No mo mo

On November 15th it looked like this:

Today it looked like this:

Well that's something, I guess. Truth be told, I want to be rid of the schnirr. It always feels a bit moist underneath it, and it just itches and scratches and aggravates. I don't think the skin on my face and the hair it produces are out of the closet compatible. My skin tolerates it, but after a couple of days it just screams "get this ingrown stiff-necked heretic out of here" and I oblige. 

I still haven't taken the knife to it. If not tonight, then tomorrow night, but soon there must be no mo mo.

Ride report

in:      -8'C wind 20 ks S

out:   -4'C wind 15 ks NNE

 

Doing good

This can only be a beginning. I'm going to continue it sometime. Honest. I've been impatient. I confess it. Who wants to wait? I've been waiting long enough. Putting it off really. Putting it off so long that all I've managed are small spurts of it, which is more dabbling than engaging. I have a long way to go, and I've really just started down the path.

I'm mixing my metaphors. Spurts. Paths. Enough of that. I am so slow to believe. I know, if you know me, you know that I have a gullible side - a "want to believe it" side - that keeps me going. But in truth I don't really believe in myself, or in the goodness I apparently hope for. 

I say apparently because when I rave on about how things could be or should be better, I recognize a kind of fundamentalism of hope. It's in my genes I think. One philosopher (I recall who - John Gray?) says that "hope" is pernicious and the root of religion and foolishness because it distracts us from the toil and crap of today; it averts our eyes upward to some vista that may as well be a mirage.

Rather, one must examine the crap, pay attention to the labour at hand. This is such an obvious maxim. Live in the now. Do what you do now, well, and confront it when it's bad. Stop then, and proceed to the next good thing to do. Seek only to know enough to tell good from bad, and then to do it (the good that is).

And what is good? What does one draw on to determine that? I had a dream last night. I'd fallen behind again. We'd been called in to work. It was an email message that I had seen but not opened. When I finally did open it, I was already late. So I rush out the door. Better late than never I think. Even though it's on my Christmas holidays that's the sort of power my boss has over me. It's a whole staff affair, and it's some kind of a trust-building activity day. I get there just in time to help a group of them try to lift and roll (or were we trying to bounce it?) a large tractor tire the size of the ones that are used on four-wheel-drives. The goal is to move it from one line to another one, but the tire starts out in a kind of a ditch, so we have to roll it up the ditch hill first. It's heavy. It's hard. The tire wants to roll back down. 

Sisyphus. This is the first sign of bad. Engaging a contrived task that threatens to become repetitive, alone or with others, that has no inherent meaning or purpose. We roll the tire not because it needs to be moved, but because the authority has asked us to, and because we trust that authority and each other to be looking out for our best interests. But we suspect they're not. We suspect they're looking out for their own best interests. We suspect that we are putting off our own best interests in an attempt to garner their favour, and the favour of those around us. This is bad. 

I know this means I'm defining good in the negative. That is, if I can figure out what is bad, then I'm halfway to determining what is good. Well, halfway certain is better than not certain at all. I'll take that much for now. It's taken me a while to see that just persevering in doing bad stuff, isn't good. Just because perseverance is virtuous doesn't mean that practicing it is always taking you down the path to goodness. I've spent a lot of time and energy being mad at others for working hard at foolish tasks, and even hating my own foolishness in engaging such tasks. So now I must engage in the task of undoing this habit of mind, this way of being, that is founded in any hope that someone else will see the merit of my effort as worthy, rather than the merit of the task. Which is to say that I have to stop worrying about my effort being measured, and worry more about doing good things, right now, for myself. 

Oh that sounds selfish. See? My religion bears down on me again. 

Ride report

in:      -1'C wind 8 ks S

out:   -4'C wind 2 ks W

Three things from the weekend

Sunday: 10 Myths About Introverts describes me. Pretty much exactly.

Saturday: Watched Everything Must Go. 

I love watching Will Ferrell being serious. He's still funny, it's just a different kind of funny. He's not trying  to be funny, he's just funny to watch. And he can act. Although I don't think he's as engaging in this performance as he is in Stranger Than Fiction, he's working harder here. The cast isn't powerful  and overwhelming in this film, as compared to STF (where he was working with Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman, and Maggie Gyllenhaal) so he's got to carry things on his own. He does. I liked the movie, but since it's based (loosely) on a Raymond Carver story - Why Don't You Dance? - I had that thing in my head too, and I ended up thinking too much about the opportunities the movie missed. 

I'd have hoped that since this production was about as close to an independent release as you can get in Hollywood it might also allow itself to get closer to edgy. That's what Carver's stories do - play on the edge: the guy drinks a lot of whisky, not a lot of Pabst Blue Ribbon; the guy himself sets up his furniture on the front lawn in the same way that it was set up in his house, he's not been kicked out with all of it by his wife (that's been done in a few movies before); the young couple shows up and he plays them records and they dance together and he with them, he doesn't meet an underprivileged kid with whom he plays catch, and who he grooms into a salesman, nor does he meet a tender-hearted young mom-to-be who nurtures him back to health. These re-visions are not better than the source material. 

In fact maybe they only noted the source material to avert a possible complaint, and then went about there merry business disregarding the story (except for the furniture on the lawn bit). Maybe the screenplay based on Carver's story should have been written by Tom Waits (or at least by Charlie Kaufman). Maybe then it would've hung onto the grit and the rough. Then we'd have to do a little good work ourselves to see what good has come of it for the fired, down-on-his-luck lost American-dreamer. Do we always need to be told that there's a "diamond" in there?          

Friday: Won $70 at poker (2 games, subtract $20 for the fee to play). Won the first game, came in second in the second.

Curling season win #2

Tonight was a good night! A win against win of the best teams in the draw, and two free beers to fortify the ride home! I'm gonna sleep well tonight!

Ride report

in:     -1'C wind 15ks S

out:  2'C wind 15 ks S

Make it strange

The Errol Morris Op-Ed doc explaining the apparently sinister and inexplicable "umbrella man" of the Kennedy assassination makes the point, again, that truth may well be stranger than fiction.

Well that's a cheap shot at fiction. The nub of the matter is that if we scrutinize any moment in which numerous people are going about their routines, or breaking out of them, we will find oddities that, if we are looking for devils, will look devilish.

That's a fair and reasonable. When we observe things, we change them - some psychology study said so. And so what about fiction, and truth, and strangeness? 

There isn't enough time to get into it right now. No matter what I do, I always end up here at about 11:35 pm scrambling something together for this consumptive blog-monster. That's true. It's not strange. It's completely predictable. Almost reliable, except that I'm not. 

And I'd use this situation in a piece of fiction because it might be interesting, and because it's easy to believe that it's true, and because fiction isn't supposed be strange, it's supposed to be plausible and, wait for it, insightful. The point of most fiction, from Stephen King's horror to Ursula K. Le Guin's speculations, is to say something about the "human condition." (I put that phrase in quotation marks because I need to tell you that while it should be ubiquitous, and in many ways is rather than cliched, you can't be sure of much these days. But in some circles you can't say "It's about the human condition." without a significant incidence of eye-rolling.) 

What is "strange" anyway? Purely a matter of point of view isn't it? We don't need too many examples to recognize that the major factor in anyone's declaring an event or a person as "strange" is their perspective on the subject. 

What is "true?" A matter of point of view too? Likely. That and consensus I imagine. If a large group of us agree on an account or an explanation, we come to allow ourselves the luxury of certainty and we declare the thing as true. Ahhh. Now we don't have to think about that thing anymore. We've got it filed. If anyone asks, we can refer them to our neatly stored reality.    

What is "fiction?" When someone has the audacity, or imagination, to go back to one of those files, open it, reread it, and suggest another interpretation of the person or the event, he's created a fiction, another version of the truth. Sometimes these story-bound suggestions go further afield than others - read Philip K. Dick sometime - and sometimes they read like, well, like it's not been imaginative enough, that the interpretation is more like a paraphrase than anything - think about the trouble James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) got into when he (or his editor) walked this line.

So what is fiction? It's that truth we've all already agreed upon being made strange again so we can re-see it, re-imagine it, re-consider it, even re-tell it. Truth is not stranger than fiction. Fiction is truth made strange again. 

Ride report
in:        -3'C wind 20 ks S
out:     -5'C wind 15 ks S

Layout and decline

Clever title eh? I learned today, from a trusted friend, that a person in the city was asking $2500 to complete a task I've done 15 times (and am now doing my 16th and final time) as a volunteer over the past few years. Well I guess I'm either a tool, or a really generous guy. 

I don't feel generous these days. Behind maybe. A bit bitter to be sure. Not generous though. It says a lot (and not very good things) about me that I'm still doing this, despite my misgivings. My generous spirit is in sharp decline. I've given more than I should have, and now I'm in a tailspin. 

It's going to be positive though. I'm going to come out of this having to figure out how to use the time I'm going to take back, to develop something more lasting - myself. If this all sounds kind of hokey and 21st century whine-o-rama so be it. I'm due. It's in the design. 

Ride report

in:     -11'C wind 12 ks S

out:   -10'C wind 15 ks S

       

Pictures of children (fiction)

He buys the scooter and has it delivered. It's perfect. Italian and cream and tan and parked outside on the front walk. Leaning there, nonchalant on its stand, it makes even Winnipeg under the elms look like residential Paris.   

Still, the shine is off. Neither of them wants to admit it, least of all he. There is always a way to avoid it, though in her eyes the signal flickers. If however, you don't keep your eyes open wide when you greet her with a kiss, you'll never notice. 

The question is whether he understands his need to continue, or how this, his most recent effort, might only be an attempt, yet again, not to lose. Does he understand the question? We do, but Vincent's awareness has become, in some way, our question too.

For instance, he's just read the latest New Yorker, to which he subscribes on his ipad, and on it he's chuckled at the cartoons (which he reads first, always), in particular at the one with the caption: "We realize it's a win-win, Jenkins - we're trying to figure out a way to make it a win-lose." 

The men around the boardroom table get it. So does Vincent, but not in the way that will be helpful for him, and for us. Meredith might get it too, but she would never read The New Yorker on her ipad. She'd want to know what Babble or dooce would say.

Wistful, she'd enter the blogger's world hoping for pictures of children. The one of the two girls standing at the front door, backpacked and bundled for the trip to school. Herein lies our first clue. It's obvious really. Embarrassingly so.