Inner Peacock

When I see a person in a shiny car it makes me think of a peacock. I'm not making fun of that person, we all have our ways of puffing out our chests and displaying our feathers. Dancing a little to catch the fickle eye of the hen. With us humans it's not always a rooster hen thing, mating often has nothing to do with it. As humans we have a need to be noticed.

Nice hair cut. Thank you, is that a new coat? Why, yes I got it for a steal! Excuse me I have to check my blackberry, can't leave the office for a moment. Gosh, don't I know it!

Did you see my picture?

Did you read the clever thing that I wrote?

Meet my dog, see what I read:)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91FLc4yDGc&feature=channel_page

Structure of a Town

Brick and stone. Stone first, and then brick, that's the way they seemed to appear in my home town of Cambridge, Galt. The area was settled by Scottish Immigrants in the early part of the 19th century, the Scots brought with them their talents in working stone.

When you walk around the buildings in the downtown core you first notice the front facades of carved stone or ornate brick. next you marvel at the buildings sides and rear, how it is composed of carefully fitted rough stone. You see this method of construction in the tiny little cottages that have survived the century and one half since they were first built. I think that as people in my area prospered they began desire the sophistication of brick.

Brick is a hallmark of civilization, any peasant can gather field stones and pile one atop the other, but it takes structure and civil planning to organize a brickyard.

Resolve

Me: I want to change the world. I will change the world. With the force of my will and the strength of my convictions, I will make this world a better place... How shall I begin?

Guru: In order to affect positive change in the world, you must first affect positive change in yourself.

Me: Oh crap! forget it, it sounds like a bigger job then I thought.

Riddle for a Winters Day

I can travel on water.

I can fly in the air.

I have been to other planets.

I can be made of wood, paper, leather or even clay.

I can sometimes be a witch.

What am I?

I wish everyone warmth and light, on this the shortest day, through this the longest night.

Earmuffs

I spent the summer working in Toronto, there I got to know a really fun and creative girl, she shares my love of words. Her primary creative focus is painting, I've seen her work in oil, very unrestricted and abstract. She has promised me a painting but has yet to deliver. I'm not going to rush her, when it comes to waiting for things I have a Jobian Patience. When I transferred back to my home location I found that I missed our daily conversations.

We began a game of email tag, we would take turns posing a question and then try to answer it in the most creative way that we could. One day she brought this question to the virtual table. "after you die what is the most interesting thing that you could have done with your remains"? In my reply I described an elaborate ritual of cremation. followed by a scattering of my ashes upon distant lands, that in life I had failed to visit. I made my descriptions of the places as visually beautiful as I could, I used a very somber tone, I built into it a reverence for the earth and its peoples.


That night I thought again about the topic. I felt it was to morbid for my taste, though I liked the way it had stretched my imagination. I felt that it needed to be balanced with humour, and an absurd humour at that.

The next day I wrote this,

An additional request for the handling of my remains. I have always had nipples of a rather large size. They have caused gym class ridicule and beach front embarrassment. To this day when someone suggests a shirts and skins basketball game I enter a state of full blown panic.

I don't wish to take them with me on my journey into the afterlife. Before cremation, my nipples will be removed and sent to a tanner, after the tanning process is complete, fine fleece needs to be fitted into their inner surface. I would like a master craftsman to fashion my tanned and padded nipples into a pair of earmuffs.

It would please and honor me so, that if on the coldest of days you would wear them. At that point I believe my spirit could rest knowing that my nipples, something the caused me such grief in life, were now keeping warm the ears of a dear friend.

If on a cold winters night you were to wear your nipple-muffs and walk alone into a silent glade of the forest, I am sure that you would hear the echo of my beating heart.

Are you smiling?

Face

Behind these hands is the most handsome face. I've kissed it when it first appeared on this earth, and every day there after I kissed it again. I wouldn't have traded those kisses for travel, for money, for any other excitement. It's been a good run of kisses, these nine and one half years.
I know that circumstance will interrupt this practice from time to time, as the future stretches itself out before us.

It's the sweetest thing to stand over a sleeping baby, to softly kiss his face and whisper, God bless you and keep you safe.

I, Ghost

I find the worse thing about being a ghost is not that you can’t touch or taste, it is that you can still see and hear but you can’t touch or taste. Can anyone blame me for my envy of the living?

I took this picture and wrote these words after a conversation with a friend about ghosts. I believe in ghosts only metaphorically. I see them as literary stand ins for alienation. To me ghosts carry a subtext of yearning for what is impossible.

Boyhood

There is a book, or there should be a book about boys. It is, or should be, titled, Rivers of Our Boyhood. It describes the crackling tight feeling of mud-clay drying on small hands. It should detail the exciting, golden, dragon scale flash of a carp breaching the surface of murky shallows.

To read it is to see the underside of bridges illuminated in dancing reflected sunlight.

Soup

I have no recipe for soup that I follow in my little kitchen, the ingredients are dictated to me by what is left in my fridge. Soup is the food of second chance, the broth of redemption. Stuff that was headed for the compost bin, the bits and pieces that failed to make it into my meals throughout the week, are made useful.

When those scraps come together in my pot its a kind of magic to me. Its a Sunday afternoon story of something from nothing.


Oh, don't forget to add a pinch or two of turmeric, or you'll still have nothing.

My Kitchen Rock

I was a young man when my father died. A year later my mother died. I wept more for my father, though I was closer to my mother. Oedipedal guilt Freud would say, but not really, for I never begrudged my father my mothers affections. He was simply a nice guy, a mostly gentle person.


After his death I took his wrist watch, not his dress watch but the one that he wore to work every day. When I would slip it on I would feel some of his energy, a tingle in my arm. Whether real or imagine the sensation was comforting.


I have in my possession an egg shaped cobble of granite, a stone that I found on a walk in the woods.It reminds me of the egg shapes in a Dali painting. I made it surreal with a hammer and chisel years ago when I was bored. I use this stone as a "kitchen rock". I crack peppercorns and pound garlic like an east Indian cook. It is very useful, better than any store bought utensil.


If you are a sensitive person, you could hold this article in your hand and feel my energy, a tingle in your arm...

Cell Phone Tower-Tower of Babel

I'm not very good with numbers, higher math has always eluded me. When I see people applying concepts to numbers and figuring things out like , how much the tip at a restaurant should be, I am left in awe. A jealous awe I should add, for when someone demonstrates a talent that I don't possess,my humanness makes me jealous, not in the really bad, Catholic theology, 1/7th of the deadly sins kinda way. Just a benign, I want to have also.

Try to imagine how confused I am when I attempt to understand the cause of the global economic crisis, being that global economics isn't a strong point for a guy who can't tell you what 15% of a $12.50 order is. Challenged as I am, I think I can say with a bit or certainty, what wasn't the cause.

A raise in the minimum wage I don't believe had anything to do with it, I think community sponsored agriculture may be off the hook as well. We certainly can't blame the creation of more child care spaces or the funding of programs for youth at risk. Harm reduction strategies, socialized medicine, lower tuition fees, and the Kyoto accord, I feel are all innocent.

I don't buy into the old proverb: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. -I would choose good old human greed as a more direct route.

Old Canoe

My old canoe. If there was anything or anyone in my life that was so neglected and abused as this old boat, I can't say. I remember the day that I bought it from its maker, Mr. William Coleman of Cambridge, Galt. He made sturdy canoes of hand laid fibreglass. It's been at least twenty years since I first tied it to the top of my Toyota Tercel and drove off in search of still lakes and meandering rivers.

I once carried it on my head on a 5 kilometer portage to a tiny lake in Algonquin park. I stayed there with a friend for five days the weather was so beautiful. I remember sitting in our camp at night, the immense wilderness all around, and staring into our warm fire. I remember thinking that sitting in front of a fire in the dark uncertainty of night is one of the most human things that we do.

I love this old boat, I see beauty in it's lines, and grace in it's function.

My best memory of this canoe was paddling the Grand River on the still waters above the Parkhill dam. My wife Elaine sat at the bow, she was nine months pregnant, dipping her paddle every once and awhile. I paddled the J-stroke and brought us up river to the point where we floated adjacent to the Cambridge hospital. We both smiled at one another, we had an appointment there, our baby was to be delivered by Cesarean section the next day. Less than twenty four hours later I stood in the sun room at the hospital holding my new boy tightly swaddled. My gaze kept shifting between his perfect face, and the river of my own boyhood.

Moments like these in our lives make even the most practical person philosophical, The date was July,15,1999

The Fruit of Neglect is No Fruit at All

I'm a neglectful gardener, my poor little plum tree developed a black knot infestation and I let get out of hand. Before the snow came and the ground froze I hacked and hacked until there was little if anything left. the only thing that stopped me from uprooting the tree and getting rid of it was the same laziness that got the tree into trouble. If that tree was a dog, I would have had it taken from me and my neglectful cruelty would have placed me in jail.

If I'm lucky I'll find a few blossoms on the remaining limbs next spring, and if I'm really lucky, mid-August will have me tasting plums.

Fast-break-Fast

Huevos rancheros, my kid will eat this guaranteed. He cleans the plate every time. I fill a flour tortilla with scrambled eggs, drop in some chopped, crisp bacon, shredded cheese and some salsa. Fold over, brush a little oil on a hot pan, and brown on both sides. This is fast simple peasant food at its very best.

Put a pinch of oregano in the eggs , go ahead I dare you!

Remembering a Summer Bike Ride

Shade of a spruce, printed on this old barn, built long before the tree was even a seed.

I saw closeup the old farmhouse door. Streets and avenues intersect in its weather-checked paint. A blemish mares the luster of its porcelain knob, like a crater does the face of the moon.
The key hole is a dark mysterious orbit of an ancient skull through which I cannot peer. I try to imagine the splendor that lies behind. Light that falls through bare windows, illuminating wide planked floors. Old ,rose patterned paper curling off the walls from the humid weight of summers past. Switch plates of old Bakelite.

I reach for the knob, the door is locked.

Jack

Coincidence and synchronicity always leave me feeling strange. They make me feel like I'm being poked at by a cosmic smart-ass, an omniscient, playful prankster that sticks his foot out when I'm walking down the corridor of life.

Several months back I ordered an inexpensive screen printing kit from an art store. I had the idea that it would be fun for my 9 year old son and I to make t-shirts with some cool stuff printed on them. I searched online for high contrast images that I could use, I polished them up with some imaging software and I showed them to my son before printing them to a transparency. The first picture was one of writer Jack Kerouac
and the other was of the 60s icon Twiggy.

When I showed them to my son he was unimpressed, He didn't know who those people were and he didn't care. He told me to keep searching.
The next day I went into work. I work in a warehouse and look after inventorying office furniture that we store for corporate clients. I was telling my coworker the Jack And Twiggy story, and how my son responded to my choices. My friend laughed and said that the kid probably wants a picture of Sponge Bob.

20 minutes later I was pulling furniture from the racking, I had a skid that was full of freestanding sets of drawers, what we in the office furniture business call peds. the peds were old and used, they had been inventoried but not properly specified and bar-coded. I always clean the contents out of the drawers so that when I ship the ped out someone doesn't receive a bonus rotten banana or a pair of smelly shoes. When I opened the bottom drawer I found a photograph of Jack Kerouac lying on a bunch of loose papers, It wasn't a copy of the one that I found for printing, it was one of Jack standing shirtless, on a beach.

I have these strange experiences all of the time, I imagine that most people do. It's as if the universe is keyed into you and you into it. It's like underlying everything there is a force of playful humour at work.