over from yet another ill-considered work night out with the boys (the band got better and better with every beer and I just had to hear their best) and I had a very important afternoon meeting with an architect whom I hoped to convince to become entangled with me in some kind of artistic virtual vision. As I tried to milk some toothsome artistic phrases out of my water starved beer brain, really feeling that I was making some progress, I was startled by a short shout of MEH! from my right. A chilly goat in the little park zoo was passing comment on my efforts. It turns out the goat had brought things into the right kind of frame for me. At the meeting, I talked about building virtual spaces that adapted to user movement. The architect talked about building real spaces using fancy materials and mechatronics that, essentially, ate people, but in a loving way. I thought this was a match made in heaven. He thought it was a bridge too far. On a good day, I might have been able to nudge him a bit, if not sway him completely. But it was not a good day. At least he did agree to listen to my ranting again in a couple of weeks.

As the lesson (whatever it was -- only listen to bad bar bands on work nights?) soaked in over Saturday, there was much sobering thought about that goat critique, my grand designs, and the grander-by-far sea of being that grounds all of it. By Sunday, this had led me, quite sensibly, to my hard little bench, my sore knees, and my rasping breath.

time and memory

Lewis Carroll was a prophet:

'It's very good jam,' said the Queen.
'Well, I don't want any TO-DAY, at any rate.'
'You couldn't have it if you DID want it,' the Queen said. 'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam to-day.'
'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.
'No, it can't,' said the Queen. 'It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know.'
'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!'
'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first--'
'Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of such a thing!'
'--but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.'
'I'm sure MINE only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things before they happen.'
'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.

From Through the Looking Glass.