Anti-boomer boomer?

In our youth we are horrified by our inheritance, the world bestowed upon us by those who have flagrantly exploited it, then passing onto us, their heirs, the toxic runoff from their vicious destruction of all that matters. Then in our late youth, we are so busy surviving the life that most of us have accidentally fallen into, careers, families, homes etc to have energy for anything as minor as the state of the world.

Next stop, middleage – that cranky time when we decry the world that is clearly going to hell in a handbasket, no fault of our own, mind. It’s those reckless progress seekers who are destroying every institution that mattered, ie every nostalgic memory we have that bears only a passing resemblance to reality. What’s particularly horrifying at this juncture is that we boomers get to take centre stage due not to the wisdom of our outlook but by our sheer numbers and economic clout. Yes we are in charge of most major news outlets - newspapers, TV shows, publishing and as a result we are paid a good wage to cry foul about where all this is headed - okay I'm not, which may explain my bitterness.

Could this boomer-crusted media empire be why we are subjected endlessly to the ongoing kerfuffle about a grammar-stickler's punctuation book, an insult laden judge of perky young divas and divos (the male equivalent?) and an apparently mediocre novelist taking a strip off his more successful peers? While bloggers obsess over hangovers and Paris Hilton, we boomers who are not in charge, sit in our easy chairs and say, you tell ‘em Lynn Truss, Simon Cowell and Dale Peck. And then as a just reward for your cranky dismissal of all those who do not match your exquisite expectations, we shall turn our magnifying glasses on you and burn gaping holes in your work.

How many times has Lynn Truss been accused of bad grammar? How many words have been spent on Dale Peck’s failings as a critic and novelist? Just desserts or holding them up to their own criteria? Or is it just one more opportunity for the self-aggrandizing among us to poke fingers at those who have achieved success even though we're way smarter, and despite, or because of, the fact that they are achieving this success by ruining all that really matters (to us). Maybe it's simpler than that though. Maybe it's yet another example of self-righteous nastiness disguised as fun - lots of that going around too, always has been. Hey, wait a minute, that sounds just like this blog. Or as Emily Litella would say, never mind.

Plan 24B

We have so many plans, we need flow charts to follow them all. If I get into Library school X, but not Library school Y and it’s a Friday with a slight breeze and a chance of showers during a month that contains an R, then we will do A, unless of course, the peach pit séance suggests that’s a bad idea. Then we fall back on plan 24B, part iii that is only slightly less complicated than getting myself declared empress for life of a small green planet in the next galaxy.

People with children do not have the time for so much navel-gazing and permutation wielding. People who are living through a civil war don’t have the energy or inclination to run through one more time, every possible scenario of our lives over the next two years. Hell even I don’t have the time or inclination but unfortunately that doesn’t prevent my continuing to examine the endless possibilities.

Maybe if I…unless of course S wants to…and then we could always…. but maybe it would be better to…

Is that a PDA in your pocket or are you just panicked?

I find that suddenly I am panicking about heading off to three years of school after which I have to find a job, build a career, keep my relationship strong, maintain my sanity, avoid going too deeply into debt and try to have a bit of fun out of it all.

After spending all these years trying to build our cabin in the woods and find a way of staying in this remote heavenly place, which we have now achieved, we are suddenly thinking of uprooting so that S isn’t stuck in her job forever and I have some tangible skill to offer the world instead of trying to cobble together contracts doing things I don’t know how to do but am willing to try, for which amazingly, people have occasionally been willing to pay me.

Are we stepping up to an exciting new adventure or embarking on a foolish feat that will only serve to disrupt and disorient our, not perfect but pretty damn fine as they are thank you very much, lives?

Worth and death

I read a large feature in a newspaper recently that told the tale of a rich white young man struck down in his prime, made all the more tragic for the fact that, let’s face it, he was a rich white young man struck down in his prime. People die everyday – not all of it is news. Not all of it should be news. And tales of accidents with no uniqueness about them except that they struck down a rich white young man in his prime, are not major national news stories, or shouldn’t be.

When they are treated that way, they demean all those other deaths that are not deemed significant because they were not rich or white or young or men. The implication being that if instead of a denizen of Bay Street dying in a high powered water toy at an exclusive resort, it was a dishwasher in a crummy restaurant in Parkdale who died in an industrial accident, his or her life and death would certainly not warrant national attention.

I don’t want to point to a specific article because that would just be cruel and pointless. For the family of the young man who died, it is in fact, a horrific and tragic event and I would not in any way want to insult that. My issue is with the more objective decisions being made about what constitutes news, or more particularly, a particular level of news. Was this an issue on the level of import as Darfur? Then why was it treated as such?

Decisions have to be made as to what to cover and my hope always is that the point of a major story on a personal tragedy is to focus on some larger issue related to that personal tragedy, one that informs and enlightens us, instead of in essence, telling us that some kinds of personal tragedy are more important than others. I did not learn anything from this particular article except that a stupid accident happened and people suffered as a result. Well, yes they would, and they do, everyday. That, unfortunately, is not news. And even more sadly in my mind, is that fact that it is still not news that the lives of some people seem to count for more than others.

Nifty nibbles and tipples

Whatever happened to the delicacies of childhood? I’m talking the raw weiner and moulded ball of white bread staples of my youth. I’ve had many a fine meal since, but the pure intense delights of food at its most basic has never reached the heights of my halcyon days stripping a perfectly ordinary piece of bread of its crust then rolling it between my palms until it was a lumpy essence of bread blob which I blissfully consumed, après or avec, the pink finger of swirled up meat and not-meat products that was the hot dog of days gone by. We are definitely not talking the pure beef or tofu gourmet doggies with which one is confronted today. Rumour was that the original hot dog's ingredients included the floor sweepings in the plant where they were made. Urban myth or gritty approach to food prep in days gone by? Either way, health food they were not, a realization of stunning non-relevance to a pre-teen wiener nibbler.

This is not to suggest that my mother was not concerned with our culinary habits. We spent a good solid week being subjected to the liver and porridge good-for-you breakfast no doubt being touted in some magazine article of the day that convinced her to adopt it with a vengeance, at least until we made her life a living hell as a result. Our cat ate very well that week as he was tossed little tidbits of finely cut up liver leather, tossed discreetly by the older of us in the crowd, flung gaily by the lest discretion-oriented youngsters. When we were busted at that game and placed in separate rooms, some of us managed to stuff a few of those tasty morsels into heating vents. Sometimes I imagine I can still smell that warm smoky liver odour wafting up from the floor. And to this day I cannot think of oatmeal without conjuring up great gleaming glops of a glue-like substance dumped into our unsuspecting bowls. Even the cat wouldn’t touch that stuff.

Living with an amazing cook means that I have been the lucky partaker of many a wonderful meal – I eat far better than anyone has a right to. And yet it is the vividness of those early delights and horrors that stick with me. Literally. I think I can still feel a year’s worth of wonder bread balls encrusted on my ribs. Maybe I need a little nip of Baby Duck to wash it all away. Now we’re talking.

Shun the dub (wow, just missed by an m)

I recently read Winnipeg writer Miriam Toews’s book A Complicated Kindness about a dysfunctional Mennonite family and as I was reading it, it occurred to me that the act of shunning, the Mennonite version of “I can’t hear you”, is being wasted on mere dancers, fornicators and card playing infidels.

For the non-Mennonite versed, shunning basically means you are not allowed to acknowledge the existence of the officially shunned individual, even if the shun-victim is your wife, your child or your boss. Fortunately there’s a whole slew of rules for this bizarre turn of events that allows you to continue to function in a quasi-relationship with this person, to cohabitate even with someone who no longer exists. That’s as creative an interpretation of the world as I’ve seen yet, barring the current U.S. administration.

Which makes me think of the natural connection between the two, a symbiotic relationship as it were. And to help stir that concoction up, a new mode of civil disobedience, of political action, of just saying no, is born. Its tagline -“Shunning: It’s not just for Mennos anymore” - the inaugural shunnee, none other than the eminently shunnable George W. Though perhaps just this once, we can have a deep discount for a gaggle of his cabal cohorts. A special three-for-one deal that includes Rummy, Cheney and Georges in one monster shunathon – a shun troika extraordinaire.

Think of it. If the terrible triplets no longer existed, there would be no presidential draft dodgers (no, that suggests an actual thought followed by an action – how about “I didn’t want to go so I didn’t have to because rules, laws and morality are for poor and ugly people, not rich white brats like me”), soldiers would not go off to do nasty things to people or to be killed themselves and the Geneva convention would not be shamelessly flouted, not to mention the constitution of the United States being compromised by White House lawyers trying to wrest power from congress and bestow it where it “rightfully” belongs – in the presidential office. Can you spell Fascist boys and girls? (kudos to Anthony Lewis and his article “Making Torture Legal" in the July 15th 2004 issue of The New York Review of Books – kudos in general to the NYRB for their great articles on the frightening developments under George the Dub).

Granted I am not an American and maybe there’s some basic genetic link I am missing (though my grandfather was American and his son, my uncle, returned there as an adult and is as hard-core American as you can get) that allows me to understand why a person would want to choose someone who is stupid, a liar, a bully and a coward as their leader.

Last time I checked those were not the primary qualities of a good boss-guy. I know there’s a whole whack of Americans who feel the same way that I do, which gives me great hope despite the fact that there remains a large percentage of people who continue to believe what the Dub says just because he says it emphatically in single syllable words.

I was interested to read Bush’s comment about Kerry’s recent much praised Democratic National Convention speech as being a “clever” speech like this is the worst thing a person could do. You gotta watch out for those clever types, they’re just trying to bamboozle you. This from the man who told us that WMDs definitely existed in Iraq, who declared the hostilities over in that country, hundreds of deaths prior to what continues to be an endless quagmire. And not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, that long-ago war he initiated and “won”, where recently Doctors Without Frontiers declared they had to withdraw from the country due to an exceedingly dangerous situation, made more so by the reckless merging of U.S. military and humanitarian actions, thus managing to jeopardize the lives of all engaged in true humanitarian actions.

And as everything gets more and more insane and I fear for the world if the Dub’s brought back into power, whether by declaring no election due to terrorist threat (oh good one – that’s never been tried by a pathetic tyrant holding onto power any way he can) or by an illegal, immoral or just plain incompetent election process like the last one, it may seem a lame, head-in-the-sand approach, but since nothing else appears to be working, I’m willing to take the chance. And I encourage you as well to Shun the Dub. Do it now and do it often. What have we got to lose?

Idio-fools and furbabies

I have been given very strict orders by S to never refer to her as a “single mom” while I’m away at school. The fact that we have pets as opposed to children seems to be at the heart of that demand. For while we refer to each other that way whenever one of us is away and the other is left at home to care for the “furbabies” (another term I have been forbidden to use) as our little joke, oh the crazy hijinks we get up to, I believe she is worried sick that we will appear to be of the childless ilk who insist on treating their four legged housemates as though they were real live human beings. Not just human beings but stupid, helpless creatures who must never be reprimanded or trained so as not to jar their terribly delicate sensibilities. Never mind the suffering sensibilities of those who live among these spoiled temperamental little beasts as they annoy well beyond their body weight.

Why is it that the direst hippies and anarchists just happen to have the most loathsome beasts as pets? People need structure oh “let them be free” idio-fools; animals need boundaries. Think about it – oh right I forgot, you don’t do that kind of thing – it’s too soul-destroying. Well I’ll do it for you then. If we don’t know how we’re supposed to behave, if we don’t know what’s expected of us, we become a quivering mess of insecurities and have a tendency to flail blindly at the world. Imagine what happens in the case of an animal who, despite your imaginings to the contrary, is really not capable of rational thought.

Virtually every dog I know who has an idiot for an owner (note: not a mommy or daddy, unless you’ve initiated a new procreative technique I do not want to know anything about) has a lunatic for a dog. There are half a dozen of them in my rural hippy haven neighbourhood alone, all of whom have, at one time or another, attacked my dog, who while not the brightest lamp in the room, is a sweet and utterly passive beast. That’s not just cruel to my dog, it’s cruel to yours, for your failure to exercise your responsibility for their well-being may actually cause you to be responsible for their death. If you don’t bother to teach them what’s right or wrong they may end up doing something really stupid like bite a child. Then Marlo Thomas could do a follow-up version of her Free To Be You And Me book, except about irresponsible pet owners like you and it would be called Free To Be Put Down.

Well that’s all I have to say about that. Except, I do happen to have a couple of pictures of my darlings that I can post if you’re interested. Just say the word. I mean, so many animals are vile creatures as a result of their bad owners, but well, our precious pretties are different. They’re special. Thanks no doubt to their excellent upbringing by moms who love their little furbabies – oops, looks like I’m headed to the doghouse.