Vacation in fantasy land

Well, I'm back from my week of respite in Barbados. Though, truthfully, when your suitcases are packed full of children, respite is a funny word to use. We had lots of illness, pestilence, heat intolerance, prickly rash, teenage hormone surges, and some surprisingly intolerant and unfriendly hosts and hostesses at times. So it wasn't the idyllic 'escape from it all' that the tourist brochures might have promised. On the other hand, that's probably ok. The reason that we chose to go to Barbados as opposed to some other island in the south seas is that our perception was that at least to some extent, in spite of its horrible history in the hands of Europeans, this was an island that actually worked. Most people have some means of holding life and limb together. The gigantic resort operations that move into tropical zones, pave them over, erect huge barbed wire fences around vacation compounds filled with obese tourists looking out furtively through the bars and hoping they will hold up so that the "locals" on the other side, filling their stomach with mud pies (literally) to stave off the pain of starvation can't get in to take back any of the coconuts filled with rum and limeade that they might otherwise covet. Barbados is a long way from perfection. There are far too many cars. Far too much of the food (at least the food we were able to find) comes from somewhere else. At one point, I found myself sitting in front of a bowl of granola consisting of fruit that had been picked locally, shipped to Belgium to be mixed with European grains, and then shipped back to me. I thought I could actually taste the diesel. But for all of its postcolonial ridiculousness, it seems to be a country that stands a chance of surviving the century.

It's telling that now when I find myself in a place away from home, I start trying to assess the resources and future potential of the place. When the shit really hits the fan, which now seems to be happening with a slightly perceptible uptick in pace, how will these people do? The answer in Barbados is that they will do much better than we will. Their climate is year round perfect for avoiding the early devastations of climate change. They haven't had a hurricane since the 50s. They have lots of highlands. The ground is still fertile, though I have to wonder about the legacy of hundreds of years of sugar cane crops. The coral base of much of the island serves as a huge built in water filter. The place is small and the population is fairly low.

I passed some time reading what turned out to be not so restful a book -- Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe. I thought it a brilliant choice at the time. Clarke and I share an agent so I already knew a bit about his background but when the time came to buy the connected literature for the trip something made me think first of Patrick O'Brian. It was only at the last minute that I remembered that Clarke was not only from the Caribbean but from Barbados itself. The book, though, was achingly sad and fairly brutal and left me wondering how it was that blacks and whites in Barbados were able to live together on the island without killing one another.

I drank vast quantities of Mt Gay Rum. In fact, when it became clear that we would be spending much of our holiday trapped in our "villa" (which, yes, did have an electric gate around it but at least not any barbed wire) I confess that I laid in an ample supply of the stuff and considered it fair holiday behaviour to pour my first rum cocktail some time between 9 and 10 am. This worked reasonably well until about the third day, when I discovered that I had triggered a wicked gout attack--a lifestyle ailment which I richly deserve and which makes it almost impossible for me to walk.

I had some nice interactions with local Bajan down-and-outers. I'm not sure what it says about me that when I travel I always have the best of times hanging out with people who have nothing. There's a certain kind of wisdom that comes from destitution. Maybe it's nothing more complicated than that when you hit bottom there's so much less left for you to try to defend that you enjoy a certain kind of clarity that those puffed up with possessions are lacking.

I don't know.

But now I'm back, slowly injecting myself back into the fray of my usual life, putting thoughts of early retirement that have strayed through my head for the past couple of days into the deep background. The news is filled with ugly portents. At a time of year when we're normally planning the garden and summer vacations, we're now wondering whether we should stock up the pantry with bags of rice and pots of cooking oil. But while all of this is going on, much of our ridiculous way of life continues unabated. We're pouring massive resources into repaving huge highways that will likely never see as much use as they have in the past. We're digging huge holes way outside of town so that we can plonk down more gigantic estate houses on half-acre lots covered with Kentucky bluegrass.

It makes it harder and harder for me to imagine any gentle landing into a state of realism where the truth slowly dawns on us that we're spending the last of our easily-gotten resources in the worst way imaginable. I hate to even think it, but some days it sure feels as though we won't wake up to what's coming until the last bit of potential food has been choked down the gasoline hose into the last SUV that's standing.

Hiatus

Grades are in. Another grant submitted. Pounds of flesh have been contributed. Fuckit. I'm going to Barbados. See you in a week.

I'm in control here

In a long and checkered academic career, I've had the pleasure of being "presiding officer" at a final examination exactly twice. The presiding officer is the person who decides what happens if anything out of the ordinary occurs during an exam. The first time I presided, we had a one hour long power failure. Somehow, we managed to move everyone around in a huge, labyrinthine building so that everyone had a seat close to a window and could see well. I think we may have given them a few extra minutes. Nobody complained. The atmosphere was very "Earth Hour." The students and staff talked about it for years afterwards.

The second time I presided was today. Someone pulled a fire alarm. Students were required by regulation (enforced by me) to remain in their seats and continue to work while we tried to ascertain whether the alarm was genuine or false. Of course it was false -- a common exam time prank. What's interesting is that I'm already getting complaints from students who feel they've been short-changed.

Note to self: No more final exams.

Nervous Nellie

Honestly, I expend so much time and energy getting nervous about giving talks that I wonder sometimes whether I'm in the wrong profession. I've got a 15 minute talk to give on Friday at a very small and friendly conference, but it's a little outside my comfort zone because the topic is a new one for me and the audience is mostly a non-academic one. In my heart of hearts, I think it's going to be a really fun couple of days, but my stupid brain chemicals refuse to fall into line.

Just back from a nice run (4 more glasses of wine -- I could've gone to five but decided to round down for once, besides which it seems as though the more I run the less I drink anway -- all to the good in terms of being around long enough to teach that son of mine all the dirty guy tricks I know -- armpit farts take a fair bit of practice) and now enjoying that dreamy post-exercise state where you feel as though you've just learned how to breath again. I actually had a bit of a scare on the weekend. Right near the end of a fairly long run I had a sudden flutter of rapid heart beats followed by a dizzy spell. The whole thing lasted for about five seconds, and I figured it might even have just been in my head. But I wear a heart rate monitor, so when I got home I checked the graph and there's this nice peak, looking a bit like the Seattle space needle, right at the moment I had to grab the side of a parked car to not fall over.

Dreaming

Suddenly, after a drought extending for years, I find that I'm dreaming again. They're not long or consequential dreams, but they have some narrative content, suggesting I may be getting some REM sleep finally. Last night my dream woke me up amid gales of laughter. I was working with some unidentified friend on a kind of assembly line, very much like the Mouse Trap game I used to play as a child. Near the beginning of the line, I had to add a bucket of water to a system. At the very end of it, I got the water back. Somehow, the idea that the end result of all of the fascinating machinations was the very same thing that I had started with was so amusing to my friend and I that we doubled over with crippling mirth.

My mood has been up and down otherwise. I have a talk to give at the end of the week which is making me anxious because it's in front of a very unusual audience. My hunch has been that most of them will wonder why I'm there -- while they're mostly mucking in the trenches trying to find a way to help the local dispossessed hold body and soul together, I'll be talking about how we can use gear that cost enough to keep a soup kitchen running for a couple of years to understand how we react emotionally to simulations of FrankLloyd Wright architecture. The organizer says they'll be fascinated. We'll see.

Parent teacher interview

We dragged our pre-teen out of bed at an ungodly hour this morning to get her to our interview with a bunch of her grade 7 teachers. I like her school a lot more after noticing that three of her teachers are saying pretty much the same thing about her that we always tell her at home with respect to her school achievements. They know her and they like her. We do too, fortunately. But then I find myself wondering whether all average middle class parents think the same things about their kids and all teachers know this, so they just sit on the little chairs behind those ugly little tables and repeat the same four sentences over and over, nodding like academic bobble-heads. Maybe there's even a manual.

As you can imagine, having these thoughts run through my head while trying to listen to a math teacher explain why our kid didn't quite seem to understand ASA and SAS and congruent triangles made it slightly necessary for me to inflict a bit of damage on my lower lip so as not to spray coffee across the table. It also didn't help that the young student teacher with luxuriously flowing chestnut hair and exceptionally tall stiletto heels was sitting at one of these little desks looking just willowy enough and chewing delicately on a pencil while reading a novel buried in her lap. Nobody wanted to talk to her (nobody knew who she was, probably) but I imagine she was carefully following an instruction to attend, hoping to get taken on staff next year. At some point, as the morass of my daughter's algebraic etchings was laid out before me, I lapsed into lascivious thought and I let it happen. Shame on me.

So now I've just gotten home from an interview that only ran 45 minutes behind schedule to find an email granting me a one year extension on my funding. Or more accurately, pointing out that I had had this option all along and had just not known about it. So now, pending answers to a few small questions of clarification, the vista of my summer is possibly entirely different. Instead of the scramble to shove into print every piece of shit data I can possibly wrap a sexy figure around, I can actually think about what I'm doing and maybe even collect a little more data so that I know what I'm talking about.

Also, it means more time for the book that ate my life. And my kids, who I'm seeing more than for a long time really do need a whole lot of my time. And a garden.

Now I'll go wander around in the rain for a bit.

So human

So after calculating how many things I had to do in the next four months and noticing that it was impossible to do half of them, I think I've done the rational thing this morning. Two cups of coffee, a nice run (5 more glasses of wine just today and no evangelists in sight!), and a nice email to one of my granting agencies asking if they won't please just consider extending my deadline by, oh, a year. They'll probably laugh, but it felt good just to ask. So now it's 11 am and that paper I have to write is clearly not getting too far today. So I might as well just post my favourite set of lyrics of the day so far, and go get some more coffee (and a shower.......phew!).

What if

Lucinda Williams

I shudder to think
What it would mean
If the president wore pink
Or if a prostitute was queen
What would happen then
How would the world change
If thick became thin
And the world was rearranged
If the rains brought down the moon
And daylight was feared
And the sun rose too soon
And then just disappeared
If dogs became kings
And the Pope chewed gum
And hobos had wings
And God was a bum
If houses became trees
And flowers turned to stone
And there were no families
And people lived alone
If buildings started laughing
And windows cried
And feet started clapping
And out came inside
If mountains fell in slivers
And the sky began to bleed
And blood filled up the rivers
And prisoners were freed
If the stars fell apart
And the ocean dried up
And the world was one big heart
And decided to stop
If children grew up happier
And they could run with the wolves
And they never felt trapped
Or hungry or unloved
If cats walked on water
And birds had bank accounts
And we loved one another
In equal amounts


God, I'm posting lyrics now. I guess that's what old guys do in spring when there's no hope their bodies will give them as much sex as their minds would like to have.

Disconnect

Driving home from this last night (ok already we go out too much but what the hell....hard days are coming), we both commented on how unusually successful our drive to and from Toronto had been. When I moved to this area in the 1990s, one of the first visitors to my office told me that the best thing about living in Waterloo was that it was "only one hour from the airport." Over the years, the time seems to have crept up so that the last few trips have convinced us that it isn't often fun to visit Toronto unless you can stay overnight -- it's just too far. Now, to get to an event that starts at 8 pm, you pretty much have to take an afternoon off of work.

I digress.

Just after uttering the fateful words that we'd both put off uttering out of superstitious foolishness, we ground to a complete stop because road workers had closed off two lanes of the highway to begin the job of resurfacing a road that to me already looked like it was in good shape. The last time they peeled off the top of this highway was recent enough that I remember it. As I sat wedged in among a few hundred 18-wheelers, my mind wandered to Roger Doucet's excellent book, Urban Meltdown, read recently after a friend sent it to me to celebrate the fact that I'm in the youth of old age. One of his arguments is that we're draining the budget to sustain our roads and we're really doing that to sustain a business model in which highways serve as taxpayer subsidized warehouse space for just-in-time systems. I explained all of this to my wife (Ok, I'm not always the best date), but even while I was saying it, I was thinking of the utter insanity of making this kind of cash investment in a way of life that many signs suggest is about to end. When we could be putting money into finding ways to retrofit sprawling suburbs so that they can provide food for starving city dwellers, we're instead ensuring that there's a way to deliver more plastic salad tongs to Walmart for the next 5 years without too much breakage on the way.

Because to do otherwise would be too frightening? What has to happen before we drop the pretense that the way we live now is sustainable for much more than a decade?

Synchronicity

So just when I'm working so hard at being gloomy and doomy, I get invited to have dinner with this guy who's probably going to be brimming with great ideas to make our lives better. Trying not to be excited. Trying so hard...practising my dour doomer face....not....working....damned endorphins.

My run was almost spoiled by the fact that I was accosted by two aggressive young men on the trail who demanded that I rip the earbuds out of my ears so I could hear the news of Jesus Christ. I kept going, fuming at their audacity, but then I saved the day by spending the next few minutes fantasizing about how I would toss them both into the muddy ditch if they were still there lying in wait on my return leg. Luckily for all of us, they weren't. Unfortunately, I think I strained my soleus a bit in my ardour to get back to them. Even if they had been there, I probably wouldn't have shoved them. Probably. But I would have yelled a lot. What is it with these guys anyway? What kind of religion is so desperate for new recruits that they send out storm troopers to belay joggers in the park? There was a look of desperation on their faces, as if they'd realized how badly we'd fucked up everything and now just wanted to find lots of other sorry lost souls so we could all hang onto each other and sing sad dirges as the ship went down. Not me. No matter how pessimistic I might be, I'm not giving up.

Bad moon on the rise

When we came back from rural Nova Scotia, almost two years ago now, my head was filled with visions of apocalyptic immediate futures. There were times both towards the end of our stay there and after our return here when I thought it might be sheer madness for us to not immediately find ourselves a quiet piece of land somewhere and start learning how to look after our own needs.

Somehow, in the last 20 months, in the hullabaloo of some unaccustomed career success, a little bit of attention, a couple of nice book contracts (one for currency that may not be worth much in a few years), it was easy to put on the blinkers and stop worrying quite so much about everything. Here in the city, surrounded by busy excitement, interesting culture, young people brimming with life, high-technology ideas, and enthusiasm for the future, it's been easy to forget the worries I had living an admittedly pampered life in the country. There, I saw first-hand, every day, what it was like to live in a community where many people had to spend some part of every day trying to figure out how to scratch together the resources to stay warm and look after their children.

When we first got back to city life, I was determined to learn more about things like solar cooking and urban agriculture and had visions of getting at least a small hunk of land somewhere on which I could build a cabin, a hideout of some kind. Now after a couple of years even those trivially inadequate ambitions have reached a vanishing point. There are a few mutterings to those who wonder about my efforts to protect a window box full of tomatoes from the voracious urban squirrels that "it's important for all children to see at least a bit of food growing at their houses." I use the thyme I grow to season the incredibly costly meat that I buy at the corner market -- well at least I walk there and I use a re-usable shopping bag, and I idly surf the coal-fueled internet looking for some product in a plastic bottle I can buy online to repel the squirrels from my little box of veggies, while still, perhaps, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, realizing that there may come a day, sooner than I had anticipated, when the squirrels will be a thing of the past because we will have had to feed them to our kids.

So now, I wake up on the first post-teaching morning of the term, keen to shirk a few responsibilities and go off to get some exercise. But first, of course, I have to charge up the Ipod and while I'm doing that, I might as well browse through the news, which contains stories like this and this. There's no denying it. Eight thousand Americans are receiving foreclosure notices every day. The US economy is crumbling to dust and it is going to happen quickly -- within 10 years the landscape south of the border will be vastly different. Many will die. Many are dying. Energy prices will fly through the roof. Eventually, we'll stop buying the plastic toys that have driven them there, but by then it will be far too late for many of us. Food riots right now seem like something remote to the average North American, but not forever. In the worst but not extremely unlikely scenarios, my son, perhaps as a teenager or young man, may need to use his fists if he wants to fill his belly. I may not be around to help him.

I've got an offer to go build a cabin on a self-sustaining farm this summer. On days like this I'm thinking it might actually be an immoral act for me not to find the time to do it. But right now I'm going to plug these things into my ears and go deny for one more hour. I'm not sure how long I can keep it up, though.

Survived another one

Last lecture delivered until September. Made it through one more season. Soon I'll take a little vacation, but first it's one more book revision, one more research paper, one more talk, and one more set of papers to grade. Sun's out though.

(Almost) keeping to my vows

Mostly a non-working weekend. A short visit to St. Jacob's Farmer's Market with my brother and friends who had blown in from Singapore for a rare and precious visit. We should definitely visit this market more often. I suppose we don't because we're within easy biking distance of a smaller market that would make more sense for us. But we don't go there either. Especially when there's 3 meters of snow piled by the sides of the road.

We spent last night at the Mayor's Dinner as guests of a dear friend and previous winner. Net result was a profound feeling we both shared that we're not doing enough to help out in our community. We're pleased with our involvement in the Philippines project -- helping to build a village for a small community ravaged by typhoons -- but we're not doing much locally and it's obvious that there is an increasing need. Everyone has an hour or two to spare. We also walked away with some nice scores from the silent auction. A dinner here -- a great place despite the fact that they seem not to update their website quite as often as they should. An incredible deal on a home inspection for energy efficiency -- we figured nobody else knew what it was so didn't bid. Not only did we know, but we had once been on the waiting list for this and had then somehow fallen off.

A little reading and reflection on the fact that every breath I take may be my last.

A new favourite song. Til it's gone. By Po Girl. Perfect for old guys gallumphing down the trail. Also for sitting on the back deck with that extra half-cup of coffee, contemplating mortality, finding new resolve to look after his body to make it last long enough to not only have all the fun he wants to have, but see through his commitments to his family as well.

I wish things all made this much sense every day.

Singin' the blues

This guy blew into town tonight. Amazing. Not much time to think of titles.

Death of a title

We've been scooped on book title. The most frustrating part of this is that I think the title works better for my book than it does for his. I guess it could have been worse, considering his release date is within a couple of weeks of my original but now postponed date -- there would have been massive confusion if two books with the same title and a somewhat resemblant subtitle (despite diverging content) had come out at the same time. As a rookie, I imagine I'd have been clobbered.

Still anyone stumbling across this site who has a brilliant idea for a title for this book please do chime in. I'll be here, nursing wounds, regrouping, getting blood back in my head.

Actually, tonight I'm going to hear this guy, with whom I share an editor. I imagine this will take my mind off my woes for a little bit. And if that doesn't work, I've topped up the wine equilibrium.