It don't take much.

A cheap drunk. A pushover.

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Don't complain about life! Don't complain about life! This book is unfaithful to the latest moments of history. This CD is a boring imitation of real rock. You don't have to justify everything you are going to throw away with a criticism. I'm a super-good person and ... Hey, any spare change?    I don't give money to bums! Get a job! Define 'good'.   I hear that Al Gore was in Lima for COP 20 and I want to hear what he had to say. I used to know how to grab those UN videos - I seem to have forgot but I eventually find a copy posted on YouTube by Julio Ruiz and since there is an embedded email address in it I thank him for taking the time to post it. He responds! Turns out he has a blog with a number of interesting clips from the event. I'm very critical of the UNFCCC generally and severally - to the point of boorish rudeness and well beyond - but not without having read and listened to them. In the process Julio finds this blog and makes some complimentary remarks, praises it. Man! That feels good! And here we are. Oh sure, maybe it's just a flash in the pan and the conversation will languish for some reason I will never know, but in the meantime there's a brief respite at least. Blue-sky-wise it's possible to visualize a 'nuclear fission' model of human psychological flourishing, maybe even a quantum theory if some minimum level of interest or concern can be identified with measurable units. Fraught with value judgements of course - tempting to define 'positive interaction' and so forth; 'flourishing' itself is not quite a neutral term though few would mistake it. Might be interesting to analyse so-called social 'atomization' in this context: Does it promote or inhibit the reaction?

A friend of mine who is in a position to know (or was until he retired) tells me that near-death statements are problematic, not dependable - possibly governed by the psychedelic effects of a failing liver. Not for nothing the Brazilian expression 'desopilar o fígado' (cleanse the liver) for 'cheer up' then eh?

Ademir Paixão's Dilma is deliciously ambiguous. What could she be doing? Blocking her ears so she won't hear? Flossing her ear canal? (To clean out the oil?) Applying a tourniquet? Putting on a mask? 'These people' have all got a serious hitch in their gitalong. Maybe what they need is a ... Double Date (!!!): Couple'a cool rich and powerful dudes with a couple'a hot Brazilian chicks (er ... ). Given the status of 'these people' we'll need a chaperone (from French chaperon 'hood' so possibly related to Brazilian camisinha). Who better than Jacob Zuma? (Although Izabella Teixeira certainly fills the bill as a stereotypical duenna.) I'll leave it to you to figgure out where Kátia Abreu and her stance towards the Código Florestal fits as Minister of Agriculture and what Dilma Rousseff means by appointing her. If I could have found a photograph of them together with Izabella Teixeira the Environment Minister it might begin to look like casting for the opening scene of Macbeth. What happens to people? She was tortured apparently, as a young woman in the 70s. What does that do to you I wonder? Grounds for compassion and easy enough for that to bleed over into a general (but unjustified and unwise) approbation. What Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott and Dilma Rousseff and Kátia Abreu and Izabella Teixeira (and their legion of colleagues around the world) are setting up for is hell on earth. They should be doing more than just cleaning their livers. Dig it! A different kind of double date portrayed by Daniel Espinosa in his film 'Easy Money': Three meditations, reflections, ruminations ... which seem to me to be central to the global environmental catastrophe as it unfolds:

Burning Bush: 1968 (August) Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia;   1968 (September) Ryszard Siwiec (7 March 1909 — 12 September 1968) in Poland, aged 59; an accountant with a degree in philosophy, active in the Polish resistance movement, with five children - so ... not a flake;   1969 (January) Jan Palach (11 August 1948 – 19 January 1969) in Wenceslas Square on January 16th, a student, aged 20;   1969 (February) Jan Zajíc (July 3, 1950 – February 25, 1969), a student (railroad engineering), aged 18;   1969 (April) Evžen Plocek (29 October 1929 – 9 April 1969) up-through-the-ranks manufacturing manager and a Communist party member, aged 39;   1985 Mikhail Gorbachev, Glasnost (openness), & Perestroika (restructuring);;   1989 Velvet Revolution, note that this is 20 years later - so even multiple self-immolations cannot be called an effective tactic;   1989-1993 & 1993–2003 Václav Havel;   2003-2013 Václav Klaus. Interesting that he outs himself in 2009 (Copenhagen year) as a climate change denier. :-) ;   1991 documentary film by Polish director Maciej Drygas 'Usłyszcie mój krzyk' / 'Hear My Cry' about Ryszard Siwiec;   2013 Burning Bush a three-part HBO mini-series by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, in Polish;   I've tried to get the Buddhists I know talking about the 'self-immolations' in Tibet (to no avail); and I've tried to get the Toronto climate fasting aficionados to talk about the notion of an actual hunger 'strike' (also to no avail). Mind you this is 'talk about' I'm talking about, discuss, exchange thoughts and ideas. What's so unspeakable? What shibboleth have I tripped over? But ... ... not a (fricken') word! This business of self-immolation must be solitary on several levels. Be that as it may, Theresa Spence's hunger strike on Victoria Island, even though it's object was a share in a diamond mine, showed the power of dramatic personal sacrifice and (it seems to me that) self-immolation falls onto that scale and so should be thought about, considered, not for immediate action or planning purposes but just to see where it fits into the scheme of things.

Samuel Scheffler 'Death and the Afterlife': The library does not have a copy and I am too demoralized to think about asking them to get one. Luckily there is a pirate .pdf floating around so I get to read it. (It was on BookZZ but things come and go over there. If you ask me I will send you a copy by email.) I fall for these philosophers so easily - such a pushover. It was the same with Stephen Gardiner and 'A Perfect Moral Storm' a few years ago. I get right into it, catalogue his (many) typos and send them to him by email for which he thanks me (and the changes are incorporated into the paperback version) but the guy will simply not answer my question about Cuba. How hard could it be to say even just, "Fuck off you know-nothing asshole!"? It would be very easy to tip into "These fuckin' soi-distant careerist American philosophers!" Similar responses from Tim Jackson & Peter Victor & Peter Sale though - so I guess it's nothing to do with either philosophers or America per se. 'Death and the Afterlife' turns out to be another of those 'how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin' exercises conducted under the 'rational' auspices of an avuncular self-effacing and very likeable fellow - he graciously spreads the glory to selected colleagues f'rinstance. I'm glad to be poor and forced to find the pirate version - 200 pages for 40 bucks to buy it, and then I might have felt ... even more like a fool. Nonetheless and all that said - some light is shed upon the poignant quandary of why no one is acting in the face of an overwhelming and quite likely terminal environmental catastrophe (although it is only addressed obliquely). A-and it's just 200 pages, a short read even for washed up old farts with flagging attention-spans. •   provenance: from Adbusters who have obviously read a review but have no idea what the book is about (and are hard pressed to convey even that much gramatically);   •   published by: Oxford University Press / OUP USA and in the OUP blog;   •   a good review: After the Meteor Strike, Amia Srinivasan (pdf) (I mean the review is good), appeared in the LRB where it is securely locked up - the link is to the author's copy;   •   NPR: A Philosopher's 'Afterlife': We May Die, But Others Live On, with a link to an audio interview with the author;   •   YouTube: interview with Harry Kreisler at University of California Television (UCTV) in 2012;   •   bio & contact: blurb at NYU;   •   In the NYT (himself): The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously.;   [What hooked me this time (incidentally) is that the situation (at least) - regarding humanity's extinction ('regarding' as a verb) - has personal relevance. Not in terms of regret for the world my children (who have pretty well turned their backs on me) and grandchildren (whom I hardly know) will inherit - sorry to say it but there it is. And no, I don't fear death, just the pain I expect to preceed it. This is no more than bog standard human nature which has no cousciousness nor real knowledge of death itself and cannot possibly have any.]

Michael Harris 'The End of Absence': Some related (I think, not having seen Harris' book yet) material from Nicholas Carr: his essay in The Atlantic in 2008; and his 2011 book 'The Shallows' (mentioned here previously). One hums a few bars of Bob: "... and his mind has been mismanaged with great skill." •   provenance: from Tim Lott in The Guardian.   •   at the Toronto Public Library with quite a long waiting list;   •   the author's blog: The End of Absence; and an Interview in the New York Times; and the publisher's blurb from Penguin - just $26.95US;   It's all doubly & triply irritating, frustrating, because as a tool email has such wonderful possibilities. I am such a fool as can still imagine he sees advantages :-) But consider addiction to anodyne, the erosion of memory, takeover by the rentier/rentières ... Look up eutrapely (for the second or third time) and have a look at Ephesians 5:4 in the KJV where one sense of eutrapely is stressed. There's a lot more to be said no doubt - but the central phenomenon, which I have seen in myself and others close to me, is backfilling the genuine authentic interest & concern of real people (now excavated & absent) with the seemingly omnipresent & ever ready Kómputtor. There is a phenomenon in 'Dune' (was it?) where those addicted to artificial cerebral stimulation starve, to death. (No, not in 'Dune' maybe it's in 'Dhalgren' ...) And so ... remembering again my old friend Vincent Bernardus Tieleman Twight (getting misty and sentimental here) who managed to stay about completely away from computers in any form (but who did type a short email to me three or four months before he died - typed it mind you, someone else sent it :-). He said ... ... Oh fuck! It's gone! I've lost the damned email! Nevermind. It was just a few words, one sentence, well thought out and through and through, I remember that much. Oh! You see how this useless technology lets you down eh?! Fuck I miss 'im!

Presentation on the new times: Televisions, telephones, computers.     With so much information it's never been so easy ... ... to be misinformed about this brief and finite existence.

 
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Aha! It ain't necessarily cyclical!

It's a cook book!                           
(Costing not less than everything.)

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The rainman gave me two clues: (and I, jumped right in) 1) A conversation overheard:   Walking down the street just before Christmas two people are discussing 'Inherent Vice' - the film! One says to the other, "No one thought anything by Pynchon could ever be made into a film ..." 2) Finite tilings:   Extending the edges of polygons generates tilings in which some regions are bounded and some are not but where the number of regions is finite. Two lines which are not parallel cross only once. These models do not require fastening but ¾" clips are useful during construction, as is carpenter's white (beige) glue at the outer crossings if you want them to last when handled (although they tend to stay together if left clipped for a day or two until the weave sets firmly in). Coffee stir-sticks only serve well up to 7-gons. After that they must be spliced which makes the models less pleasing (to me at least), less ... appealing. The 9-gon/nonagon/enneagon may be of particular interest to Bahá'ís in light of the new temple nearing completion in Chile. Also interesting in containing three triangles - equilateral triangles in the case of a regular nonagon.

3 7 1 +   6=3*2 4 9 1 +   8=4*2 5 16 1 + 5*1 +  10=5*2 6 19 1 + 6*1 +  12=6*2 7 29 1 + 7*1 +  14=7*2 8 33 1 + 16=8*2 +  16=8*2 9 46 1 + 27=9*3 +  18=9*2 10 51 1 + 30=10*3 + 20=10*2 11 67 1 + 44=11*4 + 22=11*2 12 73 1 + 48=12*4 + 24=12*2 13 92 1 + 65=13*5 + 26=13*2 14 xx 1 + xx=14*x + 28=14*2

Of course there must be a formula to get these numbers - but the squash is not equal to such a task anymore (if it ever was). The models can also be fun as frisbees - tossed at the wall they ... explode. Delightful! :-) These next few are examples of what I call flags, banners. What they are are variations on the minimum stable possibility - four struts - and worth remembering simply because they are limiting cases. I like 'em. I have one in the back window. My son, looking up from the lane, saw it there - and he likes it too. 3) "Fish-fingers and custard" (Amelia Pond): I could be wrong, there might've been three clues. The yam started six years ago - a volunteer sprout on the kitchen countertop as it was waiting to go into the soup. I bought a largeish rectangular pot to fit on the windowsill and stuck it in. It gets water from the aquarium and the odd flick of cigarette ash - and a few verses of 'Sisters of Mercy' once in a while (elas vão prendê-lo com amor que é gracioso e verde como um caule). At first it grew vine-wise: the topmost leader feeling around for something above it and when I put a stick there curling and climbing on up. Over the years it grew many times back and forth over the window but the climbing behaviour slowly reduced till in September a new leader began as a stationary clump. I thought this change meant impending death (truth be told) but as you can see it's still going. There are many cycles we normally know - day, month, season, year, sometimes longer (june bug flights, cicadas' singing &c.), human generations: brothers & sisters, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, as well as age-groups in tribal cultures - and others we have stumbled upon scientifically - el niño/la niña, lunar (19 years) and solar (28 years), Milankovitch, glaciation, elemental geological cycles of carbon & phosphorous, ice ages and geological epochs. It's enough to imprint cyclic events into the central symmetry processing circuits, dominantly. There are Northrop Frye's modes. I can't remember if they repeat. Are there three or four? Or six? ... metonymic, hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic? (It has taken weeks of mental Aikido for these terms to float up out of the molasses murk.) Then ... Anne Tyng's historical spiral (which happens to be where this misbegotten string of thoughts actually began). Now, a spiral is somewhat but not strictly cyclic. More along the lines of comme ci, comme ça and que sera sera. Teilhard de Chardin's development from geology to the Noosphere isn't even a spiral - it's ... linear. Same goes for the entire myth-of-progress-and-human-perfectability shebang - straight line. Lines is one thing - first coming, second coming and eternity for the elect - but lines that end? Uh oh! Planets go approximately round and round, comets elliptically ... asteroids? Some of 'em end as shooting stars and some as craters don't they? Curved line with a full stop. Life has been evolving on the planet for four billion years or so (in a universe 13 billion years old - they say). The estimated planetary lifetime is twice that - about eight billion years (dependent upon a relatively local fusion reactor), but the planet itself goes on, or at least the matter in it does. Waddabout the Big Bang? Is it a BANG-whoosh-whoops-wheeze-BANG-whoosh-whoops-wheeze- sorta cosmic Model A kinda sorta thing? Or is it a k-k-k-crank-KAPOW and Riddley Walker's 1 Big 1, a single backfire? The natural macrocosm might be cyclic (even though folks like our Northrop will tell you that's just a metaphor, a fabrication, an artefact built for comfort not accuracy). A microcosm lifetime definitely isn't. It may have been a grave mistake to get so ... (what to call it?) 'involved' (?) in thinking about the environmental Armagedd-i-on catastrophe, even if it does mean extinction. Demonstrably better (by far) to indulge & pursue well-founded self-interest, cash for dental emergencies, megabucks even, blow-jobs at the ready, choice & flexibility ... mmmmmmm ... Easy to make a mistake. Easy to confuse & get things turned 'round backwards: vitiate (viciate) from latin 'vice': to render incomplete, imperfect, or faulty; to impair or spoil; to corrupt, deflower or violate; to render of no effect, invalidate either completely or in part (legal instrument or force); to render inconclusive or unsatisfactory (argument); to adulterate; to alter feloniously. enervate (a 'nerve' being first a sinew or tendon and only later an electrical canal): to cut the tendons of, to hamstring, hough (a horse); to emasculate; to weaken physically; to impair the strength of; to weaken mentally or morally; to destroy the capacity for vigorous effort of intellect or will; to destroy the force of (argument, testimony, &c.); to destroy the grounds of (doctrine, opinion); to render ineffectual (law, an authority, an opponent's efforts, etc.); to disparage the power or value of. For, say, vitalise and energise. If only: If only it were limited to the NSA & CIA, or even America, or even ... North America, or the 'western' elites, or ... or, or. But it's the whole fricken' shebang, the whole shitteree. I think this is not misogyny at all but (has become) misanthropy, a more general kind of (mixed) feeling having nothing at all to do with sex. "The answer is that these imbecile words are euphemisms for manic-depressive highs and lows, and that anyone who struggles for sanity avoids both." I had this message from him years ago. You'd think I might've heard it by now eh? Mind you, he was talking about 'some contemporary situation' and while this environmental catastrophe is definitely a situation, and contemporary in a way, it is not necessarily a cycle and so perhaps ... different. UNFCCC UNFCUC UNFUCT UNFCOF! [Realizing that it may not be cyclic feels something like the first reading of A.S. Byatt's 'Ragnarok', mixed with the horror of watching a Twilight Zone episode 'How To Serve Man' in 1962 (when TV was still new) and she calls to him as he walks up the ramp into the spaceship, "It's a cook book!" It used to be received wisdom that adolescents (and then twenty- and then thirty-somethings) are immortal, an almost sentimental philosophy. Now death is officially become a professional event, put so far away that the notion of actual or 'real' mortality is (even as observed here a year ago) interpreted as obscenity. The tune emerges over several weeks, almost a month (believe it or not), at first just a rhythm - dah dah dum dum dah dah dum dum dah dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah dah dum dum - which resolves with excruciating slowness into 'Christmas in Killarney'. At first I think it's to do with 'Brigadoon', download and watch the film, a week spent just in that. Brigadoon, 1954, with an already complete myth of New York City as poisonous & effectively defunct. Someone who actually knows anything, say, Noam Chomsky or Jakke Straw, might laugh and say "1954!? It was well before that you silly wanker!" I'm afraid the human world is ending. Easy enough to say, "Well, your world certainly is," and leave it at that. Maybe add, "Good riddance!" or better still ... shunning & silence with no comeback, and good of a certain kind to be had in schadenfreude (taking malicious pleasure in the misfortune of others). A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. I am increasingly overwhelmed by grief and particularly (I think, because) I am grieving alone. ]

 
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It's NOT too late!

Though it IS close as dammit,
so close as makes no nevermind,
AND it's improbable we'll turn around in time.

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A few days later it comes to me (as often happens) that I have forgot to make the point: see Postscripts (below). Having a beer (and Jameson chaser) with my good son the other day, somewhere west on Queen. Doesn't happen often enough. His friend the barman asks what the 350 button's for and makes the Jameson complimentary. Then my son and I get to talking and he lets me know, gives it to me straight, "It's too late." I say, "No it ain't," and give several good scientific reasons. He says, "Yeah but we'll never turn it around in time." He's probably right. I just about agree. Gwynne Dyer about agrees too and he's a pretty smart guy. Jim Hansen drifts in that direction as well (I think) though you'd never know it from a quick reading of his latest epistle: Assuring real progress on climate. He seems more-and-more under the spell of his 'team' who appear to be aficionados, adherents, and devotees of Norman Vincent Peale and Edward Bernays, but if you read carefully there are no reasons to be hopeful in it. Unless (that is) you really believe donations to (the always polite) Citizens Climate Lobby and (the ever vain) 350.org are gonna do the trick and turn the tide. Everyone pretty well knows what's needed: ... but nobody's really sayin' nor wants to be first.   Settling the question - one way or the other - is a satisfying operation. I can dig it. And the up-side is so fraught & ambiguous that it's easier by far to go with "It's too late." [I wonder if such satisfactions have anything to do with judgements on misogyny? Skulking feral skrællings (from neither Shem nor Ham nor Japheth)!] I tell you what though: spending any amount of time with my kids delivers a great big walloping jolt of positive energy right into the ol' hypothalamus lizard brain. I've not tried cocaine but it might be something like that, or amphetamines, whites but without the crash. So ...     ... it's the next day ... alone with no telephone and ... ... here's what happens:

Dear Elizabeth May, Bruce Hyer, and Adriana Mugnatto: I staked a grand on Elizabeth May's election in Saanich-Gulf Islands a few years ago - I like to imagine that some of the 7,300-odd winning votes were down to me - and I staked another grand and more on Adriana Mugnatto and her activities when she was a Green Party candidate in Toronto-Danforth. I am not saying this to brag - I am saying I think this gives me a right to expect you to read this carefully and make some kind of answer. There is a national election coming soon. Neither Stephen Harper's (sleveen) Conservatives, nor Justin Sinclair's Liberals, nor wazizname and the NDP, have anything like a platform to properly address global warming, climate change, and the associated issues: ocean acidification ... &c. &c. &c. or as I call it the Environmental Armageddon - which is already well underway and which may spell extinction for our kind. We all know the UNFCCC process is doomed to failure. That makes national, provincial and municipal elections into do-or-die struggles. Over some years I have (politely) visited the Green candidates in my riding - Beaches-East York - and found them lame and unsupportable (by me anyway, and according to results by others as well). I could name them. I could prove this point with nine-inch nails but I am sure you know what I'm talking about. So ... what if the Green Party of Canada gets serious? Oh I know, you think you're serious already. But I was in the room when Don Drummond was invited (!) and spoke to a Green Party convention and did not get run out of the place for talking about the "inevitability of growth." And I was in another room when Adriana Mugnatto herself asked the chair if it was not past time to tell Green voters the truth about the near-hopelessness of the environmental situation and was told (effectively) not to be so negative. And I know that Adriana was not playing to win because I asked her and she told me. What would the Green Party of Canada getting serious look like? For one thing it would be Peter Victor and Tim Jackson talking about economics and (de)growth not some ex-banker. What if the Green Party computed a Fee & Dividend carbon tax large enough to have a substantial effect and made that their central platform plank? What if the Green Party told the unvarnished scientific truth about the odds for a less than 2°C average planetary temperature rise and the best scientific opinions to fix it? It's a no-brainer but even the scientists agree we must stop burning fossil fuels NOW. What if the Green Party promised, not only that all subsidies for fossil fuel related activities would immediately cease, but also that all government pension funds would be immediately required to divest fossil fuel and related investments? And that the pension funds of any organizations (including labour unions) doing business with the government would have to immediately follow suit or be barred? What if all of those subsidies and investments were redirected to deployment (not development, we already have the technology) of wind, solar, and geo-thermal sources of energy? What if the Green Party told voters what a prosperous and flourishing society would result from such policies? What if the Green Party of Canada promised to tax shipment of crude oil by rail at such a rate as to make it impractical? What if the Green Party of Canada promised to tax automotive, truck, and air fuels similarly, the revenue to be used to reinstate effective bus and rail transportation both within and between cities? (Do you know that if you want to get from Toronto to Sarnia - in order to, say, support Ron Plain - it can't be done by rail or bus?) And what if this platform were not called some equivocal 'Green Shift' but: THIS IS WHAT WE MUST DO NOW TO ENSURE HUMANITY'S FUTURE ON THIS PLANET (!)? I don't have any more grands to give you. All the money's gone. I'm living on handouts. I know I must sound like a nutbar flake but the money I did give you came to me as a very prosperous senior techie working for the likes of KBR/Halliburton & Exxon oil baronies and these organizations only pay for performance - so ... not always a nutbar flake at least, and I didn't get fired either - I walked away. What I will give you is a promise to do WHATEVER I can do of WHATEVER you may ask me to do IF YOU DECIDE TO PLAY TO WIN - up to and including the bitter end. Please know that if none of you respond to this I will send emails, and then hardcopies by mail, and if I still get no response I will come to your doors as often as I am able to and knock politely and ask, and I will keep on like that until I get some kind of answer wise or otherwise. Then I will be able to look my children and grandchildren in the eye and say, "I did what I could even if it was silly and lame and not nearly enough." cc Colin Griffiths (who tells me he is a mover and shaker in the Green hierarchy).

After that it goes something like this:    • 21st:write the draft, sleep, and have bad dreams.      • 22nd: encounter a man shouting in the park, "Merry Christmas to all," and ten seconds later, "I'm gonna kill those cops, gonna kill all those cops," and I'm thinking how difficult it is to get across, he doesn't scare me and doesn't look like he's really going to kill anyone - he's just yelling, in the park, in the wintertime, with bagfuls of what look like donated clothes, and everyone is backing away, including me who should be the one to talk with him.      • 23rd: no communications except Jim Hansen's epistle; stonewall in the latest round of "you're a misogynist," "no I'm not."      • 24th: she sends Zero bars, four of 'em.      • 25th: run out of smokes, talk to Mohammed about his sons, Lion and Honoured.      • 26th: very low.      • 27th: ditto till she reminds me that popcicle-stick models explode when you toss 'em at the wall; and a Christmas invitation comes too late.      • 28th: make flags, remember the Foote's Bay Regatta, wonder what happened; maybe I'll send a link (knowing they don't follow links for fear of unseen executables) or maybe not; a kind note is slipped under the door by the landlord asking if I need anything.      • 29th: silence, singin' 'You Better Come On In My Kitchen' and 'Sitting On Top Of The World' and 'Hello Young Lovers'.      • 30th: listen to Al Gore congratulate Christiana Figueres on her performance at COP 20 in Lima - HORSE COCK!      • 31st: what if I did send emails?      •  2nd: send the fricken' emails? maybe tomorrow.      •  3rd: or maybe not, it's not that they're Greens per se y'unnerstan', it's that the others are all so appallingly contrary to any sort of sense or sensibility, hermetically seamless.      •  4th: it's worth having a close look at the Green Party of Canada Platform: in brief or in (100 page .pdf) detail if only to savour the delicate brushstrokes of the architects of (what looks to me like) a moribund ideology.      •  5th: read it all again and ... ?      •  6th: ditto ... ?      •  7th: ditto ... ?      •  8th: ditto ... ?      • 10th: ... fuck it.   Not much boobage in the last while; maybe a few unicorn jokes will fill the gap: Aiming low on all fronts: [This Horsey cartoon is from 2011. Doesn't seem fair to centre out the poor hard-done-by fossil fuel industry. The blame should be spread somehow over the gazillion politicians and consultants and definitely all over the UNFCCC, Connie Hedegaard & Christiana Figueres.] The Socialists think of Cuba as an ideological exemplar of some kind. Obama probably thinks of it as a market. I think of it as a successful experiment of what happens when you turn the oil off. There's not much more to say really. I'm probably not getting on a bus to go confront Elizabeth May or Bruce Hyer. I'm probably not even gonna bother sending emails. There was a bright moment there a few weeks ago and now it's gone dark again. "Now she's gone and I don't worry 'cause I'm sittin' on top of the world." [Probably not Peary, Scott, or Amundsen. Could be a Zen Buddhist epitome, a perfectly realized being or a seamless insouciant pose, sufficient heroin or oxycontin, up against the wall waiting for the order to fire or in the electric chair waiting to be hurled.] "A plague on both your houses!" (And so there is.) "From this moment the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand." (And we all know where this leads. :-) All I can say these days is "I don't care," (the latest incarnation of Tourette's) but you know, people say things they don't mean all the time. It's like throwing things in the garbage to make them easier to ignore and forget - and then finding you can neither forget nor ignore them. [So. And any of those upon whom I have visited my unjustified criticism can now say, "Nyah nyah nah na na na!" though I'm sure they won't. It's like the joke about the arrogant mouse that tries it with an elephant - "Suffer baby! Suffer!" What Ever! Whatever the outcome I laid it out as true as I were able.]

Postscript: A few days later (on the lucky 13th) it comes to me (as often happens) that I have forgot to make the point: It's not (quite) too late now. Unless real leaders emerge in 2015 it will be. (And I don't mean at the UNFCCC in Paris.)  Best I've seen is:                 Occupation Apple Tree;                 Vancouver Island Community Forest Action Network; and,                 East End Against Line 9. All well worthy of praise and whatever support they may ask for. It's either some kind of resistance or we can all go along and go along and go along (with Foxy Loxy) and find out exactly what they meant at the end of 'Limits To Growth' when they said: "... falling into a state of worthless existence."   Postscript:   A-and a few WEEKS later (around midnight on the 30th) it comes to me (as often happens) that I have DOUBLY and, and ... TRIPLY (!) forgot to make the point: So - a rejoinder and surrejoinder (though there have been no replies whatsoever). The whole edifice and infrastructure is so thin that with $300 million recently invested by The City of Toronto in their welfare software they are unable to properly print a cheque. It is physically gibbled (as is often the case the receptionist tells me) and the bank finds an excuse not to cash it. I have to carry it back to the office and beg for a new one. But it is the 30th and the place fills up with others on approximately the same and similar errands - end of the month welfare crisis blues. Three hours go by before a kind security guard notices my 350 button and asks about it and a kind woman (a maritimer) kibitzes her way to discovering and removing the blockage - the cheque is in an automated queue which the clerk has forgotten to monitor (not his fault). The cheque is soon reprinted and I am on my way. I've shortened this - there's a tin of coconut macaroons involved as well. The effect is augmented by the bank teller remembering my face from last month and smiling. These (tiny?) bits of attention are sufficient to stoke the embers to some kind of ... positive fugue. The mindless downloaded TV hyper-dreck (episodes of 'Justified' and 'Catastrophe') jumps into focus momentarily - I reach (but do not grasp) modes of story telling beyond the age of irony (beyond Archie Bunker and The Simpsons). AND! I see that my poking at Elizabeth May and Bruce Hyer and Adriana Mugnatto is unfinished. The very-nearly-perfect vacuum of Canadian politics in which a twerp like Justin Sinclair is next in line to Stephen Harper (according to a Globe on-line poll) might be re-inflated by the simplest act of courage on their parts. Of course courage is never simple, but the vision of complacency overturned is strong enough for me to come back here and make these few notes - so at least (even if it is never grasped) I will not entirely forget it.

Erm ... of course there are ... ... other points of view, other opinions, takes & glimpses, wise and otherwise (and not necessarily either stupid or sentimental). Says Natalie Dee: "The world isn't going to end, we're not that lucky. It will just get worse and dirtier and we will be trapped." Miel (almost) smiles and says nothing. Joep Bertrams is on about a national health care situation - but for me it works better ... more 'globally', as the blind leading the blind. A-and Gado takes the brass ring.

 
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